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Stylistics in Use
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Introduction ................................................................................................ xi
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
1-1. Novel forms of the phrase frame found through web search of random
word combinations (letter “b”) ........................................................... 18
1-2. Instances of the “* me no *s” phrase frame recorded by Bartlett
(1905), Potter (1915), and Cooper (1916) ........................................... 24
2-1. Most relevant semantic fields in the corpus ...................................... 40
2-2. Most recurrent canting terms in the corpus ....................................... 41
7-1. Nombres usados con mayor frecuencia para referirse a los otros
africanos ............................................................................................ 117
INTRODUCTION
“BUT ME NO BUTS”:
ALLUSION, INTERTEXTUALITY,
AND OTHER THINGS CORPORA CAN’T SEE
1. Introduction
The history of literary language in English is filled with popular
catchphrases. Some of them epitomize the idiolect of a particular fictional
character for posterity (e.g., “I would prefer not to”) whereas others
transcend individual works and become widespread in the literary canon of
a specific period. For instance, many Elizabethan plays written around
1590 include “paucis pallabris” or a variation thereof1—a phrase that
constitutes one of the earliest recorded examples of systematic
intertextuality in secular texts. Some other popular literary phrases, however,
do not comprise a fixed set of words, but rather a syntactic structure that
becomes very productive by virtue of paradigmatic substitution. In other
words, one is looking at a phraseological unit that is actualized for stylistic
purposes by changing one or more of its constituents.
These multi-word sequences containing one or more free slots are often
referred to in the field of phraseology as a “collocational frameworks”
(Renouf and Sinclair 1991, 128) or “phrase frames” (Stubbs 2007).2 In the
1
See, for example, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (In.i.5, “paucas
pallabris”) and Much Ado About Nothing (III.v.16, simply “palabras”), and Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy (III.xiv.118 “pocas palabras”).
2
Although terminological disputes are beyond the scope of this essay, “phrase
frame” will be the term of choice henceforth because the definition for
“collocational framework” specifies that it is “a discontinuous sequence of two
words, positioned at one word remove from each other.” Evidently, “X me no Xs”
meets neither criterion.
2 Chapter One
case in point, as we shall see, the phrase frame “* me no *s”3 may result in
concrete realizations such as “but me no buts,” “diamond me no
diamonds” or “virgin me no virgins”—to name but a few.
As the title of this chapter suggests, “but me no buts” is the most
popular realization of the “* me no *s” phrase frame. Indeed, it is the only
formulation of it that has made its way into the phrasicon (i.e., the whole
catalogue of conventionalized phraseological units in a language). Thus, it
is recorded in several phraseological dictionaries.4 In this regard, “but me
no buts” can be classified as what Gläser (1986b; 2001) calls “quotations
and winged words”—that is, propositions (sentence-like phraseological
units) that are commonly known and can be traced back to a known
source, even if the meaning and pragmatic use of the expression no longer
correspond to that of its original source. In the case of “but me no buts,”
its first recorded use is to be found in Susanna Centlivre’s The Busie Body
(1708), although several sources claim5 that it was its use in Scott’s The
Antiquary (1816) that popularized it. In fact, it has become so widespread
as a stereotypical formulation that it is often misattributed to Shakespeare.6
This particular expression of the frame, however, is by no means the
only documented use. As noted above—and within literary language
alone—we can list many other examples, such as “clerk me no clerks” or
“front me no fronts.” Such has been the popularity of this phrase frame as
a source of literary creativity that some early studies attempted to compile
a catalogue of the existing instances of this manifestation of
intertextuality. John Bartlett (1905, 861), for example, enumerates
nineteen different realizations of “* me no *s” from literary works dated
anywhere between the Elizabethan period and the 19th century (see
Appendix A). Soon after this, Potter (1915) set out to expand Bartlett´s
records in a short paper exclusively dedicated to listing further examples
of the same phrase frame. He compiles another fifteen examples of the “*
me no *s” pattern (see Appendix A) and finds new occurrences of
Bartlett’s examples in different works of literature. It is also worthy of
remark that he notes for the first time that “this locution” also “crops up in
contemporary writers.” A year after Potter’s note, Cooper (1916)
submitted to the same publication an addendum to the former’s collection.
It supplies a further 33 examples (Appendix A), for one of which he
admits the references to be lacking. All the examples that Cooper
3
We follow the convention of utilizing an asterisk (*) to denote a free slot in a
string of text where any word may be used in its stead.
4
See, for example, Kumar (1998), Jewell (2002) or Manser (2006).
5
See, for example, Partridge (2005 [1940], 58) and Stevenson (1948, 1218)
6
See Bernard Levin (1983), as quoted in Wells and Shaw (2005 [1998], 82).
“But Me No Buts” 3
enumerates are once again taken from works of literature, the majority of
which are late Tudor and Restoration drama. He does not seem to have
read Bartlett’s book, however, or he would have noticed that some of the
“new” examples he records had already been listed by Bartlett. In all, the
popularity of this phrase frame as a literary device is well attested, to the
extent that it is sometimes used to illustrate lexical creativity, word
formation, and other linguistic phenomena.7
A superficial glance at the examples recorded by the authors cited
above seems to suggest that “* me no *s” has been especially productive
roughly during the 250 years between the late 16th century and the first
half of the 19th century, with some occasional later occurrences. Other than
this, there is very little that can be derived from the data available in
earlier studies, and there is no evidence to suggest that this phrase frame is
used regularly outside literary discourse. However, it is my contention in
this chapter that this particular phrase frame is a ubiquitous stylistic device
in other genres and registers (e.g. journalism and colloquial web genres).
Also, other potentially relevant circumstances in the distribution and use
of this frame are also to be explored: geographical, chronological, social.
In order to gauge whether and to what extent these elements are germane
to this research, the analysis draws in the main from a corpus-based
methodology. In addition, the data from the different corpora available is
presented with a purpose that goes beyond the primary research objective
stated before. Indeed, as we shall see, one of the reasons why so little data
is available has to do with the limitations of the corpora at our disposal.
Therefore, in this study we not only analyze a particular phrase frame from
the point of view of corpus-based phraseo-stylistics,8 but we also try to
overcome the restrictions imposed by corpora that were not compiled—
and neither were their search interfaces—with these phenomena in mind.
Thus, as a derived objective, we set out to mark the most relevant
methodological caveats for future research on this or related questions.
7
See, for example, Crystal (2005a; 2005b; 2007).
8
See Gläser (1986b) and related research on the wake of her paper, like Oncins-
Martínez (2005).
4 Chapter One
In this case we have a larger text sample at our disposal (450 million
words) from a different geographical source (United States) and, perhaps
most importantly, it has undergone regular updates so that at present it
comprises texts from 1990 to 2015.12 The Corpus of Contemporary
American English retrieves 44 raw results for the query “* me no *s”—a
figure that is proportionally larger than what is to be expected by
comparison with the size of the BNC. The number of relevant results,
however, is also rather small at 3 (Figure 1-2). All three instances of the
phrase frame in question belong to literary works,13 and only two of them
had not been recorded previously “name me no names” and “behoove me
no ill-behooves.” The third one is another utilization of the popular “but
me no buts.”
Once again, neither the distribution nor the frequency of the results
suggests that there has been any change in the use of the phrase frame
primarily as a restricted stylistic device in literary genres.
12
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
13
“Name me no names” is from Cynthia Ozick’s collection of short stories
Dictation: A Quartet and “but me no buts” was retrieved from Tobias Wolff’s This
Boy’s Life. The case of “behoove me no ill-behooves” is rather tricky, because it
belongs to the movie script of The Bonfire of the Vanities, but it does not appear in
the text of the original novel.
6 Chapter One
18
There has been a relatively recent edition published in Mumbai (2004, Wilco
Publishing House).
19
To quote two random test queries that were performed in order to explore this
circumstance, “Bounderby” retrieves almost 100 results, most of which are
duplicated quotations from Hard Times or fragments of the digitized text of the
novel. Also, the text of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Xanadu” is repeated four times
in the corpus.
10 Chapter One
web interface indicates,20 “allows you to search more than 200 billion
words (200,000,000,000) of data in both the American and British English
datasets.” In addition, the dataset comprises texts between the 1500s and
the 2000s; this chronological range covers contemporary usage as well as
the epoch of the earliest recorded examples in Appendix A.
The number of results (both the raw data and the relevant examples) is
larger than in any previous queries. Specifically, out of an initial batch of
93 phrase frames and more than 16,000 realizations (Figure 1-4), we are
left with 15 relevant formulations of the frame, which account for 2,669
occurrences.
20
http://googlebooks.byu.edu/x.asp.
“But Me No Buts” 11
the instances one by one so that the extent of this portrayal can be
faithfully estimated quantitatively and qualitatively.
“But me no buts” is by far the most frequent realization of “* me no
*s” in the Google Books Corpus, as it occurs 998 times. When the actual
texts in the corpus are displayed, one can see that practically all the cases
fall into one of three broad categories: a) an entry in a phraseological
dictionary or a dictionary of quotations; b) the phrase in use in the relevant
work of several authors (Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, Susanna Centlivre,
and Henry Fielding); and c) a reference to this realization of the frame in a
critical edition of a literary work as a way to illustrate another of its
formulations in that work. Occasionally, one encounters a case that has
been used in a different work of fiction,21 but the phraseological nature of
this frame and its use in well-known classical works diminishes its
potential stylistic effect.
“Thank me no thankings” (378) and “proud me no prouds” (432)
usually go together, as most of the results are from editions of Romeo and
Juliet (“Thank me no thankings nor proud me no prouds,” Act III, Sc. v).
In addition, as in the previous case, dictionaries of quotations and
scholarly publications (on Shakespeare, but also on linguistics and other
areas of study within the humanities) make up the entirety of this set of
results.
The rest of the results follows a similar pattern. The number of
occurrences is usually a combination of examples in dictionaries of
quotations and scholarly works plus the original example in different
editions of the same literary work. Thus, we find “prize me no prizes” and
“diamond me no diamonds” (145 and 157 results respectively, quoted
from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), “petition me no petitions” (112 from
Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb), “virgin me no virgins,” “end me no ends,”
and “cause me no causes” (111, 85, and 82 results respectively, all from
Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts), “digest me no
digestions” (95 from a letter from the Count of Essex to recommend
Francis Bacon for Attorney General, edited or quoted in different
publications), “plot me no plots” (94 from Francis Beaumont’s The Knight
of the Burning Pestle), “parish me no parishes” (74 results from George
Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale), “map me no maps” (71 results quoted
originally from Henry Fielding’s The Justice Caught in His Own Trap),
21
Such is the case of Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the
Apocalypse and Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire: The Story of a Squad. The latter is
perhaps one of the few cases that deserves further exploration, as it is a translation
of the original French and “but me no buts” is used twice in the same passage.
12 Chapter One
“clerk me no clerks” (56 results from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), and “vow
me no vows” (49 results from John Fletcher’s Wit Without Money).
Even if the purpose of this study were to track the use of the examples
recorded in Appendix A in the history of literary criticism, the Google
Book Corpus presents a series of problematic elements that would mar the
validity of such a study. The first of them is of technical nature. After the
initial query was performed (* me no *s), each of the relevant results was
tested in the search interface as a literal text string; i.e., I searched for “but
me no buts,” “diamond me no diamonds,” “clerk me no clerks,” and all the
other instances of the phrase frame. In doing so, I discovered that—for
reasons unknown to me—the web-based interface retrieved two different
search lines for certain formulations, one of which had a slightly altered
spelling because a random letter was capitalized (Figure 1-5). These two
different set of results did appear in the initial result list in the case of “but
me no buts/But me no buts”—albeit far apart from each other because of
the difference in number of occurrences. “Diamond me No diamonds,” on
the contrary, was absent from the first list. Thus, neither the number of
occurrences nor the distribution of the sources were initially accurate, and
these additional findings had to be added to arrive at the figures discussed
above.
Figure 1-6. Five different editions of the same work make the number
of results increase by fivefold
2.6 WebCorp
Perhaps the most suitable corpora for assessing whether “* me no *s”
has any prevalence outside literary language—and if such prevalence
entails some sort of creative strain—are those compiled at WebCorp.23
Initially, the WebCorp Live suite presents the ideal capabilities, for it
“allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus—a large collection of
texts from which facts about the language can be extracted.”24 However,
after the first few queries retrieved fewer results than one would expect, I
filled in a feedback form online and received a message stating that the
“Google Search API is limited to a maximum of 64 search results.” If we
consider for a moment what 64 results represent in the larger scheme of
the whole Internet, it follows naturally that WebCorp Live cannot be used
for the present research purposes. In addition, the Google API is the only
one that allows wildcard queries (only one), so none of the others available
is of any use.
