Chapters Syntactic Analysis

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Chapters
Syntactic Analysis
3. 1 Grammatical Model
Syntax being perhaps the most significant aspect of the grammatical struclurc
of language it has come to be recognized as synonymous with its superordinatc
'Grammar'. Broadly defined, it refers to 'the way words, phrases and clauses are
ordered and formally grouped" ( Wales, 1989 : 450). Syntax has generally been
considered a crucial feature of style both by literary critics and linguists. Literary
critics have taken cognizance of the syntax of literary works in terms like 'simple' ,
'terse', 'loose' or 'complex' whereas a linguist like Sapir recognises the relation of
the basic structure of language with an artist's individuality of expression. Tufte in
her book Grammar as Style (1971) emphasizes the organic view of style and argues
that grammar itself is style. 'Grammar is itself the carrier of ideas, syntax (sic ) no
accessory but the very means of meaning' (ibid.: p 5 ). A great many stylistic
studies of literary works are centered round syntax. Syntax- focused analyses of
literary works have proved to be of crucial importance especially in practical
stylistics because syntax-based grammars offer a set of well-defined and
interrelated concepts which are easily accessible to both teachers and students of
stylistics. Non-native, overseas students of English are found to familiarize
themselves with the syntactic level of language with greater ease than with other
levels like phonology, lexis, semantics, context or discourse. So even pedagogically
a syntax-based analysis can provide safer guidelines to them for the understanding
and appreciation of literary texts. Creative writers themselves are well aware of
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the correlation between the message they want to convey and the syntax in which it
is encoded. The flexibility of English syntax has been one of the important/
resources poets have been using for stylistic effects. Consequently, we find a great
variety of ways in which syntax has been manipulated by poets, from the most
regular to the puzzlingly deviant. Syntactic deviations, like lexis, are open-ended. In
Davie (1955 ) and Baker (1967) we come across some early efforts to
systematically categorize the syntactic patterns generally used by English poets.
Baker (1967) classifies the possible syntactic patterns under four heads : norm, ^
fragmentation, elaboration and dislocation. Deviation from the norm (i.e. the
normal SPCA pattern of English syntax ) generally consists in addition to, deletion
from or rearrangement of the basic elements of an English sentence. Baker (1967)
in his study of the syntax of English poetry from 1870 - 1930 depends more or less
on the terminology of traditional grammar. Later linguist-critics, however, are
inclined to keep pace with the methods and terminology developed by modern
linguistics and use them in their stylistic analyses of poetry. Corresponding to the
new developments in the sphere of linguistics we find new analytical techniques
developed in stylistics, too. A brief chronological survey of the grammatical models
used in stylistic analysis of literary works has already been given in Section 1.2.4. It
adequately reveals the correspondence between the developments in these two
closely related fields.
In keeping with the theoretical developments in the field of stylistics, I have
adopted an eclectic approach in my syntactic analysis of the selected poems of Das.
I have generally adhered to the more 'traditional' grammar of Quirk et al (1972)
and the Haliidayan functional-systemic grammar. But although my metalanguage is
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derived mainly from these two grammars I have not hesitated to borrow some ad
hoc terms from TG grammar as well. In addition to these I have also drawn on
some of the stylistic categories discussed by Leech in his Linguistic Guide to
English Poetry (1969).
3.2 Syntactic Study of a Few Poems by Das
A syntactically-based study of Das's style is likely to yield significant insights
not only into the nature of her poetic language but also into the motivating drives
behind it. Considered in the context of the preceding Indian women poets writing
in English, Das's poetry can be viewed as 'revolutionary' in more than one way.
The women poets of the earlier generation wrote in more or less conventional
manner attaching undue importance to formal verse systems. They revealed a
colonial mentality both in terms of themes and style, which had a ring of
artificiality about them. Das, for the first time, breathed a new life in the generally
outmoded poetry of Indian women poets by bringing in some new sensibilities and
new modes of expression. She took to writing poetry under the compulsion of
giving an outlet to her long-suppressed anger against the domestic, social and moral
constraints imposed on her and because of her deeply-felt need for expressing her
emotional responses to the world around her. Unlike her predecessors, she refuses
to be confined by any overt rules of versification or to adopt a deliberately 'poetic'
style. Her poems seem to grow naturally from some intensely emotional
experiences and are, therefore, rightly described as 'confessional' poems. The genre
of poetry she has adopted for the 'confession' of such personal emotions and
experiences is 'Free Verse'. Such a genre does not allow for any deliberate 'formal'
constraints of traditional prosody , rhyme and rhythm. Stripped of any overt formal
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arabesque, her poems are in the form of spontaneous utterances. The 'form' and
'structure' of such poetry cannot be studied in terms of conventional critical criteria
or terminology. It can be better analysed in terms of its syntax apart from its lexis
and semantics.
The first 'marked' feature that strikes us about Das's syntax is its affinity
with the plain regular common patterns of English. Das seldom varies from a natural
order of words and does not show any marked preference for radical syntactic
variations. She generally writes in the stylistic vein of plainspokenness and yet stirs
such deep responses in her readers as perhaps could hardly be stirred even by a
studied sophisticated syntax. What are then the syntactic resources of the emotional
and aesthetic appeal that her poetry generally has for the readers? In the following
sections I propose to discuss some aspects of her syntax which are stylistically
distinct in the sense that they have a high communicative value in her poetic
discourse.
