Characterisation through

Language:
Perspectives from Stylistics

PIERGIORGIO TREVISAN

Gratitude to:

UNIVERSITÀ
DEGLI STUDI
Dl UDINE

The volume has been published with the financial support

of the Department of Languages and Literature,
Communication, Education and Social Studies (DILL)
of the University of Udine (Italy). BICA
 Table of Contents

15 Preface

PART 1: THE STUDY OF CHARACTER

19 What is a character?
24 Mimesis and 'anti-mimesis'
27 The 'dissolution' of character
27 The Morphology of the Folk Tale
29 Structuralism
31 Bringing all together: 'stylistics' models
34 Conclusion
First published in Great Britain in December 2019
by Bica Publishing
bicapublishing@bicagroup.com PART 2: A TOOLKIT FOR THE STUDY OF CHARACTERISATION
© 2019 Bica Publishing 37 Introduction
39 'Top-down' processes
All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reprinted or reproduced or uti-
lised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or 39 Prototype theory and Schema theory
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
46 Social cognition
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
49 'Inferring'characters
ISBN 978-0-9931724-6-5
51 Bottom-up processes
ISSN 2058- 7929 52 Narratorial control
 55 Self and other presentation
Preface
56 Implicit and explicit information about characters
61 Narratorial 'filters'
61 Point of view
65 Mind style
66 Mind style and narratology
69 Mind style and metaphorical patterns
72 Mind style and deictical patterns
75 Mind style and pragmatics
78 Mind style and under/over-lexicalisation
81 Mind style and corpus stylistics
83 Transitivity patterns and characterisation
88 Dialogue and characterisation
88 Politeness and impoliteness
This book is about the 'inhabitants' of fictions: characters. More than ever
92 Expressive identity before, our daily lives are surrounded by them, in a plethora of different
93 Characters as 'inhabitants of possible worlds' ways: we encounter characters in literature, poetry, drama, movies, TV
shows, etc. Sometimes they 'migrate' from one medium to another, or be-
97 Characters and 'intertextuality '
come 'serial' in one single medium for decades. Moreover, characters may
98 Conclusion become so central in people's lives, that identification phenomena may
arise: we have all experienced what it means to 'see the world' through the
eyes of a character we love, to 'feel' that the character of a book we are
PART 3: A CASE-STUDY: 'THE BODY ARTIST'
reading would behave in a certain way in a situation we are experiencing
101 Introduction in our 'real' world. Fiction can have a dramatic impact on our lives, as the
TV show binge-watching phenomenon testifies every day: millions of peo-
102 Chara~terisation through 'fictional world' features
ple spend a great deal of their time following the lives and adventures of
103 The impact of character presentation modes the characters they love, feeling good or bad because of them, sometimes
105 Characterisation through lexis imitating their actions or their speech patterns.
111 Characterisation through 'mind-style' Despite all this, crucial theoretical issues are still hotly debated by crit-
ics: what is a character? how are characters different from human beings?
113 Characterisation through conversation and politeness patterns how shall they be approached, from a critical perspective? Centuries of
115 Transitivity patterns and characterisation fiction writing have not been of great help from this point of view: several
readers know that Don Quixote (1605) was the first character in the his-
118 Characterisation through a newly-expanded narratology: actions
tory of literature and one of the most studied, yet very few of them would
as thoughts, intennental thinking doubly embedded narratives
probably analyse him using different tools from those used to understand
122 Characterisation and intertextuality real people. At most levels, characters continue to be studied as if they
123 Structure of the novel and characterisation were human beings, without considering the fact that they are, first and
124 Conclusion foremost, the product of one writer's imagination and, most importantly,
they are communicated via language, that is to say, with words, so words
127 References are how characters are realised in the 'real world'. When analysing them,
as will be discussed, 'textual' properties also need to be considered, along Ruqaiya Hasan's claim that "in verbal art the role of language is central.
with the 'human-like' attributes. Here language is not as clothing to the body; it IS the body" (1985, 91).
Broadly speaking, these issues have been addressed by two main This book is therefore both about character and about characterisation.
schools of thought: the first one has been referred to as 'humanising', since Though obviously related, the two terms have different meanings: the first
it tends to investigate characters as if they were real people; the second one one is the 'output' of the second, since character is the 'result' of all the
has been called 'de-humanising', since the approach is purely textual and strategies used by an author in order to impress a certain image in the mind
tends to investigate characters as if they were only "patterns of recurrence" of the readers. The first Part, in particular, is more concerned with charac-
(Weinsheimer 1979, 195), "functions" which are constantly dissolved into ter, even if some crucial theoretical aspects are inevitably addressed. The
'textuality' (see Culpeper 2001, 6-7). Both approaches are equally prob- second and third Parts are more concerned with characterisation, therefore
lematic, as they fail to take into account crucial attributes of the category: with all the strategies employed for producing particular characters, with
the textual one in the first case, the 'human-like' in the second. distinct traits and psychological aspects.
By building and significantly expanding the models discussed in a
previous volume of the author (Trevisan 2008), this book aims at finding
a compromise between the two positions, i.e. at corroborating the study
of so-called 'mixed approaches' (Culpeper 200 I, 9), i.e. approaches that
account for both dimensions of characters and, at the same time, for the
readers' cognitive processes.
This book is divided into three main parts. The first one is concerned
with the 'evolution' of characters in the last few centuries: as will be shown,
characters have undergone drastic changes with the passing of time, espe-
cially towards the end of the 191h century. Their 'construction strategies'
have changed a lot throughout the centuries, resulting in what we may call
a divergent 'species' of character. Very interestingly, the analytical theo-
ries have followed the same path: 'humanising' approaches have gradually
been replaced by 'de-humanising' ones, to the point that characters have
been analysed as 'actants', or 'roles' nested in the syntactic patterns of the
narrative.
The second part of the volume is entirely devoted to the construc-
tion of a model for characterisation: starting from existing theories, several
points are addressed for outlining a coherent and comprehensive approach
taking into account both the psychological and the textual dimensions of
characters. Very importantly, the model can be applied not only to nar-
rative, but also to drama and TV shows. In other words, the theoretical
framework is positioned within the tradition of' stylistics': when some ob-
servations are drawn about the psychology of a particular character, for
example, they are always 'bottom-up' in origin, since they originate from
a close scrutiny of the language used in the texts. The chapters, introduced
and discussed with many examples, are to be conceived as a guide for ad-
dressing different aspects of characterisation. As will be explained, not all
the features discussed are always present at the same time, yet they mostly
work in combination with the aim of producing a clear-cut image of char-
acters in readers' minds.
ln the third section, the discussions outlined in Part 2 are further ap-
plied to a case-study: the novel The Body Artist by the American writer
Don DeLillo. The central role of stylistics is reinforced here, in line with
 Part 1: The study of character

1.1 WHAT IS A CHARACTER?

In an episode of the British TV series Black Mirror called The Waldo Mo-
ment, the protagonist Jamie Salter is a failed comedian who, for a living,
performs the voice and movements of a cartoon character called Waldo.
Originally designed for children, Waldo suddenly becomes extremely pop-
ular after provocatively addressing politicians by means of screens posi-
tioned on the side of the road: while in a van parked near the screens, James
Salter animates Waldo and 'gives voice' to him when politicians walk by
the screens. What initially seems to be a funny game enjoyed by the politi-
cians themselves, soon turns into a totally unexpected social phenomenon
whereby Waldo is acclaimed as the symbol of a new political era and asked
by the public at large to run for the next presidential elections.
In the space of a TV episode, The Waldo Moment addresses crucial is-
sues regarding the ontology of fictional characters: despite being 'non-ex-
~istent entities', they are largely present in people's lives; sometimes they
have the power to significantly influence real world events 1, or to change
over time and 'migrate' from one medium to another in order to reach
Gider audiences. However, their existence is dependent on some authors
(a writer, a screen producer) providing 'life' for them: from this point of
view, their status is tha emiotic constructs, i.e. entities that consist
of mediatedsigns. Waldo, for example, is first and foremosta 'linguistic'
artefact depending on the decisions of his author, James Salter - himself a
fictional character. Yet, it would be hard and perhaps a bit unfair to think

1
It will be sufficient to think of how many people committed suicide to imitate
fictional characters like Goethe's Werther, or Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
 exclusively of characters in terms of 'linguistic signs': as we all know, they
are much more than that.
As these preliminary observations make clear, defining the nature of
characters is a crucial starting point for identifying the best analytical tools
[ for understanding and analysing them. Authors and critics have been con-
cerned with this for a very long time, and sometimes discussions about
the ontology of characters have even been incorporated within the fiction-
al works themselves. The British author David Lodge, for example, has
addressed this issue in the presentation of Robyn, one of the two central
characters in his novel Nice Work (1989):
According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who
have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing
as the 'self' on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded
- that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a
persons identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of
discourses - the discourses of power. sex, family, science, religion,
poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an
author; that is to say, one who originates a work of art ab nihilo.
Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and
citations of other texts; and, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida,
(famous to people like Robyn, anyway), 'il n '.Y a pas de hors-texte',
there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only
production, and we produce our 'selves' in language. Not 'you are
what you eat', but 'you are what you speak' 01~ rather, 'you are what
speaks you' is the axiomatic basis of Robyn s philosophy, which she
would call, if required to give it a name, 'semiotic materialism'. It
might seem a bit bleak, a bit inhuman ('anti-humanist, yes; inhuman,
no'; she would interject), somewhat deterministic ('not at all, the
truly determined subject is he who is not aware of the discursive
formations that determine him. Or her', she would add scrupulously
being among other things a feminist). But in practice this doesn't
seem to affect her behaviour very noticeably - she seems to have
ordinary human feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties,
frustrations, fears, like anyone else in this imperfect world, and to
have a natural inclination to try and make it a better place. I shall
take the liberty of treating her as a character, not utterly different in
kind, though of course belonging to a very different social species,
from Vic Wilcox (Lodge 1989, 40-41).
Even though characters are a 'product oflanguage', and 'there is noth-
ing outside the text', no 'origin' but only 'production', the author lets us
know that Robyn seems to have ordinary human feelings and anxieties like
everyone else in the world; therefore, he will take the liberty of treating
her as a character, even if in the previous page he had pointed out that
"rather awkwardly for me, [she] doesn't herself believe in the concept of
character" (1988, 39). A 'double ontology' seems to emerge from Lodge's
T extract: characters are both 'signs on a page', and 'entities' projecting am-
bitions, desires and frustrations very similarly to human beings. Therefore,
they can be approached at least from two points of view: 'textual' and
_ 'psychological'.
More generally, as Eder et al. (2010, 8) have suggested, discussions
focusing on characters' ontology can be grouped into four main positions:
1. Semiotic theories consider characters to be signs or structures of
fictional texts.
2. Cognitive approaches assume that characters are representations
of imaginary beings in the minds of the audience.
3. Some philosophers believe that characters are abstract objects be-
yond material reality.
4. Other philosophers contend that characters do not exist at all.
Each position has important implications for the analysis of characters:
position 4, in particular, is the most extreme of them since it implies the
investigation of character only in terms of yet another 'textual element'
like narrative technique, time, point of view, description, etc. According to
position 4, in other words, characters and real people have nothing in com-
!11Qn, a reason why no reference tohwruin beings shoula ever be made in
t~ygs. P_£,si!!.£!LU.s....s.omehow similar-but not.so extremexcharacters
ar~rt of the .'..faruic' o~t§_ip which they are embedd~ however
this does not entail their_nQp_~istence; in fact, it is not uncommon for
characters to 'migrate' from one book to the other, or from a book to a
movie, TV series, or live show. Therefore, they seem to have an existence
that goes "beyond purely textual boundaries" (McIntyre 2014, 150):__this
is in line with position 3 claimino that characters are abstract ob· ects be-
YQ.!:d matena rea ity, i.e. "something aveuncL.a.b0-¥e-St~~"
(Eder et al. 2010, 132), a statement that admits the possibility of creating a
character before creating a story (Eder et al. 2010, 116). Position 1, finally,
adds to position 3 the account.of.how real reader~ompr.ehenclcharacters:
this is a crucial perspectiYe_,__since personal_r_eading experiences are ofte
in conflict with literary criticaLac.counts af characters (see also McIntyre
2014, 151 ). Position 2 is also...tb.e_o,n4! one that accommodates-aJ+.al:ld~nce;
therefore, it is in tune with 'pragmatic concerns.'..., i.e. concerns that revolve
around.the communicatioJLOLineanmg-s (Culpeper and Fernandez-Quinta-
[
nilla 2017, 94). To be noted, 'imaginary beings' are mentioned for the first
time: this admits for the possibility of characters being not only actual peo-
ple or representations of actual people, but also anthropomorphic animal
characters like those found in Disney or science fiction.
Despite these philosophical and semantic perspectives, however, it
could not be denied that, for a very long time, it was taken for granted
 that characters represented human beings, that novels were about people,
and that psychological motives sustained plots. According to Henry James,
characters had to be considered 'representations' ofreal people: similarly
[to paintings, they needed "a basis in life without being mere copies of
Jexisting people", and authors had to "mediate and interpret human experi-
ence through them" (James 1984, 1322). For this reason, at least until the
1920s, characters were mostly referred to as 'people', both by critics and
by authors: E.M. Forster, for instance, used the term 'People' in the title of
his two renowned chapters focusing on characters in Aspects of the Novel.
"Since the actors in a story are usually human", he explained, "it seems
convenient to entitle this aspect People" (Forster 1954 [1927], 30).
, The very first critical approaches to characters, therefore, tended to
j 'humanise' them, a reason why these models have been called 'humanising
approaches' (Culpeper 2001, 6): in Shakespearian Tragedy, for example,
the critic A.C. Bradley talks about Shakespeare's characters in a manner
that could be very similar to the way in which we could talk about real
people:
So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from
the sun where he was born; but no longer young and now graved,
self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils,
hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and
in speech a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his
worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and
unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from
without and all rebellion from within (Bradley 1926, 189).
His chief desire is not by any means to ensure his mothers silent
acquiescence in his design of revenge; it is to have her soul. And
while the' rough work of vengeance is repugnant to him, he is at home
in this higher work. [. . .] The truth is that, though Hamlet hates his
uncle and acknowledges the duty of vengeance, his whole heart is
never in this feeling or this task; but his whole heart is in his horror
at his mother 's fall and in his longing to raise her (Bradley 1926,
138).
Both in Othello's (first extract) and in Hamlet's analysis (second ex-
tract), no reference is made to the linguistic features characterising the
texts: the characters are treatecLaS-iL.tbey were real.men, and past and
future lives are even imagined for them. Things are not dissimilar in the
extract below, when Bradley analyses King Lear's traits starting from a
series of extra-textual considerations:
How can there be such men and women? We ask ourselves. How
comes it that humanity can take such absolutely opposite forms?
And, in particular, to what omissions of elements which should
be present in human nature, or, if there is no omission, to what
distortion of these elements is it due that such beings as some of
these come to exist? (Bradley 1926, 264).
Bradley was not the only critic who approached characters as if they
were real people: in those same decades, following Freud's groundbreak-
',ing contributions to modern psychology, so-called 'psychoanalytic ap-
1proaches' became so popular that expressions like 'Oedipus complex',
I 'consequences of sexual repression', 'death wish', to name but a few, were
commonly used in characters' analyses:
The underlying theme relates ultimately to the splitting of the mother
image which the infantile unconscious effects into two opposite
pictures: one of a virginal Madonna, an inaccessible saint towards
whom all sensual approaches are unthinkable, and the other of a
sensual creature accessible to everyone . . When sexual repression is
highly pronounced, as with Hamlet, then both types of women are
felt to be hostile: the pure one out of resentment at her repulses, the
sensual one out of the temptation she offers to plunge into guiltiness.
Misogyny, as in the play, is the inevitable result (Jones 1949, 97-8).
Language, as can be seen, was hardly mentioned in these types of
analyses, nor were other crucial narrative features like narration, point of
hiew, speech and thought presentation, etc. 'Humanising' approaches, in
other words, were in line with readers' text experiences, according to the
notion that "what we all do when we read a book, or watch a play or film
iato at©n-pU.oJnl.qpret characters, despite their imaginary status, in large
part with knowledge about people acquired through our real life experienc-
es" (Culpeper 200, 6- 7).
After 1920, however, things began to change: critics started to express
dissatisfaction with the treatment of characters solely in a 'person-like'
way, therefore new perspectives began to emerge. In Modern Fiction, for
instance, Virginia Woolf pointed out that her characters were all but 'tra-
ditionally constructed', thus implicitly implying that fictional entities and
human beings did not have much in common:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind in an ordinary day. The
mind receives myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent,
or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come,
an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differentlyfrom of old[. . .] If a writer were a free man and not a
slave, ifhe could write what he chose, not what he must, ifhe could
base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there
would be no plot, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
 accepted stvle. and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond
Street tailors would have it (1921, 189; my emphasis).
Very interestingly, Woolf's extract pointed to two different directions at the
~
I same time: on the one hand, she expressed her dissatisfaction with.rhe.tra-
diti,QI1al..pmG~s~-oLc.haractro construction - i.e. with what would today
be called 'characterisation:; on the other hand, by clearly differentiating
"ordinary minds" (i.e. 'real' people's minds) from fictional ones, she was
actually expressing her point of view regarding the distance among the
characters in her novels and the characters in the literature of the past.
Crucially, then, in order to fully understand why additional approach-
es began to be used along with the more traditional 'humanising' ones,
it is necessary to reflect upon the changes that occurred to characters at
the beginning of the 20th century. As a matter of fact, a 'different type of
character' seemed to emerge at the end of the 19th century, and an entirely
'new' one was already in Woolf's mind in 1921, when the extract above
was composed. The 'new' characters and the 'new' theories were not un-
related phenomena.
1.2 MIMESIS AND 'ANTI-MIMESIS'
The development of representational, mimetic analytical methods like the
ones discussed above was, at least in part, related to the 'types' of charac-
ters produced by traditional literature: throughout the centuries, novelists
had repeatedly created their fictional 'prototypes' by copying them from
'the book of nature'; as a consequence, characters and real people had tra-
ditionally shared several attributes and behaviours.
As Gerard Genette (1987, 57-58) made clear some decades later, how-
ever, things had begun to change around the 1880s: in carrying out what
he called ironically 'a simple experiment' with the help of a six-year-old
child, he analysed the opening pages of several novels produced before
1850, and compared them with later productions. In doing so, he noticed
that a significant change had occurred around 1885: until that moment,
character presentations had mainly been carried out by means of very de-
tailed descriptions that started from their body parts and culminated in a
careful account of every single element of their face. As a consequence,
during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, characters had become
so similar to human beings that their authors had often felt they needed to
provide 'precautionaryexplanations to avoid risks ofreader identification:
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse
anyone; for though everything is copied from the book of nature, and
,
scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from
my own observations and experience; yet I have used the utmost
care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees
and colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
degree of certainty; and if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where
the failure characterised is so minute, that it is a foible only which
the party himself may laugh at as well as any other (Fielding 1970
[1742], XXII).
After 1885, however, presentation techniques started to change, as
Henry James's production well shows: more traditional characterisation
strategies dominated his novels until The Bostonians (published serially
·n 1885-1886), whereas from The Princess Casamassima (published seri-
ally in those same years) onwards, characters had been introduced "as if
readers were already very familiar with them" (Genette 1987, 57): for this
---reason, detailed descriptions of their physical features were not necessary
~Y more.
These changes became even more evident in the first decades of the
20th century, after Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson, William James and Sig-
mund Freud had heavily affected traditional scientific and philosophical
frameworks. As the novels by WoQlf, Joyce and Proust showed, writers had
~ome increasing4Lc.oncemed__wi.tlllheir charactersminds and their inner
conflicts,-..a reason wh..y_characterjsation_techniques drastically.evolved. As
D.H. Lawrence pointed out in 1914, the 'old-fashioned' representation of
characters was not interesting anymore:
Somewhat that which is physic, not human, in humanity, is more
interesting to me than the old fashioned human element, which
causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and
make it consistent. In Turgenev, and in Tolstoy, and in Dostoevskij,
the moral scheme into which almost all the characters fit - and it
is nearly the same scheme - is, whatever the extraordinary of the
characters themselves, dull, old, dead. [. . .] You mustn't look in my
novels for the old stable ego o[the characters. There is another ego.
according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable. and
passes through. as it were. allotropic states which it needs a deeper
sense than any we've been used to exercise. to discover are states of
the same single radically-unchanged element (in Huxley 1932, 198;
my emphasis).
Both Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were therefore concerned
with very similar phenomena: the "incessant shower of innumerable at-
oms" (Woolf's extract above) or the "allotropic states" (Lawrence's ex-
tract) inherently characterising and influencing people's lives. From the
point of view of a character's construction, the most immediate conse-
quence was that accurate body descriptions were now replaced by detailed
accounts of internal thoughts and states of minds, mainly reported by in-
novative techniques like free indirect speech and interior monologue (see
.IPart 2 of this volume). Very little was now told about characters by narra-
. tors: most of the information was instead shown by means of inner speech
or thought representations2•
1.3 THE 'DISSOLUTION' OF CHARACTER

