John Collier (May 3, 1901 – April 6, 1980)

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 667.

Part 2

Roman Jakobson

Task 2. Check the meaning of the foreign insertions in the text

Task 1. Check the meaning of the following words

Entitle, confine, ludicrous, valid entity, conformity, resurrection, posthumous, prone, tempt, intrinsic, supplant, foist, manifesto, endeavor, envisage, comprehensive, successive, warrant, illicitly, encompass, concurrent

L'aprйs-midi d'un faune, Divina Commedia, laissez faire, reductio ad absurdum

Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the other functions of language. An outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (‘referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous, nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication. All these factors inalienably involved in verbal communication may be schematized as follows:

Jackobson's Communication Model

Each of these six factors determines a different function of language. Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find verbal messages that would fulfill only one function. The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some one of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function. But even though a set (Einstellung) toward the referent, an orientation toward the CONTEXT -- briefly the so-called REFERENTIAL, ‘denotative,' ‘cognitive' function -- is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account by the observant linguist.

The so-called EMOTIVE or ‘expressive' function, focused on the ADDRESSER, aims a direct expression of the speaker's attitude toward what he is speaking about. It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned; therefore, the term ‘emotive,' launched and advocated by Marty has proved to be preferable to ‘emotional.' The purely emotive stratum in language is presented by the interjections. They differ from the means of referential language both by their sound pattern (peculiar sound sequences or even sounds elsewhere unusual) and by their syntactic role (they are not components but equivalents of sentences). ‘Tut! Tut! said McGinty': the complete utterance of Conan Doyle's character consists of two suction clicks. The emotive function, laid bare in the interjections, flavors to some extent all our utterances, on their phonic, grammatical, and lexical level. If we analyze language from the standpoint of the information it carries, we cannot restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of language. A man, using expressive features to indicate his angry or ironic attitude, conveys ostensible information, and evidently this verbal behaviour cannot be likened to such nonsemiotic, nutritive activities as ‘eating grapefruit' (despite Chatman's bold simile). The difference between [big] and the emphatic prolongation of the vowel [bi:g] is a conventional, coded, linguistic feature like the difference between the short and long vowel in such Czech pairs as [vi] ‘you' and [vi:] ‘knows', but in the latter pair the differential information is phonemic and in the former emotive. As long as we are interested in phonemic invariants, the English /i/ and /I:/ appear to be mere variants of one and the same phoneme, but if we are concerned with emotive units, the relation between the invariant and the variants is reversed: length and shortness are invariants implemented by variable phonemes. Saporta's surmise that emotive difference is a non-linguistic feature, ‘attributable to the delivery of the message and not to the message,' arbitrarily reduces the informational capacity of messages.

A former actor of Stanislavskij's Moscow Theater told me how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to make forty different messages from the phrase Segodnja vecerom ‘This evening,' by diversifying its expressive tint. He made a list of some forty emotional situations, then emitted the given phrase in accordance with each of these situations, which his audience had to recognize only from the changes in the sound shape of the same two words. For our research work in the description and analysis of contemporary Standard Russian (under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation) this actor was asked to repeat Stanislavskij's test. He wrote down some fifty situations framing the same elliptic sentence and made of it fifty corresponding messages for a tape record. Most of the messages were correctly and circumstantially decoded by Moscovite listeners. May I add that all such emotive cues easily undergo linguistic analysis?

Orientation toward the ADDRESSEE, the CONATIVE function, finds its purest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative, which syntactically, morphologically, and often even phonemically deviate from other nominal and verbal categories. The imperative sentences cardinally differ from declarative sentences: the latter are and the former are not liable to a truth test. When in O'Neill's play The FountaIn, Nano, ‘(in a fierce tone of command),' says ‘Drink!' -- the imperative cannot be challenged by the question ‘is it true or not?' which may be, however, perfectly well asked after such sentences as ‘one drank,' ‘one will drink,' ‘one would drink.' In contradistinction to the imperative sentences, the declarative sentences are convertible into interrogative sentences: ‘did one drink?' ‘will one drink?' ‘would one drink?'