3.2.1 Verbal Repetition
Verbal repetition which is a kind of parallelism or 'obtrusive regularity', as
Leech ( 1969: 73) terms it, is a characteristic feature of Das's linguistic organization
both in terms of frequency and function. The feature of lexical repetition as a major
cohesive device has already been discussed in section 2.3.1. In this section I am
going to deal with verbal repetition in conjunction with grammatical repetition since
its consideration in the broader context of syntax forms the basis of its categorization
in the schemes of rhetoric.
Besides the lexical repetitions in the framework of parallelism Leech (1969)
mentions a kind of irregular repetition which he calls free repetition. He defines free
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repetition of form as 'the exact copying of some previous part of text whether word
phrase or even sentence' (p.77). Traditional rhetoric distinguishes between two
categories of free repetition: that of immediate repetition or epizeuxis and of
intermittent repetition called ploce. Das's poetry yields examples of both these kinds
of repetition as is illustrated below. The examples are chosen on the basis of their
stylistic and semantic value in the poems.
a)lnstances of Immediate Repetition:
... 'We were the yieldera I yieUhng ourselves...' ( The Descendants)
... 'in me / The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on and on and on '
( Forest Fire)
'I click-click, click-click tiresomeiy into your ears...' , 'I go on and on, not
knowing why'... ( Loud Posters)
' The neighbours watch/they watch me come and go' ( The Stone Age)
'I come to you ... but to learn/ what I was and by learning, to learn to grow
(The Old Playhouse)
T drink and drink again', 'With/ Glass in hand drink, drink, and drink again..
(Summer in Calcutta)
'What is/The use, what is the bloody use!" ( Convicts)
'The language I speak becomes mine, its.../ All mine, mine alone' ( An
Introduction)
' I shall some day leave, leave the cocoon'... (I Shall Some Day)
' It was hot, so hof..., 'Wide skirts going round and round, ... anklets /mg/ing,
jingling,/ Jingling '... ( The Dance of the Eunuchs)
'your oft repeated plea, give me time, more time...' (IVieSeashore)
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b) Instances of Intermittent Repetition
'you cannot believe, darling,/ Can you... ' { My Grandmother's House)
...To soft beds and against softer forms..' , 'It is/ Not for us to scrape .../
Memories, not for us even... ' ( The Descendants)
' /// me shall walk the lovers, hand in hand, and in me ...In me, the street lamps...
and m mg the dying mother...' (Forest Fire)
' Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneathl Tht bone...' ( Loud Posters )
'I drive my blue battered car/ Along the bluer sea', 'ask me the flavour of ..., ask
me why....\ 'Ask me why...Ask me why....ask me what is bliss and what its price'..
( The Stone Age)
'This hacking at each other's parts/ like convicts, hacking, breaking clods',
'There were no words left, all words lay trapped...'(Convicts)
'He did not beat me but my sad woman-body felt so beaten , 'he is every man
who wants a woman , just as I am every woman who seeks love', ( An Introduction)
' ask for drinks or are asked for drinks', 'shall I forgive the days..../Forgive the
crowds...' ( The Seashore )
'Some beat their drums others beat their sorry breasts', '...and lightening/ And
rain, a meagre rain' ( The Dance of the Eunuchs)
'But I shall return..../jMr/ by .../Too hurt by fierce happiness...'(I Shall Some
Day)
Before we go on to examine the possible contribution of the repetitive syntax
to the total significance and impact of a poem it would be in the fitness of things to
refer to some critical opinions on this particular stylistic feature of Das's poetry.
There seems to be a general consensus among the critics of Das that the excess of
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repetition in Das's poetry is many times unwarranted and boring, de Souza (1980)
agrees that repetition is the stylistic device which reinforces the emotional quality of
her poems but according to her Das has a tendency to indulge in 'pointless repetition'
(p.45). Kohli ( 1975 ) notices with a tinge of disapproval her 'irresistible temptation
to repeat a particular word three times' (p.63). Patel (1965), while commenting on
The Dance of the Eunuchs points out the 'jarring' effect of the threefold repetition
of the word 'jingling'. Nabar (1994) also looks upon the 'indiscriminate use' (p.45)
of repetition as a common flaw in Das's verse.