Along with the advent of new character types, theories more con- 1.3.1 The Morphology of the Folk Tale
cerned with 'textual' aspects started to emerge. The most significant one
In 1928, the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp formulated an approach to
is perhaps represented by E.M Forster's acclaimed work Aspects of the
narrative structure where characters had a central role. In particular, by
Novel (1927): although the two chapters devoted to characters were called
analysing 115 Russian folk tales, he singled out 31 underlying narrative
'People', the connection with the texts in which they were embedded was
functions performed by 8 character types: as far as characterisation was
central to the work. In particular, besides the renowned distinction between
concerned, they performed the role of 'doers' (e.g. hero, villain, victim,

I
Flat and Round characters', Forster focused on the importance of narrative
etc.) without any reference to the psychological motives that might have
techniques like point of view for the construction of characters, along with
motivated them to carry out the deeds. By way of illustration, the list of
other textual aspects like patterns and rhythms.
functions is given below (Propp 1968 [1928], 21):
Despite its pioneering nature, this model became a recurrent point of
reference for approaches to character analysis in the following decades: 1. One of the members of a family leaves home.
William Harvey in 1965, Baruch Hochman in 1985, and David Fishelov in
1990, for example, all referred back to it during their attempts to single out 5. An interdiction is addressed to the hero.
a 'typological taxonomy' of characters in literature. 6. The interdiction is violated.
After Forster, the past tendencies to imagine previous or future lives
for the characters tended to disappear. Indeed, as the English critic L.C. 7. The villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance.
Knights pointed out in an essay provocatively called How Many Children 8. The villain receives information about his victim.
Had Lady Macbeth?, good criticism could only occur if textual elements
were also taken into account: 9. The villain attempts to deceive his victim in order to take posses-
sion of him or of his belongings.
The main difference between good and bad critics is that the good
critic points to something that is actually contained in the work of 1 O. The victim submits to deception and thereby unwittingly helps his
art, whereas the bad critic points awayfrom the work in question: he enemy.
introduces extraneous elements into his appreciation - smudges the
canvas with his own paint (Knights 1963, 18). 11. The villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family ( defined
as 'villainy').
12. Misfortune or lack is made known; the hero is approached with a
request or command; he is allowed to go or he is despatched.
13. The seeker agrees to or decides upon counteraction.
14. The hero leaves home.
15. The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc., which prepares the
2
Most of what we know about Mrs Dalloway, for example, is not 'told' by the way for his receiving either a magical agent or helper.
narrator, but is the result of a technique whereby her actions and thoughts are 16. The hero reacts to the actions of the future donor.
'shown' as they unfold.
17. The hero acquires the use of a magical agent.
18. The hero is transferred, delivered, or Jed to the whereabouts of an
object of search.
19. The hero and the villain join in direct combat.
20. The hero is branded.
LO
21. The villain is defeated.
22. The initial misfortune or lack is liquidated.
23. The hero returns.
24. The hero is pursued.
25. The hero is rescued from pursuit.
26. The hero, unrecognised, arrives home or in another country.
27. A false hero presents unfounded claims.
28. A difficult task is proposed to the hero.
29. The task is resolved.
30. The hero is recognised.
31. The false hero or villain is exposed.
32. The hero is given a new appearance.
33. The villain is punished.
34. The hero gets married and ascends to the throne.
The number of functions, Propp pointed out, is always the same, and the
functions of characters "serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, inde-
pendent of how and by whom they are fulfilled" (1968, 21 ). Moreover,
seven basic character types (also called 'roles') were identified:
• Villain
• Donor/provider
• Hero
• False hero
• Dispatcher
• Helper
• Princess, (+ father)
A character, Propp made clear (1968, 92), ..c.an-fu-lfil more than 0J1e-.role
(some individuals in the tale could for example be both villain and false
hero, for instance); by the same token, one role can be fulfilled by sever-
al individuals (several characters could function as helpers or villains).
Whatever the case, it is important to note that in this approach characters
were considered 'functions': they were subordinated to the progression of
the plot, therefore their 'anthropomorphic' traits were backgrounded.
Despite being created in 1928 and first published in Europe not before
1965, the model was used extensively and is still used today for the study
of characters in both literature and film analyses: Michael Toolan (200 I,
19-20), for instance, applied it to the study of movies and popular narra-
tive", and Ruth Wodak (2009) analysed the political drama television series
The West Wing by making reference to the characters roles outlined by
Propp. Moreover, Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla (2017) have recent-
ly shown how, even if the model tends to 'de-humanise' characters, it can
still be fruitfully used in combination with cognitive theories for analytical
purposes: clearly, the critics explain, there are schematic associations be-
tween fictional character roles and real-life social categories (2007, 101),
therefore whenever a particular character function (in Propp's terms) is
identified, a particular schema containing 'anthropomorphic' traits is re-
trieved by readers (for the notio]k.Qf~'sc~, see 2.2.1 - Part 2 of this
volume).
1.3.2 Structuralism
"Character is the major aspect of the novel to which structuralism has paid
least attention and has been least successful in treating" (Culler 1975, 230):
Jonathan Culler's statement may perhaps be sufficient for outlining the
approach to characters during Structuralism, one of the most important
intellectual movements of the 201h century. Indeed, this period showed very
little interest in the category, considering it merely as a 'functional' cate-
gory, or as an 'actant'.
As regards the former, the most important model elaborated at the
time was Philippe Hamon's Pour un statut sémiologique du personage,
first published in Littérature in 1972. As_tbe title suggests,..nature..GÎ-GA-ar-
acter was inherentl.y_:sei:niotic' ,Jherefore analyses had...tQ-be--eftFFi~d-outin
terms of linguist~signs in S~~re1_tgrri_s (1916): their signifier (prop-
erties, 'marks') ha "fo'"'oerelated..t0-their..signified (their 'sense'), and both
I dimensions needéd to be compared to these same dimensions embodying
the other characters in the text or in other texts. In other words, accord-
ing to this model, ch~acters had a 'semantic.-Malue;-wmGi:i-'.Mas_obtained
through phenomena of 'accumulation' J:bat started at the beginning of the
text and enaed at its conclusion. These values, which coincided with char-
acteristics like 'sex', 'job', 'ideology', etc. contributed to the creation of a
hierarchical classification among characters along specific axes5. By way
of illustration, the table below shows how 5 characters could accumulate
their 'semantic value' according to 4 categories (1972, 98):
4
For instance, he used the model to analyse the Star Wars film trilogy.
5
The following situation is an example: if a recurrent opposition between a
king and a young shepherdess was identified, the fundamental semantic axes
would be sex (male character VS female character), age (old character VS
young character), ideology (noble character VS plebeian character), habitat
( cultural urban world VS natural, rustic world), etc.
£0

SEMANTIC AXES GEO-GRAPHIC

SEX IDEOLOGY MONEY
CHARACTERS ORIGIN
Cl + + + +
C2 + + + +
C3 + 0 0 0
C4 + + 0 0
cs + + 0 0
In the example, characters 1 and 2 would be considered more 'complex'
than characters 3, 4 and 5, since they are 'informed' by a bigger number
of semantic axes: the notion of 'complexity', it goes without saying, has
nothing to do with the 'psychological complexity' typical of 'humanising'
approaches, yet researchers following the structuralist tradition found it
very useful to identify similar characters ('galaxies' of characters sharing
the same semantic value) or characters who were in a relation of opposition
with one another.
As regards the actant model, it was originally formulated by the French
narratologist Algirdas Greimas in 1966, and was strongly dependent on
Propp's approach developed in Russia forty years earlier. In Greimas's
view, all narratives were underlain by a fixed number of very general cate-
gories called actants, themselves structured into three interrelated couples
in a relation of opposition (I 966, 38):
Giver Receiver
Subject Object
Helper Opponent
As remarked by Toolan (2001, 82), the model could well fit many tradi-
tional folk and fairy tales: a young character of lowly origin (subject), for
example, may fall in love with a princess (object) and want to marry her.
In his quest, he may be helped by a friend (helper), but their efforts could
be frustrated by some opponent (usually a wicked relative of the princess),
until a sender (the king, usually, or some individual with magical powers)
might intervene creating a possible happy end. In the same vein, more
complex narratives may also be analysed: in Joyce's short story Eveline,
for example, the main character embodies both the subject and the receiver
role, and her desire for freedom and happiness is the object; her helper
Frank has the power to support her escape from a life she does not want to
live any more, but her violent opponent father insists on not letting her go.
The absence of a superhelper is openly announced by the narrator ("Out of
a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was
her duty") (Joyce 1996 [1904], 42), who refers to God as the absent actant,
a reason why Eveline cannot obtain the freedom and happiness she desires
(her objects).
In Hamon 's and Greimas 's approaches, character dissolution was
'completed': no reference to any psychological motive driving the charac-
ters' action was ever made, therefore the two models were at the opposing
end to Bradley's approach mentioned above. Very interestingly, the theo-
retical 'de-humanisation' of the character found analogies in what was hap-
pening within the fictional domain, as Barth's The Literature of Exhaustion
(1967) makes clear: Borges's language games and 'ironic' use of conven-
tions, Pynchon's mixing of'high' and 'low' literature, Eco's intertextuality,
to cite but a few writers, all pointed towards a very unconventional idea
of character, that seemed to have lost all its traditional, 'representational'
potential. This was also in line with the postmodern notion of dispersion
of a unified, 'solid', 'authentic' self. In Cixous's words (1974, 384), tradi-
tional representational characters served to "repress the unconscious of the
reader, keeping the subject in its limited place by means of identification
strategies"; 'contemporary' characters, on the other hand, by being "multi-
ple, decentred, differentiated into a trans-subjective effervescence", could
enhance the "full realization of the reading subject" (1974, 387).
For at least 40 years, then, theories tended to 'de-humanise' charac-
ters, after the 'humanising' approaches of the past. This went hand in hand
with a general tendency to produce characters that had lost many of their
long-established attributes. Only in the 1960s, with the emergence of the
so-called 'stylistic' approaches, a compromise between the two positions
could finally be reached. A general introduction to this research arena is
provided in 1.4, whereas all Part 2 of this volume is devoted to a model of
characterisation that may be termed 'stylistic'.
1.4 BRINGING ALL TOGETHER: 'STYLISTICS' MODELS
In the past few decades, new approaches have been developed for the study
of narrative fiction. As a consequence, character analysis has received re-
newed attention, particularly as regards the representation of 'fictional
minds' by means of the so-called 'cognitive stylistic approaches' (See part
2)~ênerally speaking, ffietwo most important research arenas underlying
stylistics are '!œ_guistics' and 'narra~ogy', two disciplines that enjoyed
a similar developmënrboffiïn Britain and in the United States. Although
evolving from different bases, the two fields have both proved successful
for the analysis of narratives, either in combination or on their own.
As the linguist Katie Wales made clear back in 2001 (372), the wide
variety of approaches underlying contemporary stylistics is heavily de-
pendent on the influences coming from the different branches of linguis-
tics and literary criticism. Th~rence to literary criticism is emblematic,
since the texts analysed by stylisticians are, indeed, mostly 'literary': for,
this reason, the theory has often been conceived of as an expansion of the
~u
earlier studies of 'elocutio' in rhetoric (Burke 2014, 1). As Semino and
Culpeper pointed out, however, "it would be restrictive to conceive of the
discipline as a phenomenon pertaining exclusively to the realm of litera-
ture" (1995, 513-520): stylisticians indeed analyse 'language style' in sev-
~ fields ranging from.literature. to.advertising, from newspaper.reponing
to ~ligion, fro_!!} bureaucracy to everyday conversation.
Unlike other research arenas, stylistics has a precise 'date of birth': it
was in fact referred to explicitly for the very first time in 1958 during..the
renowned Indiana Style Conference, its ':futheLbeiJ1g.Ro.m.an ...Iakobeen,
one of the most influential linguists of the 201h century. In closing the con-
ference, he stated that "a linguist deaf to the poetic function in language
and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and un-conversant
with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms" (Jakobson
1960, 3 77). This position shed important light on a dispute that had con-
cerned literary studies for decades, regarding the more useful tools to be
used for the analysis of narrative texts. Van Peer's words (1989, 2), formu-
lated almost thirty years later, are crucial for understanding this dispute:
Literary scholars frown upon linguists and their methods because
of their formalism and their stubborn rationality. They feel that
somehow the real 'literary' nature of the works studied is not done
justice to, and they therefore prefer to exclude linguistics (and
linguists) from their field of study altogether. Since literature also
deals with emotions and with the irrational side of human existence,
they feel that little help is to be expected from an all-too-narrowly
defined rational approach. The linguists, on the other hand, find
fault with the looseness of terms and methods adopted by literary
scholars, their superficial linguistic knowledge and their lack of
system, as a result of which they also question the validity of the
conclusions arrived at in literary scholarship. They also feel that
literary language is amenable to linguistic analysis.
Thirty years after Jakobson's renowned statement, then, the dispute
had not yet been resolved: indeed, despite providing useful notions on their
own, both disciplines seemed to lack some tools that could only be inte-
grated by recurring to 'cross-fertilization' practices. Linguists seemed of-
ten too 'formal' and 'rational' in their analyses, whereas literary critics did
not seem to reflect enough on the 'linguistic texture' of the texts. Eighteen
years later, things were not very different:
One tends to see the late twentieth century at least as the site of
an at times impassioned agon for pre-eminence between linguistic
stylistics on the one hand, and, on the other, a myriad variety of lit-
critic angles which contend with, but are basically tolerant of, each
other. And this was, and continues to be, the case. After all, it was
one thing to smile on linguistic attention to texts in 'dead' languages,
and quite another to concede equal dignity to a linguistic approach
to thriving modern and contemporary literature (Miller and Turci
2007, 3).
In the last few decades, stylistics has been the arena where more ef-
forts have been made to narrow the gap discussed above: by not limiting
itself to merely describing texts' 'formal features' for their own sake, it
has successfully taken into account the functional significance of such fea-
tures, in the light of better interpretations (Wales 2001, 372-73). Stylistic
models, in other words, are to be considered 'necessary complements' to
the 'implicit nature' of much literary criticism, their scopes
going far beyond the rhetoric, poetics, formalism, structura/ism
and functionalism of the past to embrace corpus, critical, cognitive,
pedagogical, pragmatic, gender, multimodal, and most recently,
neuroscientific approaches (Burke 2017, 2).
Broadly speaking, then, the growth and diffusion of stylistics since
the 1960s coincided with a movement away from the merely formalist ap-
proaches of the past, in favour of a closer focus on the relationship between
language and the pragmatic, social, ideological and cognitive dimensions
of literary production and reception. This was also made possible by the
enormous advances in fields like discourse analysis, socio-linguistics,
computational methods, pragmatics, systemic functional linguistics and
cognitive linguistics, to name but a few. Some of them will be very shortly
introduced below.
One of the most influential contributions has been Michael Halliday's
'systemic model' of language, which provides a 'multi-level' and 'mul-
ti-functional' view of style: the theory explains each linguistic choice by
referring to the system as a whole, and relates the formal features to the
functions they perform inside and outside language (see 2.3.5 Part 2). Hal-
liday himselfrecognised that different writing styles could foreground dif-
ferent functions (Leech & Short 1981, 31 ), as will be discussed later.
Another research area successfully used in stylistics - and in the anal-
ysis of character interaction in particular - is Pragmatics, a field that draws
attention to the particular 'contextual configuration' in which communi-
cation occurs6: developments in this field have proved very useful for the
analysis of meaningful exchanges in fictional dialogues, a reason why the
approach has been used widely in the study of characterisation. Addition-
ally, so-called 'literary pragmatics' has looked at the linguistic features of
texts emerging from the 'real' interpersonal relationships between author,
text and readers (Wales 2001, 238).
Stylistics has also been fruitfully influenced by Foregrounding Theo-
ry, a field that investigates the linguistic choices creating reactions of 'de-
6
See, in particular, Black (2006).
familiarisation' in the readers, i.e. reactions triggered by patterns of lan- approaches', where characters were analysed as if they had been human
guage use that deviate from what we would normally expect. As regards beings, a series of 'de-humanising' approaches appeared when characters
characterisation, the theory has focused on defamiliarising strategies used began their 'metamorphosis'. In particular, 'textual' approaches like the
by authors to foreground particular characters - or particular 'aspects' like ones described in 1.3 began to look at characters as if they were only 'use-
emotional reactions or speaking styles - and not others. ful functions' for the progression of the plot. In those approaches, no refer-
Recent advances in cognitive science have also proved important for ence to psychological motives was ever carried out, therefore they were in
stylistics, as the large number of publications in this field indicates: Cogni- total opposition with the 'person-like' models of the past.
tive stylistics - or Cognitive Poetics, as this branch is often called (Stock- In Part 2 of this volume a model of characterisation 'bringing all to-
well 2002; Freeman 2017) - investigates the 'cognitive effects' of style gether' will be proposed: starting from recent research on language, the
in readers. Particularly influential for cognitive stylistics are the studies model will take into account both the language underlying the texts - there-
of 'frames' and 'schemas' elaborated initially by cognitive psychologists fore the 'textual' aspect, and the 'mental functioning' of the characters re-
and later used by stylisticians for analysing reader interpretation of literary sulting from cumulative patterns of specific language configurations. A
texts (Cook 1994; Semino 1997; Culpeper 2001; Stockwell 2002; Emmot, series of linguistic approaches very useful for characterisation will be pro-
Alexander and Marszalek 2017). Cognitive Stylistics has also provided posed, together with many examples from contemporary fictions.
important insights for approaching character's 'mental functioning' (Sem-
ino 2006, 2011, 2014; Trevisan 2010).
Finally, in very recent years 'corpus techniques' have been used for
the study of style and of characterisation, as demonstrated by innovative
research published in leading journals or in monographs (Toolan 2008;
Bednarek 2010, 2011; Mahl berg 2012; McIntyre and Walker 2019). In par-
ticular, as will be shown in Part 2, corpus methods provide the possibili-
ty to analyse consistent linguistic patterns typical of particular characters
and not of others, thus projecting particular 'styles' and 'mental function-
ing'. For example, it has been shown that 'neurotypical' characters tend
to use personal 'deictic' patterns starting from the here and now of their
personal experience (Lyons 1977, 63 7), yet this 'deictic centre' (McIntyre,
2006, 2007) might breakdown in characters with limited cognitive abilities
(Bockting 1990, 1995; see also Semino 2011, 423). Intuitively, this may
project peculiar mind styles.