Fortunately, WebCorp also has three other digital corpora that have
been compiled by “extracting textual content from web pages.”25 These
are the Diachronic English Web Corpus26 (130 million words), the
Synchronic English Web Corpus27 (470 million words), and the
Birmingham Blog Corpus28 (630 million words). The data from these
corpora are accessible through their website and it does not depend on an
23
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/.
24
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/guide.jsp.
25
http://wse1.webcorp.org.uk/.
26
http://wse1.webcorp.org.uk/cgi-bin/DIA/index.cgi.
27
http://wse1.webcorp.org.uk/cgi-bin/SYN/index.cgi.
28
http://wse1.webcorp.org.uk/cgi-bin/BLOG/index.cgi.
“But Me No Buts” 15
external API. Although only one wildcard symbol (*) can be used per
query, this does not affect the relevance of the results or hamper the
weeding out of the irrelevant cases. Additionally, no limitations on the
number of search results exist.
The case of the Diachronic English Web Corpus deserves little
commentary. It retrieves 20 results, none of which fits the “* me no *s”
frame. Paradoxically, as we read on the main page of the corpus, it “covers
the period Jan 2000 - Dec 2010. Each month contains 1 million words.”
Once again, it seems that this phrase frame is not in current use in English.
The results from the Synchronic English Web Corpus are not much
more promising: 131 results, only three of which are relevant (two
instances of “but me no buts” and one of “clerk me no clerks”). Here, once
again, one detects a problematic methodological issue in the compilation
of the corpus: If each of these three results is analyzed individually, it is
striking to find that all of them have been extracted from different issues
of the British satirical magazine Punch.29 This poses, at least, two caveats
for researchers using WebCorp at large. First, these three texts are
obviously not from the 2000-2010 period, regardless of the date when they
were uploaded to Project Gutenberg. Thus, any chronological conclusions
based on these corpora and drawn from larger datasets must be taken with
a grain of salt, because unless each individual concordance line is checked,
there is no way of knowing whether we are looking at texts written in the
last few years. Second, on closer inspection we learn that these three
examples come from a sub-corpus called “Mini-web Sample,” described
as “339,907,995 words from 100,000 randomly selected web-pages to
form a sample of the distribution of texts throughout the web.” Although
the randomization of the sample ensures robust results—especially when
selected from such a large data source as the web, the specific information
on the precise sub-corpus and/or domain is only accessible at a glance if
the appropriate option is selected from the “Display Info” drop-down
menu. Otherwise, each concordance line must be clicked on to prompt a
contextual menu that lists that sort of information (Figure 1-7). Let this be
a technical recommendation to anyone using the WebCorp suite.
29
The first occurrence of “but me no buts” is from Vol. 1 (August 7, 1841); the
second “but me no buts” is to be found in Vol. 153 (November 7, 1917), whereas
the only instance of “clerk me no clerks” dates from March 26, 1892 (Vol. 102).
All the texts were taken from the Project Gutenberg site
(http://www.gutenberg.org/) which, by the way, stores a phenomenal digitized
collection of Punch (over 500 issues).
16 Chapter One
As regards the pertinent issues for the scope of this essay, it is worthy
of note that this is the first batch of results that—despite not having a
novel formulation—are used in satirical, creative discourse outside the
domain of mainstream literature. In all, however, the chronological and
geographical limitations of the sample—not to mention its size—do not
justify any interpretation that goes beyond a stylistic oddity.
The third WebCorp corpus (Birmingham Blog Corpus) also retrieves a
sizeable set of examples (142) for the “me no *s” query, with the usual
minuscule set of relevant results (1). This case is, unsurprisingly, another
instance of “but me no buts”30 in its canonical, phraseological sense. There
are, however, two “silver linings” in this use of the frame: First, it occurs
outside literary language. In fact, it is merely found in a comment to the
original blog post—blogging being susceptible to utilizing stylistic traits
from literature. Second, one can be sure that the example was written in
2010, as indicated by the date in the heading of the comment.
30
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/12/31/final-notes-on-obamas-2009/.
“But Me No Buts” 17
already been documented. After all the queries discussed throughout this
chapter, there is only one truly novel exploitation of the frame (“butt me
no butts”) and only a couple of valid examples in genres like journalism or
blogging.
In a last attempt to verify the validity and replicability of my findings
outside the corpora available, I decided to take a more inductive approach:
I set out to brainstorm for possible realizations of the phrase frame,
Google them in quotation marks so that all the search results would
include an exact match of the proposed formulation, and record them
systematically. I decided to use words that begin with the letter b only; not
because of any conscious decision, but because the starting point was the
eponymous “but me no buts.” The results were unexpectedly positive.
All the relevant examples; i.e., those random combinations that had
been used in a particular text, are listed in Table 1-1 below, together with
the url of the website where they were found. Thus, what follows is only a
brief commentary about their lexical components, the genre in which they
are used, and their stylistic function.
Table 1-1. Novel forms of the phrase frame found through web search
of random word combinations (letter “b”)
Examples URL
Bite me no http://eastwickpress.com/news/2012/09/bite-me-no-bites/
bites
Bush me no http://midtermmadness.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/roves-losing-
Bushes strategy/?_r=0
http://www.pageglance.com/trolls-bush.be
Bad me no http://shaksper.net/archive/2003/199-february/17674-re-bbc-series-sp-
bads 783493134
Bill me no bills http://cronymag.com/c/?p=128
Blush me no http://www.wetdryvac.net/November3rdClub/2006/11-
blushes 06/fiction/nicaragua.htm
Bass me no http://flyfishinginnh.com/vforum/archive/index.php/f-10-p-10.html
bass
Bing me no http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/06/15/2352200/apple-finally-patches-java-
Bings vulnerability
Bath me no https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.usage.english/MhzKoYEbBNE/eiIG
baths NTab12EJ
Blog me no http://www.blog-me-no-blogs.blogspot.com
blogs
Brand me no http://terrifavro.ca/post/133466186967/unbrand-that-writer
brands
Bake me no https://twitter.com/KLong1724/status/552330819508109313
bakes
Blast me no http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Fall_Walther.php
blasts
18 Chapter One
Bear me no http://www.khakain.com/archdeco/vault/swirve/vetinari/board.cgi%3Fboa
bears rdset=vetinari&boardid=assassin&thread=17&startmsg=20.html
Bogus me no http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1998/nov/17/further-commons-
boguses amendment-in-lieu
Boob me no http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/615805-the-elder-scrolls-v-
boobs skyrim/62221568
Boot me no http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/VUW1931Spik-fig-
boots VUW1931Spik001a.html
Frost me no http://darcysheartstirrings.blogspot.com.es/2011/02/fyi.html
frost,
scoop me no
scoop, brown
me no browns
Brew me no http://www.soxaholix.com/tp/2012/04/mailing-it-in.html
brews
Brook me no http://languagehat.com/two-etymologies-2/
brooks
Brother me no https://books.google.es/books?id=ucatAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT48&ots=EX
brothers MR9uMNG3&dq=%22brother%20me%20no%20brothers%22&pg=PT48
#v=onepage&q=%22brother%20me%20no%20brothers%22&f=false
Bud me no https://www.flickr.com/photos/onkel_wart/2513880577
buds https://www.flickr.com/photos/62322566@N00/5950203924/
Budget me no http://www.ebay.com/itm/1902-DAN-LENO-Espinosa-ballet-Ms-
budgets Bernard-Beere-actress-photo-article-1-
/222010159482?hash=item33b0d6317a:g:6UUAAOSwnLdWrLbe
Butt me no In addition to the news item found in the GloWbE corpus, there are
butts dozens of examples of this formulation in recent websites alone. We
reproduce a few here as a way of illustration.
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140624/letters/letters5.html
http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/01/19/butt-me-no-butts-a-sideways-
look-at-the-because-effect/
http://life-and-vincent.blogspot.com.es/2010/09/butt-me-no-butts.html
http://barticles.blogs.timesdispatch.com/2012/01/09/butt-me-no-butts/
The most obvious notion that this random sample illustrates is that
there are many more exploited versions of “* me no *s” than one may
initially believe. If one considers that all these novel31 combinations have
been retrieved by brainstorming words in front of a computer screen for an
hour, and that only words beginning with the letter b have been chosen, it
is easy to imagine that the real figure must be larger by an order of
magnitude. This estimate does not take into account the possibility that
there should be a sizeable proportion of parallel phrase frames that do not
use the first person pronoun (“me”), and use some other instead—as in the
“force him no forces” that Cooper cites (Appendix A). Furthermore, the
31
A few of them had been recorded elsewhere, but none of them has any
intertextual connection to the source cited in Appendix A.
“But Me No Buts” 19
collection above only lists examples that are not literary texts in print and
have been used in relatively recent sources (late 20th and early 21st
centuries). In fact, in addition, the process of brainstorming for plausible
formulations has resulted in a remarkable by-product group of earlier
novel occurrences of the “* me no *s” frame. These have been detected in
literary and journalistic texts of the last two centuries. Just to mention a
few—despite the fact that older literary cases are outside the scope of this
chapter—we have “book me no books,”32 “brute me no brutes,”33 and
“brink me no brinks,”34 among many others.35 Citing a few examples of
this sort, however, is a necessary step towards exposing yet another
systematic shortcoming of certain web-based corpora. In this particular
case, the reader may easily locate each formulation of the “* me no *s”
frame in their original context by performing a simple search on Google
Books©. In spite of this, as the data above indicates, the Google Books
Corpus (see section 2.5) does not retrieve any of these occurrences, even
though a direct search of each individual case was additionally performed
at this stage for good measure. Thus, one may argue that either of the
following three questions of design are faulty (or all of them to varying
degrees): First, it may well be that books published before editions were
also released in digital form may contain errors of character recognition,
especially if the font used is rare at present. In this case, although the
entirety of the Google Books database has been made into a corpus, we
can only expect to retrieve results from those stretches of text whose
characters have been correctly identified by the OCR software and thus
transcribed into intelligible words for text-driven search engines (corpora
or others). Alternatively—quite possibly, simultaneously—it is plausible
to believe that a significant chunk of the Google Books dataset is not
accessible by or has not been compiled into the web-based corpus
available at http://googlebooks.byu.edu/. The author does not know
whether this happens because certain books are not available for preview
or because the examples are found in books that were incorporated into the
32
Robert Folkestone Williams. The Youth of Shakspeare. London: Henry Colburn,
1839.
33
Thomas Otway. The Atheist; or, the Second Part of the Soldier’s Fortune.
London: T. Turner, 1813.
34
Esmerie Amori. The Epistolary Flirt in Four Exposures. Chicago: Way &
Williams, 1896.
35
Other novel occurrences from the late 19th and early 20th centuries include “bed
me no beds,” “better me no betters,” and “brother me no brothers.” The whole list
of examples and references will be happily shared upon request (only for lexical
units beginning with the letter b).
20 Chapter One
dataset after a certain date. In all, the fact remains that there are striking
discrepancies between both (theoretically identical) corpora. To illustrate
this with one of the aforementioned examples, “book me no books”
retrieves 17 results when the search is performed at the Google Books site,
whereas it retrieves none when using the Google Books corpora designed
by Mark Davies. Finally, the preceding discussion should also take into
account the fact that, as the description of the Google Books Corpus reads,
there is an inherent “mismatch between the frequency data in our charts
and what you see at the Google Books site.” Specifically, the problem
seems to be that
the n-grams frequency lists (either on our site or theirs, when you have
selected a particular dataset) apply to just THAT ONE dataset. The book
extracts, however, are from ALL Google Books (American, British, +/-
fiction, +/- one million books, etc). As a result, you will almost always see
more hits—sometimes MANY more hits—from the book extracts than
from the n-grams frequency data.
References
Bartlett, J. Familiar Quotations: A collection of passages, phrases and
proverbs traced to their sources in ancient and modern literature.
London: Macmillan, 1905.
Cooper, C. B. “But Me No Buts.” Modern Language Notes 31/5 (1916):
314.
Crystal, D. The Stories of English. London: Penguin, 2005a [2004].
—. How Language Works. London: Penguin, 2005b.
—. Words, Words, Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Douglas, F. “The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech: Problems of
Corpus Design.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 18/1 (2003):
23-37.
Gaskell, G. A. Gaskell’s Compendium of Forms, Educational, Social,
Legal and Commercial. St. Louis: Richard S. Peale, 1881.
Gläser, R. Phraseologie der Englischen Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1986a.