With due regard to the critical opinions of the scholars quoted above I would
like to say that 'repetition' does not remain a 'device' but becomes an integral and
inevitable part of Das's language considering the emotive contents of her
confessional poems. Das's avowed claim has been that she wants to preserve the
'rawness' of her experiences, without letting its 'spontaneity' be blurred by any
verbal discipline or syntactic sophistication. The repetitive nature of her syntax in
fact is indicative of her fidelity to the experience. A careful study of her poems
reveals that Das's language takes recourse to repetition whenever it is concerned with ,'
the communication of high emotional excitement. In the first part of The Dance of
the Eunuchs she is taking in the details about the dance and the dancers with the
eager curiosity of a child who has her first encounter with a scene she had long
wished to see or experience. Her child-like excitement at the spectacle which owes
its appeal mainly to the repetitive motions of the dancers and the rhythmic sounds of
cymbals and anklets finds a natural outlet in a similarly repetitive syntax. In the
second part of the poem when the excitement starts waning, the syntax too loses its
overt repetitiveness and succumbs to the 'formal sophistication' of structural
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parallelism. In An Introduction her defence of the language of her choice naturally
changes into a passionate expression of her sense of commitment to the language and
hence the repetition of 'mine' in a line from the poem quoted above. In The Stone
Age the eight-fold repetition of the segment 'ask me' is a syntactic endeavour to
capture the overwhelming joy, the exuberance of erotic passion that the poet wants
the puritans to understand in its rawness. The repetition seems to imply that there are
no adequately expressive words in the lexicon of the language to encode this
experience and so it can be expressed only by modulating the syntax to imitate the
dynamism of the sexual activity and the tides of emotions accompanying it. In
Convicts her sense of frustration at the violence and physicality of love erupts in the
meaningfully repeated rhetorical question, 'What is/ The use, what is the bloody
use?'
So whether repetition is a stylistic flaw, an indication of a lack of discipline in
the poet or it is an inevitable part of her spontaneous, unsophisticated, 'linguistic
primitivism' as Baker (1967) calls it, could be a moot point.
On many occasions repetition is also integrated with the meaning by virtue of
its value for iconic and emphatic effects. Repetitions like 'go on and on', 'round and
round', 'jingling, jingling, jingling' 'click-click', and 'drink ,drink and drink again'
in their respective contexts seem to replicate an action, a sound, or a mental state. In
some cases a word is repeated to achieve the effect of intensification . Reiterations
of a word with the addition of an intensifier as 'hot so hot', 'hurt..., too hurt',
'rain...meager rain' .-. reinforce the idea expressed.
Besides emotional emphasis verbal repetitions also contribute a quality of
musicality toDas's verse.
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3.2.2 Verbal Parallelism
Verbal parallelism refers to 'verbal repetition in equivalent positions' (Leech,
1969: 79). Words or sentence fragments are repeated at the beginning of the
'relevant unit' of a text which may range from a nominal group or prepositional
group to a clause or sentence to a verse paragraph. The verbal repetition and the
equivalent pieces of language at the beginning of which it occurs together create a
parallelistic pattern of invariables ( the verbal repetition itself) and the variables ( the
rest of the unit). This kind of parallelism is a distinct feature of Das's poetry which
can be noticed not only at the of grammatical level but also at the morphological
level. Let us examine some of her poems where parallelism figures as a distinct
stylistic device at various grammatical levels. Following Palmer (1983 ),
morphology is considered as a division of grammar. Let us, therefore, first see how
parallelism operates on the morhological level of Das's language.
a) Morphological Level: In two of the selected poems Das has created
sequences of parallelistically structured words and compounds by making a
significant use of the English rule of affixation and compounding. In lines 14-15 of
the poem I Shall Some Day, Das visualizes her own 'independent' world as 'c/e-
fleshed, J^-veined and ^e-blooded'. She has to conceptualise her vision of a world
completely shorn of romantic trappings, a world reduced to its utterly naked reality.
To achieve this Das first functionally converts 'flesh', 'vein' and 'blood' from nouns
to verbs and then prefixes them all with the negative de thus creating a series of
predicators where the prefix remains the same and the lexical verbs vary. The
parallelistically constructed series communicates her intense sense of negation and
deprivation.
In lines 9-10 of The Descendants, Das has to communicate a nebulous
'trance' like state of awareness which is common to both spiritual and erotic
experiences. She does this through a parallelism of compounds where the first
element 'half remains constant and the second elements vary. The parallelism of
'half-dusk, half-dawn and half-dream half-real trance' enhances the impact of a
vague awareness the speaker wants to communicate.
In Loud Posters the semantic implications of monotony through a ritual
exposure of her 'two-dimensional nudity' through journals and periodicals are
reinforced by the parallelism of the plural suffixes at the end of 'weeklies, monthl/V^.s'.
quarter//e.y.' Inwfi-Dance of the Eunuchs the repetition of the progressive 'ing"
suffix to verbs give us five parallelistic structures-going, clashing, jingling, flying,
and flashing- adding to the tempo and tone of the poem.
b) Group Level: Many times we come across parallelistic patterns in nominal
or prepositional groups used as the S, C or A elements in the clause structure. In
lines 5-7 of The Seashore the pensona's deep involvement with her lover is revealed
in emotive expressions like
the only face I remember
Then is yours, my darling, and the only words, your
Oft-repeated plea...'
In Convicts her awareness about the bodily confinements of love turns into an ache
rising 'out of/ sea, out of wind, out of earth and/ out of each sad night ' In Loud
Posters the self-inflicted torture of the persona intensifies as she penetrates within
herself to locate her mind 'beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath/ the bone.'
The repetition of 'no more' in the nominal groups 'no more singing, no more dance'