1.5 CONCLUSION

In Part 1 of this volume an overview of the notion of character has been

proposed. Starting from a discussion about his/her ontological status, a
general introduction to his/her 'morphological' evolution in the last three
centuries has been provided.
In particular, it has been noted that a drastic change in character con-
struction occurred at the end of the 191h century, resulting in a decline of
physical descriptions and in a tendency to 'move inwards': as a result, in
the first half of the 20'h century 'traditional' characters seemed to dissolve
into a language that to a great extent only reported their thoughts and their
'streams of consciousness'. Very interestingly, something similar occurred
to theories concerned with their analysis: after centuries of 'humanising
Part 2: A toolkit for the study of characterisation

2.1. INTRODUCTION

In a book that would soon become a classic, the narratologist Rim-

mon-Kenan (1983) joined the debate about literary characters by pointing
out that it is not a mistake to conceive of them both as human beings and as
linguistic signs. This view seemed to reconcile the conflicting perspectives
presented in the first part of this volume, and encompassed both psycho-
logical studies and linguistic ones:
If both approaches [textual and mimetic} end up cancelling the
specificity of fictional characters, though from different standpoints,
should the study of character be abandoned, or should both
approaches be rejected and a different perspective sought? Can such
a perspective reconcile the two opposed positions without destroying
character between them? Is it possible to see characters 'at once as
persons and as parts of a design'? I think it is, provided one realizes
that the two extreme positions can be thought of as relating to
different aspects of narrative fiction. In the text, characters are nodes
in the verbal design; in the story they are - by definition - non (or
pre-) verbal abstractions, constructs (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 33).
Starting from the assumption that any novel is both 'text' and 'story'
at the same time, 'story' coinciding with the narrated events abstracted
from their disposition in the 'text' (1983, 3), characters could therefore be
conceived of as 'human beings' in the 'story' and as 'textual patterns' in
the 'text'. In other words, characters may be looked at as two equally im-
portant sides of the same coin and analysed accordingly: tools belonging to
the realm of psychology may be used for the story-part, whereas linguistic
,jl)
tools may be used for the 'text' part. Following this perspective, characters
could be defined as "possible individuals made up of words" (Margolin
1990, 453), i.e. as text-embedded patterns not reducible to words, or, fol-
lowing Lubomir Dolezel ( 1989, 236), as "inhabitants of a semiotic mecha-
nism for the construction of alternate universes".
With all this in mind, the second part of this volume aims at outlining
an approach to characterisation that mixes cognitive structures and linguis-
tic features: indeed, when readers infer characters from a text, they draw
both from their own experiences with real people and with the linguistic
features assembled in the texts by their authors. Therefore, for an adequate
account of characterisation to take place, both cognitive and textual aspects
need to be considered, something which "literary critical comment and
debate have often failed to do" (Culpeper 2002, 251-2).
As an example, let us go back to the novel quoted at the beginning of
Part 1: Nice Work, by David Lodge. The female protagonist, Robyn, is a
University Professor teaching Victorian literature; as a result of a partner-
ship project between her university and one of the most important indus-
tries in the area, she is required to spend one day a week with the industry
manager Vic Wilcox, who is very successful at his job but knows nothing
about literature and the humanities in general. The dynamic of their rela-
tionship constitute the core of the novel, which alternates moments of high
tension with comical situations that result from the 'inter-character' behav-
iour. ln particular, irony tends to involve the male character, who is often
portrayed while he is wondering about the meaning of words pronounced
by Robyn while they are driving to some locations or while she is visiting
the factory he manages: concepts like 'metaphor', 'metonymy', 'semiot-
ics', are totally obscure to him, while she uses them regularly to talk about
the elements of the foundry they visit, or about the hidden meanings be-
yond the cigarette brand he smokes.
The degree of reader enjoyment during the reading process, howev-
er, depends heavily on their ability to understand that the whole novel is
itself a parody of Victorian literature: the colours in the foundry closely
resemble the colours of London as described by Dickens, the books Robyn
quotes are mainly 191h century novels, their relation echoes the relationship
between characters during the Victorian Age, etc. Only readers with good
knowledge of Victorian literature will therefore be able to fully appreci-
ate Lodge's novel, whereas readers who do not have such knowledge will
still enjoy the story, but at a different level. In other words, readers' own
impression and enjoyment of the characters will result both from the text
itself, and from their own 'background knowledge' about literature: this is
mainly the reason why the same text can be experienced so differently by
different readers.
Characterisation, then, results from the interaction of at least two cru-
cial phenomena: readers' prior knowledge ('background knowledge'), and
inputs coming from the text - which include a vast array of strategies like
narrative technique, point of view, mind style, figurative language, per-
sonal deixis, (im)politeness patterns, power (a)symmetries, to name but a
few. Both these phenomena need to be investigated in order to outline the
'psychology' of the character, something that has also been referred to as
'mental functioning' (Palmer 2004, 170).
In the following pages a model of characterisation will be outlined
drawing both on 'top-down' and on 'bottom-up' processes (Culpeper 2001,
27), namely on simultaneous operations that together contribute to the
characters' impression in readers' minds.
2.2 'TOP-DOWN' PROCESSES
2.2.1 Prototype theory and Schema theory
The issue of how people remember past information and experiences, and
of how such previous knowledge is used to interpret newly acquired infor-
mation has long been investigated by cognitive psychologists. Very gen-
erally, two types of 'memory stores' have been singled out by researchers:
'long-term memory' and 'short-term memory'. The first one is likely to be
more permanent, therefore more 'passive', whereas the latter is defined
as a 'working memory', therefore more active and prone to changes. Our
experience with texts activates mainly the first type of memory, which is
better understood in the light of two areas of study: prototype theory and
schema theory.
The most important notion for prototypetheory is 'category', which
"consists of a typical or ideal exemplar called a prototype and a range of
peripheral or less good examples" (Culpeper 2001, 61 ). Prototypes are only
formed through experience, and the degree to which a newly experienced
item becomes a member of a particular category depends on the similarity
between its features and those of the category's prototype. Categories are
organised hierarchically, according to the parameter of inclusiveness: a car,
for example, can be included within the category 'means of transport', thus
being subordinate to it. Such hierarchies have three levels: a superordinate
level (such as 'means of transport'), a basic level (car, bike, bus, etc.),
and a subordinate level (the 'kind' of car). The optimal level for cognitive
activity is generally considered the basic one, since at this level categories
are more differentiated from one another.
As far as schema theory is concerned, interest for this area of cogni-
tion took off around the mid 1970s, and stylisticians used it at least from
the 1990s. Schemata are "mental representations of typical instances"
(Cook 1994, 11): they involve generic knowledge and, in the words of
Eysenck and Keane, "may be used to represent events, precepts, situations,
relations, and even objects" (Eysenck and Keane 1990, 275). A typical
:>O
example is the schema all of us have for restaurants, which includes slots
about roles (waiters and customers), slots about props (tables, the menu),
and slots about actions ( entering, ordering, eating, paying the bill). Sche-
mata are generally assumed to be induced from experience, thus they are
associated with episodic memory: people's airports schemata, for example,
are acquired through the similarity between all the actions that need to be
carried out in all the different airports of the world. Once they have been
experienced as episodes, these experiences become part of a more general
schema, later recalled in similar situations. Crucially, schematic knowl-
edge also shapes the way in which we view and make inferences about
newly elaborated information: therefore, the notion of schemata is useful
for understanding how what we see is, at least in part, determined by what
we expect to see.
As far as the relation between schemata and the comprehension of
texts is concerned, the following example by Cook (1994) helps make
things clear: "imagine", he proposes, "a witness in a trial who has been
asked to tell the court about his movements during a specific morning".
Such a witness could produce the following statement, thus satisfying the
needs of the court:
1 woke up at seven forty. 1 made some toast and a cup of tea. 1
listened to the news. And I left for work at about eight thirty (Cook
1994, 12).
However, this alternative report might also be produced in the same
situation:
1 woke up at seven forty. 1 was in bed. 1 was wearing pyjamas. After
lying still for a few minutes, I threw back the duvet, got out of bed,
walked to the door of the bedroom, opened the door, switched on the
landing light, walked across the landing, opened the bathroom door,
went into the bathroom, put the basin plug into the plughole, turned
on the hot tap, ran some hot water into the washbasin, looked in the
mirror . . (Cook 1994, 1 2).
Despite being true, the content of the second extract contains far too
much information. If the court wants to know 'the whole truth', however,
why should details be omitted? Schema theory explains it by postulating
that the 'default elements' of the schema activated in this particular cir-
cumstance can be taken for granted: when the sender of a message judges
that his interlocutor's schema corresponds largely with his/her own, the
only details worth mentioning are those not contained in the schema, all
the other ones being present by default.
Schemata, in other words, provide the possibility to construct an inter-
pretation containing more information than the one actually present in the
text: empirical evidence has indeed shown that it is difficult to distinguish
what is supplied by our schematic knowledge from what is supplied by
the text. Differences in comprehension - or in retrieving information - are
therefore also to be ascribed to differences in readers' schemata: although
people belonging to a similar culture are likely to share similar schemata,
different personal experiences may result in the creation of different sche-
mata, a reason why communicative misunderstandings could also be inter-
preted as 'lack of relevant schemata' for a particular situation. At present,
to the author's knowledge, no research has ever considered the perception
of characters by readers who, by belonging to totally different cultures,
may have developed totally different schemata for similar situations. For
example, starting from the same text, it could be very stimulating to in-
vestigate whether the elaboration of a particular character in a novel is
different for a reader coming from a Western country compared to that of a
reader coming from an Eastern country.
Schemata are also very useful for approaching the mental functioning
of fictional characters. As an example, Jet us consider the central charac-
ter of Ian McEwan 's novel Atonement (2001 ), a young girl called Brion y
Tallis 7. In the third chapter of the novel, she is described while observing
a scene from the nursery window of her rich parents' country villa (2002:
37-40). The protagonists of the scene are her sister Cecilia and the cleaning
lady's son, Robbie Turner. A very precious old family vase has just been
broken by them in an attempt to fill it with water at the house's Triton
fountain, and Cecilia decides to enter the freezing water to rescue at least
some of its broken fragments. The scene, which will prove crucial for the
development of the plot, had already been narrated a few pages before
(2002, 27-31 ), but on that occasion the reader could not realize that Briony
was observing it. The extract below is taken from the first of the two de-
scriptions, and is divided into two parts. The first part reports the dialogue
between Cecilia and Robbie before the vase was broken, while the second
is concerned with the characters' reactions in the moments following the
accident:
(1) 'Let me take that, 'he said, stretching out a hand. (2) 'I'll fill it for
you, and you take the flowers. '
(3) 'I can manage, thanks.' (4) She was already holding the vase over
the basin.
(5) But he said, 'Look, I've got it.' (6) And he had, tightly between
forefinger and thumb. (7) 'Your cigarette will get wet. (8) Take the
flowers.'
(9) This was a command on which he tried to confer urgent
masculine authority.
7
For a detailed analysis of the novel, see Trevisan (2010).
'fU
[.. .}
(10) 'You idiot! (11) Look what you've done. '
(12) He looked into the water, then he looked back at her; and simply
shook his head as he raised a hand to cover his mouth. (13) By this
gesture he assumed full responsibility, but at that moment, she hated
him for the inadequacy of the response. (14) He glanced towards the
basin and sighed. (15) For a moment he thought she was about to
step backwards onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed,
though he said nothing. (16) Instead he began to unbutton his shirt.
(17) Immediately she knew what he was about. (18) Intolerable.
(19) He had come to the house and removed his shoes and socks
- well, she would show him then. (20) She kicked off her sandals,
unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her skirt and
stepped out of it and went to the basin wall. (21) He stood with
hands on his hips and stared as she climbed into the water in her
underwear. (22) Denying his help, any possibility of making amends,
was his punishment. (23) The unexpectedly freezing water that
caused her to gasp was his punishment. (24) [. . .} He did not exist,
he was banished, and this was also the punishment. (McEwan 2002,
29-30)
The stylistic features of the extract will be analysed in detail in section
2.3.4.1, as they belong to the 'bottom-up' processes we have referred to
above. For the time being, let us focus on the way Briony makes sense of
the same scene, reported in the extract below:
She [Briony] had arrived at one of the nurserys wide-open windows
and must have seen what lay before her some seconds before she
registered it. (2) It was a scene that could easily have accommodated,
in the distance at least, a medieval castle. (3) [. . .} Closer; within the
boundaries of the balustrade, were the rose gardens and, nearer still,
the Triton fountain and standing by the basins retaining wall was
her sister, and right before her was Robbie Turner. (4) There was
something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head
held back. (5) A proposal of marriage. (6) Briony would not have
been surprised. (7) She herself had written a tale in which a humble
woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying
her. (8) What was presented here fitted well. (9) Robbie Turner, only
son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father; Robbie who
had been subsidised by Briony s father through school and university,
had wanted to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up
medicine, had the boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia s hand.
(JO) It made perfect sense.[. . .] (11) What was less comprehensible,
however; was how Robbie imperiously raised his hand now, as
though issuing a command which Cecilia dared not disobey. (12) It
was extraordinary that she could not resist him. (13) At his insistence
she was removing her clothes, and at such speed. (14) She was out
of her blouse, now she had let her skirt drop to the ground and was
stepping out of it, while he looked on impatiently, hands on hips.
(15) What strange power did he have over ha (16) Blackmail? (17)
Threats? (18) [. . .] The sequence was illogical- the drowning scene,
followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal.
(McEwan 2002: 38)
A significant number of textual cues indicates that the same events are
now experienced from a totally different 'deictic centre' (McIntyre 2007,
124)8: to start with, the use of the modal auxiliary "must" (1 ), makes it clear
that the events are presented in the order that Briony herself experiences
them, a phenomenon Short calls "psychological sequencing" (1996, 275).
Such a shift in focalization is even more evident if we consider the use of
the prepositional phrase "in the distance at least" (2) and the comparative
forms "closer" (3) and "nearer still" (3), which are to be interpreted in rela-
tion to Briony's position: in actual fact they refer to those parts of the park
Briony can see from the nursery window. In addition, although the extract
is narrated in the third person, the language used is likely to be perceived
as Briony's: "humble" (9), "boldness of ambition" (9), "imperiously" (11 ),
"extraordinary" (12), and "strange" (15), are all to be ascribed to her, even
though they are reported by the external narrator.
Briony's viewpoint becomes more explicit in the sentence "There was
something rather formal about the way he stood [ ... ]" ( 4), which coincides
with the moment readers start to penetrate her mind. Such a moment is fur-
ther signalled by the abrupt shift in narrative technique: unlike sentences
1 and 2, which are clearly a narrative report, sentence 4 is an example of
free indirect thought, and such a shift is even more evident in the following
sentence ("A proposal of marriage"), which has the typical (un)grammat-
ical construction of colloquial speech (and is therefore more likely to be
attributed to Briony than to the author/narrator). Moreover, sentence 5 fea-
tures a crucial parallelism with Cecilia's utterance "intolerable" in the first
extract analyzed (18): in both cases the content of the free direct thought is
foregrounded by means of a structural strategy which, by rankshifting the
phrase to the level of a sentence, better records the moment of highly emo-
tional tension9. Sentence 5 hence marks the moment when Briony starts to
8
"The location of a speaker in time and space is referred to as their deictic
centre. [ ... ] All fictional narration is made up of a number of deictic fields,
defined by Stockwell (2002, 4 7) as a set of deictic expressions all relating to
the same deictic centre" (McIntyre 2007, 123-124).
9
See 2.3. I for an introduction to narrative techniques and, in general, Short
and Semino (2004, 42-65)
'+£
elaborate the scene as a marriage proposal. Quite significantly, the external
description of the physical environment characterizing the first three sen-
tences in narrative report (NR) is here replaced by a series of sentences in
free direct thought (FDT) which coincide with a mental interpretation of
the events, such an interpretation being necessarily the result of Briony's
intentionality and volition.
Although the two extracts record the same event, the second is there-
fore a personal, 'private' re-elaboration of the first one and can thus be
referred to as a 'subworld' of the character: in particular, since Briony's
interpretation is a blend of 'real' and 'fantastic' elements, her 'subworld' is
a 'mistaken knowledge world' (Ryan 1991, 124) of a very particular type.
The extract in fact presents both the 'content' of Briony's 'subworld' and
its 'online creation', i.e. the character's mental processing responsible for
it: stated differently, readers are allowed to both observe the scene from a
more 'objective' perspective, provided by the narrator, and to observe the
same events while the character is elaborating them.
Schema theory can be usefully applied to investigate Briony's mental
functioning: indeed, in order to make sense of the scene she is observing,
Briony searches her memory for similar situations, what cognitive psy-
chologists call TOP (Thematic Organization Point, Schank 1982, 113)1°:
once the situation has been identified, a series of mental schemata related
to that situation are activated. Since Briony's knowledge of the world de-
rives mainly from the books she has read, the situations resembling most
closely those stored in her memory are the ones narrated in fictional sto-
ries, and in tales unfolding in medieval castles in particular. The expres-
sions "fitted well" (8) and "made perfect sense" (10) explicitly refer to the
activation of a particular TALE mental schema which makes her process
Robbie, the only son of her family's "humble cleaning lady" (9), in the
same way es the "humble woodcutter" (7) prototypically asking for the
hand of a princess who is the protagonist of one of the stories she has writ-
ten as a young child. The occurrence of the nominal phrase "a proposal of
marriage" in sentence 5 is therefore part of a free direct representation of
Briony's thoughts, which sheds light on her particular world view: a par-
ticular context - the rose gardens of her house, the Triton fountain - is con-
sistent with the typical settings of the Medieval tales she adores, and thus
it triggers the activation of a schema which turns Cecilia and Robbie into
'prototypical characters who behave as the canon of such tales would im-
pose. The adjective "formal" (4) is particularly significant in this respect,
since it seems to pave the way for Briony's interpretation of the scene as
10 "TOPs are convenient collections of memories involving goals and plans,
written in terms of a sufficiently abstract vocabulary to be useful across do-
mains. For any reminding experience that crosses contexts, we can expect the
two experiences to share a goal type, some planning or other conditions, and
one or more low level identical features" (Schank 1982, 113).
a "proposal of marriage" (5): marriage proposals are indeed prototypical
actions in fairy tales and gothic novels, and thus play a crucial role in her
mental schemata.
As the text unfolds, however, it seems clear that the TALE schema
is not the only one she applies in order to make sense of the events she is
witnessing: the expression "What was less comprehensible" (11) signals
the activation of a second schema which makes her process the story world
in a completely different manner. This happens because she has noted a
behavioural act - ("Robbie imperiously raised his hand now", sentence
11) which comes into conflict with the schematic behaviour of a "humble
woodcutter" of her own gothic-romantic tale, as a result of which Rob-
bie is suddenly perceived as a powerful, domineering character whose
will Cecilia "dared not disobey" (11 ). In this (second) part of the text her
'worldview' is thus significantly influenced by a mental schema contra-
dicting the first schema she applies, a fact which makes her experience
the story world in highly dramatic as opposed to romantic terms. Again,
this is consistent with the assumption that Briony tends to apply 'fictional
world' schemata in order to make sense of the situations she experiences.
Indeed, as the co-text makes clear (2002, 6- 7; 39-40), she has spent most of
her childhood reading dramatic stories and romantic tales. However, Bri-
ony seems to realize the contradiction embedded in the activation of two
conflicting schemata, as the sentences "What was less comprehensible"
(11) and "The sequence was illogical - the drowning scene, followed by a
rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal" (18) make clear. Yet,