—. “A Plea for Phraseo-Stylistics.” In Linguistics across Historical and
Geographical Boundaries. In Honour of Jacek Frisiak, i. Linguistic
Theory and Historical Linguistics, edited by D. Kastovsky and A.
Szwedek, 41-52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986b.
—. “The stylistic potential of phraseological units in the light of genre
analysis.” In Phraseology: Theory, Analysis, and Applications, edited
by A. P. Cowie, 125-144. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Hundt, M., N. Nesselhauf, and C. Biewer. Corpus Linguistics and the
Web. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Jewell, E. J. The Pocket Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kumar, V. The Sterling Dictionary of Idioms. New Delhi: Sterling, 1998.
Leitner, G. “International Corpus of English: Corpus Design – problems
and suggested solutions.” In New Directions in English Language
Corpora: Methodology, Results, Software Developments, edited by G.
Leitner, 75-96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992.
Manser, M. H. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Idioms. Ware: Wordsworth,
2006.
Miller, D. and D. Biber. “Evaluating reliability in quantitative vocabulary
studies: The influence of corpus design and composition.”
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20/1 (2015): 30-53.
Oncins-Martínez, J. L. “Another plea for ‘phraseo-stylistics’ʊor how
literary texts can contribute to the development of phraseology: the
case of Shakespeare”. In Phraseology 2005. The many faces of
“But Me No Buts” 23
1. Introduction
As a consequence of the growing demand of roguish literature derived
from the English criminal environment, 18th-century dramatic representations
of the underworld proved to be a very successful venture for many
contemporary playwrights. Many of them started writing an important
number of plays which dealt with the lives and adventures of English
rogues, whose illegal activity was articulated around their encoded canting
speech. Due to their quality and success, these literary works have
traditionally been studied from a literary point of view. However, far too
little attention, if any, has been paid to the crucial role of drama as a means
for the dissemination, categorization and enregisterment of cant language.
Coleman, for example, has addressed the lexicographic potential of
roguish drama in the different volumes of her comprehensive A History of
Cant and Slang Dictionaries (2004-2010), whilst But (2011), among
others, has explored the uses and perceptions of cant and slang
terminology in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nevertheless, neither of these
works has approached cant language from the point of view of
enregisterment. In this chapter, I argue that literary depictions of cant
language can provide very useful insight into this variety and its users
during the 18th century, whilst exploring how they contributed to the
creation and circulation of linguistic and sociocultural ideas about it,
which ultimately derived in the enregisterment of the canting tongue as a
stable and homogeneous variety. For this purpose, I will analyze the most
recurrent lexical, semantic and sociocultural features of cant language as
documented in the corpus of analysis, which has been compiled using data
extracted from two of the most emblematic roguish plays available that
30 Chapter Two
represented cant in the 18th century: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
(1728) and The Pettyfogger Dramatized (1797), by T.B. Junr. They have
been selected with the aim of providing a representative, well-balanced
sample of this variety at the time: two plays from the early and late 1700s,
respectively. The data have been organized thanks to the information
provided by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and several dictionaries
representative of the century: Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological
English Dictionary (1721), Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755),1 and A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1785) by Francis Grose. Grose’s work is the most relevant and
comprehensive canting dictionary of the 18th century (see Coleman 2008),
and the ones compiled by Bailey and Johnson constitute two of the most
influential English dictionaries of the period, which cover not only the
standard variety but also popular language, including cant. In this manner,
I will investigate to what extent literary renditions of the canting tongue
played a role in the enregisterment and circulation of this underworld
register and the cultural values most commonly associated with it.
1
In what follows, I will be using the third edition of Bailey’s work (1737), which I
accessed through the database Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), and the
sixth edition of A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1785.
The Vulgar on Stage 31
2
The OED first quotes the term cant in Harman’s work. However, the word is
documented as a verb, to cant, with the meaning “to speak in the whining or
singsong tone used by beggars; to beg.”
The Vulgar on Stage 35
3
See, for example, Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1785).
The Vulgar on Stage 37
visits to the prison. Be it as it may, the fact that the canting terms used in
The Beggar’s Opera are rather scattered throughout the whole play
suggests that Gay may have turned to contemporary widely recognized
cant terms (Coleman 2004, 121) rather than using them from first-hand
experience, which would give us a useful account of the knowledge that
English people had about the canting register.
In the years prior to the 19th century, the interest in the underworld and
its concealed language decreased due to an emerging new interest in
detectives rather than criminals (Coleman 2008, 12). However, we can still
find some works of roguish literature such as the play The Pettyfogger
Dramatized (1797), by the anonymous T.B. Junr., which deals with
trickery, corruption and debt. The play was published together with a little
glossary, some of whose entries are cants terms that, given the plot of the
play, mainly refer to money, trickery and debt (Coleman 2008, 201). The
play stands out for its linguistic diversity since its unknown author proves
to have command not only of cant language and standard English, but also
of Latin, French, and the legal jargon of the time, which makes it a
valuable source of linguistic information.
In what follows, I will undertake a qualitative and quantitative linguistic
analysis of the canting lexis present in the plays selected for this study. In
this manner, I will approach 18th-century cant language in an attempt to
shed some light on the linguistic and sociocultural connotations associated
with it which were transmitted to contemporary non-canting audience by
means of drama.
least, one cant term. Nimming Ned, Betty Doxy and Jenny Diver,4 among
others, are examples of this interesting function of cant which suggests
that the terms used to identify some of the characters may have been
familiar enough to the non-canting audience so as to evoke their criminal
status. Apart from that, the number of cant words used in the dialogues of
the play is not particularly abundant, and they are employed in a marginal
way, probably for flavour. These professional thieves use cant vocabulary
among themselves in conversation, which helps characterizing the rogues’
social group, but, due to its occasional, irregular appearance, it is hard to
say that a clear in-group or social structure is created and shaped around it.
Furthermore, the sociolect is neither used as a tool to perform or maintain
the secrecy of their illegal activities, nor as a means to draw a distinction
or exclude the non-roguish characters of the play. As a consequence, and
taking into account the fact that almost all the characters are criminals, the
non-canting society takes a neutral position towards cant; neither positive
nor negative reactions to this variety are recorded in Gay’s play.
Similarly, in T.B.’s The Pettyfogger Dramatized (1797), cant is once
more used with characterization purposes since it is only employed by the
criminal, dishonest characters of the play. These characters are mainly
rogues under the direction of a corrupt lawyer, Mr. Wolf, who stands for
the criminal master figure so common in 18th-century London, and they
earn their living by means of fraud, thanks to which they take advantage of
naive debtors. Cant is again employed in conversation to typify and mark a
very specific type of persona; this register, however, is not used as a
literary device to shape, define and structure a social group. Indeed, cant is
not even employed to exclude outsiders. Most standard speakers
understand and successfully communicate with criminals using this
language in spite of not being able to speak cant themselves. This can be
exemplified in the passage in which roguish Sly defrauds distressed Mr.
Meanwell and addresses him using cant:
(1) Sly. . . . Dash it, if I can serve a man, I will. Come, draw a bill upon
yourself, and accept it, payable to Wolf. (Meanwell writes) –He has took
the bait (aside). Well, you shall have the mopusses.
Mr. Mean. Sir, I am so much obliged, I know not how to express. (T. B.
1797, 24)
4
Nim is defined in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) as
“To steal or pilfer”; doxies is glossed as “She beggars, wenches, whores”; whilst
diver is defined as “A pickpocket.” In what follows, and unless otherwise
indicated, all definitions have been taken from Francis Grose’s work.
The Vulgar on Stage 39
(2) An apology should be also made for the vulgarity of many other parts
of the dialogue, which must be attributed to the general conduct and
behaviour of this description of persons. The whole is, however, humbly
submitted to the candor and indulgence of the reader; and the writer hopes,
that a perusal of this little drama, may be found in some degree
entertaining, and that it may be the means of saving some honest,
unsuspecting man from ruin. (T. B. 1797, 8. My emphasis)
(3) Some words and explanations in the former edition having been
pointed out as rather indecent or indelicate, though to be found in Le Roux,
and other Glossaries of the like kind, these have been either omitted,
softened, or their explanations taken from books long sanctioned with
general approbation, and admitted into the seminaries for the education of
youth ʊsuch as Bailey’s, Miege’s, or Philip’s Dictionaries; so that it is
hoped this work will now be found as little offensive to delicacy as the
nature of it would admit. (Grose 1788, 3. My emphasis)
Although the two plays selected do not clearly reflect these contemporary
attitudes towards cant, non-literary testimonies such as those I have
mentioned mirror 18th-century perceptions of this variety and show how it
was, in fact, regarded as a vulgar, indecent variety which had to be
censored.
As Table 2-1 shows, the vocabulary regarding trickery and theft has a
prominent role in the 18th-century data. Clearly, the number of words
belonging to this semantic field is larger than those found in the other
groups, and their frequency significantly doubles that of the terms
included in the semantic field of money. These, as well as the words
denoting food, drink and insults are also quite numerous and recurrent in
the corpus, thereby contributing to the establishment of homogeneous and
stable semantic frames for the articulation of 18th-century literary cant. It is
worth noting that an important number of the terms included within these
semantic fields—black “a shabby, mean fellow”; tipple “liquor,” among
others—are used as proper names for some of the fictional criminals, so I
have been unable to obtain exact quantitative data in terms of frequency.
However, interesting qualitative information can be derived from this
employment of canting language, since these terms seem to have been
salient enough so as to be recognized and associated with crime.
A more careful examination of the canting lexis gathered in the corpus
reveals the presence of a recurrent set of items which are used in the two
plays in a relatively systematic and consistent manner:
plays, there is another word which is documented in the corpus data: filch
“to steal; to take by theft.”5 This term is not used with this sense during the
action of the play given that it is employed to identify two characters:
Filch in The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Filchey in The Pettyfogger
Dramatized (1797); however, clear allusion is made to this meaning since
the two rogues are professional thieves, which likewise reveals the
significance of this word. Remarkably, all the terms belong to the four
semantic fields highlighted in Table 2-1: filch denotes trickery and theft,
ready refers to money, bumper and punch are drinks, and black and
bubble, insults.
These terms, thus, constitute a fairly consistent lexical repertoire that
was presented before the non-canting London audience through dramatic
performance, giving way to the literary articulation of 18th-century English
cant. As such, and according to its dramatic representation, cant in the
1700s mainly referred to trickery, money, insults and drinking. This, in the
words of But, bears witness to “a deeply embedded, negative attitude
towards criminals in the period” (2011 “A kind of gibberish”: 4), which
was in turn inevitably transferred to their language. Contemporary non-
literary descriptions of this sociolect reinforce the linguistic account of the
London underworld provided by the corpus; in fact, some of the most
important dictionaries of the period listed these terms. Nathan Bailey’s
Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1737) recorded all the words
but bumper in the section devoted to cant language. Similarly, Samuel
Johnson included all of them in A Dictionary of the English Language
(1785) and highlighted that black, an abbreviation for blackguard, was “a
cant word amongst the vulgar,” and that ready was seen as “a low word.”
Finally, Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)
likewise glossed all the words with the exception of filch, which was
explained with a different meaning.6 Interestingly, the word ready was
specifically labeled as cant, which emphasizes its salience as a characteristic
term of this register. These testimonies confirm the cant status of the
words used by John Gay and the anonymous T.B. in their representation of
the London underworld in the period. In addition, modern lexicographic
evidence provided by the OED is in line with the previous data and points
to the stability of this canting lexical repertoire across centuries by
recording all the terms I have extracted from the corpus. This reinforces
the linguistic portrait that 18th-century roguish plays made of the underworld
5
The definition for filch has been extracted from Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary
of the English Language (1785).
6
It was defined as “a beggar’s staff, with an iron hook at the end, to pluck clothes
from an hedge, or any thing out of a casement.”
The Vulgar on Stage 43
gradually became aware and learnt about the register and its sociocultural
values.
All in all, 18th-century dramatic representations of cant language prove
to be a crucial element in the process of enregisterment of this underworld
variety since their production certainly points to the existence of third-
order indexical links whereby linguistic and sociocultural ideas about cant
were indexed to this form of expression. Further research in the field of
enregisterment may shed light on the processes involved in language
social and regional variation, as well as on people’s past and present
attitudes and perceptions about language use that lead to the creation and
circulation of linguistic and cultural ideologies associated to the many
varieties of the English language.
References
Agha, A. “The Social Life of Cultural Value.” Language &
Communication 23 (2003): 231-273.
—. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
15/1 (2005): 38-59.