The traditional model of language as elucidated particularly by Bühler was confined to these three functions -- emotive, conative, and referential -- and the three apexes of this model -- the first person of the addresser, the second person of the addressee, and the ‘third person', properly -- someone or something spoken of. Certain additional verbal functions can be easily inferred from this triadic model. Thus the magic, incantatory function is chiefly some kind of conversion of an absent or inanimate ‘third person' into an addressee of a conative message. ‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu' (Lithuanian spell). ‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea-bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea-bottom, may grief never come to burden the light heart of God's servant, may grief be removed and sink away' (North Russian incantation). ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aj-a-lon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed...' (Josh. 10.12). We observe, however, three further constitutive factors of verbal communication and three corresponding functions of language.

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (‘Hello, do you hear me?'), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (‘Are you listening?' or in Shakespearean diction, ‘Lend me your ears!' -- and on the other end of the wire ‘Urn-hum!'). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski's terms PHATIC function, may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication.

Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "Well!" the young man said. "Well!" she said. "Well, here we are," he said. "Here we are," she said, "Aren't we?" "I should say we were," he said, "Eeyop! Here we are." "Well!" she said. "Well!" he said, "well." The endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings. It is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication.

A distinction has been made in modern logic between two levels of language, ‘object language' speaking of objects and ‘metalanguage' speaking of language. But metalanguage is not only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists; it plays also an important role in our everyday language. Like Molière's Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the CODE: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e., glossing) function. ‘I don't follow you – what do you mean?' asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction, ‘What is't thou say'st?' And the addresser in anticipation of such recapturing questions inquires: ‘Do you know what I mean?' Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: ‘The sophomore was plucked.' ‘But what is plucked?' ‘Plucked means the same as flunked.' ‘And flunked?' ‘To be flunked is to fail in an exam.' ‘And what is sophomore?' persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. ‘A sophomore is (or means) a second-year student.' All these equational sentences convey information merely about the lexical code of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language learning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations.

We have brought up all the six factors involved in verbal communication except the message itself. The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function. Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry.

‘Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and Joan? Do you prefer Joan to her twin sister?' ‘Not at all, it just sounds smoother.' In a sequence of two coordinate names, as far as no rank problems interfere, the precedence of the shorter name suits the speaker, unaccountably for him, as a well-ordered shape of the message.

A girl used to talk about ‘the horrible Harry.' ‘Why horrible?' ‘Because I hate him.' ‘But why not dreadful, terrible, frightful, disgusting?' ‘I don't know why, but horrible fits him better.' Without realizing it, she clung to the poetic device of paronomasia.

The political slogan ‘I like Ike /ay layk ayk/, succinctly structured, consists of three monosyllables and counts three diphthongs /ay/, each of them symmetrically followed by one consonantal phoneme, /….l…k…k/. The make-up of the three words presents a variation: no consonantal phonemes in the first word, two around the diphthong in the second, and one final consonant in the third. A similar dominant nucleus /ay/ was noticed by Hymes in some of the sonnets of Keats. Both cola of the trisyllabic formula ‘I like /Ike' rhyme with each other, and the second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the first one (echo rhyme), /layk/ -- /ayk/, a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object. Both cola alliterate with each other, and the first of the two alliterating words is included in the second: /ay/ — /ayk/, a paronomastic image of the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function of this electional catch phrase reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy.

As we said, the linguistic study of the poetic function must overstep the limits of poetry, and, on the other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the poetic function. The particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked participation of the other verbal functions along with the dominant poetic function. Epic poetry, focused on the third person, strongly involves the referential function of language; the lyric, oriented toward the first person, is intimately linked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person is imbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory or exhortative, depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the second one or the second to the first.

“John Collier is … notable for lightly carried erudition, literary allusiveness
and a rare capacity to entertain… Perhaps because he is so unclassifiable
he's definitely underestimated and needs to be rediscovered.”