she persuades herself that the 'dramatic fiction' schema is the truly valid
one in order to mentally process Robbie and Cecilia's actions: Robbie's
raised hand, which is attributed no precise purpose in the first extract, is
hence processed by Briony's mind as issuing a command Cecilia cannot
dare disobey; Cecilia's speed in removing her own clothes is interpreted as
a consequence of Robbie's insistence, and Robbie's embarrassed staring at
her in the first text is here turned into a sign of his impatient desire to see
her without her clothes. From this point on, this second schema is the only
one she uses in order to make sense of the narrated world, and all the events
she witnesses afterwards are therefore interpreted - and reinforced - in
this light11• Such a "schema reinforcement strategy" also sheds significant
light on her in terms of "traits" - attributes like 'fixity' and 'rigidity' may
11
Starting from Edelman 's assumption (] 992) that people's minds must build
new schemata [mental representations of typical instances] and adjust ex-
isting ones to adapt to new experiences, Cook explains that discourse [and,
more generally, world situations] may be divided into three major types:
"schema reinforcing", "schema preserving" and "schema refreshing" (Cook
1994, 10). In particular, a schema refreshing situation will deviate from sche-
matic expectations, whereas a schema reinforcing one will tend to maintain
and reinforce already existing schemata.
'+'+
be ascribed to her personality - and is closely connected to the dramatic
evolution of the plot12•
Briony's massive exposure to the worlds of fiction, in conclusion, has
a great impact on her background knowledge of the real world, and in
tum influences the way in which she makes sense of it: her mind appears
to have a tendency to conceive of most aspects of experience either in
dramatic or in romantic terms, a fact which is responsible for most of the
misunderstandings that occur in the novel. ln addition, although she openly
declares that she loves romantic stories, she tends to apply 'dramatic fic-
tion' schemata that tum Robbie into a prototypical aggressor and Cecilia
into a victim. Overall, this results in the impression of a creative but also
simple mind, which shows little ability to evaluate the consequences of its
own operations, and is consistent with the young age of the protagonist.
2.2.2 Social cognition
Schemata and prototype theory are not the only 'cognitive' approaches that
can be used for the study of character. Researchers working on the area of
social cognition, for example, have generally focused both on the psycho-
logical mechanisms by which people mentally represent themselves and
other people, and on the social nature of perceivers, namely on the way in
which the social world emerges in the course of social interactions.
Generally speaking, social categories include three main groupings,
which are defined by the kind of information that constitutes them: the first
one comprises personal categories, which encompasses knowledge about
people's preferences, interests, goals, and so on. These are quite idiosyn-
cratic features, and are related more to an individual's characteristics than
to a particular social group. The grouping comprises social role categories,
which are cencerned with people's social functions: kinship roles, occupa-
tional roles, relational roles, etc. Finally, the third one includes group mem-
bership categories, which is related to knowledge about social groups: sex,
race, class, nationality, religion, etc.
A particularly relevant notion in social cognition studies regards the
role of social schemata, i.e. cognitive structures containing links between
the social categories referred to above: when a category is activated, a series
of other categories is automatically activated at the same time, thus creating
something similar to a network. Once an individual has been 'categorised'
in a certain manner, for instance, the schema activated also provides a large
amount of additional information, as Bern (1983, 604) exemplifies:
Gender-schematic processing in particular thus involves
spontaneouslysorting attributes and behaviours into masculine
12 Briony's misunderstanding of the scene will prove catastrophic for the lives
of both her sister Cecilia and her lover Robbie.
and feminine categories or 'equivalence classes', regardless of
their differences on a variety of dimensions unrelated to gender; for
example, spontaneouslyplacing items like 'tender' and 'nightingale'
into a feminine category and items like 'assertive' and 'eagle' into a
masculine category.
The activation of social schemata is closely connected with evaluative
beliefs and worldview: people belonging to different groups are likely to
develop different schema types for assessing the same social group. Such
attitudes may influence the way the schema is employed in the interpreta-
tion and production of social discourse, which in tum influences the devel-
opment of the schema.
Our perception of others is not based on generalised social schemata
only: both semantic and episodic memory also need to be accounted for.
Semantic memory contains abstract generalisations about groups of peo-
ple, the central belief of these schemata constituting the stereotype for that
group; episodic memory, on the other hand, contains inferences related to
particular experiences of individuals or groups, which are themselves influ-
enced by ideology or worldview. People, in other words, can be perceived
through two main alternative procedures: category-based impressions - in
which case the person is perceived on the basis of our general catego-
ries related to the group a particular person belongs to - and person-based
impressions, in which case great emphasis is placed on the idiosyncratic
features of the particular person we are interacting with. Category and per-
son-based impressions have very different characteristics, categorisation
implying simplification and lack ofrichness, and person-based impressions
implying complexity and personalisation (see also Culpeper 2001, 83).
Together with prototype and schemata, social cognition research can
be fruitfully applied to the study of characters: Propp's dramatic roles in-
troduced in Part 1 of this volume, for instance, are concerned with 'univer-
sal roles' underlying all narratives. If a character in a novel or in a tale is
the author of several good deeds, he will likely be processed as a 'hero' by
readers, therefore a whole 'schema network' will be activated in readers'
minds containing features like 'male', 'not old', 'handsome', 'brave', etc.
Recognising the specific genre of a story, in other words, activates a whole
set of' dramatic expectations' which will later guide readers' perception of
characters. In Culpeper's words:
[. . .} the attributes and features of a flat character are organised
according to a preformedcategory or schema to form a category-
based impression; the attributes and featuresof a round character
combine to form a person-based impression. The staticism/change
dimension can be explained: a categorised character implies no
change, while the piecemeal integration of a personalised character
implies change. And the 'surprise' dimension alsofollows: the
confirmatory categorisation of a character means being satisfied
'+0
that a current schema adequately accounts for the information you
have about that character. whereas piecemeal integration means that
a character will not fit an existing schema and is thus 'surprising'
(Culpeper 2001, 94).
On the other hand, if readers identify another type of genre, for ex-
ample a biography, they might give more weight to their knowledge about
real people, a knowledge that, however, is widely employed by readers in
all types of genres.
Forster's binomial recalled by Culpeper can also be explained in the
light of Cook's schema refreshing/schema reinforcing dichotomy: as he
points out ( 1994, 10), readers' schemata can be either disrupted (refreshed)
or reinforced by a literary text. In the first case, a clash takes place between
the information contained in the text and the schemata present in the read-
ers' mind, such a process probably resulting in a change of schemata; in the
second case the text somehow confirms readers' schemata, thus reinforcing
them. As far as characterisation is concerned, fl.at characters may be de-
scribed as a typical schema reinforcing model, due to their stability of traits
throughout the novel, whereas round characters fall under a typical schema
refreshing model, since they tend to change and are likely to surprise and
disrupt readers' expectations.
The schema potential of stories and situations is regularly exploited
by writers or film-makers in order to dramatically surprise their readers/
viewers: in the movie Mystic River, for example, a young woman is found
dead in a field after a night out with some of her female friends. The last
person who saw her in a pub that night, an old friend of her dad's, is sur-
prised by his wife when he comes home very late at night covered with
blood. When questioned about the blood, he tells his wife that he was
assaulted in a parking Jot on his way home. This same character, called
Dave, was kidnapped and raped as a child, a reason why he now tends to
be solitary and emotionally unstable. His wife pretends to believe him,
but it is clear to all viewers that she suspects him of having murdered the
young girl. Cognitively speaking, both his wife and all viewers are likely
to activate social schemata that combine person-based and category based
impressions: as regards the former, he clearly gives the impression of an
emotionally troubled character, who finds it hard to interact with others;
as regards the latter, he is likely to be categorised in the same manner as
most people who have endured violence and sexual abuse as children, i.e.
more fragile, weak, perhaps unpredictable in their behaviour. These sche-
mata, combined with the information coming from the text (the movie)
are at the base of the sensational mistake characterising the movie: when
his wife tells the girl's father that, according to her, Dave is the killer of
his daughter, he kidnaps Dave and kills him in revenge. However, very
soon some police officers arrest the real murderer, a deaf-mute teenager
who was jealous of his older brother's relationship with the girl. Despite
the deaf-mute character having already appeared many times, no one - in-
cluding the audience - has activated any type of 'killer' schema in relation
to him, since people with this type of disability are generally perceived
as more quiet, shy, non-threatening. The audience's decoding activity, in
other words, was manipulated thanks to the combination of information
coming from the movie itself (the fact that Dave came home covered with
blood) and of schemata types activated both in the viewers and in the
characters of the movie.
This phenomenon can be referred to as dramatic recategorisation
(Culpeper 2001, 96), a recurrent strategy whereby writers create a situa-
tion in which a character is formed according to a particular schema, but
then force the reader to abandon that schema entirely and activate a new
one. Several renowned characters are formed exploiting the activation of
conflicting schemata, consider Bianca, Katherina's sister in Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew: in the first half of the play, Shakespeare makes
the reader think that she is the truly good daughter. In the latter half of the
play, however, a dramatic change in schema leads readers to fully re-cate-
gorise her, turning her into a truly bad character.
Social cognition theories, in conclusion, provide crucial insights for ap-
proaching significant aspects of characterisation, largely ignored in the
past. Before focusing on the bottom-up processes, the next section will
shortly introduce a further dimension of the top-down ones: how our mind
infers i.e. recognises :fictional entities before categorising them.
2.2.3 'Inferring' characters
Before attributing traits to characters, readers are required to recognise
them, therefore it is crucial to focus on how and when this process takes
place. ln other words, it is important to single out which top-down pro-
cesses make it possible for readers to decide that a particular behaviour
- linguistic or non-linguistic - contributes to the formation of a character
impression. Broadly speaking, two theories have been used to address this
question: corresponding inference theory and covariation theory.
Correspondent inference theory and covariation theory are both
sub-systems of attribution theory, an area of research devoted to under-
standing how real life situations trigger the creation of particular person-
ality traits for people in social contexts. In particular, the former generally
tries to single out those traits through a correspondence inference, i.e. a
process depending on different factors, primarily context13. The latter, on
13
The other factors are causal ambiguity, according to which the fewer reasons
there are for doing something, the more likely we are to be sure of why a
person did it - and thus of making a correspondent inference -, and social
desirability, according to which behaviours that are unusual tend to be more
informative about a person. See also Culpeper (2001, 116)
.. 0
the other hand, tries to neatly distinguish those personality traits that are
caused by context from those that are more specifically rooted in the per-
son's singularity, notwithstanding the context. Following Culpeper (2001,
127), three possible types of attributions may be identified: a person attri-
bution, a stimulus attribution, and a circumstance attribution. If a person
sees me laughing, for instance,
[. . .] you may decide that it is because I am characteristically a jovial
person (a person attribution), or because the.film I am watching is
very funny (a stimulus attribution), or because I have just consumed
a bottle of wine (a circumstance attribution) (Culpeper 2001, 128).
Hence, covariation of cause and effect can help decide how an at-
tribution should be made. In particular, the integration of correspondent
inferencetheory and covariation theory gives the possibility of associating
a particular behaviour to a particular person's trait or disposition, provided
that the behaviour is:
1. Free from external pressure;
2. Low in ambiguity;
3. Unusual - departing from the perceiver's expectations;
In other words, under these conditions observers should be able to
make some reasonable inferences regarding someone's traits, starting from
their behaviour. This, of course, works differently for characters, compared
to real people, since in the case ofreal people inferences may also take into
account additional factors, like past events involving the person, or contex-
tual clues. Characters, on the other hand, do not have a past life or any type
of life outside the texts in which they are embedded; therefore, things tend
to become ri-iore complicated.
In order to overcome this impasse, Culpeper argues that attribution
theory should be combined with foregrounding theory, an analytical frame-
work rooted in Russian Formalism and in the Prague School of the first
decades of the twentieth century, and later developed in Europe in the 1960s
and 1970s. Very generally speaking, the theory explains how some textual
elements achieve particular salience (i.e., they are foregrounded) through
deviation from the norm, whereas others tend to stay backgrounded, i.e.
not noted by readers. Deviation can take place at different levels; therefore,
particular patterns can be foregrounded from the phonological, syntactic, or
semantic point of view. In the sentence "Green is fantastic", for example,
two grammatical rules are broken, thus creating deviancy and foreground-
ing: first of all, an adjective (green) cannot fill the subject slot in a clause;
secondly, an adjective cannot function as an attribute of another adjective
realising the function subject (fantastic). Both 'green and 'fantastic' are
therefore deviant from the norm, thus foregrounding the sentence content.
As Douthwaite points out (2000, 177), the theory can be also read
through the lenses of cognitive psychology: "habituation in perception",
he explains, "is indeed a normal phenomenon in human life, one that rou-
tinizes life and dulls the senses". Therefore, one way of combating habit-
uation is that of "experiencing an entity in an innovative way, so that our
automatic modes of processing are impeded, slowed down" (2000, 177):
defamilarisation thus takes place, which obliges us to examine a particu-
lar entity from a new perspective. All this can help form a new interpre-
tation of reality; additionally, there seems to be empirical evidence that
foregrounded elements are not only psychologically more striking but may
also be regarded by readers as more important in relation to the overall
interpretation of the text (van Peer 1989, 1986).
By focusing on unexpected irregularities and on unexpected regular-
ities, the theory takes into account behaviours that deviate from a norm,
and is therefore, in some sense, analogous to attribution theory. While the
latter is only concerned with non-linguistic evidence, the former is strict-
ly linguistic-oriented; therefore, far from being different, the two theories
may be interpreted as two sides of the same coin: readers construe their
own idea of characters both through their non-linguistic behaviour and
through their language. Linguistic strategies for foregrounding will be
discussed at various points in the book, and do not constitute a section
on their own. In the next paragraphs, a range of bottom-up processes will
be discussed.
2.3. BOTTOM-UP PROCESSES
As anticipated above, readers' or viewers' impressions of characters result
both from top-down and from bottom-up processes: although presented
separately, it must be kept in mind that mental operations (top-down pro-
cesses) and textual configurations (bottom-up processes) work simultane-
ously during the act of reading ( or watching), and are equally responsible
for the creation of characters' images in readers' minds.
In the rest of Part 2, a wide range of linguistic cues contributing to
characterisation will be addressed and carefully explained: as other re-
searchers have done (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 59- 70; Pfister 1988, 183-95;
Culpeper 2001, 163-234; Culpeper and Fernandez-Quantanilla 2017, 93-
128), a checklist of textual cues will be provided, inevitably overlapping,
at least in part, with those formulated by some other scholars. To start with,
three main cues will be discussed: narratorial control, self or other's orien-
tation, explicit versus implicit".
14
For a detailed discussion of these cues, see also Culpeper and Fernan-
dez-Quantanilla (20 I 7).
2.3.1 Narratorial control Apart from N, which involves no speech or thought presentation but
just pure narration, all the other options encompass the reporting of char-
Taking for granted that all aspects of character behaviour and talk, includ- acters' words or thoughts, with different degrees of control over them.
ing direct speech, are ultimately under narratorial control, there are some In particular, narrative presence is quite strong in NRSA/NRTA and in
discourse presentation methods that seem freer than others, thus contribut- IS/IT, where narrators tend to be perceived as in total control of what
ing to the impression of characters being more in control of their choices they are reporting. As we move towards the right hand side of the scale,
and decisions. The presentation of characters' speech and thought has been however, control seems to gradually decline, and readers tend to perceive
investigated at least for 40 years, with Leech and Short's model (1981) they are closer to the character's own words or thoughts. In DS/DT and
being one of the most referenced even nowadays 15: in FDS/FDT, in particular, it is canonically assumed that the direct string
Speech Presentation reports exactly the words and thoughts used by the character, without
DS FDS any filter.
N NRSA IS FIS
Different options produce different effects, mainly related to the au-
Thought presentation tonomy of characters and how close readers feel towards them. As an
N NRTA IT FIT DT FDT example, let us consider the opening of Virgina Woolf's Mrs Dal/away,
The model, as the examples below make clear, presents on the left where different presentation options are used in sequence:
a situation in which narrators are in total control of characters' speech or Mrs. Dal/away said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had
thought, and, on the right, an increasing lack of control in favour of char- her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges;
acters' freedom: Rumpelmayer '.s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa
Examples from the two categories Dal loway, what a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a
beach.
N (Narration): She looked at him.
NRSA (Narrative report of speech acts): She promised she would return. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her;
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now,
NRTA (Narrative report of thought acts): She wondered about her she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton
brother's feelings. into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course,
IS (Indirect speech): She said she would return the following week to the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss
see them. of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she
then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open
IT (Indirect thought): She wondered if her brother was still in love window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at
with his wife. the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the
FIS (Free indirect speech): She would return there to see them the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said,
following week. "Musing among the vegetables?"- was that it? - "I prefer men
to cauliflowers"- was that it? He must have said it at breakfast
FIT (Free indirect thought): Did her brother still love his wife? one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter
DS (Direct speech): She said: "I will come back to see you next week". Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or
July, she forgot which, for his letters were aw(ullv dull: it was his
DT (Direct thought): She wondered: "Does my brother still love his
sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife. his smile, his
wife?" grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished -
FDS (Free direct speech): "I will come back to see you next week". how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. [my
emphasis}
FDT (Free direct thought): "Does he still love his wife?"
The first sentence is IS, with the narrator indirectly reporting the con-
15 This is not the most recent model for speech and thought presentation. How- tent of Clarissa Dalloway's utterance. However, things are different in
ever, it is very clear and easy to use. For a more detailed model, see Semino the second sentence, where the focus is moved into the character's mind:
and Short (2004). by means of FIT, we have the possibility of feeling closer to Clarissa's
::>L
thoughts and mind, without any narratorial intervention (for example, the
author might have decided to use a narratorial tag such as 'she reflected',
'she thought', etc., but she did not). The fact that the maid is called by
name or that a colloquial expression like "cut out" has been used, prompts
readers to feel as if they were actually listening to the character's thoughts,
without any narratorial mediation.
The sentence starting with "And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway"
moves back towards a higher narratorial control, even though the phrase
"what a morning, fresh as if issued to children on a beach" sounds more
character-oriented than narratorial-oriented. The following paragraph,
starting with "What a lark! What a plunge!" is FDT, where readers can
actually hear the thoughts of the character as if they had been plugged
to her brain. Interestingly, the Westminster morning triggers memories of
events happened several decades before, when she was still a young wom-
an spending time at Bourton, her parents' country house. Therefore, "fresh
as if issued to children on a beach" refers both to her present feelings in