Beal, J. “‘By Those Provincials Mispronounced’: The STRUT Vowel in
Eighteenth-Century Pronouncing Dictionaries.” Language and History
55/1 (2012): 5-17.
—. “Enregisterment, Commodification, and Historical Context: ‘Geordie’
versus ‘Sheffieldish’.” American Speech 84/2 (2009): 138-156.
Beal, J, and P. Cooper. “The Enregisterment of Northern English”. In
Researching Northern English, edited by R. Hickey, 25-50.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2015.
Blank, P. Broken English. Dialects and the Politics of Language in
Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge, 1996.
But, R. ‘A kind of gibberish used by thieves and gypsies’: The Social
Significance of ‘cant’ in the Eighteenth Century. Crime and the City
symposium. Sheffield: School of Law, University of Sheffield, 2011.
—. Unconventional Language Use in the Past: The Pragmatics of Slang in
an Eighteenth-Century Context. Sheffield: University of Sheffield,
2011.
Cannadine, D., ed. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. [online].
Accessed August 3, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com/.
Clark, U. “Er’s from off: The Indexicalization and Enregisterment of Black
Country Dialect.” American Speech 88/4 (2013): 441-466.
Coleman, J. A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries. Volume I: 1567-
1784. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
The Vulgar on Stage 45
1. Introduction
The effect or impact that a word, a phrase or a sentence from the Holy
Scripture, or a mere reference to the Bible, may have on literary discourse
is not, in principle, any different to the bearing that any of those segments
may have upon a manifestation of ordinary written or oral language.
Likewise, the role of biblical intertextuality in a play or poem written by
Shakespeare is not different, in essence, to that of a quotation or a simple
scriptural reference in the speech of a preacher, a common believer or,
simply, of any individual who quotes the Old or the New Testament for
cultural, historical or any other reason. The function of the use of such
quotation may range from poles as distant from one another as are, in fact,
the sectarian indoctrination or proselytism, on the one hand, and the mere
decoration of the language, on the other. This function is not dissimilar to
that of allusions to classical literature. In other words, scriptural
intertextuality may have profound religious and theological significance or
merely an aesthetic and stylistic one, or perhaps both, as has often been the
case with mystical literature.
It is probably unnecessary to state that the Bible has been one of the
main sources of all manifestations of art and particularly of literature. As
far as English literature is concerned, it is a generally acknowledged fact
that the King James Version of the Bible was probably the most influential
book on the literature written in English after 1611; and most critics and
readers coincide in the fact that this particular influence was, in general,
more of an aesthetic nature than of a doctrinal or even ethic one. Any
which way, there is little doubt that the strength of the religious
component gradually decreased as the heyday of the religious debate of
the Reformation weakened. This point is quite important because
48 Chapter Three
Shakespeare wrote the biggest part of his works between 1590 and 1611,
that is, before the publication date of the Authorised King James Version.
In other words, neither could Shakespeare benefit from the high aesthetic
quality of the Authorised Version of the Holy Writ nor was it easy for him
to escape from the theological feuds in which his fellow writers and
humanists were involved. What is certain though is that, in his numerous
works, there is no evidence of his participation in the mentioned religious
controversy of the epoch. It is equally true, and quite relevant for the kind
of analysis carried out in this chapter, that the main source of his frequent
resource to biblical discourse was the so-called Geneva Bible.1
Needless to say that the language of the Bible has indeed been an
inexhaustible source of literary inspiration2 and rhetorical devices; and this
is true of all of its versions and renderings into the languages of all of the
countries of Christendom. This is true because all of them count on
translations, which rightly deserve the qualifiers of “ancient,” “venerable”
and “memorable.” This memorable and, to a certain extent, venerable
character of the language of those translations accounts for the fact that
many authors have drawn on it for purely aesthetic reasons. This is quite
logical especially if one bears in mind that the Bible has not only affected
the mentality and beliefs of the peoples of those countries but also their
languages. The enormous wealth of rhetorical figures, literary devices or
forms, and even of phraseological units, collocations or single words of
biblical origin that have entered the vernacular languages into which the
Holy Writ has been translated is telling evidence of this fact.
The existence of this strictly linguistic influence, or interlanguage, in
the ordinary language of the different peoples of Europe has its logical
parallel in the strictly stylistic—not doctrinal—influence or intertext in
what might be called the extraordinary use of language, namely, in
1
Steven Marx, in his book Shakespeare and the Bible, states that “[the] first
edition of the King James translation of the Bible was published in London in 1611
[so it] is unlikely that Shakespeare had a hand in this project, but not impossible”
(2013, 1). In the “General Note” of his book, he also agrees with the fact that “the
[Geneva Bible] is one that most authorities agree Shakespeare read” (Marx 2003,
iv).
2
See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry, The
Literary Guide to the Bible, The Pleasures of Reading, The World of Biblical
Literature; Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the
Bible to the Present, The Book of J; Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and
Literature, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of ‘The Bible and
Literature’; Frank Vermode, The Sense of an Ending, The Genesis of Secrecy: On
the Interpretation of Narrative; among others.
Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 49
3
The opposite case, so to speak, would be Bernard Shaw’s for this dramatist uses,
and even subverts, biblical language in order to emphasise his Christian disbelief
as Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín has proven in his article “Shaw’s Subversion of
Biblical Language” (2013, 114-34).
4
Edmond Malone’s own edition of Shakespeare’s works—including essays on the
dramatist’s biography or the plays in performance—remain invaluable. Among his
works, both as an editor and as a critic, the following ones are very relevant: “An
Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare Were
Written,” in The Plays of William Shakspeare in Ten Volumes (1778); A
Dissertation of the Three Parts of “King Henry VI” (1787); An account of the
incidents from which the title and part of the story of Shakspeare’s “Tempest”
were derived, and its true date ascertained (1809); and, especially, Life of
Shakspeare (1821).
5
Ritson expresses his unfavourable opinion of Malone’s edition of Shakespeare’s
plays in his Cursory criticisms on the edition of Shakspeare published by Edmond
Malone (1792). Later on, he published his own edition: Fairy Tales, Legends &
Romances Illustrating Shakspeare & Other Early English Writers (1875).
6
The first edition of his book On Shakspeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible,
was published in 1864, in London.
7
Rolfe is probably one of the key American figures in early Shakespearean
criticism. His works are: Shakespeare the Boy (1896); Life of Shakespeare (1901);
Life of William Shakespeare (1904); and Shakespearean Proverbs (1908).
50 Chapter Three
It is obvious that the biblical key, in this case, resides within the words
“break my heart,” in which not only do the verses of the psalmist
resonate;10 yet so too the voice of the prophet Isaiah11 and even that of the
evangelist Luke.12 It is evident that Hamlet does not invoke, neither in this
10
“He healeth those that are broken in heart, and bindeth up their sores” (Psalm
147:3); “The sacrifices of God are a contrite spirit: a contrite and a broken heart, O
God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalm 51:17); and “Rebuke hath broken mine heart,
and I am full of heaviness, and I looked for some to have pity on me, but there was
none: and for comforters, but I found none” (Psalm 69:20). For these, and the
following quotations from the Bible, original spelling from the 1560 Geneva
Bible—see Works Cited for full reference—has been modernised; and alterations
have been made in a small number of instances where confusion might otherwise
result (for example, ‘thee’ for ‘the’).
11
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, therefore hath the Lord anointed me: he
hath sent me to preach good tidings unto the poor, to bind up the broken hearted, to
preach liberty to the captives, and to them that are bound, the opening of the
prison” (Isaiah 61:1).
12
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me, that I should
preach the Gospel to the poor, he hath sent me, that I should heal the broken
hearted, that I should preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to
the blind, that I should set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18).
52 Chapter Three
case nor probably throughout the whole work, the divine compassion that
is reminded to us by the psalmist, the prophet and the evangelist.
Contrarily, he only employs the image of the “broken heart” in order to
show his sorrow and the magnitude of both his pain, and the hatred and
resentment that will lead him to carry out his revenge or to administer
justice, according to what is understood by the work. Its function,
therefore, is rhetorical, not religious, and serves to justify the need for
revenge or justice.
Regarding the question of whether this play is about a man seeking
revenge or looking forward to administering justice, it must be stated right
now that, apart from the traditional interpretation of this play as a “classic
revenge tragedy,” there is another one that is far more in keeping with
Shakespeare’s humanistic view of life. This alternative interpretation sees
Hamlet as the inevitable victim of an honest humanist trying to shun the
feudal thirst for revenge in favour of the modern search of justice. Only in the
light of this perspective, does Hamlet’s interest in persuading people of the
righteousness of his cause, and even his procrastination, acquire meaning.13
The collocation man/dust that Hamlet uses at the end of his illustrious
eulogy of man has also been recognised for its biblical criticism as an echo
of the words of Genesis 3:19. Behold the context in which Hamlet delivers
those famous words:
Stanley Wells (2005, 220) draws our attention to the biblical resonance
of the word “dust,” but without making any further comment. The biblical
intertext comes from Genesis 3:17-9:
(3) Also to Adam [the Lord] said: “Because thou hast obeyed the voice of
thy wife, and has eaten of the tree, (whereof I commanded thee, saying,
Thou shalt not eat of it) cursed is the earth for thy sake; in sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring
forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy
face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth, for out of it wast thou
taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return.”
13
See Arnold Kettle, “From Hamlet to Lear” in Shakespeare in a Changing World
(1964), especially pp. 160-171.
Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 53
However since these words of Genesis have become part and parcel of the
liturgy of the Church, and quite popular due to the traditional practice of
the imposition of ashes for Ash Wednesday, it is worth making it clear
that, contrary to what may appear at times, the mediaeval insistence on the
brevity of life can by no means define Hamlet’s personality. Far from that,
the concept “dust” is the key to a question about the mystery of the origin
of man. Indeed, what Hamlet highlights through these beautiful words is
the greatness of man. In fact, this eulogy is among one of the best literary
homages to mankind.
Another interesting and well-known collocation of biblical origin is
used by Hamlet in his “To be or not to be” soliloquy: the land of no
return. Wordsworth, quoting and relying on Douce (1807), agrees with
this author in that “Job, was present to our poet’s mind” (Wordsworth
1880, 288), referring to Hamlet’s words in the said soliloquy: “The
undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns…” (3.1.79-
80). The similarity with Job’s words is beyond all doubt: “Before I go and
shall not return, even to the land of darkness and shadow of death” (Job
10:21). Therefore, the existence of this case of intertextuality between
Hamlet and the Book of Job is unquestionable.
In a thorough analysis on biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s tragedies,
Peter Milward pays a lot of attention to the references to the Book of Job.
Milward (1987, 1-3) states:
(4) [in] the wealth of Biblical echoes and allusions in the course of
[Hamlet], what stands out most impressively is the way they serve to
emphasize the predicament of Man in this world [and this] is the
predicament most vividly portrayed, among the Biblical writings, in the
Book of Job, whose echoes, while scattered throughout the play, come as it
were to a head in Hamlet’s central soliloquy of “To be, or not to be.” (…)
From this point of view, one might even say that the basic meaning of the
play is a preparation for death (in a Socratic as well as a Christian sense),
as in answer to the basic question of his soliloquy there gradually dawns
over Hamlet’s mind the lesson “The readiness of all” (…).
Nonetheless, no one must say “that the basic meaning of the play is a
preparation for death.” In fact, there is no doubt, however, that given the
popularity of Job’s story, these words of the text attributed to Moses must
have contributed enormously to conveying the high degree of affliction
that Hamlet is enduring at that particular moment. This is a telling
example that testifies to the fact that Shakespeare is not intending to imbue
Hamlet with Job’s patience and endurance, but to highlight the degree of
the latter.
54 Chapter Three
(5) [b]ehold this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, Pride, fullness of
bread, and abundance of idleness was in her, and in her daughters: neither
did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49).
In this scene, Hamlet makes reference to the unexpected killing of his dear
father, King Hamlet, whose death, as was stated earlier, had caught him
unrepentant, unconfessed and, worst of all, unhouseled, as the Ghost says
in one of his appearances (1.5.77). Hamlet’s words are:
Though Malone deserves the credit for being the first to detect this
biblical trace, the kind of critical perspective he applies on Shakespeare is
perhaps not the most adequate; for he simply identifies the source but adds
very little or nothing. Wordsworth, on the contrary, adds too much. He
adds too much, and of no relevance. As always, he takes advantage of each
single quotation or reference to tell us how good a Christian Shakespeare
was or, like in this case, that Shakespeare shows an “intimate acquaintance
with Holy Scripture” (1880, 208).
