Tone: Emotion in Fiction
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 593.
Ideas for Discussion
This story is “the greatest compliment” John Collier could pay to his readers for he assumed in them “sufficient skill and understanding to see through the surface statement into the seriousness or levity beneath”. Reread, please, Section ‘Tone: Emotion and Fiction' of this book, paying special attention to definitions and categorization of humour and irony. Find as many examples of various types of humour and irony in the given story.
Tone of a literary work refers to the methods by which writers convey attitudes, although the discussion of tone sometimes becomes focused on the attitudes themselves. In literary study the word tone has been borrowed from the phrase tone of voice. Tone of voice in speech is a reflection of your control over your attitude toward whomever you are addressing and toward your subject matter. The tone of a speech can be formal or intimate, outspoken or reticent, abstruse or simple, solemn or playful, angry or loving, serious or ironic, condescending or obsequious, and so on through numberless possible nuances of relationship and attitude. All authors, like all real-life speakers, have a choice about what lo say and how to say it, and they make their choices in full consideration of their readers. Genuine emotion in fiction, like characters, is to be presented indirectly – it should be dramatised. Emotion accompanying and producing insight, not emotion for itself, is the end of the interpretive writer. He writes in order to present a sample of experience truthfully; the emotions he arouses flow naturally from the experience presented.
To perceive tone the reader should be alert and constantly aware of the general impressions that various passages leave him/her with. It is equally necessary to understand all the words and figures of speech. Read the work carefully and then study passages selected for discussion to determine matters such as the situations that prompt dialogue, the appropriateness of style (e.g. speech to character, descriptions to setting and action), the comparative freedom the characters may exert to control their fates, and apparent attitudes towards readers. It is also recommended to study some traditional ways and techniques writers use to achieve certain effects, i.e. convey certain emotions. Major aspects of tone include humour and irony, and in many cases they are not easily perceived and accounted for.
Humour and Irony[6]
No two critics agree on what exactly makes people laugh, but all agree that laughter is essential in a person's psychological well-being. However, the major elements in humour seem to be these:
1. An object of laughter. There must be something to laugh at, whether a person, thing, situation, custom, habit of speech or dialect, or arrangement of words.
2. Incongruity (inconsistency, absurdity). Human beings have a sense of what to expect under given conditions, and anything that violates these expectations may be a cause of laughter. The behaviour of a character may be inconsistent with the situation, and the language itself may be meaningfully inappropriate to the subject what also provokes laughter. In the literary creation of verbal slips, the tone is directed against the speaker, and the author and reader both share the enjoyment.
3. Safety and/ or good will. Seeing a person who has just slipped on a banana peel hurtling through the air and about to crack his or her skull may cause laughter as long as we ourselves arc not that person, for our laughter depends on our being insulated from danger and pain. The incongruity of such situations causes laughter, and one's safety from personal consequences together with the insulation from pain of the participants – prevents the interference of more grave or even horrified responses.
The element of good will enters in works where you are drawn into general sympathy with the major figures. As the author leads the characters toward success, your involvement with them will produce a general sense of happiness, which may cause you to laugh sympathetically.
4. Unfamiliaritv, newness, uniqueness, spontaneity. Laughter depends on seeing something new or unique, or on experiencing a known thing freshly. Laughter usually occurs in a flash of insight or revelation, and the situation producing laughter must always possess spontaneity. This is not to say that ordinary situations are excluded as topics of humour. Indeed, the task of the comic writer is to develop ordinary materials to the point of instant recognition, when spontaneity enables laughter to proceed.
Irony is a term with a range of meanings, all of them involving some sort of discrepancy or incongruity. It is a contrast in which one term of the contrast in some way mocks the other term. It is not to be confused with sarcasm, however, which is simply language designed to cause pain.
The storywriter uses irony to suggest the complexity of experience, to furnish indirectly an evaluation of his material, and at the same time to achieve compression. In expressing an idea ironically, writers pay the greatest compliment to their readers, for they assume sufficient skill and understanding to see through the surface statement into the seriousness or levity beneath.
Three kinds of irony are distinguished:
1. Verbal irony, the simplest kind, is a figure of speech in which the opposite is said from what is intended. Verbal irony may be a way of saying two contradictory things at once, both true but in different senses. (E.g. 'A machine gun is an example of progress.') In many cases such figures of speech as understatement or overstatement (hyperbole) help a writer to achieve the ironic effect.
2. In irony of situation, usually the most important kind for the storywriter, the discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfilment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate. Situational irony refers to conditions that are measured against forces that overpower human capacities. These forces may be psychological, social, political, or environmental. A type of situational irony that is connected with a pessimistic or fatalistic view of life is sometimes called irony of fate or cosmic irony.
3. In dramatic (a special kind of situational irony) the contrast is between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true. The value of this kind of irony lies in the comment it implies on the speaker or his expectations. Usually the character is deceived in something or is deceiving himself while the reader sees it is a lie.
In all cases irony makes it possible to suggest meanings without stating them. Simply by juxtaposing two discordant facts in the right solution, the writer can start a current of meaning flowing between them, as between the two poles in an electric battery. The ironic contrast generates meaning.
Satire[7]
Satire is the art of ridiculing a subject through laughter or scorn. Satire may be directed at an individual, or a type of person, a social class, an institution, a political ideology, a nation or even the entire human race. Satirists try to diminish their subject by evoking amusement, contempt or indignation towards it. Laughter is often a weapon used by satirists but not all satire is comic: George Orwell's Animal Farm has humorous elements but his other satirical work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, evokes little laughter in the reader. Although satire is often directed at individuals, satirists claim that they target the failing and not the human being. By attacking a particular vice they hope to contribute to its elimination. Satire may be the governing principle of a work, and elements of satire may be found in various other literary forms: it exists in both prose and poetic form.
[1] Anthony Burgesswas the pen name of John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993), an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
[2] The Sitwells (Edith Sitwell, Osbert Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell), from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, were three siblings, who formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London in the period roughly 1916 to 1930. The first Sitwell venture was the series of Wheels anthologies produced since 1916. These were seen either as a counterweight to the contemporary Edward Marsh Georgian Poetry anthologies, or as light 'society verse' collections.
[3] The story was first published in New Yorker on April14, 1951. It was later included into the collection Fancies and Goodnights (1951).
[4] Ivan Sergueïevitch Tourgueniev (French) = Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (English)
[5] Robinson Crusoe – the hero of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), who survives a shipwreck and lives for years on a desert island
[6] Ëèñåíêîâà Î.À., Âîëãèíà À.Ñ., Ñèíåîêîâà Ò.Í. Ëèíãâèñòè÷åñêèé àíàëèç òåêñòà. – ÍÃËÓ, 2009.
[7] D. Delaney, C. Ward, C. Rho Fiorina. Fields of Vision. Vol. 1. // Genres. – Longman, 2005.
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