London, and to the feelings she had experienced at Bourton, while opening
the big French windows. The actual and the metaphorical, time present and
times past interweave in her mind, each memory triggering another one.
The fact that we have access to her mind by means of FDT is even clearer
if we consider the sentences "Musing among the vegetables?"- Was that
it? -"I prefer men to cauliflowers"- Was that it? He must have said it at
breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter
Walsh", in which it is clear that Clarissa cannot trust her memories from
some decades before.
'Narratorial control' is a powerful tool that authors use to create their
characters' image in the mind of the readers. As noted above, different
choices could be carried out, with totally different effects. To conclude this
section, let us observe how a portion of the same extract would sound, had
a different technique been used (see also Lodge 1992, 45):
*What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to mg,
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, l
burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the
open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air
was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a
wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as l then was)
solemn, feeling as l did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen [. . .].
Had this option been chosen, the character would of course be the
same, Clarissa Dalloway. However, she would probably sound totally dif-
ferent in readers' minds, especially as regards how close they would feel to
her. Would she therefore be the same character?
2.3.2 Self and other presentation
Generally speaking, character presentation may occur in at least three dif-
ferent manners: self-presentation, self-presentation in the presence of other
characters, other-presentation. In the first case, a character provides explic-
it information about him/herself when he/she is alone; in the second case,
he/she provides explicit information about him/herself in the presence of
other characters; in the third case, a character provides explicit information
about someone else, a process also called 'altero-characterisation' by Eder
et al. (2010, 32). Crucially, altero-characterisation also provides important
clues about the character, since the statements regarding others implicitly
reveal the character's own values and worldviews (Eder et al. 2010, 33).
A crucial issue here is reliability, since characters may lie for strate-
gic reasons, both when they are talking about themselves and when they
are talking about others. As happens with real people, they might distort
information about themselves ( or about others) in order to reach particular
aims: self-presentation is inevitably oriented towards others, therefore it is
rarely undistorted; therefore, readers should be able to "discount aspects
of self-presentation that are likely to be motivated by strategic reasons"
(Culpeper 2001, 168), but doing so is not always easy.
As regards self-presentation in the absence of other characters, for ex-
ample when characters speak to themselves in a monologue, it mostly tends
to happen at crucial turning points of the plot: for this reason, it is generally
experienced as true by readers, since there does not seem to be any good
reason for a character to lie when he/she is speaking to him/herself. Of
course, monologues are not only used for self-presentation purposes, but
authors may often use them as indicators of characters' inner life: in this
case, clashes may take place between the public and the private image of
the characters, a very recurrent experience with Shakespearian characters.
Other-presentation, finally, takes place when a character is introduced
by another character: the kinds of inferences readers can gain from this
choice are not dissimilar from the other ones. In particular, the informa-
tion provided by other characters is not necessarily less important or reli-
able than the information provided by the particular character in question.
As in the case of self-presentation, however, readers should be aware that
information coming from other characters may be distorted for strategic
reasons, thus complicating inference activities: for this reason, "before we
can assess the value of the characterising statement for the target character,
we must first discount aspects motivated by the characteriser or the situ-
ation" (Culpeper 2001, 171 ). An important factor influencing whether a
particular cue is discounted is the credibility of the character carrying out
the presentation, since statements coming from unreliable characters are
likely to be false. Generally speaking, it is therefore important to analyse
how different characters speak of a certain character before turning the
information into a trait.
2.3.3 Implicit and explicit information about characters
In addition to self- or other-presentation, information about characters can
be cued in a range of other ways, including statements from the narrator or
character's language behaviour.
Very generally, two broad categories can be singled out for identifying
useful information about characters: explicit or implicit cues. Starting from
the first ones, they coincide straightforwardly with the authorial 's naming
of traits, especially in descriptions or introductions. A character may be
explicitly described as honest, or rich, or a liar by the author, and there
is generally no reason why readers should not attribute those traits to the
character being described; the adverb 'generally' is here used because there
are, indeed, examples ofunreliable narrators who deliberately say things in
order to deceive their readers, as happens in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie, or in William Thackeray's VanityFair.
Things are very different if we focus on implicit characterisation cues,
since that information always has to be derived by inference, and contex-
tual factors also need to be taken into account. Both verbal and non-verbal
behaviour all contribute to the formation of inferences, with verbal ones
having more weight. All verbal activity is very informative, and, as point-
ed out above, interacts with schemata that readers have developed for real
people: a character described with a very high pitch of voice, for instance,
may be perceived as agitated, or bossy; a character whose speech is very
fast may be perceived as lacking self-confidence, or in an unusual emotion-
al state, and so on. Culpeper (2001) is probably the most comprehensive
study dealing with implicit cues so far: in his view, those cues comprehend
conversational, lexical, syntactical, paralinguistic, non-verbal and contex-
tual features, accent and dialect. All of them, although not providing di-
rect information about a character, trigger meaningful inferences that may
sometimes prove more important than the direct cues themselves. A short
discussion of each of them will be presented below.
To start with, conversationalfeatures can provide useful insights about
power relations: by analysing how power is balanced between characters,
it may be possible to identify the most and the least powerful ones (see
Sacks et al. 1974; Levinson 1983). One way of doing this is by identifying
the way in which talk is distributed among participants, in particular the
number of conversational moves for each participant, the length of each
tum, the way in which speakers alternate. This last point is particularly
important: do speakers wait for their tum or do they just enter the 'con-
versational floor' whenever they feel? Do they interrupt each other? Who
interrupts whom? Do characters usually stick to a topic or do they tend to
change the topics they are discussing? All these points are related to pow-
er, as actions like interrupting, changing topic, speaking much more than
someone else tend to happen when a character is powerful enough to be
allowed to do so.
Conversations make use of lexis: whether a character is portrayed
while speaking to another character, or is presented during a monologue,
the way words are used is a crucial parameter for the readers' impressions
of him/her. Broadly speaking, very formal lexis tends to be associated with
quite pompous, serious - often boring - characters, whereas a more infor-
mal use of words is generally perceived as the norm and associated with
more friendly or down to earth characters. There is much more to this, of
course: one way of pinning down the relationship between lexis and char-
acter is to look at the predominant etymological origin of the words used
by a character, since different stylistic dimensions correlate with lexical
source. The most common words in English - the words of speech - tend to
have a Germanic origin, whereas words originating from Latin tend to be
rarer and appear largely in written language: moreover, Germanic originat-
ing words are more often used in informal, private contexts, whereas Latin
originating lexis is more formal and therefore used on public occasions.
Concrete things are usually referred to through Germanic terms, whereas
more abstract concepts tend to be explained by Latin lexical items. It goes
without saying that a character using lots of Latin originating words is
likely to be perceived as more educated and more formal than a character
using merely words of Germanic origin, even if all these features work in
combination so it might of course happen that a very uneducated character
uses some Latin based words or that a very educated one is portrayed most-
ly in informal situations where words of Germanic origin are preferred.
Whatever the case, lexical richness plays a key role: Bradac (1982, 107)
and Culpeper (2001, 188) both explain how, by dividing the number of
different words by the total number of words spoken by one character, it
is possible to observe the diversity of lexis relative to the size of the total
sample of speech. Nowadays, this is easily managed by means of compu-
tation corpus techniques. It is commonly accepted that a lower diversity
stands for lower communication competences, lower socio-economic sta-
tus and a higher level of anxiety.
Studies on lexis have also focussed on the concept of surge (see for
example Caffi and Janney 1994, 328), a notion that is closely concerned
with personal affect and is conveyed by a range of linguistic features that
include evaluative lexis, modal verbs, lexical repetitions and pronouns.
According to Taavitsainen (1999, 219-220):
Personal affect is a component of participant relations andfinds
outlets in various forms; thus it gives a picture of the persons
behavioural patterns and mental characteristics. It may exhibit more
permanent qualities of emotion, with a long-term realisation, e.g.
love, fondness, sadness or dislike, or more transient and volatile
states of mind like anger, or dislike erupting into telling someone
off These outbursts of emotion can be called surge features. [. . .}
According to my earlier studies, outbursts of emotion in surge
;;,u
featuresof personal affect include exclamation, swearing, and
pragmatic particles.
A very promising and relatively new field of investigation related to
the notion of surge is Appraisal Theory, which was first developed in Syd-
ney within the broader Systemic Functional Linguistics framework. By fo-
cusing on people's evaluation practices, it considers aspects like 'attitudes'
negotiated by people in texts, together with the strength of the feelings
involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned.
The resources provided by the appraisal framework are used to negotiate
social relationships, therefore they are considered interpersonal resources.
Broadly speaking, Appraisal is concerned with attitudes, that is to say
with how people - or characters - evaluate things and other people from
the linguistic point of view. Such evaluations can be more or less intense
(more or less amplified) and come from different sources. In the following
extract, for instance, different types of attitudes are used:
He was working in a /.QJ2. security structure. It was the beginning of
a beautiful relationship. We even spoke about marriage. A bubblv.
vivacious man who beamed out wild energy. Sharply intelligent.
Even if he was an Englishman, he was popular with all the 'Boer'
Afrikaners. And all my girlfriends envied me. Then one day he said
he was going on a 'trip'. 'We won't see each other again. . maybe
never again'. I was torn to pieces. So was he (Quoted in Martin and
Rose 2007, 26, my emphasis).
The speaking voice begins by appreciating the value of her partner's
work and their forthcoming relationship (a top security structure, a beau-
tiful relationship), then turns to the man's character, which she holds in
very high esteem (a bubbly vivacious man, wild energy, sharply intelligent,
popular), and finally she describes her girlfriends' emotional response to
their relationship and her own feelings on their separation (envied, torn
to pieces). Her evaluations can thus be divided into three basic kinds,
according to what is being appraised: 1) the value of things, 2) people's
character and 3) people's feelings16• Moreover, her evaluations are often
amplified (sharply intelligent, wild energy, tom to pieces), which points
out how attitudes are gradable - their intensity can be increased or de-
creased depending on the author's aim. Finally, it is important to consider
from whom attitudes come: in this case, they all come from the speaking
voice (narrator), but we should keep in mind that a common strategy is to
create another voice in the story by using direct or indirect speech. In "I
end with a few lines that my wastes vulture said to me one night: 'I have to
live with this hell", for instance, a second evaluating voice is introduced,
16
This short overview of the Appraisal model owes much to Martin and Rose's
own explanation (2007, 25- 72).
thus attitudes towards the narrated world have to be attributed to a speak-
ing voice distinct from the main one. Therefore a range of resources exists
for expressing attitudes, amplifying them and attributing them to sources.
Three types of attitudes have been defined: expressing emotion, judging
character and valuing the worth of things. Technically speaking, resources
used to express emotions are referred to as affect, resources used to judge
character are referred to as judgement, resources used to value the value of
things are referred to as appreciation. Clearly, this model can be a useful
tool to characterisation, especially when used in combination with the oth-
er aspects introduced above.
Further significant means of signalling social information are terms of
address, which include vocatives and pronouns and place characters with-
in particular social groups. As Leech explains (1999), the main semantic
categories related to terms of address are ordered from those that signal
a familiar or very intimate relationship to those signalling a more distant
and formal one, including endearments (my darling, love, sweetie, etc.),
family terms (mummy, daddy, grandma, granny, etc.),familiarisers (guys,
mate, folks, etc.),first names (with shortened first names as a subgroup),
titles and surnames and honorifics (sir, madam, etc.). The usage of terms
of address depends on several factors, including the emotive state of the
speakers, the context, the relationship between the characters.
Another implicit cue to account for in characterisation is syntax: even
though research is not very developed in this area, Scherer (1979, 172), has
associated simple syntax with more simple-minded characters, and more
complex syntax with more mentally complex ones. However, it is crucial
to keep in mind that even more developed characters might decide to use
simpler syntax, and Jess developed ones might use more complex syntax,
on some occasions: characterisation is a complex process and the combina-
tion of several factors should always be the aim of the analyst.
Accent and dialect are also important implicit cues: standard ac-
cents and dialects are stereotypically associated with a higher social sta-
tus, whereas regional accents or dialects are expected to be used by less
ambitious and self-confident characters. Two main problems arise here:
which accent really constitutes the standard? What is, again, the role of the
context? In some contexts - local pubs, for instance - using the standard
accent may be considered snobbish, thus even more high-class people may
opt for the local accent in order to feel more 'at home'; on the other hand,
there might be contexts in which characters are expected to use standard
accents but this does not happen. Clearly, in written texts indications about
accents tend to come from the narrator, therefore indications of this nature
may prove particularly significant for characterisation.
As far as paralinguistic features are concerned, Giles and Powesland
(1975, 1-4) have pointed out that they might sometimes be more significant
with respect to social evaluation than the content of speech itself (they are
phonetic features and can be discussed independently of the sequences of
vowels and consonants, of the stress patterns of words, of the stressing of
lexical rather than grammatical words, and of intonation structure). Para-
linguistic cues are to do with particular aspects of personality and charac-
ter, and usually work side by side with non-verbal ones. Culpeper takes the
following paralinguistic cues into consideration (2001, 215-221 ):
• Speech tempo and non-fluency features: experimental work has
suggested that the absence of hesitation pauses and a generally
faster speech rate usually stand/or extroversion, competence
and likeability. Slow speech, on the other hand, seems to suggest
seriousness and ponderousness.
• Pitch range: it is a good indicator of sex, the typical female
range being higher. As far as male speakers are concerned,
higher pitch may suggest extroversion and confidence. If a male
speakers pitch results similar to a females one, then a high pitch
may suggest weakness, nervousness and emotional instability.
• Variation in pitch: generally speaking, a high variability in pitch
is associated with dynamic and extroverted people, whereas a flat
voice with limited pitch movement suggests a more masculine,
sluggish and withdrawn speaker.
Of course, in narrative :fiction this information comes from the narra-
tor, whereas things change significantly in drama. Kinesic features (how
someone positions him/herself in relation to other people is correlated with
the degree of social distance, thus of power), appearance features (people
generally tend to attribute more positive qualities to attractive people and
negative qualities to unattractive ones) and characters company and set-
ting (a person's surrounding can communicate a lot about that person: we
tend to use our, schematic knowledge to 'encapsulate' a particular character
on the basis of the people he/she mixes with and the places he/she usually
likes to go to) are other implicit cues that might contribute to the formation
of a character image in reader's minds.
Finally, another crucial cue (that originates from an author's choice) is
the name. As Lodge (1992, 36- 7) remarks:
Our first names are usually given to us with semantic intent, having
for our parents some pleasant or hopeful association. Surnames
however are generally perceived as arbitrary: we don i expect our
neighbour Mr Sheperd to look after sheep, or mentally associate
him with that occupation. If he is a character in a novel, however,
pastoral and perhaps biblical associations will inevitably come
into play. One of the great mysteries of literary history is what
exactly the supremely respectable Henry James meant by calling
one of his characters Fanny Assingham. ln a novel names are
never neutral. They always signify, if it is only ordinariness. Comic,
satiric or didactic writers can afford to be exuberantly inventive, or
obviously allegorical, in their naming (Thwackum, Pumblechook,
Pilgrim). Realistic novelists favour mundane names with appropriate
connotations (Emma Woodhouse, Adam Bede). The naming of
characters is always an important part of creating them, involving
many considerations, and hesitations, which I can most conveniently
illustrate from my own experience.
A writer can profit from the meaning potential of a particular name
for different purposes, and in each case particular schemata are activated
in readers' minds. Such schemata can later be confirmed (schema reinforc-
ing) or disrupted (schema refreshment) by the text, yet very rarely will the
choice of a particular name sound neutral to readers. It may also happen
that characters choose a particular name for themselves, thus capitalising on
intertextuality: indeed, not rarely the names chosen point back to legendary
figures of the past, a fact which provides significant information about the
beliefs and ambitions of the character himself/herself The most famous
case is probably Don Quixote de la Mancha, who chose his own name in the
same manner as the heroes of the past used to do: by selecting a new name
for themselves, in other words, characters are likely to activate particular
expectations in readers' minds, a fact which, together with all the other cues
discussed above, strongly contributes to the characterisation process.
2.3.4 N arratorial 'filters'
As anticipated above, readers' access to :fictional worlds is always ':filtered'
by narrators. The degree of :filtering depends on different factors, and high-
ly affects character perception (see, for instance, Popova 2016). In this
section two :filtering strategies are introduced and discussed: point of view
and mind style.
2.3.4.1 Point of view
To start with, let us go back to the two extracts from McEwan 's novel
Atonement introduced in 2.2.1:
[1]
(I) 'Let me take that,' he said, stretching out a hand. (2) 'I'll.fill it for
you, and you take the flowers. '
(3) 'I can manage, thanks.' (4) She was already holding the vase over
the basin.
(5) But he said, 'Look, I've got it.' (6) And he had, tightly between
forefinger and thumb. (7) 'Your cigarette will get wet. (8) Take the
flowers.'
ov
(9) This was a command on which he tried to confer urgent
masculine authority. [ ... ]
(10) 'You idiot! (11) Look what you've done. '
(12) He looked into the water; then he looked back at her, and simply
shook his head as he raised a hand to cover his mouth. (13) By this
gesture he assumed full responsibility, but at that moment, she hated
him for the inadequacy of the response. (14) He glanced towards the
basin and sighed. (15) For a moment he thought she was about to
step backwards onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed,
though he said nothing. (16) Instead he began to unbutton his shirt.
(17) Immediately she knew what he was about. (18) Intolerable.
(19) He had come to the house and removed his shoes and socks
- well, she would show him then. (20) She kicked off her sandals,
unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her skirt and
stepped out of it and went to the basin wall. (21) He stood with
hands on his hips and stared as she climbed into the water in her
underwear. (22) Denying his help, any possibility of making amends,
was his punishment. (23) The unexpectedly freezing water that
caused her to gasp was his punishment. (24) [. . .] He did not exist,
he was banished, and this was also the punishment. (McEwan 2002,
29-30)
[2]
(]) She [Briony] had arrived at one of the nursery's wide-open
windows and must have seen what lay before her some seconds
beforeshe registered it. (2) It was a scene that could easily have
accommodated, in the distance at least, a medieval castle. (3)
[. . .] Closer, within the boundaries of the balustrade, were the rose
gardens and, nearer still, the Tritonfountain and standing by the
basin's retaining wall was her sister; and right beforeher was Robbie
Turner. (4) There was something rather formal about the way he
stood, feet apart, head held back. (5) A proposal of marriage. (6)
Briony would not have been surprised. (7) She herself had written a
tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning
and ended by marrying her. (8) What was presented here fitted
well. (9) Robbie Turner; only son of a humble cleaning lady and
of no known father, Robbie who had been subsidised by Briony 's
father through school and university, had wanted to be a landscape
gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine, had the boldness
of ambition to ask for Cecilia's hand. (1 OJ It madeperfect sense.
[. . .] (11) What was less comprehensible, however, was how Robbie
imperiously raised his hand now, as though issuing a command
which Cecilia dared not disobey. (12) It was extraordinary that she
could not resist him. (13) At his insistence she was removing her
clothes, and at such speed. (14) She was out of her blouse, now she
had let her skirt drop to the ground and was stepping out of it, while
he looked on impatiently, hands on hips. (15) What strange power
did he have over her. (16) Blackmail? (17) Threats? (18) [. . .] The
sequence was illogical - the drowning scene, followed by a rescue,
should have preceded the marriage proposal. (McEwan 2002: 38)
As observed above, a significant number of textual cues indicate that
the same events are experienced from two totally different deictic centres
in the two extracts: the first one is described by an external narrator who
seems to be endowed with a bird-eye view making it possible to shift from
one character to the other without keeping the focalization fixed; narration
of events, in other words, is perceived as objective, even though it is clear
that some words are likely to belong to the characters ("intolerable", for
example). Things are very different in the second extract, which is entirely
focalized on Briony: to start with, the use of the modal auxiliary "must"
( 1 ), makes it clear that the events are presented in the order that Brion y
herself experiences them, a phenomenon Short calls "psychological se-
quencing" (1996, 275). The shift in focalization is made even more evident
by the prepositional phrase "in the distance at least" (2) and by the compar-
ative forms "closer" (3) and "nearer still" (3), which are to be interpreted in
relation to Briony's position: in actual fact, they refer to those parts of the
park Briony is able to see from the nursery window. In addition, although
the extract is narrated in the third person, the language used is likely to be
perceived as Briony's by the readers: "humble" (9), "boldness of ambition"
(9), "imperiously" (11 ), "extraordinary" (12), and "strange" (15), to quote
but some of them, are all instances of a negative attitude of the 'Judgement
type' (Martin and White 2005, 52) that are formulated by the character.
Briony's viewpoint becomes even more explicit in the sentence "There
was something rather formal about the way he stood [ ... ]" ( 4), which also
coincides witli the moment readers start penetrating her mind. Such a mo-
ment is further signalled by the abrupt shift in narrative technique: unlike
sentences 1 and 2, which are clearly a narrative report17, sentence 4 is an
example of free indirect thought, and such a shift becomes more evident in
the following sentence ("A proposal of marriage"), which has the typical
(un)grammatical construction of colloquial speech (and is therefore more
likely to be attributed to Briony than to the author/narrator). Moreover,
17
The modal verb "must" (1), together with the conceptual content, establish-
es the first sentence as thought external to Briony; in sentence 2, the modal
"could" appears to be the narrator stating that the physical conditions - "in the
distance", a prepositional phrase significantly upshifted to the level of clause
- objectively warrant the application ofBriony's own mental schemata.
 sentence 5 features a crucial parallelism with Cecilia's utterance "intol-
erable" in the first extract (18): in both cases the content of the free di-
rect thought is foregrounded by means of a structural strategy which, by
rankshifting the phrase to the level of a sentence, better records the mo-
ment of highly emotional tension. Sentence 5 hence marks the moment
when Briony's brain suddenly decides that the scene in front of her eyes is
to be interpreted as a marriage proposal. Quite significantly, the external
description of the physical environment characterising the first three sen-
tences in narrative report (NR) is here replaced by a series of sentences in
free direct thought (FDT) which coincide with a mental interpretation of
the events, such an interpretation being necessarily the result of Briony's
intentionality and volition.
Manipulation of viewpoint plays a crucial role in the presentation of
characters' minds in all novels: in Atonement, in particular, the juxtaposi-
tion ofBriony's viewpoint with that of Cecilia and Robbie makes it possi-
ble for the readers to gain better access to Briony's mind and to the sche-
mata she uses to make sense of the scene she is observing. If the first of
the two extracts was omitted, in other words, it would be very hard for the
readers to realise that Briony's interpretation of the fountain scene borders
on the absurd due to the inappropriate application of certain schemata. The
same narratological strategy is exploited by McEwan in other parts of the
novel, as will be observed in the section analysing the use of metaphorical
patterns for the description of fictional mental functioning (see paragraph
2.3.4.2.2): as a result, readers are positioned closer to the mind of a particu-
lar character, and have the chance to better understand the way that mind
works 18•
Generally speaking, the notion of point of view includes at least three
major perspectives: spatiotemporal, psychological and ideological points
of view. McEwan's extracts have highlighted how both spatiotemporal and
psychological points of view are often interrelated, as the former often
gives access to the latter. As regards ideological point of view, on the other
hand, it has to do with "the set of values, or belief system, communicat-
ed by the language of a text" (Fowler 1996, 165): therefore, this concept
captures "those aspects of world views that are social, cultural, religious
or political in origin" (Semino 2002, 97). Like the other two, ideological
point of view is very important for characterisation, especially when value
judgements are found· in a particular character's speech and/or thoughts
(Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla 2017, 21). In Joseph Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, for instance, the character-narrator Marlow describes his first
experience of Africa by stating that "We were wanderers on prehistoric
18
Importantly, experiencing the point of view of a character does not necessar-
ily grant access to that character's mind. In the opening of Dickens's Great
Expectations, for instance, the point of view is that ofa child (Pip, the protag-
onist of the novel) but readers cannot access his mind at that point.
earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet" (Conrad
1899 [2007], 14). Clearly, the narrator is presenting the point of view of
Europeans, since the term "prehistoric" brings with it a set of assumptions
about cultural naivety which are connected to the Eurocentric attitude that
is explored in Conrad's novel (see also Short 1996, 278).
2.3.4.2 Mind style
Mind style is the second narratorialfilter used by authors to develop char-
acterisation. Like point of view, it is a bottom-up process, as it springs out
from the language of the text and interacts with readers' schemata to form
the impression of a character in their mind.
Introduced for the very first time by Fowler in order to capture "any
distinctive linguistic representation of an individual mental self' (1977,
103), the notion was later developed by Leech and Short in chapter 6 of
their seminal work Style in Fiction (1981): a "fictional world", they ar-
gued, is "what is apprehended", whereas mind style is concerned primarily
with how a fictional world is apprehended and conceptualised (1981, 187).
Therefore, the notion has to do with the way in which characters make
sense of the story world in which they are embedded, and can in principle
be applied to all texts, even if a cline exists between "mind styles which
can easily strike a reader as natural and uncontrived [ ... ], and those which
clearly impose an unorthodox conception of the fictional world" (1981,
188-9). In other words, the focus on how systematic linguistic choices re-
flect the workings of individual minds becomes increasingly more obvious
as we move towards the unorthodox end of the cline: "the more normal
the choices become, the less force the mind-style concept tends to have"
(Short 2006, 250), i.e. mind styles are more interesting (and more easily
detected) when they are idiosyncratic, distinctive19•
Clues about characters' mental functioning can originate from a wide
range of different linguistic patterns, including metaphors, deixis, lexis,
etc., and have been analysed by different stylistic and narratological ap-
proaches. Very importantly, all of them contribute to shaping crucial as-
pects of characters' inner lives, so a general overview of each of them will
be offered in the next sections.
2.3.4.2.1 Mind style and narratology
One of the main attractions of reading fiction is that it can give us an in-
volving impression of what it is like to be somebody else - to do, feel
and think things that are not part of our own personal experience (Semino
19
In this volume, the expressions mind style, mental functioning and mind func-
tioning are used interchangeably.
2007, 154): in other words, a very important part of suspension of disbelief
is the possibility of accessing directly the minds of characters by means
of different narrative techniques. This point has also been highlighted by
different narratologists: Fludernik (1996, 30), for example, has pointed out
that the reader's narrative experience always implies the protagonist's con-
sciousness and has made clear that the centrality of this notion is closely
related to the prominence of consciousness representation in the 201h cen-
tury (see part l of this volume).
The representation of characters' minds is central also to Palmer's
framework, where narrative fiction is considered "in essence, the rep-
resentation offictional mental functioning" (2004, 184). In Fictional Minds
(2004), he remarks how, in order to investigate characters' inner lives, nar-
ratology has traditionally used a speech category approach, namely an
approach in which the categories traditionally applied to fictional speech
have been extended to fictional thought. Such an approach, he points out
(2004, 53), is concerned primarily with that part of the mind known as in-
ner speech, but fails to account for other important aspects of mental life,
in particular the ones he calls the whole mind (2004, 87-129), i.e. cognitive
activities like thinking and perceiving complemented by dispositions, feel-
ings, beliefs and emotions; the social mind, (2004, 130- 169), i.e. the minds
of characters captured while they are interacting with other characters; and
the mind in action (2004, 205-239), i.e. the mind of characters while they
are engaged doing something.
In his own approach, probably the most exhaustive model for the
study of characters' minds in narratology, Palmer focuses in particular on
the notion of continuous consciousness frame:
The reader uses existing or prestored knowledge of other minds in
the actual world in order to process the emergent knowledge that is
supplied by fictional-mind presentations. The work that we put into
constructing other real mindsprepares us as readers for the work of
constructing.fictional minds. Because fictional beings are necessarily
incomplete, frames, scripts, and preference rules are required to
supply the defaults that.fill the gaps in the story-world and provide
the presuppositions that enable the reader to construct continually
conscious mindsfrom the text (2004: 175-6).
Clearly, the explanation above encompasses the notion of schemata
introduced in 2.2.1, and extends it: to understand fictional mental function-
ing, our consciousness needs to blend with the consciousness of the char-
acters, thus creating a consciousness frame that continuously shifts from
our own mind to the one of the character, and vice versa. Once the continu-
ous consciousness frame is activated, it is possible to access the character's
embedded narrative, namely the whole of a character's mind, including
perceptual and cognitive viewpoint, ideological worldview, memories of
the past and the set of beliefs, desires, intentions, motives and plans for
the future (2004, 183). Embedded narratives, Palmer points out, are "the
product of the application of the continuous consciousness frame to the
discourse" (2004, 184): to put it differently, the continuous conscious-
ness frame is the means by which we are able to construct fictional minds,
whereas the embedded narrative is the result of such a construction. Three
subframes of the continuous consciousness frame are crucial for capturing
characters' minds: the relationship between thought and action, interrnen-
tal or group or shared thinking, doubly embedded narratives.
As regards the first one, it must be kept in mind that any construction
of a fictional mind is inextricably linked to the presentation of actions: in
other words, direct access to inner speech and states of mind only repre-
sents a small part of the process of making sense of a mind in action; phys-
ical events are always associated with a mental event, textually cued by the
verb or an adverb. The sentence "The three statesmen hid themselves", for
example, quite clearly represents the description of an action, yet it does
more than that, since it also captures the related mental processes much
more than, let's say, "They stood behind a curtain", that would leave the
readers uncertain as to why "they" are standing there (Palmer 2004, 211 ).
As regards the second one, intermental thinking is based on the notion
that mental functioning can be properly applied to social as well as to indi-
vidual forms of activity, and is therefore closely connected to the concept
of communicative action, i.e. the kind of action happening when more than
one character is present. Examples singled out by Palmer include:
1. Outside his door, two very limp detective sergeants had deserted
their posts.
2. When they reached the pits they decided they were hungry. It
seemed too far to climb up the dining tent, so they ate as much
- of the mechanic's lunch as Miss Runcible 's cigarette had spared
(2004, 222).
In the first example, the joint action of desertion exemplifies inter-
mental thinking: the verb deserted, according to him, captures the two
characters' mental processes better than what a description of a physical
movement would do. In other words, even if the text does not make the
reasons for the characters' decision to leave explicit, their shared feelings
or emotions can still be inferred from the context. In the second example,
a paradigmatic intermental thinking dynamic is presented, since an initial
decision shared by both characters is explicitly reported and actualised af-
ter the adverb 'so' has been used.
As far as the third subframe is concerned, doubly embedded narratives
refers to a character whose mind is contained within another character's
mind: his/her identity, in other words, does not only encompass his/her em-
bedded narrative only, but springs from all the doubly embedded narratives
of which he/she is the subject. Something similar happens in real people's
daily lives: they constantly create more or Jess detailed narratives of others
in their minds, while making several efforts to control the narratives that
the other people have of them. According to Palmer (2004, 232), "the so-
cial role which we acquire as it is formed within the embedded narrative
of others thus becomes part of our situated identity". The example below
describes a situation in which a character called Emma is talking to her
friend Clara about an invitation she has recently received:
I am very happy Robert has invited me to go to the cinema with
him, though I guess there must be some strange motive behind his
decision to invite me.
By speculating about the motives of Robert's invitation, Emma is cre-
ating a doubly embedded narrative, i.e. she is creating the embedded narra-
tive of another person in her own mind. As a consequence, readers have the
possibility to observe the functioning of two different minds at the same
time: Emma's one, captured while thinking about possible explanations for
Robert's invitation, and Robert's one introduced by Emma's speculations.
As a consequence of this, an ontological question is at issue here: what
can be said about a particular character's identity when contradictive ver-
sions of that character are presented through doubly embedded narratives?
To state it with an example, how should we make sense of a character's
personality whose traits are not explicitly defined by the narrator, but are
defined by the doubly embedded narrative as negative (mean, for exam-
ple) and, by him/herself as generous? If the readers also find the character
mean, "there is an interesting sense in which the ontologically real char-
acter is less real than the epistemological versions" (Palmer 2004, 233).
According to Margolin (I 996, 114-15), a character can be real within the
ontology of the story-world, and a second version can exist within that
same story-world, Generally speaking, characters are stipulated as real by
the narrator, and as epistemic versions (I 996, 115) by the doubly embed-
ded narratives that contain them.
Leaving the ontological discussion aside, it seems clear that an inter-
mental thinking approach to characters can also be very useful in order to
capture the type of affective relationship among them: often, two or more
characters involved in several intermental actions are emotionally very
close, either in a positive or in a negative way. In the same vein, the total
Jack of intennental thoughts in contexts where they could reasonably take
place can often be interpreted as a sign of solitude, loneliness, suffering.
Clearly enough, the phenomena discussed by Palmer are not necessar-
ily present in all novels: some of them may be more highlighted than others
within the same novel, and different genres of novels may foreground dif-
ferent phenomena. Additionally, there may be novels in which such phe-
nomena are not present at all: in the works by the French novelist Alain
Robbe-Grillet, for instance, characters are usually portrayed exclusively
from the outside, with no reference to the mental processes happening in
their minds. As a consequence, no instances either of doubly embedded
narrative or of intermental thinking can be found, a strategy that might
explain the feeling of objectivity readers usually experience in Grillet's
literature".
In conclusion, the newly expanded narratology of the fictional mind
proposed by Palmer can usefully complement all the other bottom-up ap-
proaches discussed in this part of the volume; together with the more tra-
ditional speech category models introduced above, and perhaps integrat-
ed by frameworks originally conceived for real minds (psycholinguistics,
psychology and philosophy of the mind, to quote but a few), it can open
up new avenues of research for investigating the functioning of characters'
minds. An example will be introduced and discussed in Part 3 of this vol-
ume.
2.3.4.2.2 Mind style and metaphorical patterns
Mind style can also be approached in relation to the use of figurative lan-
guage, as work by Fowler (1976) and Leech and Short (I 981) has brilliant-
ly shown. The development of Cognitive Metaphor theory at least from the
publication of Lakoff and Johnson's milestone Metaphors We Live By in
particular has highlighted the crucial importance of particular metaphori-
cal patterns for the projection of mind style (see Black 1993; Semino and
Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002, 2006, 2014; Demjén, Zs6fia, and Elena
Semino 2016): the central claim of the theory is that consistent patterns of
conventional metaphorical expressions in language ( e.g. You are wasting
my time; that job cost me an hour) reflect conventional patterns of meta-
phorical thought, known as conceptual metaphors ( e.g. TIME IS MON-
EY). Conceptual metaphors involve systematic sets of correspondences
between a source conceptual domain (e.g. MONEY) and a target concep-
tual domain ( e.g. TIME), and typically help speakers to make sense of
abstract, complex, or poorly delineated experiences (such as time and emo-
tions) in terms of more concrete and well-delineated experiences. As Sem-
ino and Swindlehurst (1996, 147) have remarked, the use of consistent and
unconventional metaphorical patterns within a particular text reflects the
conceptual system of its creator. In the same vein, at an individual level:
The systematic use of a particular metaphor (or metaphors) reflects
an idiosyncratic cognitive habit, a personal way of making sense of
and talking about the world: in other words, a particular mind style.
(Semino and Swindlehurst, 147)
In their analysis of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo :S- Nest, for
example, Semino and Swindlehurst show how the language of the first-per-
20
Alain Robbe-Grillet is generally considered the father of the so-called Nou-
veau Roman, a literary trend that originated in France during the 1960s.
uo
son narrator Bromden is characterized by the consistent presence of un-
conventional metaphorical expressions drawn from the source domain of
MACHINERY (e.g. I'm running out of steam or I don't want to throw a
spanner in the works), that reflect his peculiar conceptualization of reality:
society is described as the Combine (an allusion to combine harvesters),
the mental hospital where he lives as a patient as a factory for the Combine
[. . .] for fixing up mistakes made in the neighbourhoods and in the schools
and in the churches, and the group of patients he belongs to as machines
with flaws inside that can't be repaired. This, they argue, projects a mind
style that reflects the character's cognitive habits and limitations, since he
appears to use his knowledge of machinery to compensate for his lack of
understanding of other areas of experience, including other people's minds
and emotions ( comprising his own), and society at large (I 996, 156).
Cognitive metaphor theory has proved very useful for analysing the
mind style of characters with cognitive limitations (Semino and Swindle-
hurst 1996; Semino 2006, 2014); however, it can be applied to all charac-
ters who use consistent patterns of metaphorical expressions. Going back
to McEwan 's Atonement, for instance, Trevisan (2010) has shown that the
central character's mind tends to make sense of the fictional world in a
mechanistic way which brings her to perceive everybody else as an actant
incapable of developing outside the roles that have been thought of for
them. Not surprisingly, such a cognitive habit is extended to herself:
(1) The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly distorted
- her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same time
remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. (2) She raised
one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes
before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider
on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. (3)
Or did it have some little life of its own? (4) [ . .} She brought her
forefingers closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. (5)
It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely
serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it,
was not the same as actually moving it. (6) [ . .} A second thought
always followed the first, one mystery bred another: was everyone
else really alive as she was? (7) [. . .} If the answer was no, then
Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough
on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she
had. (McEwan 2002: 35-36).
The text, which intersperses the language of the narrator with that of
the character, is replete with non-standard metaphorical images that cast
crucial light on Briony's distinct conceptualisations of reality: "thing"
(2),"machine for gripping" (2), and "fleshy spider" (2) are all unconven-
tional metaphorical expressions that have a part of Briony's body (her
hand) as their referent. In addition, it is significant that the character's hand
is perceived as, possibly, having a life of its own.
In cognitive metaphor terms, a series of targets (some parts of her
body, other people) are explained through only one source (machines), the