With this collocation, the wickedness of the Queen is expressed by her
comparison to disloyal Jerusalem, to Sodom and her daughters; to which
14
“The uncommon expression, full of bread, our poet borrowed from the Holy
Writ: … Ezekiel xvi. 49” (Malone 1778, 215).
15
Comments by these critics are compiled in The Dramatic Works of William
Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes: ‘Hamlet, ‘Othello’, ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’.
Volume Ten. New York: Collins & Hannay, 1923.
Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 55
Ezekiel in the same text names “whores.”16 The parallelism with Queen
16
“And beside all thy wickedness (woe, woe unto thee, saith the Lord God): thou
hast also built unto thee an high place, and hast made thee an high place in every
street. Thou hast built thine high place at every corner of the way, and hast made
thy beauty to be abhorred: thou hast opened thy feet to everyone that passed by,
and multiplied thy whoredom. Thou hast also committed fornication with the
Egyptians thy neighbors, which have great members, and hast increased thy
whoredom, to provoke me. Behold, therefore I did stretch out mine hand over thee,
and will diminish thine ordinary, and deliver thee unto the will of them that hate
thee, even to the daughters of the Philistines, which are ashamed of thy wicked
way. Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou wast
insatiable: yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet couldest not be
satisfied. Thou hast moreover multiplied thy fornication from the land of Canaan
unto Chaldea, and yet thou wast not satisfied herewith. How weak is thine heart,
saith the Lord God, seeing thou doest all these things, even the work of a
presumptuous whorish woman? In that thou buildest thine high place in the corner
of every way, and makest thine high place in every street, and hast not been as an
harlot that despiseth a reward. But as a wife that playeth the harlot, and taketh
others for her husband. They give gifts to all other whores, but thou givest gifts
unto all thy lovers, and rewardest them, that they may come unto thee on every
side for thy fornication. And the contrary is in thee from other women in thy
fornications, neither the like fornication shall be after thee: for in that thou givest a
reward, and no reward is given unto thee, therefore thou art contrary. Wherefore, O
harlot, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God, because thy shame was
poured out, and thy filthiness discovered through thy fornications with thy lovers,
and with all the idols of thine abominations, and by the blood of thy children,
which thou didst offer unto them. Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers,
with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all
them that thou hast hated: I will even gather them round about against thee, and
will discover thy filthiness unto them, that they may see all thy filthiness. And I
will judge thee after ye manner of them that are harlots, and of them that shed
blood, and I will give thee the blood of wrath and jealousy. I will also give thee
into their hands, and they shall destroy thine high place, and shall break down thine
high places. They shall strip thee also out of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair
jewels, and leave thee naked and bare. They shall also bring up a company against
thee, and they shall stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their
swords. And they shall burn up thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon
thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee to cease from playing the
harlot, and thou shalt give no reward anymore. So will I make my wrath toward
thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will cease and be no
more angry. Because thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, but hast
provoked me with all these things, behold, therefore I also have brought thy way
upon thine head, saith the Lord God: yet hast not thou had consideration of all
thine abominations. Behold, all that use proverbs, shall use this proverb against
thee, saying, as is the mother, so is her daughter. Thou art thy mother’s daughter,
56 Chapter Three
Gertrude, who not only fornicates with her lover but also pays him—
paying him with the royal crown—, could not be clearer. As for the
severity of her crime, as seen and confirmed by the critics and editors that
comment upon the phrase “full of bread,” it also appears more powerful
for the fact that King Hamlet dies in sin. Hamlet’s father died unanealed,
as his Ghost says, that is, unanointed and unabsolved, because he was
unable to purify his soul through extreme unction.
Once again, the prophetic text of Ezekiel has a very clear rhetorical and
stylistic function, as it serves to complete the profile of the two characters
that plot and carry out the crime.17 Therefore, the use of biblical discourse
enhances the style of the play. It allows Shakespeare to highlight the
magnitude of the severity and cruelty of the regicide. In fact, for Hamlet,
his admirable father, being human, was also a sinner. For, though in
goodness he believes that nobody bit him, he is like everybody else, a
sinner. Thus, depriving him of extreme unction not only kills his body but
also punishes his soul to the suffering of Purgatory. That is the only
function of the echo of Ezekiel, namely, to add more strength to the crime
committed by his uncle and his mother.
In one of the most soring conversations that he has with his mother,
comparing his father to Claudius, her new husband, Hamlet recurs to a
collocation whose biblical force gives the scene an additional dose of
severity. He tells her mother that Claudius is “…a mildewed ear/Blasting
his wholesome brother” (3.4.65-6). Wordsworth (1880, 69) detects in
these words the echo of the second dream of the Pharaoh, described in
Genesis, stating that he saw “seven thin ears, and blasted with the East
wind, sprang up after them” (Genesis 41:6). Of course, the function of
that hath cast off her husband and her children, and thou art the sister of thy sisters,
which forsook their husbands and their children: your mother is an Hittite, and
your father an Amorite. And thine elder sister is Samaria, and her daughters, that
dwell at thy left hand, and thy young sister, that dwelleth at thy right hand, is
Sodom, and her daughters. Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done
after their abominations: but as it had been a very little thing, thou wast corrupted
more than they in all thy ways. As I live, saith the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath
not done, neither she nor her daughters, as thou hast done and thy daughters”
(Ezekiel 16:23-48).
17
I am convinced by the validity of an original idea that professor López Ortega
explained in one of his seminars on Shakespeare (2012), commenting upon the
phrase “full of bread.” To be precise, López Ortega maintains that Shakespeare
establishes a brutal contrast between the collocation “full of bread” and the term
“unhous’led” uttered by the Ghost in the passage, since “unhous’led” means
without the sacramental bread. Therefore, this is an equivalent to “the bread of
communion.”
Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 57
shall not fall on the ground without your father”) in the collocation Hamlet
uses (“… there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”). However,
it is extremely difficult to actually understand the role that Hamlet attributes
to providence in these lines. Probably the obscurity and even confusion of
his reasoning about God’s designs are not alien to the debate over the issue
of predestination in the days of the Reformation. Shakespeare might not
want to take sides in the controversy of “the mysterious ways of
providence.” For Shakespeare the theological problem did not exist
because, as Edwards says, “[t]he recognition of ‘a divinity that shapes our
ends’ is Hamlet’s; not necessarily Shakespeare’s” (1983, 50).
Once again, this biblical collocation that Shakespeare proclaims through
his characters is more a literary device to express the contradictions that a
modern humanist living in old feudal Denmark would have to face rather
than the predestination conflict between Catholics and Calvinists in
Shakespeare’s Europe. It goes without saying that Hamlet, both as a
mediaeval prince of Christendom and as a humanistic Christian prince of
the sixteenth-century, had to believe in the Christian God, a circumstance
that, incidentally, Shakespeare would not have to necessarily share.
3. Conclusion
The fact that Shakespeare was quite familiar with the Bible is so well-
known and patent in his literary texts that it is difficult to explain why the
mere compilation of this type of collocations, quotes, allusions and echoes
has received and is still receiving so much academic attention. It is equally
difficult to justify the excessive, and often disproportionate, attention that
the moral or ethical explanation of the use of the biblical reference in
Shakespeare’s works has been paid, since such a purpose was quite
common, if not commonplace, in the literature of his time. As for the
enormous amount of criticism that uses the scriptural intertext to
demonstrate Shakespeare’s alleged religiosity or, even worse, to assign
him an Anglican adscription, or even a Roman Catholic one, one has to
say that it is simply out of place, if it deserves a place in literary criticism
at all.
As far as is known, from the scarce existing documentation on his life,
he kept aloof from the religious debate of his time. Although he does not
among others, in Luke 12:40 and in Acts 25:11. With these words, Shakespeare
characterises the setting, which is the scene of a mediaeval duel. For, although the
duels and the jousts were not well received by the Church, a part of the Christian
ritual was always present in their performance.
Biblical Types and Archetypes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 59
appear to have left out of his works any of the important things and themes
of his epoch, as a matter of fact he actually refused to touch upon what
was probably the most burning issue of the time: the religious debate
brought about by the Reformation. This exclusively stylistic use of biblical
and religious discourse is obviously the corollary of Shakespeare’s
deliberate distancing from the theological feud aroused by the
Reformation. It is certainly shocking irony that one of the writers who
delved most deeply into the collective mentality—as well as the historical
events—of his time should and did avoid the mentioned religious
controversy.
Indeed, whereas both the mechanical compilations of this kind of
references or the pro-Protestant and the pro-Catholic criticism abound, the
research on the stylistic purpose of biblical intertextuality in his works is
still very scarce. And yet, it is beyond all doubt that the only certain
function this intertext serves is that of enhancing characterization and
ambiance.
Only when one realises that the purpose of Shakespeare’s use of
biblical language is purely aesthetic do these apparent contradictions cease
to exist. Hence, it is surprising that those critics and editors that are not
caught in the trap of forcing a religious interpretation or sense of the
biblical discourse onto the play limit themselves to identify the source. It
is this aesthetic intention that undoubtedly accounts for Shakespeare’s use
of such a corpus of biblical discourse for enriching his dramatic and poetic
language, in general, and particularly that of Hamlet.
References
Alter, R. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
—. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
—. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard
University, 1987.
—. The Pleasures of Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
—. The World of Biblical Literature. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Bloom, H. Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the
Present. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
—. The Book of J. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Collins & Hannay. The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, in Ten
Volumes: “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre”, vol. 10.
New York, 1923.
Douce, F. Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manners: With
Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare; on the
60 Chapter Three
In the present paper, however, the focus will be on a sui generis type of
phraseological unit: wellerisms, and how they are translated in the
peninsular Spanish version of The Simpsons. Wellerisms, of all the types
5
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1387335.stm.
6
Hann (2007).
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 63
There are, however, quite a few wellerisms that do not exhibit the third
element of the characteristic triadic structure, as in the following examples.
“The only trouble with my profession is that it is apt to be a rather
confining one,” as an ex-convict said. (no. 237)
“I was taken by a morsel,” says the fish. (no. 844)
“I’m bored stiff!” said the dead man. (no. 1262)
7
See the works of Jente (1947), Hoyos (1954), Castillo de Lucas (1956) or Orero
Clavero (1997a; 1997b; 2000) for Spanish scholarship on wellerisms.
8
Spanish wellerisms “seem to be quite rare in Spanish-speaking countries, and
collectors must be attentive in order to write down any instance that appears”
(Orero Clavero 1997a, 462; my translation).
64 Chapter Four
Something that may seem odd is the label chosen to name this
particular type of phraseme: wellerism. The name corresponds to a
character from C. Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club:
Sam Weller, who was distinctly fond of the use of a rather unique type of
formulaic expression, as can be seen in the numerous examples found in
the novel.10 But the term “wellerism” is not the only alternative that has
been proposed to name phrasemes following this structure. In his 1949
article, C. G. Loomis proposed the alternative “yankeeism” to name
American wellerisms, possibly in an attempt to further distance American
from British culture. As Loomis (1949, 2) explains:
9
(a). Perfect wellerisms, with all three parts […].
(b). Wellerisms without the speaker or second part […].
(c). Wellerisms without the third part […] (Orero Clavero 1997, 462; my
translation).
10
Some examples of wellerisms employed by S. Weller in The Pickwick Papers
are:
—“Out vit it,” as the father said to the cold, ven he swallowed a farden. (Dickens,
1972: 235).
—“There’s nothin’ so refreshin’ as sleep, Sir,” as the servant-girl said afore she
drank the egg-cup-full o’ laudanum. (Dickens 1972, 292).
—“Hooroar for the principle,” as the money lender said ven he wouldn’t renew the
bill. (Dickens 1972, 577).
—“Come Sir, this is rather too rich,” as the young lady said ven she remonstrated
with the pastry cook, after he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside
(Dickens 1972, 632)
—“Fine time for them as is well dropped up,” as the Polar Bear said to himself,
ven he was practising his skating. (Dickens 1972, 491).
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 65
(1) MARGE Your majesty, did you remember to invite Ned Flanders?
FLANDERS As the worm said to the plate of spaghetti, “I…”11
(2) BARNEY Eh! Ah! Nice try, boys! Now, as the roadrunner said to the
coyote, “meep meep”!12
(3) MARGE Ned Flanders, I can’t believe what you doodly did for us.
FLANDERS Well, seriously, Ocean said to the dirt, “I appreciate the
sediment.”13
(8) BART Well, something chewed through the cellar door and the floor is
covered with paw prints.
HOMER This can only mean one thing; Flanders, you ate my jerky!