Anthony Burgess[1]

“John Collier's edgy, sardonic tales are works of rare wit, curious insight, and
scary implication. They stand out as one of the pinnacles in the critically neglected but perennially popular tradition of weird writing ... With a cast of characters that ranges from man-eating flora to disgruntled devils and suburban salarymen (not that it's always easy
to tell one from another), Collier's dazzling stories explore the implacable logic of lunacy, revealing a surreal landscape whose unstable surface is depth-charged with surprise.”

fantasticfiction.co.uk

John Henry Noyes Collier was born in London to John George and Emily Noyes Collier. His parents could not afford a genteel education for their son because the father became responsible for his own younger siblings. Educated privately by tutors, mainly by his uncle Vincent Collier, a novelist, John determined to become a poet. Though dismayed at first by his decision, his father indulged him and managed to provide him with a small allowance of two pounds a week which (in addition to whatever John Collier could earn himself by writing book reviews and acting as a cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper) gave him a chance to write poetry and eventually bring out Gemini (1932), a book of poems.

Collier remained in London in the 1920s, savouring the bohemian life of the city. During this time, being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes and visits to picture galleries. He never attended a university. For ten years Collier attempted to reconcile the intensely visual experience opened to him by the Sitwells[2] and the modern painters, with the austerer preoccupations of those classical authors who were fashionable in the 1920s. He felt that his poetry was unsuccessful, however: he was not able to make his two selves (whom he oddly described as the "archaic, uncouth, and even barbarous" Olsen and the "hysterically self-conscious dandy" Valentine) speak with one voice. Being an admirer of James Joyce, Collier found a solution in Joyce's Ulysses: "On going for my next lesson to Ulysses, that city of modern prose," he wrote, "I was struck by the great number of magnificent passages in which words are used as they are used in poetry, and in which the emotion which is originally aesthetic, and the emotion which has its origin in intellect, are fused in higher proportions of extreme forms than I had believed was possible."

While he had written some short stories during the period in which he was trying to find success as a poet, his career did not take shape until the publication of his first novel, His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp (1930). Though controversial it enjoyed certain popularity and critical approval. As a private joke, Collier himself wrote a decidedly cool four-page review of His Monkey Wife, describing it as an attempt "to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel," and concluding with the following appraisal of the talents of its author: "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humour is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude." But even though the central proposition of this work seems light-hearted and preposterous, it analyses civilization and its discontents. The novel concerns an Englishman who returns from Africa with a monkey bride who fascinates the British society. Emily, a sensitive, warm, compassionate, and highly educated chimpanzee, is contrasted to the hysterical women and neurasthenic men of London.

In 1932 John Collier co-authored Just the Other Day: An Informal History of Great Britain Since the War, in which he establish a reputation as scrupulous craftsman and an author who aspired to make serious statements about life. Collier's next novel, Tom's A-Cold (1933), continues his examination of society. In a post-apocalyptic world his characters discuss the natural relationship between aristocrats and workers. Unleavened by Collier's wit, this piece of conservative philosophizing was an embarrassment to the author in his later years. Colliers's last novel, Defy the Foul Fiend (1934), is a picaresque following of the fortunes of a naïve young man, and, in the process, it satirizes many aspects of modern life. Willoughby, the hero, passes through hazes of romantic love, radicalism, decadent hedonism, and finally becomes a Tory. His enthusiasms are all doomed to ironic outcomes, and his final incarnation as as a country squire is essentially a defeat. Collier's novels are the work of a serious moralist with a taste for the absurd and audacious wit. But these traits are more ebulliently manifested in his short works.

But what really earned him a reputation were his fifty light, elegant and witty short stories. Many humorists darken in their late years as they come to serious contemplating. In Collier's case more serious works came first, and it was not until 1937 and onwards that he wrote most of the stories for which he is remembered as a humourist. Of all his works these came most easily, they were written off-handedly, quickly, and ‘to pay the bills'. He said that the major problem was framing the first sentence, and then the story more or less ‘wrote itself'. Collier pitches headlong into his tales that frequently involve the romantic misadventures of somewhat limited young men, supernatural elements, grisly episodes, social satire, and parody of myth, fairy tale or serious literature. Their chief appeal is their style. His stories are usually very short, averaging about 3,000 words. This type of short-short form demands ingenious economy, lightness of touch, and carefully contrived but nonetheless surprise endings. And if first lines were Collier's major challenge, it is last lines that remain in the reader's memory. But Collier's verbal mastery puts his surprise endings in a different category from O'Henry's. The macabre and fantastic plots, contrasting with the refined and elegant style, are characteristic of an approach which critics have named ‘a strictly British genre of humour'. Lord Dunsany and H.H. Munro (Saki) were earlier practitioners, Roald Dahl – a later one. John Collier himself alluded to Lawrence Sterne, Tobias Smollet and Henry Fielding as his influences.