conceptual metaphors underlying these linguistic realizations being there-
fore THE HUMAN BODY IS A MACHINE/HUMAN BEINGS ARE MA-
CHINES. Even the expression "fleshy spider" (2), which does not seem
to refer to machines directly, may be processed by readers as a metaphor
for machines, since science fiction has repeatedly portrayed 'post-human'
bodies equipped with hands that are similar to spiders. Like her hands,
which do not seem to be "entirely at her command" (2) and may be viewed
as a synecdoche for her larger self, even all the other people - "was every-
one else really alive as she was?" (6) - are processed by her as potentially
lacking the possibility of acting autonomously, a fact which is consistent
with the actantial model (she unwittingly applies) referred to above.
The machine model seems therefore to account for at least a part of
her mental functioning, and is also in line with her habit to assign the other
characters stereotypical roles. Her sister's lover Robbie, in particular, is
constantly conceived of as a potential aggressor, and such a tendency is not
rarely extended to the other characters, as the metaphorical expressions re-
lated to 'attack' and 'defence' in the following exchange make clear (2002:
140):
(1) "Shut up, for goodness' sake! (2) You really are a tiresome little
prima donna. (3) The boys had no clean socks so I took some of
yours." - (4) Briony stared at her, amazed. (5) Attacked, betrayed, by
the only one she longed to protect.
In answering her sister Cecilia's accusation, which is realised by
means of a metaphorical reference to the world of drama ("tiresome little
prima donna", in the first sentence), Brion y resorts to a series of linguistic
expressions ("attacked", "protect", in the second sentence) which reflect
the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR: as Lakoff and Johnson
demonstrate (1980, 5), we "talk about arguments that way because we con-
ceive of them that way - and we act according to the way we conceive of
things". Although the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR is quite
common in people's conceptual system, it is particularly significant in the
case of Briony, since it is part of her more general tendency to conceptu-
alize several events she experiences in terms of war, as is testified by the
role aggression plays in her mental life. More generally, the metaphorical
expressions characterising Briony's language are drawn from the source
domains of WAR, ATTACK, ASSAULT, a fact that reflects her tendency
to cognitively elaborate many of the events in terms of 'aggression' and
has catastrophic consequences for the destiny of the characters, including
herself.
2.3.4.2.3 Mind style and deictical patterns
As pointed out by Sanchez-Davies (2017), "readers' capacity to project
themselves into different perspectives in the story-world is a major factor
in their understanding of fictional characters and feeling of involvement
with the narrative" (see also McIntyre 2006, 92; Jeffries 2010, 147-8). The
area of stylistics focusing on the effects of perspective-taking is deixis,
which concerns issues of distance and proximity in space, time and social
relations, and is rooted on the notion that speakers tend to interpret deictic
terms in relation to where they are positioned (McIntyre 2006, 50). Start-
ing from the assumption that reading is an activity where the author/narra-
tor and the readers inhabit different (temporal) locations, readers need to
undergo a deictic shift to project themselves into the character's/ narrator's
deictic centre and make sense of the narrative.
The framework called 'Deictic Shift Theory' (DST) was therefore de-
veloped in order to investigate the ways in which linguistic cues (grammat-
ical, lexical, figurative, etc.) may encourage or discourage readers to adopt
a particular point of view by undergoing a deictic shift (Galbraith 1995;
McIntyre 2006): as Galbraith (1995) explains, readers may be pushed from
the real-world into a fictional world (a phenomenon he calls 'PUSHes')
or popped out of the fictional world (a phenomenon he calls 'POPs'), for
example when they are disturbed while reading.
McIntyre (2006) expands Galbraith's explanation by pointing out that
it is possible to 'PUSH' and 'POP' in at least two different ways, the first
being along the different levels of the discourse structure (author-reader,
narrator-narrattee, character-character), and the second being along the
temporal chronology of the fictional reality ( through flashbacks/ flashfor-
wards, for example). This, he explains, in itself highlights that "the terms
PUSH and POP ,suggest there are two processes involved in moving be-
tween deictic fields when actually there is only one" (McIntyre 2006, 110).
Deixis, however, is not limited to temporal and spatial reference points
only, but also includes dimensions which are central to the study of charac-
ter's mind style: in particular, 'person' deixis, 'empathetic' deixis, 'social'
deixis, and 'discourse' deixis (Levinson 1983; McIntyre 2006; Stockwell
2002) can shed important light on characters' mental functioning, as they
can provide clues to their degree of egocentricity or openness towards oth-
ers and towards the outside world in general.
Semino (2011), in particular, analyses the deictic patterns used by
Christopher Boone, the first-person narrator and protagonist of the ac-
claimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time pub-
lished in 2003. Christopher is described on the book's back cover as being
autistic, and specifically as being affected by Asperger's syndrome, a form
of high-functioning autism. In addition to phenomena of 'under-lexicali-
zation' and 'over-lexicalization' characterizing the protagonist's language,
Semino focuses on the use of personal deixis, i.e. on the use of person-
al pronouns, objective pronouns, possessive adjectives. By using corpus
techniques that allow her to compare the distribution of person references
in the novel to the distribution of the same patterns in the Imaginative Writ-
ing Section of British National Corpus, she finds that first-person singular
pronouns are overused in the novel, while first-person plural pronouns are
underused (2011, 430). This, she argues, reflects Christopher's tendency to
be unusually focused on himself, and, more specifically, his own actions
and thoughts, which may contribute to the impression that he has an au-
tistic-spectrum disorder. Additionally, the under-use of plural first-person
pronouns suggests "some degree of alienation from others" (2011, 431) or,
in Palmer's words introduced in 2.3.4.2.1, a lack of 'interrnental thinking':
Overall, I would argue that, in The Curious Incident, the
combination of overuse of singular first-person pronouns and
underuse of both plural first-person pronouns and second-person
pronouns contributes to create an impression of the particular kind
of egocentricity that characterizes Christophe,'.He is a loner; and
tends to be content in his own company. He also has difficulties
understanding the mental states of others, and seldom feels a sense
of affinity and commonality with them. This is consistent with the
attribution to Christopher of a high functioning autistic-spectrum
disorder such as Asperger s syndrome (Semino 2011, 436).
Something similar happens in the short story Flowers for Algernon
(1959), which describes a 'neuro-challenge': turning the protagonist Char-
lie into a neuro-typical subject, starting from a condition of severe de-
velopmental delay. In particular, a surgery already tested successfully on
Charlie's alter ego Algernon - a mouse who is initially able to beat Charlie
in many intelligence games - is supposed to significantly enhance his IQ,
which only reaches 68 at the beginning of the story. After what seems to
be an initial failure, it soon becomes clear that Charlie's transition will
not only tum him into a neuro-typical individual, but will rather trans-
form him into a genius whose mental functioning cannot be compared to
any of the other characters in the story-world, including the experimenters
themselves. As the story unfolds, however, Charlie notices that Algernon's
intelligence starts to slowly decrease, and through a series of highly so-
phisticated scientific argumentations he comes to the conclusion that the
futuristic treatment he and Algernon have received will not last for long:
his brain indeed undergoes a fatal deterioration which, by the end of the
story, results in the character being as cognitively delayed as he was at the
beginning.
The structure of the story therefore presents two versions of the char-
acter: 'Charlie 1 ', who is severely retarded, and 'Charlie 2', who is a men-
tal genius with an incredibly high IQ. 'Charlie l' is present at the beginning
and at the end of the novel, whereas Charlie 2 inhabits the central part of
the book. Interestingly, the number of words in the two parts is very simi-
lar, so they can be statistically compared.
In addition to phenomena of under-lexicalisation that characterise
mainly Charlie I, and of over-lexicalization that characterise Charlie 2,
the analysis of deictical patterns is particularly illuminating in relation to
his mental functioning: after creating two texts (Charlie 1 text and Charlie
2 text), a keyness analysis of words was conducted by means of Wmatrix
online, comparing text 1 and text 2. The analysis revealed that the subject
pronoun 'I' is overused in text 1, namely in the part in which Charlie is
developmentally delayed: by occurring 485 times (versus 291 in text 2), it
results in a log-likelihood of 19.15, which is a significant result. Second-
ly, a POS (part of speech) analysis was conducted on the two parts using
the same tool: the analysis revealed that the most used verbs are mental
processes, in Halliday and Mathiessen 's terms (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2014), namely verbs evoking cognitive and emotional states and changes:
to think, to mean, to suppose (2"\ 3rct and 41h position respectively).
In order to collect more evidence, the use of personal deixis in the
impaired version of Charlie was also compared to the Imaginative Writing
Section of the British National Corpus (BNC) sampler: the keyness anal-
ysis for individual words revealed that the personal pronoun 'I' is the top
key-word in the story, with a log-likelihood of 516. 71; the object pronoun
'me' and the possessive adjective 'my' were also found to be overused,
with a log-likelihood of 124.13 and 17.39 respectively. Crucially, the plu-
ral pronoun 'we' was absent both in the comparison for keyness between
text 1 and text 2 (Charlie's two versions), and in the comparison between
text 1 and the BNC sampler.
Very interestingly, these findings are in line with Semino 's discussed
above, thus perhaps singling out a common trait in the mental functioning
of characters who are cognitively delayed: on the one hand, the tendency
to be egocentric, i.e. to make sense of the world almost exclusively from
their own deictic centre, a fact which also accounts for their vulnerability
in social relations; on the other hand, the tendency to lack intennental po-
tential for sharing mental states with others, probably due to the fact that
they have not properly developed abilities to understand the workings of
others' minds (Semino 2011, 434; see also Palmer 2004, 205-240).
Crucially, by adopting the perspective of a character who is cogni-
tively impaired, the author defamilarises readers' everyday conversation-
al interaction, potentially refreshing their schemata (Cook 1994): while
reading the story, we indeed have many chances to become more aware
of the potential for misunderstanding that 'normal' people usually avoid
successfully and automatically. Thanks to the story, in other words, we
can experience the complexities of communication we are generally not
conscious of, and at the same time become aware of the difficulties expe-
rienced by people who would not be classified as neurotypical individuals.
In Charlie's words:
"I think it's a good thing.finding out how everybodylaughs at me. I
think about it a lot. It's because I'm so dumb I don't even know when
I'm doing something dumb. People think it's funny when a dumb
person can't do thins the same way they can" (Keyes, 1959: 293).
2.3.4.2.4 Mind style and pragmatics
In addition to narratological, metaphorical and deictical patterns, charac-
ters' mind style can also emerge through the presentation of their conver-
sational behaviour, especially when direct speech is used.
In the last 30 years, pragmatics and conversation analysis have be-
come central areas oflinguistics and have been increasingly used by stylis-
ticians in the analysis of fictional conversations, particularly in plays ( e.g.
Culpeper 2001, Culpeper, Short and Verdonk 2002). As regards novels, it
might be argued that salient and systematic patterns in a character's com-
municative behaviour can produce inferences about the peculiar function-
ing of that character's mind, especially in cases where these behaviours are
non-deliberate.
Research concerned with the analysis of mind style by means of prag-
matics has mainly approached character's conversational behaviour in the
light of Grice's maxims (1975, 44):
Maxims of Quantity:
1. "Make your contribution as informative as required."
2. "Don't make your contribution more informative than is required."
Maxims of Quality: Be truthful.
1. "Don't say what you believe to be false."
2. "Don't say what you lack adequate evidence for."
Maxim of Relation: "Be relevant."
Maxims of Manner: "Be perspicuous."
I. "Avoid obscurity of expression."
2. "Avoid ambiguity."
3. "Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)."
4. "Be orderly."
For example, in the previously mentioned analysis of Christopher in
The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time, Semino (2011) describes
the character's conversational exchange with a police officer some minutes
after Christopher has found a dead dog in his neighbours' garden. The ex-
change is reported in the following extract:
, .
I) Then the police arrived. 2) I like the police. 3) They have
uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be
doing. 4) There was a policewoman and a policeman. 5) The
policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and
a red scratch in the middle of the hole. 6) The policeman had a
big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking
out from one side. 7) The policewoman put her arms round Mrs
Shears and led her back towards the house. 8) I lifted my head off
the grass. 9) The policeman squatted down beside me and said,
"Would you like to tell me whats going on here, young man?" I 0)
I sat up and said, "The dog is dead." 11) "I'd got that far," he
said. 12) 1 said, "J think someone killed the dog. " 13) "How old
are you?" he asked. 14) 1 replied, "] am 15 years and 3 months
and 2 days. (Haddon 2003, 7)
As she remarks, the character has difficulties providing information
at the level of detail that would normally be expected from a fifteen-year
old: he describes some features of the police officers' legs that are not
required in that particular context, (a hole in the tights, a leaf stuck un-
der a shoe), and that will not turn out to be relevant to any subsequent
developments in the plot. Moreover, his answers to the policeman's
questions are either uninformative ("The dog is dead"; "I think some-
one killed the dog") or too informative ("I am 15 years and 3 months
and 2 days"). From the pragmatic point of view, then, the character has
difficulties with the maxims of quantity and relation introduced above.
Christopher, however, does not deliberately flout the maxims in order
to obtain some advantage for himself, but this behaviour is nonetheless
very informative for the reader as it provides clues for a better under-
standing of the character's mental functioning. Therefore, Christopher's
communicative behaviour can be interpreted as an infringement, i.e. a
breaking of the rule which has no intention of deceiving his interlocutor
(Thomas 1995, 74).
Charlie's behaviour in Flowers for Algernon is not dissimilar from
this: after the neuro-transition that has turned him into a genius, he is
finally able to hold conversations on many different topics with the other
characters, however these conversations are pragmatically problematic:
[1]
1 was shocked to learn that the only ancient languages he could read
were Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and that he knows almost nothing
of mathematics beyond the elementary levels of the calculus of
variation. I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden
this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending - as do many
people (Keyes, 1959: 297-298, bold mine).
[2]
I tried to avoid all discussions of intellectual concepts and to keep
the conversation on a simple, everyday level, but she just stared at
me blankly and asked what I meant about the mathematical variance
equivalence in Dobermann s Fifth Concerto. [. . .} No matter what
I try to discuss with her, I am unable to communicate. [. . .} I must
review Vrostadt '.s equations on Levels o(Semantic Progression
(Keyes, 1959: 298, bold mine).
In the first extract, Charlie is reflecting upon a recent exchange he has
had with Dr Strauss, the man who did his surgery and someone he used to
have great admiration for; in the second extract, on the other hand, he is
reporting an interaction with Miss Kinnian, the teacher who helped him
when he was struggling with reading and writing and who is now his only
friend (and someone he is in love with). By saying that during a previous
interaction with Dr Strauss the latter was not able to discuss mathematics
beyond what he terms "elementary levels", and that he could not speak lan-
guages other than Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Charlie makes it clear that that
conversation had not been carried out "with reasonable dispatch" (maxim
of 'manner') by him, who was fruitlessly expecting his interlocutor to use
intellectual categories he was not familiar with. In 2), Charlie is clearly
trying to convey too complicated concepts to his previous mentor, Miss
Kinnian: despite his decision to "keep the conversation on a simple, every-
day level", he still uses concepts like "mathematical variance equivalence"
which embarrass her and produce blank stares. In other words, unlike the
characters sharing the story-world with him, Charlie is now over-lexical-
ized in most of the fields he discusses, a fact that jeopardises his social rela-
tions by producing 'pragmatic failures': indeed, people do not usually talk
about mathematical variance equivalence in Dobermann's Fifth Concerto,
or Vrostadt's equations on Levels of Semantic Progression, yet he finds it
strange that the other characters do not possess his same level of expertise.
Not rarely, Charlie's frustration in social situations is openly verbal-
ised by him: in 2), he indeed complains about not being able to commu-
nicate properly with the other characters, i.e. to pragmatically fail for not
being able to keep conversation at a simple level. The following extract is
emblematic from this point of view:
[3]
Dr Nemur appears to be uncomfortable around me. Sometimes when
I try to talk to him, he just looks at me strangely and turns away. I was
angry at first when Dr Strauss told me 1 was giving Dr Nemur an
inferiority complex. [. . .} I am unable to communicate. [ ... ]I find I
don't communicate with people much any more. Thank God for books
and music and things I can think about (Keyes, 1959: 298, bold mine).
 Besides jeopardising his social relations Charlie's pragmatic failures
also risk damaging the other characters' positive face (Brown and Levinson
1987, see also 2.3.6.1 this volume): Dr Nemur is experiencing an inferiority
complex due to the fact that, after being introduced as over-educated at the
beginning of the story, he is now face-threatened by Charlie's cultural su-
periority and by his own inability to properly hold a conversation with him.
Similarly to what was observed for Christopher in The Curious Inci-
dent of the Dod in the Night-Time, however, the breaking of Grice's maxim
of manner does not seem to be caused by Charlie's intention to appear
superior, or to manipulate the people he interacts with: his uncooperative
behaviour is rather to be interpreted as a result of his inability to assess his
addressees' actual level of cultural competence, and can therefore be inter-
preted as an infringement.
In Thomas's terms (1995, 74), different reasons may impair a com-
municative performance: these include nervousness, drunkenness, excite-
ment, but also cognitive impairment, or simply the constitutionally incapa-
bility of speaking clearly and to the point. In Charlie's case, the breaking
of Grice's maxims provides evidence of his social difficulties, even when
he is a genius. This, of course, strongly contributes to the projection of a
peculiar, idiosyncratic mind style.
2.3.4.2.5 Mind style and under/over-lexicalisation
The mind style of a character can also be conveyed by the degree of exper-
tise he/she has in relation to particular domains. Characters can be over-lex-
icalised or under-lexicalised (Fowler 1996, 152) in particular fields due to a
number of reasons. In both cases, the phenomenon provides important clues
for approaching the characters' mental functioning, especially when they are
over-lexicalised in fields people are generally not expert in, or vice-versa.
In Flowers for Algernon, for example, Charlie is initially under-lexi-
calised in several fields the other characters are very familiar with, as the
following two extracts make clear:
[1]
Dr Strauss said I had something that was ve,y good. He said I had
a good motor-vation. I never even knew I had that. I felt proud when
he said that not every body with an eye-q of 68 had that thing. I dont
know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too.
Algernons motor-vation is the cheese they put in his box. But it cant
be that because I didnt eat any cheese this week (Keyes 1959, 287).
[2]
Everybody faffed and we had a good time and they gave me lots of
drinks and Joe said Charlie is a card when hes potted. I dont know
what that means but everybody likes me and we have fun. I cant wait
to be smart like my best frends Joe Carp and Frank Reilly (Keyes
1959, 290).
In this part of the story, Charlie is still in a condition of severe mental
retardation, which also explains why he is not able to spell words properly.
Examples in this sense include 'eye-q' for 'IQ', or 'motor-variation' for
'motivation'. According to Fowler (1996, 152), the inability to properly
use the lexical items normally shared among the speakers of a particu-
lar language suggests that the individual lacks the relevant concept and is
likely to provide readers with clues on the distinctive way in which his/her
mind works.
At this point in the plot, underlexicalisation concerns Charlie's lack
of knowledge of scientific language, but there is more to this than that: as
can be observed in the extract, the grammatical structures he uses tend to
be fairly simple and repetitive ("Dr Strauss said", "He said", "I felt proud
when he said"), a fact that contributes to the readers' own perception of
the character's particular mental functioning. In addition, Charlie's report
in extract 1 makes it clear that he cannot properly elaborate the content of
Dr Strauss 's explanation, mainly because he lacks the proper schemata for
this particular situation: indeed, the Doctor tells him that the mouse's moti-
vation is driven by the cheese the researchers put in his box, but Charlie is
not familiar with scientific experiments, therefore he bases his assumptions
solely on the comparison between himself and the mouse. Since the outset
of the story, then, the combination of underlexicalisation and the Jack of
proper schemata contribute to the projection of a peculiar, non-standard
mind style for the character.
In extract 2, misunderstanding with the other characters originates
from Charlie being underlexicalised in areas people his age are generally
familiar with: in particular, as he explicitly states, the expression "Charlie
is a card when hes potted" sounds totally obscure to him, thus preventing
him from making sense of the situation - i.e. his colleagues making fun of
him. As a consequence of this, he still enjoys the situation and erroneously
believes his co-workers are also his close friends. There is, in other words,