FLANDERS As the oak said to the beagle, “you’re barkin’ up the wrong
tree.”18
One of the facts that first stands out is that most wellerisms are used by
the same character: Ned Flanders, i.e. a total of six out of nine wellerisms
found. This fact, far from being a mere coincidence, is most likely a
conscious decision on the part of the scriptwriters in order to depict the
character of Flanders in a certain way, just as Dickens did with Sam
Weller, which led to the christening of this type of phraseme after the
character.
Another feature that characterizes the use of wellerisms in The
Simpsons is the fact that none of the examples found presents the full
triadic structure. Moreover, all nine examples lack the comment on the
context, the chunk that seems more easily and more frequently omitted.
15
The Monkey Suit. HABF14. Writ. J. Stewart Burns. Dir. S. R. Persi. 14 Mar.,
2006.
16
Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes. KABF17. Writ. K. Curran. Dir. L. Kramer. 28 Sept.,
2008.
17
Threehouse of Horror VI. 3F04. Writ. J. Swartzwelder, S. Tompkins and D. S.
Cohen. Dir. B. Anderson. 29 Oct., 1995.
18
Smoke On The Daugther. KABF08. Writ. B. Kimball. Dir. L. Kramer. 30 Mar.,
2008.
19
Dangerous Curves. KABF18. Writ. B. Kimball and I. Maxtone-Graham. Dir. M.
Faughnam. 9 Nov., 2008.
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 67
— Literal translation
— Adapted translation
— Mistranslation
— Total Modification
The existence of four different practices for the same purpose proves
the difficulty that this particular type of PU presents for translation into
foreign languages. This is even more remarkable if we take into account
that for a mere 9 occurrences detected, four different methods of
translation have been noticed. Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind that
this refers exclusively to the translation of wellerisms into Castilian
Spanish; thus, it can be neither confirmed nor denied in this paper that
these practices are the same for their translation into other languages or
even the Hispanic version of the series shown in Latin American countries.
The first process mentioned, literal translation, has an obvious
advantage: it transmits the message as was originally intended, without the
translators leaving their imprint. However, not all wellerisms allow for the
application of this system, as they would risk going unnoticed or not
producing the effect for which they are intended. The following excerpt is
a case of literal translation of a wellerism:
(10) MARGE Your majesty, did you remember to invite Ned Flanders?
FLANDERS As the worm said to the plate of spaghetti, “I…”
(11) BARNEY Eh! Ah! Nice try, boys! Now, as the Roadrunner said to
the Coyote, “meep meep”!
20
Funny Humour, Twitter post, August 17, 2011, 10:42 a.m.,
https://twitter.com/funnyhumour/status/103733499021889536.
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 69
(12) MARGE Ned Flanders, I can’t believe what you doodly did for us.
FLANDERS Well, seriously, Ocean said to the dirt, “I appreciate the
sediment.”
(12a) MARGE Ned Flanders, lo que has hecho por no nosotros no tiene
nombrecillo.
FLANDERS Como el mar le dijo a la tierra: “comparto sentimentillos.”
This case is rather amusing. On the one hand, the punning intentions of
the English version can be observed, in which Flanders plays with the
words “sentiment” and “sediment.” Nevertheless, this is lost in the Spanish
translation, in which “sentimentillos,” a diminutive for “sentimientos,” i.e.
feelings, was chosen instead of “sedimentillos,” a diminutive for
“sedimento,” i.e. sediment, thus voiding the pun. The shocking aspect is
that the same pun could have been kept in the Spanish version in order to
more faithfully transmit the piece of dialog intended in the original
version. In this case, the translators must have considered that keeping the
original version might have been misleading or that it was too idiomatic a
statement for its preservation word-for-word in Spanish, a decision that is
arguable to say the least.
In the second example of the adapted translation of wellerisms, the
adaptation has been carried out for similar reasons, even though, in this
case, it seems more justified:
(13) KENT BROCKMAN And prosecuting the case against Lisa is humble
country lawyer Wallace Brady.
WALLACE BRADY As the little chicken said to his mama, “I just hope I
don’t cluck up.”
Here, in the English version, attorney Brady cites a cute wellerism that
hides an inappropriate expression in order to gain the favor of the jury.
This wellerism, in which a “little chicken” is quoted, ends with a
euphemism avoiding the use of an obscene cuss, i.e. “fuck up.”21 It is
interesting, though, that in spite of the complete modification of the
phraseologism included in the wellerism in its translation into Spanish,
that the translators managed to include a Spanish idiom that is rather
similar both in meaning and the semantic field of some its elements.
The choice for the Spanish version, “meter la pata,” is a very well-
known and well-established idiom,22 at least in peninsular Spanish, which,
according to the DRAE23 in its online version, means “hacer o decir
alguien algo inoportuno o equivocado.”24 Hence, though there may be
other idioms with identical meaning, the choice of this one was most likely
a conscious one, as a careful analysis of its constituents may prove. Taking
into account the fact that “pata” in Spanish means “leg,” generally in an
animal or a piece of furniture as is used in the Spanish idiom, but can also
the he name given to a female duck, may establish a connection between
the English and Spanish idioms employed in the different versions.
The third, and last, example of adaptation in the translation of a
wellerism can be observed in the following excerpt:
21
The use of profanity on American television was banned by the Title 18 of the
United States Code, Section 1464 (see https://www.fcc.gov/reports-
research/guides/obscenity-indecency-profanity-faq), which was originally passed
for radio broadcasts in 1948. Spanish television is much more permissive about
this matter.
22
As of 3 Feb. 2016, the CREA corpus yields 272 uses of this expression both in
literary and journalistic texts. Google, however, yields around 553,000 results.
23
See “Meter alguien la pata [Def. 1]” (Real Academia Española 2013). Retrieved
February 2, 2016 from http://dle.rae.es/?id=S71hGRM|S72dH32.
24
“[To] do or say someone something inappropriate or wrong” (my translation).
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 71
25
The most adequate definition for “mixed up” in this context states that it means
to be “confused, for example because you have too many different details to
remember or think about.” See “Mixed up [Def. 3]” (Summers et al. 2003, 1056).
72 Chapter Four
This piece is quite similar to the previous one. Here the defective
translation is also caused by the translator’s intention to remain as close to
the original as possible. However, the pun present in the original is lost in
the translation. As Roget’s Thesaurus notes,26 “stumped” is a synonym for
“perplexed,” which is the word that has been chosen for the Spanish
translation. Moreover, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English27 also states that a “stump” is “the bottom part of a tree that is left
in the ground after the rest of it has been cut down”, thus propitiating the
pun with tree and lumberjack. This is obviously lost in the Spanish version
as “perplejo” could hardly be connected to “árbol,” i.e. tree, and “leñador,”
i.e. lumberjack, by anyone who is unaware of the original dialog.
Lastly, there are another couple of examples in which the wellerism
has been modified completely with different degrees of success. The
reason for this is most likely the intention of the translators to produce a
piece that can actually cause some humorous effect in the target language.
Here, linguistic, cultural, and social factors may play a role in the
questionable decision of changing such sensitive elements as phrasemes.
Furthermore, this practice may go unnoticed by viewers without a
profound knowledge of English. Yet, for someone familiar with English
phraseology, these modifications stand out and may sound artificial and
inaccurate.
The first case of a complete modification of a wellerism in The
Simpsons can be observed in the following piece:
(17) BART Well, something chewed through the cellar door and the floor
is covered with paw prints.
HOMER This can only mean one thing; Flanders, you ate my jerky!
FLANDERS As the oak said to the beagle, “you’re barkin’ up the wrong
tree.”
(17a) BART Bueno, algo ha roído la puerta del sótano y el suelo está lleno
de huellas de patas.
26
See “Unintelligibility [Adj.]” (Davidson 2004, 206).
27
See “Stump [Def. 1]” (Summers 2003, 1652).
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 73
HOMER Eso sólo puede decir una cosa: ¡Flanders, te has comido my
cecina!
FLANDERS Como la matrona dijo al mocito: “estás haciendo pipí fuera
del tiesto.”
28
i.e. “to piss outside the pot.”
29
i.e. “to pee” or “to go wee wee.”
30
“To get off the point, to say something that is not relevant” (my translation). See
“Mear fuera del tiesto [Def. 1]” (Real Academia Española 2013). Retrieved
February 2, 2016 from http://dle.rae.es/?id=ZjD1ubu|ZjD4YlL.
74 Chapter Four
4. Conclusions
From the careful observation and contraposition of the examples in the
English and Spanish versions of The Simpsons, which have been analyzed,
several conclusions may be drawn. To begin with, as has already been
mentioned, it seems rather surprising that, for the nine examples found,
four different strategies for translation have been detected, which is clearly
indicative of the difficulty of translating this type of phraseme into foreign
languages. In this regard, the different strategies employed by translators
31
See “Trunk [Def. 3]” (Summers et al. 2003, 1781).
32
See “Trunk [Def. 2]” (Summers et al. 2003, 1781). It must be noted, though, that
this term is mostly employed with this meaning in AmE.
33
See “Trunk [Def. 5]” (Summers et al. 2003, 1781).
34
As of 4 Feb. 2016, the CREA corpus does not yield any results for the “baúl de
los sueños” search. However a Google search yields around 103,000 hits.
35
This collocation yields a meagre 13 hits in the CREA Corpus.
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 75
Episodes mentioned
Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts. NABF17. Writ. T. Long. Dir. S. D.
Moore. October 2, 2011.
Dangerous Curves. KABF18. Writ. B. Kimball and I. Maxtone-Graham.
Dir. M. Faughnam. November 9, 2008.
76 Chapter Four
References
“Fox makes it official: The Simpsons’ Duff beer going on sales overseas.”
FoxNews.com, July 13, 2015. Accessed February 8, 2016.
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/07/13/duff-beer-from-simpsons-
going-on-sale-overseas/.
“It’s in the dictionary, d’oh!” BBC News, June 14, 2001. Accessed
February 2, 2016.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1387335.stm.
“Obscenity, Indecency & Profanity - FAQ”. Federal Communications
Commision. Accessed February 6, 2016. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-
research/guides/obscenity-indecency-profanity-faq.
Ayto, J., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010.
Baer, F. E. “Wellerisms in The Pickwick Papers.” Folklore 94/2 (1983):
173-183.
Castillo de Lucas, A. “Wellerismos españoles de aplicación médica.”
Clínica y Laboratorio 358/61 (1956).
Davidson, G., ed. Roget’s Thesaurus. London: Penguin, 2004.
Dickens, C. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Dowling, S. “How The Simpsons changed TV.” BBC, December 17, 2014.
Accessed February 8, 2016.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141216-how-the-simpsons-
changed-tv.
Duniway, D. C. “Wellerisms.” Western Folklore 31/2 (1972): 128-129.
Fiedler, S. English phraseology: A coursebook. Tübingen: Gunter Narr
Verlag, 2007.
Analysis of the Use of Wellerisms in The Simpsons 77
CHAPTER FIVE
Introducción
Entre finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX irrumpen en el
panorama literario español escritores—en su mayoría, poetas—que
incluyen en sus obras remedos del habla popular de las zonas en que
viven. Esta tendencia tuvo repercusión en todas las regiones españolas,
aunque con distinta intensidad en cada una de ellas. En el caso de
Extremadura, cuyas hablas, por lo general, no eran aprobadas socialmente,
se van asentando las bases de una literatura con tintes regionales que se
convertirá en un símbolo identificativo para sus gentes.
La peculiaridad de estos autores reside en el hecho de que incluyen en
sus textos rasgos fonéticos y léxicos—y morfosintácticos en menor
medida—del habla cotidiana de su entorno. Como precisa Manuel Alvar
(1971), la literatura con dialectalismos “es aportación al quehacer común
con tinte o sabor local”. La lengua hablada es menos reflexiva, más
espontánea y connatural al hombre que la variedad escrita, donde es más
evidente el reconocimiento de la norma del sistema de la lengua.
En esta línea, en este trabajo se aborda el análisis del arquetipo de las
hablas extremeñas en la literatura del primer tercio del siglo XX a partir de
un corpus de autores que incluyen el habla popular en sus obras: José
María Gabriel y Galán, Luis Chamizo y Antonio Reyes Huertas. En el
intento de reflejar el habla de su entorno, los escritores cuidan de manera
especial la fonética. La variedad regional aparece en las obras estudiadas
como un elemento connotativo que enmarca el ámbito geográfico, realza
los tintes realistas y la división de clases sociales en el plano de la
caracterización.