In Collier's fantasy pieces one finds irony, wit and creative plots, which provide a deep insight into human nature. They contain characters that are often undone by their wrongdoings. Hint of misogyny also appear throughout the author's works, portraying troubled marriages with nagging and unfaithful wives. Little is known to the public whether it is based on his own experience. His first marriage was to silent film actress Shirley Palmer. His second marriage in 1942 was to New York actress Beth Kay (Margaret Elizabeth Eke). He has one child, a son, from his 3^rd marriage in 1954 to Harriet Hess.

His stories are memorable; people who cannot recall title or author will nevertheless remember “the story about people who lived in the department store” (Evening Primrose) or “an account of the Hollywood success of a young, bold, active and singularly handsome flea (Gavin O'Leary) or the controversial topic of professional rivalry between a writer and a gorilla (Variation on a Theme).

However John Collier was surprised when journalists and biographers approached him to write about his life and work. He considered his work to be minor: “I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.” He belonged to the generation of talented writers who guiltily ‘sold out' their art for what they considered to be relatively easy money in Hollywood. For Collier it all began when in 1935, needing $500 to buy a sailboat, he impulsively accepted an offer to write a screenplay and went off to Hollywood.

In the succeeding years, Collier travelled between England, France and Hollywood before finally settling in Hollywood in 1942. While he did continue to write short stories, as time went on he would turn his attention more and more towards writing screenplays. Though considered over-scrupulous and slow as a scenarist, Collier worked for most of the major studios and achieved considerable success by contributing notably to the screenplays of The African Queen along with James Agee and John Huston, the Elephant Boy, The War Lord, I Am A Camera originally Goodbye to Berlin remade later as Cabaret, Sylvia Scarlett, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy. He wrote numerous witty pieces for Playboy, Esquire, and the New Yorker, as well as teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Several of his own stories were adapted for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

John Collier's short stories appeared in print during the thirties, forties, and fifties in various magazines (including Argosy (UK)) and in the following collections: The Devil and All (1934), Presenting Moonshine (1941), The Touch of Nutmeg: And More Unlikely Stories (1943), Fancies and Goodnights(1951), Pictures in the Fire (1958), Of Demons and Darkness (1961), The John Collier Reader (1972). The majority of his stories were collected in a 1951 volume Fancies and Goodnights, which is still in print. Later editions of this collection have more stories than earlier ones. His stories were also included into a great number of anthologies alongside with masterpieces of short fiction by other authors, and still hold appeal to his devoted admirers worldwide.

Like many writers of fantastic fiction Collier was largely ignored by scholars in his native country, the UK. Nevertheless John Collier received high praise from both the public and critics in the US, being awarded the Edgar Poe Award in 1951 for the story "Fancies and Goodnights" and the International Fantasy Award in 1952.

Returning from a trip to Mexico in 1953, he was stopped at customs and subjected to a searching inquisition which revealed that the FBI had compiled a considerable dossier on him. In part, this unwelcome attention resulted from his being confused with another John Collier, a suspect bureaucrat. Greylisted himself and indignant that many of his fellow screenwriters were blacklisted during the McCarthy era, the author moved first to Mexico and then in 1955 to France, which remained his home until he returned to Pacific Palisades, California a year before his death of a stroke in 1980.

“John Collier achieved mastery of the demanding and entertaining short grotesque tale in a period in which world problems shifted serious literary attention to more momentous works. But, elusive and peripatetic, Collier did not court fame and his work survived through its own merits, its deft plotting, its economical characterisation, its satire, and its style. Though he worked in other media or genres, his short stories are what survives, not only frequently anthologized, but also adapted for films, television, and the musical theatre.”

William Donnelly “Encyclopaedia of British Humorists”, v.1, p.264