Reading Forster's style: face actions and social scripts in Maurice - E.M. Forster

Style, Spring, 1996 by R.A. Buck

I. INTRODUCTION

In his recent article in Style on Gricean perspectives in Finnegans Wake, David Herman demonstrates how current pragmatic theories, notably those of Paul Grice, John Searle, and such conversational analysts as Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schlegloff, Gail Jefferson, Deirdre Burton, and Deborah Schiffrin, among others, can be used as tools for interpreting literary texts. He also emphasizes the importance of using literary dialogues as "models for hypothetical discourse situations" (219), products that help us to rethink and evaluate the linguistic presumptions that operate in our construction of the meaning and cohesion of discourse.(1) Herman points out that "[l]iterary dialogues ... stage the principles and mechanisms of dialogue in general, forcing us to reflect on our canons for conversational coherence" (219). The cooperative principle, speech-act theory, and principles of conversational analysis, as Herman illustrates, all seek to explain the abstract sociolinguistic mechanisms that enable us to relate context to sentential meaning and arrive at inferential pragmatic meaning in discourse.

Currently, linguists are investigating another powerful sociolinguistic principle not addressed by Herman, an abstract-principle that also operates in our construction of conversational cohesion: Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's politeness theory, which provides an account of linguistic phenomena that range far beyond simple notions of prescribed etiquette.(2) The theory posits that a subconscious sociolinguistic principle operates on conversation and functions as a social gauge, one that constrains and directs the social climate of the ever-changing turn-taking context. The theory relies heavily on Emile Durkheim's view of social interaction as ceremonial rite and, consequently, on Erving Golfman's theory that individual acts at the local level of conversation are manifestations of "face" ritual behavior, conventional behavior that as societal members we continually perform during interaction with others in order to protect and maintain our public self value as well as that of others.(3)

In addition to Brown and Levinson's theory, schema theory provides another account of how we arrive at inferential meaning in discourse. In schema theory, various internalized world-knowledge information and storage structures account for the way we process both new and familiar information encountered in discourse (Bower, Black, and Turner; Minsky; Schank). Schema theory proposes that we assimilate and interpret new information in terms of preexisting background knowledge structures such as frames and scripts that represent our conceptual organization of past experience. In other words, the process of interpreting discourse activates an interlinked network of data structures storing information based on world experiences; either so-called slots in the skeletal structure are modified in order to accommodate the new information or new mental representations are constructed to give some order to it.

Schema theory posits that new experiences are interpreted in light of preexisting expectations. Schemes of everyday, routine, common experiences and other structures that organize knowledge provide a frame of reference through which we attempt to understand new material. These structures explain how we are able, in some cases, to make the appropriate assumptions or inferences about information not explicitly stated (Halasz 28). Such internalized mental structures provide yet another framework for explaining how coherence is imposed on the discourse of conversation.

My purpose in this essay is to demonstrate how an understanding of these linguistic presumptions allows us to unveil a process for constructing meaning that unfolds when we encounter a piece of literary dialogue. A detailed discourse analysis not only reveals the variety of stylistic effects that form an integral part of the dialogue's texture; it also explains the process of contextual delimitation that emerges through our reading as we negotiate the linguistic form with our linguistic presumptions and with the always changing context of the local discourse situation.

II. METHODOLOGY

For my analysis, I have chosen from E. M. Forster's Maurice a passage of interpersonal dialogue between Clive Durham and Maurice Hall, both students at Cambridge, which captures their first meeting.(4) Maurice arrives at Risley's rooms uninvited, and instead of Risley, his new acquaintance, he finds Clive, a student he has heard of but never met. I selected this passage because it closely resembles what we might encounter in everyday conversation. Those who choose to analyze dialogue from the works of such writers as Joyce, Pinter, and Beckett find prima facie stylistic insights since the characters in most of these works explicitly violate our linguistic presumptions of pragmatic principles. My interest is rather to examine how a discourse analysis of even an ordinary piece of dialogue unfolds a complex reading of style. Through a discourse analysis, the text reveals a depth and complexity that is not "wholly given before we start interpreting" (Herman 222) but is rather derived as we negotiate the linguistic form of the text with elements of our subconscious sociolinguistic knowledge and thus arrive at some construction of the text's coherence.