80 Chapter Five
Estaba “amañandu aqueyu” porque le daba en cara verlo “en abertal”. […]
después otros dos de los “apareaos” con él, y luego “otros de los arrimaus a
eyus”, y por último, se había dicho, “a las primeras celleriscas que vengan,
o a la primera res que jocique una miaja pa lamberse estus verdinis, se
esborrega el moriu por aquí”. Y así había sucedido. (Pereda 1988 [1895])
1
Para un comentario más detallado, consúltense las siguientes referencias: (1) A.
Salvador Plans (1998): “Dialectología y folclore en Extremadura en el tránsito del
siglo XIX al XX”, Revista de Estudios Extremeños, LIV/3, pp. 807-831. (2) A.
Salvador Plans (2006): “El habla popular en los escritores extremeños
finiseculares”, en A. Salvador Plans y Á. Valverde (eds.), Gabriel y Galán, época
y obra, Mérida, Editora Regional de Extremadura, pp. 249-279.
2
Obviamos aquí las diferencias terminológicas y conceptuales entre lengua,
dialecto y habla. Remitimos, no obstante, a los siguientes artículos de Manuel
Alvar: (1) M. Alvar (1961). “Hacia los conceptos de lengua, dialecto y hablas.”.
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica XV (1961): 51-60. (2) M. Alvar (1979).
“Lengua, dialecto y otras cuestiones conexas.” LEA I/1 (1979): 5-29. (3) M. Alvar
El habla popular en la literatura del primer tercio del siglo XX 83
(1970). “Lengua y dialecto: delimitaciones históricas estructurales.” Arbor
LXXI/299.
84 Chapter Five
3
Población situada al norte de la provincia de Cáceres, a 103 km de Cáceres y a
118 de Salamanca.
4
Población situada en el norte de la provincia de Badajoz, a 24 km de Mérida.
El habla popular en la literatura del primer tercio del siglo XX 85
(1)
¡Qué güeno es el Cristu
de la ermita aquella!
Pa jacel más alegri mi vía,
ni dineros me dio ni jacienda,
polque ice la genti que sabi
que a dicha no está en la riqueza.
Ni me jizu marqués, ni menistro,
ni alcaldi siquiera,
pa podel dil a misa el primero
con la ensinia los días de fiesta
y sentalmi a la vera del cura
jaciendu fachenda.
(“El Cristu benditu”, Extremeñas)
(2)
Contentete me puse
y alborotao
al sabé que mi suegra
l’había diñao;
pero mi mujé quiso
que yo sufriera,
y al parir a mi hija,
parió a mi suegra:
¡Qué mala pata
tienen algunos hombres
cuando se casan!
(“Del fandango extremeño”, El miajón de los castúos)
Con todo, podemos observar una serie de rasgos comunes en las obras
de estos escritores que se verán en los siguientes apartados.
5
Esta forma procede de aullar, según Manuel Ariza (2008, 128).
90 Chapter Five
3.1.1. Vocalismo
(11) —Como saberlo, ya sabe que usté ha llegado, porque ayer mesmo le
mandé aviso…
(V, La sangre de la raza)
3.1.2. Consonantismo
8
De la forma “decimos”.
9
De la forma “dije”.
94 Chapter Five
b) Otro rasgo de las hablas extremeñas es el empleo del verbo quedar por
“dejar”.
(45) Yo di matracazos
con la mi matraca
(“Semana Santa en Guareña”, El miajón de los castúos)
(52) Que ande rondando a esa mujer, por si cae esa breva, no está
descaminao, porque a nadie le amarga un dulce; pero de eso a que le haga
caso esa señorita hayle más que dende aquí a Badajoz…
(XVII, La sangre de la raza)
4. Reflexiones finales
El valor filológico de la producción de los escritores que han centrado
este análisis no debe partir únicamente de los textos escritos en variedad
extremeña, sino del conjunto de su producción. Dados los propósitos de
este trabajo, nos hemos centrado de manera exclusiva en las obras de que
reproducen, en mayor o menor medida, las hablas extremeñas. Esta labor
convierte la lengua en material literario a raíz de lo que se conoce, recoge
y escoge.
Gabriel y Galán, Chamizo y Reyes Huertas coinciden en otorgar a la
fonética un papel destacado a la hora de caracterizar las hablas extremeñas
frente a otras variedades cercanas con las que comparten numerosos rasgos
(el leonés y las hablas meridionales). Como hemos indicado a lo largo del
El habla popular en la literatura del primer tercio del siglo XX 97
Referencias bibliográficas
Alvar, M. “Los dialectalismos en la poesía española del siglo XX.” En
Estudios y ensayos de literatura española contemporánea, editado por
M. Alvar. Madrid: Gredos, 1971 [online]. Acceso 15 de febrero, 2016.
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/los-dialectalismos-en-la-poesa-
espaola-del-siglo-xx-0/.
Ariza Viguera, M. Estudios sobre el extremeño. Cáceres: Servicio de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, 2008.
Brook, G. L. English Dialects. Londres: Andre Deutsch, 1978.
Chamizo, L. El miajón de los castúos (rapsodias extremeñas). Madrid:
Alejandro Pueyo, 1921.
—. El miajón de los castúos: rapsodias extremeñas. Madrid: Espasa
Calpe, 1981.
—. Las brujas: poema dramático de ambiente extremeño, en tres cantos y
en verso. Badajoz: Tip. y Libr. de Arqueros, 1932.
Fernández, J. A. “Deformaciones populacheras en el diálogo galdosiano.”
Anales galdosianos (1978): 112-116. Acceso 10 de febrero, 2016.
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/deformaciones-populacheras-en-
el-dilogo-galdosiano-0/.
Gabriel y Galán, J. M.ª Extremeñas. Edición de G. Hidalgo Bayal.
Badajoz: Diputación Provincial, 1991.
—. Extremeñas. Religiosas. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, 1994.
Hurtado Albir, A. Traducción y traductología. Introducción a la
traductología. Madrid: Cátedra, 2001.
Mair, C. “A methodological framework for research on the use of
nonstandard language in fiction.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 17/1 (1992): 103-123.
Pereda, J. M.ª de. Peñas arriba. Edición de A. Rey. Madrid: Cátedra, 1988
[1895].
Pérez Galdós, B. Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas. Edición
de F. Caudet. Madrid: Cátedra, 1997.
98 Chapter Five
CHAPTER SIX
Introducción
Podríamos señalar para empezar, sin rigor entomológico alguno, cuatro
tipos de poetas: los apenas poetas, los críticos-poetas, los poetas-críticos y
los poetas de veras. Son los primeros poetas a duras penas, de lo que se
colige que no merecen mayor comentario. Por su parte, las categorías
segunda y tercera son la prueba fehaciente de que no siempre el orden de
los factores de una suma no altera el producto, dado que no es lo mismo el
crítico metido a poeta que el poeta metido a crítico. La cuarta categoría es,
como en la gradación tomística, la más deseable: aquella en la que no se
sabe dónde empieza el crítico y acaba el poeta, porque es en este último
donde las teorías del otro alcanzan su realización plena, de suerte que al
final se precisa del crítico para entender al poeta y al poeta para entender
al crítico. Tal parece el caso, y aquí nos investimos al fin del rigor exigido,
de un poeta de veras como Dámaso Alonso. Pocos ejemplos como el
suyo—él, que en su definitiva acuñación de una “Generación de 1927” se
desmarcaba con modestia retórica como el crítico metido a poeta del
grupo—encarnan la íntima trabazón entre la teoría y la praxis concurrentes
en la construcción de una poética propia.
En este sentido, todavía nos llega a sorprender la enorme influencia
que Dámaso Alonso ha logrado tener en nuestra manera de entender la
poesía española del siglo XX en los momentos actuales. A él se debe,
prácticamente, la nómina canónica y la formulación definitiva de nuestro
100 Chapter Six
3
En aquella misma colección, la “Biblioteca Románica Hispánica” dirigida a la
sazón por el propio Dámaso, se publicaron monografías de Leo Spitzer, Helmunt
Hatzfeld, Amado Alonso o Carlos Bousoño, entre otras referencias del idealismo
estilístico.
4
Para una buena síntesis de su historia y sus propuestas hermenéuticas, véase el
volumen de José María Paz Gago, La estilística (Madrid, Síntesis 1993).
5
Tan emblemático ensayo ha sido recientemente reeditado en un facsímil al
cuidado de Luis Íñigo-Madrigal en Roberto Fernández Retamar, Idea de la
estilística. Sobre la escuela lingüística española (Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva 2003).
Dos gacelas bajo un mismo árbol 103
que sería el “estilo personal” del poeta en cuestión. Dicho de otro modo: el
crítico procura mediante un análisis lingüístico pormenorizado de los
elementos formales del texto—por ello, preferentemente poético—
reconocer no solo los usos y recursos estilísticos del autor, sino su misma
sicología, las propias e íntimas intenciones del creador y su texto. Una
imbricación entre fondo y forma que se juzga no solo deseable y crucial,
sino algo mucho más absoluto: infalible. Una certeza hermenéutica que les
llevó en ocasiones a una excesiva confianza en la “intuición” personal del
crítico, al margen de recepciones críticas intermedias6.
No en vano, el autor de Hijos de la ira ya había aplicado en La lengua
poética de Góngora (Madrid, Revista de Filología Española, 1935) su fe
en una intuición natural del lector capaz más allá de cientificismos—lo
que podríamos tildar con toda intención como una “intuición
neorromántica”7—así como en la infalible imbricación entre “significante
y significado”. Una relación que, a diferencia de lo expuesto por Saussure
para su definición del signo lingüístico, no puede ser considerada como
totalmente “arbitraria”:
Felipe Vivanco realiza de otro libro crucial de aquel año y aquel grupo: La
casa encendida de Luis Rosales (Vivanco 1949, 725). Dirige Dámaso su
análisis, por su parte, hacia la raíz existencial y local—a un tiempo—de
aquellos versos de Panero mediante una serie de fragmentos seleccionados.
De hecho, al caserón familiar de los Panero en Astorga, Castrillo de las
Piedras, nos remiten los versos del poema “El peso del mundo” de Escrito
a cada instante de donde Dámaso toma el célebre vocablo:
10
“Algún día quisiera estudiar la obra de varios de esos poetas, y señalar
coincidencias, los distintos valores y enormes diferencias. La lista sería bastante
norteña” (Alonso 1965, 349). ¿Apuntaría, con lo de norteña, además de a los
vascos De Lacea y De Otero a los también vascos Ángela Figuera y Gabriel
Celaya, a los santanderinos José Luis Hidalgo y José Hierro o al burgalés
Victoriano Crémer, entre otros?
Dos gacelas bajo un mismo árbol 107
¡Ay, yo no soy,
yo no seré
hasta que sea
como vosotros, muertos!
Yo me muero, me muero a cada instante,
perdido de mí mismo,
ausente de mí mismo,
lejano de mí mismo,
cada vez más perdido, más lejano, más ausente.
(8) Oh, nunca os pensaré, hermanos, padre, amigos, con nuestra carne
humana, en nuestra diaria servidumbre,
en hálito o en afición semejantes
a las de vuestros tristes días de crisálidas.
Referencias bibliográficas
Alonso, Dámaso. Ensayos sobre poesía española. Madrid: Revista de
Occidente, 1944.
—. Hijos de la ira. Edición de Fanny Rubio. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997.
—. Oscura noticia. Hombre y Dios. Edición de Antonio Chicharro
Chamorro. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1991.
—. Poemas escogidos. Edición del autor. Madrid: Gredos, 1969.
—. “Poesía arraigada.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 9 (1949): 671-709.
—. Poesía española. Ensayo de métodos y límites estilísticos. Madrid:
Gredos, 1971.
—. Poetas españoles contemporáneos. Madrid: Gredos, 1965.
Chicharro Chamorro, Antonio. Para una historia del pensamiento
literario en España. Madrid: CSIC, 2004.
Viñas Piquer, David. Historia de la crítica literaria. Barcelona: Ariel,
2007.
Vivanco, Luis Felipe. “La palabra encendida.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos
9 (1949): 723-733.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Introducción
“El hombre no es un árbol: carece de raíces, tiene pies, camina. Desde los
tiempos del homo erectus circula en busca de pastos, de climas más
benignos, de lugares en los que resguardarse de las inclemencias del
tiempo y de la brutalidad de sus semejantes”, afirma Juan Goytisolo
(2004). Desde sus orígenes hasta nuestros días, el ser humano pues
siempre ha estado en movimiento. Los movimientos migratorios siempre
han formado parte integrante de las sociedades humanas.
Y, en todas las épocas y sociedades humanas, la literatura, en su
calidad de, entre otras funciones, plasmadora de la realidad social, siempre
ha dado cuenta de estos fenómenos migratorios. Textos como la epopeya
sumeria Poema de Gilgamesh, considerado el primer texto de toda la
historia de la literatura, o tan antiguos como el cuento La historia de
Sinuhé, considerado el mayor logro de toda la literatura egipcia antigua, o
el homérico texto fundacional griego La Odisea, o también el Cantar del
mío Cid testimonian el hecho de que el tema migratoria siempre ha sido
presente en las manifestaciones literarias.
Hoy en día, sigue estando presente este tema migratorio mediante la
problemática de la alteridad y de la diferencia étnico-racial que genera el
fenómeno de la inmigración con una intensidad cada vez mayor en las
sociedades occidentales actuales, convertidas en nuestros días en el mayor
escenario de encuentro y mezcla de culturas. Estos encuentros y mezclas
culturales dan lugar a numerosas reservas como las manifestadas en la
Sociedad multiétnica de Giovanni Sartori y a acalorados debates sobre las
identidades nacionales europeas y la identidad comunitaria europea como
116 Chapter Seven
1. La denominación
Simone Bonnafous (2013) destaca dos vías de exploración de un
corpus en análisis del discurso. La primera, la entrada lexical tiene como
base palabras consideradas muy significativas de una época, de un
contexto (mots pivot, mots témoin). Es la vía practicada por ejemplo por
Emilie Née (2012, 15) quien justifica este enfoque con las siguientes
palabras:
l’analyse du discours (…), sans doute parce qu’il constitue une dimension
linguistique qui entretient un lien essentiel, même s’il est indirect, avec la
réalité (la langue et le monde étant “inséparablement distincts” pour
reprendre la jolie formule de P. Caussat 1998, 182) ; sans doute également
en raison de la nature sémiotique du mot, celui-ci présentant la potentialité
de concentrer des discours déjà tenus (le dialogisme de Bakhtine).
Tabla 7-1. Nombres usados con mayor frecuencia para referirse a los
otros africanos
2
Fórmula: “un ensemble de formulations qui, du fait de leurs emplois à un
moment donné et dans un espace public donné, cristallisent des enjeux politiques
et sociaux que ces expressions contribuent dans le même temps à construire”
(Krieg-Planque 2003, 7).
118 Chapter Seven
(4) VECINO 1º.- Alguien tala los árboles que dejó en pie aquel negro.
(López Mozo 2008, 87)
(5) Relata que, una mañana, al salir a la calle, el protagonista descubre que
no sólo están pintarrajeadas las paredes con esos garabatos que usan los
moros para entenderse. (López Mozo 2008, 50)
(6) ESPOSO.- Y ya ves, ahora tienes a los moros a dos pasos de tu casa.
(López Mozo 2008, 51)
(9) “El padre es moro y los moros no me gustan” (López Mozo 2008, 101)
(12) JUANA LA LOCA.- (Entre risas.) Estás chiflado, rey moro. (López
Mozo 2008, 26)
(13) En la habitación había un niño medio moro. (López Mozo 2008, 100)
(14) “El padre es moro y los moros no me gustan”. (López Mozo 2008,
101)
Étnico-racial en la literatura española contemporánea 119
(17) Allí esperaba confiando en que desde algún coche le gritaran: “¡Moro,
sube!” (López Mozo 2008, 97)
120 Chapter Seven
que dio nombre al río Níger (latín Nigris)3 y que generó también la palabra
nigritae que designaba a la gente que vivía junto al río o gente del río. Con
el tiempo, por el color oscuro del río y el color oscuro de los nigritae, la
palabra se volvió sinónimo de “oscuro”, sustituyendo con el tiempo la
palabra romana ater para significar el color que ahora llamamos negro.
Según otra teoría desarrollada por la Ferris States University en su estudio
Nigger and caricatures4, el origen de la palabra negro se situaría en la voz
latina niger, usada para describir al color más oscuro, que no refleja
ninguna luz. Se convirtió posteriormente esta palabra latina en el
sustantivo “negro” en portugués, español e inglés y nègre en francés, para
designar a los individuos africanos de piel oscura. Richard B. Moore
(2013) sitúa el primer uso de la palabra “negro” como sustantivo en
relación con la población de África a la época después de 1441, cuando los
exploradores portugueses bajaron la costa africana hasta alcanzar el río
Senegal. Denominaron pues a los pueblos de más arriba del río moros o
azenegues y a las poblaciones de más abajo del río, de piel más oscura,
negros. Con la esclavización de las poblaciones negras por los
portugueses, el término muy pronto se convertirá en “sinónimo de
esclavo” (Martín Casares 2000). Durante la posterior colonización de
África, el sustantivo mantendrá este sentido peyorativo.
En lo que se refiere a “moro”, el término es derivado el latín maurus—
que significa “negro” (Ramón Cabrera 1837, 464)—, procedente éste a su
vez de las voces griegas mauri y maurós. Estos términos son los que
usaron griegos y romanos para designar a los pueblos norteafricanos
habitantes de Maurusia, el antiguo reino de Mauritania. Este reino de
Mauritania, convertido en la Mauritania romana tras ser conquistada,
abarcaba bajo Calígula (años 37 y 41 d.C., respectivamente) la parte
occidental del actual Magreb—provincia imperial de Mauritania
Tingitana—que corresponde al actual Marruecos, y la parte central del
actual Magreb—provincia imperial de Mauritania Cesariense—
correspondiente a la actual Argelia. En la España medieval, el término
moro conservó el mismo sentido que le habían asignado los griegos y los
romanos, usándose para designar a las poblaciones norteafricanas,
musulmanas y bereberes, que invadieron el sur de la península—Al-
Ándalus—en el siglo VIII. A partir de la Reconquista, el término pasó a
3
Plinio el Joven, siglo I d.C. en
http://www.dicolatin.com/FR/LAK/0/NIGRIS/index.htm.
4
Disponible en http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/caricature/.
Étnico-racial en la literatura española contemporánea 121
2. La caracterización
El segundo acto discursivo fundamental que suele realizar el locutor en
su relación al otro es asignarle características. En este ejercicio,
observamos toda una retórica racista que se despliega en el discurso sobre
el otro. Coincidimos con Van Dijk (2001) en que ese ejercicio se produce
principalmente a nivel temático cuando el locutor emite un discurso sobre
los otros. En el corpus tomado en cuenta en este trabajo y en un corpus
más amplio observado en otro trabajo (Séka 2014), esta caracterización
suele articularse sobre dos ejes temáticos.
El primer eje temático es la diferencia. El énfasis en la diferencia del
otro casi siempre aparece en la relación discursivo al otro a la hora de
caracterizarle. Esta diferencia parte de una negativa a la identificación
manifiesta en la homogeneidad que se les impone a los otros africanos
como en La mirada del hombre oscuro:
122 Chapter Seven
(22) EL PADRE.- Y más vale que te vuelvas a tu selva, que aquí pegas
menos que un pulpo en un garaje. (Del Moral 1992, 48).
(23) EL PADRE.- […] Cada vez llueve más, y nosotros aquí con este cafre
(Del Moral 1992, 47).
(25) EL NIÑO.- Dice que se quiere comer a la niña. (Del Moral 1992, 15)
124 Chapter Seven
y aquellos designados para que las reglas los excluyan (estereotipos). Por
esta razón, los estereotipos son también más rígidos que los tipos sociales
[...] Los límites […] deben quedar claramente delineados y también los
estereotipos, uno de los mecanismos del mantenimiento de límites, son
característicamente fijos, inalterables, bien definidos.
(28) LA MADRE.- Todo ha sido por su culpa. Estábamos tan bien hasta
que apareció. ¿A qué habrá venido? (Del Moral 1992, 37)
(29) EL PADRE.- […] ¡Todo por tu culpa! (Del Moral 1992, 47)
(30) EL PADRE.- Y todo por culpa del negro. ¡Si no hubiera aparecido el
negro! (Del Moral 1992, 53)
126 Chapter Seven
(34) LA MADRE:- […] ese negro que nos podía haber matado y que casi
nos desgracia a la niña. (Del Moral 1992, 52)
(35) LA MADRE.- […] Luego acaban todos metidos en las drogas. Hay
que decírselo a la Guardia Civil. (Del Moral 1992, 37)
(38) LA MADRE.- ¡Ten cuidado, a ver si te hace algo! (Del Moral 1992,
19)
(42) LA MADRE.- ¿No tendrá pulgas la chaqueta ésta [de Ombasi]? (Del
Moral 1992, 33)
(46) CADÁVER.- Aquí será peor. Aquí no nos quieren. Ni siquiera les
interesamos para robarnos. Creen que venimos a quitarles lo suyo. Aunque
nos conformemos con lo que ellos no quieren, es igual. Creen que
128 Chapter Seven
tu casa.” (López Mozo 2008, 51) / “Te los tropiezas por todas partes” (López
Mozo 2008, 51)—y expresiones que hacen referencia a la expoliación o
apropiación ajena—“tenía el presentimiento de que pronto seríamos
nosotros los extranjeros” (López Mozo 2008, 50) / “A la chita callando se
adueñaron de las pensiones y ocuparon(…)” (López Mozo 2008, 50) / “Los
forasteros se han hecho los amos y nosotros empezamos a sentirnos ovejas
en corral ajeno” (López Mozo 2008, 50) / “Toda la ciudad va camino de
convertirse en bastarda” (López Mozo 2008, 51). Esta percepción de la
presencia del otro africano, y norteafricano en particular, es el fruto de los
fantasmas del pasado “moro” que invadió la península Ibérica en el siglo
VIII. Derrida (1993, 31) habla al respecto de hantologie u “ontología
asediada por fantasmas”. Freud (1976, 247) habla de la misma noción de
Derrida pero en vez de fantasmas los denomina “dobles” que invaden
nuestras vidas: “los muertos siguen viviendo y se vuelven visibles en los
sitios de su anterior actividad”.
Es pues esta amenaza que constituyen estos otros, lo que justifica su
puesta bajo vigilancia policial, perceptible por ejemplo en Ahlán en la
presencia siempre cerca de los términos haciendo referencia a estos otros
de términos que pertenecen al campo léxico de la policía o de la ley:
(52) Un POLICÍA vigila a los inmigrantes que ocupan las bancas alargadas
dispuestas frente a un televisor encendido. (López Mozo 2008, 67)
(53) Como otros inmigrantes, ilegales como él, acudía cada mañana a una
rotonda a la entrada del pueblo. (López Mozo 2008, 97)
130 Chapter Seven
Conclusiones
El discurso sobre el otro africano en los textos literarios reproduce el
“discurso social” que se produce y circula en las diferentes esferas de la
sociedad. Se trata de un discurso esencialmente despreciativo y hostil, de
ideología racista que se manifiesta en un uso de los ambivalentes nombres
comúnmente para designar a estos otros—“negro” y “moro”—que los
carga de su sentido denigrante e “inferiorizante”. Es por otra parte un
discurso que se articula en torno a unos temas constantes—diferencia y
amenaza—y que opera mediante una determinada lexicalización y
específicos dispositivos retóricos—metáforas sobre todo, como las de la
invasión—una caracterización “estereotipada” de este otro, basada en
percepciones imaginadas, heredadas de épocas anteriores, la visión que
Edward Said (2002) llama “orientalismo” para los otros norteafricanos y
que inspirándose en esta término de Said, el Premio Nobel de Literatura
1993, Tom Morrison7 llama “africanismo” en el caso de los otros
negroafricanos.
Referencias bibliográficas
Angenot, M. “Rhétorique du discours social.” Langue française 79 (1988):
24-36.
—. “Théorie du discours social : Notions de topographie des discours et de
coupures cognitives.” COnTEXTES 1 (2006).
Bonnafous, S. “L’analyse du discours.” In Sciences de l’information et de
la communication. Objets, savoirs, discipline, edited by S. Olivesi,
223-238. Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble (2013).
Cabrera, R. Diccionario de etimologías de la lengua castellana. Tomo I.
Madrid: Imprenta de Don Marcelino Calero, 1837.
Cornejo Parriego, R. Memoria colonia e inmigración: la negritud en la
España posfranquista. Barcelona: Bellatera, 2007.
Del Moral, I. La mirada del hombre oscuro. Madrid: SGAE, 1992.
Derrida, J. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993.
Douglas, M. Purity and Danger. Londres: Routledge, 1966.
7
“I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African
people have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions,
readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these
people… The United States, of course, is not unique in the construction of
Africanism. South America, England, France, Germany, Spain—the cultures of all
these countries have participated in and contributed to some aspect of an ‘invented
Africa’”, citado por Cornejo Parriego (2007, 27).
Étnico-racial en la literatura española contemporánea 131
132 Chapter Seven
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