a clear distinction between the actual domain of the story, in which Charlie
is made fun of, and his own private subworld, which is characterised by
his inability to imagine the contents of the other characters' minds, hence
misunderstanding originates.
Very interestingly, the parts in the text in which he is over-Iexicalised
also trigger clues about Charlie's mind style:
I must not become emotional. The facts and the results of my
experiments are clear; and the more sensational aspects ofmy own
rapid climb cannot obscure the fact that the tripling of intelligence
by the surgical technique developed by Drs. Strauss and Nemur must
be viewed as having little or no practical applicability (at the present
10
time) to the increase of human intelligence. As I review the records
and data on Algernon, I see that although he is still in his physical
infancy, he has regressed mentally. Motor activity is impaired;
there is a general reduction of glandular activity; there is an
accelerated loss of co-ordination. There are also strong indications
of progressive amnesia ], . .] (Keyes 1959, 301)
Terms like "applicability", "motor activity", "glandular activity",
"progressive amnesia" clearly require a type of expertise that not all people
have: in Charlie's case, this is even more striking if we consider the lack
of very common concepts that characterise his other version. Clearly, this
is very indicative of his mental functioning in this part of the story: he is
now very smart and he easily acquires knowledge about several scientific
domains (see also extracts I and II section 3.4.2.4).
Generally speaking, under and over-lexicalisation are very indicative
of mind style when the character is particularly expert in one domain and
tends to make sense of all aspects of the story-world according to that
domain. In John Fowles's The Collector (1963), for instance, the protag-
onist Clegg kidnaps Miranda, a twenty-year old middle-class woman he
is in love with. Clegg is obsessed with collecting butterflies and seems to
have no other interests in his life apart from this. As a consequence, he is
over-lexicalised in that domain, to the point that he is unable to make sense
of the world outside that particular field. As Semino shows (2002, 110),
Miranda herself is constructed from the beginning of the narrative as if she
was a butterfly:
[I]
When I had a free moment from the.files and ledgers I stood by the
window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and
sometimes I'd see her ln the evening I marked it in my observations
diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M
(Fowles, 1963: 9).
[II]
Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up
to it very careful, heart-in-mouth, as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow,
for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like
elusive and sporadic, and very refined-not like the other ones, even
the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur (Fowles, 1963: 9).
The frequency and elaboration of metaphorical expressions drawing
from the source domain of butterflies suggest that a systematic set of cor-
respondences between the butterfly domain and the Miranda domain is part
ofC!egg's conceptual structure (Semino 2002, 110) and, since the relevant
metaphorical expressions are not part of a particular conventional pattern
in English, Clegg's conceptual pattern is necessarily idiosyncratic, a fea-
ture of Clegg's personal mind style.
At a certain point, however, the correspondences between butterflies
and Miranda become weaker, and the character seems to be lost in his in-
terpretation efforts:
"Please", she said. Very gently and nicely. It was difficult to resist. It
was like not having a net and catching a specimen you wanted in your
first and second.fingers (I was always very clever at that), coming
up slowly behind and you had it, but you had to nip the thorax, and
it would be quivering there. It wasn't easy like it was with a kil/ing-
bottle. And it was twice as difficult with her, because I didn't want to
kill her, that was the last thing I wanted (Fowles, 1963: 40).
Miranda has just tried to convince Clegg to free her, promising him
that she will not report him to police and assuring him she will meet him
whenever he wants. As he always does, Clegg uses his knowledge of but-
terflies to speak about her metaphorically (a 'specimen') but things are
more difficult now, given that as a collector he rarely frees the animals he
collects. The butterfly metaphor, in other words, cannot properly explain
the situation Clegg is experiencing, as the sentence "It was twice as dif-
ficult with her, because I didn't want to kill her, that was the last thing I
wanted" makes clear. Clegg's attitude towards Miranda is very different
from his attitude towards butterflies, but he continues to deploy the only
domain in which he is overlexicalised, even if that domain creates prob-
lematic correspondences. This is very indicative of his mind style. For a
more comprehensive analysis of this, see Semino (2002).
2.3.4.2.6 Mind style and corpus stylistics
The remarkable growth of corpus linguistics in the last three decades has
provided new exciting opportunities and tools for the linguistic study of
literature (Bednarek 2010, 2011; McIntyre and Walker 2019), particularly
with respect to the analysis of systematic linguistic patterns that may con-
tribute to the projection of mind style (Hoover 1999; Archer and McIntyre
2005; Semino 2011, 2016; Mahlberg 2012). Corpus-based techniques can
be exploited both to test the analyst's intuitions and to identify patterns that
might have otherwise been missed.
There are many different software packages available for carrying out
corpus analyses, but in this section I will only focus on one, which was
used for collecting the data presented in 2.3.4.2.3: here, data presented in
that section will be slighty expanded to show the potential of the approach.
The software is called 'Wmatrix online' and was developed by Paul Ray-
son, from the University of Lancaster (UK). It allows researchers to carry
out analyses at the level of word, part of speech, or semantics. Once a
particular corpus (in this case, text 1 and text 2 from Flowers from Alge-
 rnon- i.e. 'Charlie as a mentally retarded character' versus 'Charlie as a
cognitive genius') has been uploaded, it needs to be compared to another,
larger corpus in order to investigate keyness. In this case, since the corpus
was a fictional one, it was decided to compare it to the Imaginative Writ-
ing Section of the British National Corpus (BNC) sampler, which contains
about 231000 words belonging to several works of fiction.
As anticipated in 2.3.4.2.3, the two texts with the two 'versions' of
Charlie were compared to each other, revealing that in version 1 there is an
overuse of the personal pronoun 'I', this overuse being statistically signif-
icant. The keyness analysis investigating the overuse of a particular word
or structure in the corpus, compared to the other one, was also conducted
with the BNC sampler as the reference corpus, revealing that the personal
pronoun 'I' is the top key-word in the story, with a very high log-likelihood
of 516. 71. The object pronoun "me" and the possessive adjective "my"
were also found to be overused, with a Jog-likelihood of 124.13 and 17.39
respectively. Therefore, corpus techniques revealed that the personal pro-
noun 'I' is overused in Charlie's 'developmentally delayed' version com-
pared to Charlie's other version and in comparison to the BNC corpus. The
software also provides the possibility of a part of speech analysis, which
was conducted on Charlie's two versions: the analysis revealed that the
most used verbs are "think", "mean", "suppose", suggesting a mind style
more inclined to reflecting about things, rather than to acting upon things.
As pointed out above, the software also allows the investigation of
under-used linguistic patterns: in this case, it was found that the first per-
son plural pronoun "we" was absent both in the comparison for keyness
between text 1 and text 2 (Charlie's two versions), and in the comparison
between text I and the BNC sampler. This suggested a mind style more in-
clined to egocentricity and Jess prone to social relationships with the other
characters, which is also a typical trait of subjects with some developmen-
tal delays like autism.
Corpus-based methods, it goes without saying, are not the holy grail
for linguistic analysis: without competence, statistical expertise, qualitative
knowledge, and intuition they are totally useless. Having said that, their po-
tential can be incredibly high for many areas of linguistics, not only irt sty-
listics: critical discourse studies, forensic linguistics, translation studies, film
studies all benefit greatly from the application of corpus techniques. Word
frequency, multi-word frequency, keywords, concordance, are only few of
the tools analysts can use to obtain immediate feedback for their intuitions.
2.3.5 Transitivity patterns and characterisation
Among the bottom-up information contributing to the formation of a char-
acter image in readers' minds, transitivity patterns play a very central role.
Considering their importance and the technicality of the theory underlying
them, a short introduction to its main tenets is offered below.
Conceiving of language as a systemic resource to construe meaning in
everyday interactions (Halliday 1978; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), sys-
temic functional linguistics (SFL henceforth) sets forth a stratification ar-
chitecture leading from context to semantics to lexicogrammar to phonolo-
gy through ever more delicate choices. Contextual information is proposed
to encompass three key variables, namely: field (the subject matter and
overall setting governing the communicative event), tenor (the relation-
ship among physical or implied interlocutors), and mode (the role assigned
to language in a particular situation, guided by the interlocutors' expecta-
tions). These parameters are linguistically manifested in three strands of
meaning, termed ideational ( concerned with the construal of events and
entities in the world), interpersonal ( concerned with the representations of
relationships among people in a situation), and textual (concerned with the
role of the medium of communication and the text's rhetorical function).
Chosen configurations in these semantic dimensions are realized by par-
ticular lexico-grammatical patterns, themselves selected from a wide range
of options. Those wordings are then realized as phonological sequences,
which are in tum realized by phonetic items. With this overall framework
and numerous specifications therefrom, SFL is capable of accounting for
a myriad of linguistic, communicative, and discourse-level phenomena
(Hasan 2019; Martin & Zappavigna 2019), beyond the constraints of for-
mal theories focused on sentential analysis.
The only strand of meaning we are currently interested in for the study
of transitivity patterns is the 'ideational', which is concerned with how
reality is represented in language, and is realised through a series of lexi-
co-grammatical choices regarding process types, participants and circum-
stances: every speaker, in other words, makes sense of reality by selecting
from a limited set of process types and participant roles embedded in the
grammar of the clause. In the sentence 'Mark kicked the ball', for example,
both 'Mark' and 'the ball' are considered participants ('Mark' is a partic-
ipant called 'actor' and 'the ball' is a participant called 'goal'), whereas
'kicked' is the process. In addition, language also gives us the possibility
to construe a circumstance, i.e. a time, a location or a manner in which the
process was carried out: 'Mark kicked the ball in the garden/an hour ago/
with great energy'.
In the grammar of English, there are six types of processes: material,
mental, verbal, relational, behavioural, and existential. For each of them,
participants have different names, as the six examples below make clear:
I. David (Actor) hit (Process: material) Tom (Goal) yesterday
evening (Circumstance: time).
2. Mary (Senser) loves (Process: mental) pizza (Phenomenon).
3. He (Sayer) always asks (Process: verbal) lots of questions (Verbi-
age).
 4. Nick (Carrier) is (Process: intensive) a professor (Attribute)/Nick
(Possessor as Carrier) has (Process: intensive) two dogs (Thing
possessed as Attribute
5. He (Behaver) smiled (Process: behavioural) joyfully (Circum-
stance: manner).
6. There was (Process: existential) a lot of traffic (Existent) in Lon-
don (Circumstance: location).
Starting with material processes, they are processes of doing, and
can be transitive (when a goal is present) or intransitive (when there is no
goal): for example, the sentence "David (Actor) has been working (Pro-
cess: material) all day (Circumstance: time)" is intransitive, as the action is
not directed to another participant. Mental processes, on the other hand, are
processes of feeling, and include cognition (verbs of thinking, knowing,
understanding), affection, (verbs of liking and fearing), perception (verbs
of seeing, hearing, etc.). Unlike material processes, mental ones always
need to have at least two participants, one of which must be a conscious
human being (Senser). Verbal Processes are processes of verbal action,
typically realised by verbs like 'say', 'tell' and all their synonyms. They
usually contain three participants: a sayer, a receiver and a verbiage, the
sayer coinciding with whatever can put out a signal (not only conscious
beings), and the verbiage coinciding with the nominalised statement of
the verbal process (usually a noun expressing some kind of verbal behav-
iour). Relational processes are processes of characterisation or identifica-
tion. They cover a very complex and rich area of transitivity (see Halliday
and Mathiessen 2004, 210-248 for an exhaustive introduction), and mainly
describe reality by means of 'being' or 'having'. Behavioural Processes
describe spontaneous or uncontrolled internal or external human activities
and are somehow 'half-way' between mental and material processes. Typ-
ically, they are processes of physiological or psychological behaviour and
are realised by verbs like breath, cough, dream, laugh, sniff, stare, smile,
watch, etc. Finally, existential processes represent experience by declaring
that 'there is' or 'there was' something: they are quite easy to identify since
the structure involves the use of 'there' as an existential subject rather than
as a circumstance of location.
With all this in mind, carrying out a transitivity analysis involves de-
termining the process types, the participants and the circumstances realised
in each clause: this type of investigation provides very significant clues as
to how experiential meanings, i.e. meanings about the world and personal
experience, are encoded through language choices by a real speaker or a
character.
Quite intuitively, the investigation of transitivity patterns can be very
useful to distinguish, among other things, characters who are more active,
more agentive, from those who are more acted-upon, passive, powerless.
Moreover, approaching characters through transitivity structures can pro-
vide important clues as to whether they tend to be doers or thinkers, or
as to whether they have the possibility to carry out actions independently
and autonomously, or whether they are more dominated by external forces
heavily influencing their actions. In the corpus-based study of Flowers for
Algernon discussed above, for example, a POS analysis has demonstrated
that the personal pronoun 'I' is almost exclusively accompanied by men-
tal processes like 'think', 'mean', 'suppose', suggesting that the character
tends to be more inclined to reflect upon things, rather than to act upon
them.
In a milestone study published in 1971, the father of SFL Michael
Halliday applied the framework to the analysis of Lok, one of the central
characters in William Golding's The Inheritors (1955). The novel deals
with a prehistoric struggle for survival: the characters of the book are a
small number of Neanderthal men and women, who call themselves 'the
people', and a group of invaders whom they call 'others', or 'new people'.
The impact between the two tribes will eventually cause the end of the first
group, the 'people'. Most of the book is narrated from the point of view of
Lok, who observes the rituals and habits of the invaders from his hiding
place beneath a tree.
Halliday argues that Lok's limited experience ofreality around him is
sharply conveyed by the syntactic structures he uses:
ln The Inheritors. Golding is offering 'a particular way of looking
at experience', a vision of things which he ascribes to Neanderthal
man; and he conveys this by syntactic prominence, by the frequency
with which he selects certain key syntactic options. It is their
frequency, which establishes the clause types in question as
prominent[ .. .] (Halliday 1981, 343).
In particular, Halliday uses the tenets of SFL to approach characterisa-
tion of Lok in the following extract:
The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A
head and a chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone
things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things
above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer
than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and
looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there
was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the
lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face.
Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to
him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would
have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his
head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out
to full length again.
O'f
The dead tree by Lok s ear acquired a voice.
'Clop'.
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had
grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the
bitter berries that Lok s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig
had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky
brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did
not like it. He smelled along the shaft of the twig The leaves on the
twig were red feathers and reminded him of goose. He was lost in a
generalised astonishment and excitement. He shouted at the green
drifts across the glittering water and hear Liku crying out in answer
but could not catch the words. They were cut off suddenly as though
someone had clapped a hand over her mouth. He rushed to the edge
of the water and came back. On either side of the open bank the
bushes grew thickly in the.flood; they waded out until at their farthest
some of the leaves were opening under water; and these bushes
leaned over.
s
The echo of Liku voice in his head sent him trembling at this
perilous way of bushes towards the island. He dashed at them where
normally they would have been rooted on dry land and his feet
splashed. He threw himself forward and grabbed at the branches with
hands and feet. He shouted: 'I am coming!' (Golding 1955, 106-7)
The passage, narrated by a third person narrator, is not always easy
to understand: what does the sentence "the stick began to grow shorter at
both ends" mean, for example? Would that same concept be communicated
differently if the point of view had not been Lok's, but a member of the
others? By referring to the categories introduced above, Halliday explains
that, out of the 56 clauses composing the extract, 21 of them are material
processes, 14 are clauses of location (including possession), 16 are mental
processes, and the others are attributive clauses. The processes are normal-
ly expressed by finite verbs in simple past tense ( 46), half of them describ-
ing very simple movements (turn, rise, hold, reach, etc.); the majority of
these processes are intransitive, their typical pattern being exemplified by
the first two clauses: "The bushes twitched again" and "Lok steadied by
the tree".
The overall picture construed by this syntactic configuration is one in
which the characters, despite acting, do not seem to act on things: in other
words, their actions do not seem to affect the objects around them. As an
example, in the sentence "he grabbed at the branches" a transitive verb
usually accompanied by a direct object in the English language is used
intransitively: recurrent and systematic deviations from the norm like this
foreground a general feeling of inaction, stillness, paralysis. Moreover, it
is quite significant that half of the actors of the material processes are not
people, but body parts, thus again shedding light on the lack of agency of
characters.
The transitivity patterns, in other words, provide important clues for
identifying Lok 's idiosyncratic way of elaborating reality. The case of the
stick is emblematic from this point of view: there is no doubt that the pro-
cesses in "a stick rose upright" and "the stick began to grow shorter on
both hands" are goal-directed, therefore transitive; quite intuitively, some-
one held up a bow and someone drew an arrow. However, in Lok's men-
tal re-elaboration of the event, the processes are undirected, self-caused:
therefore, the syntactic foregrounding of intransitives conveys the limita-
tions of actions of 'the people'.
Most of the other process types have the same pattern: mental pro-
cesses tend to be limited to a single participant, and the 'phenomenon' (i.e.
the content of perception) is either not expressed, or expressed only indi-
rectly ("he smelled along the shaft of the twig"); in addition, the subject
of cognition is rarely a human being, but rather a 'sense organ' ("his nose
examined this stuff and did not like it"). Quite interestingly, there are no
examples in which Lok's own actions extend beyond himself: similarly to
the other members of his tribe, he does not seem prepared to open himself
to otherness and to 'act upon the world' in a new and more striking way. In
Halliday's words (1981, 349):
The entire transitivity structure of language can be summed up by
saying that there is no cause and effect. More specifically: in this
language, processes are seldom represented as resulting from an
external cause; in those instances where they are, the 'agent' is
seldom a human being; and where it is a human being, it is seldom
one of the people. Whatever the type of process, there tends to be
only one participant; any other entities are involved only indirectly,
as circumstantial elements (syntactically, through the mediation
of a preposition). It is as if doing was as passive as seeing, and
things no more affected by actions than by perceptions: their role
is as in clauses of mental process, where the object of perception is
not in any sense 'acted upon' - it is in fact the perceiver that is the
'affectedparticipant, not the thing perceived- and likewise tends
to be expressed circumstantially (e.g. Lok peered at the stick). There
is no effective relation between persons and objects: people do not
bring about events in which anything other than themselves, or parts
of the bodies, are implicated.
In conclusion, the importance of transitivity patterns for the study
of characters has been established for at least 40 years. Despite the tech-
nicality and the complexity of its structures, SFL can offer crucial tools
for approaching the way in which characters make sense of the world
(ideational metafunctions) and the dynamics among them (interperson-
al metafunctions, not discussed here). After Halliday, many stylisticians
have used SFL-based approaches (Hasan 1985; Hoover 1999; Taylor-Tor-
sello 1990; Miller and Turci 2007; Miller 2017), while others have heav-
ily criticised it: in 'What is Stylistics and Why are They Saying Such
Terrible Things About It?', for example, Stanley Fish (1979) condemned
the use of SFL for the study of literature, by pointing out that the theory
only "provides labels for its constituents. [ ... ] When a text is run through
Halliday's machine, its parts are first disassembled, then labelled, and fi-
nally recombined into their original form" (1979, 137). Forty years later,
analyses by scholars from all around the world have shown that things are
somehow different.
2.3.6 Dialogue and characterisation
In the last decade, scholars have often used the expression 'interpersonal
pragmatics' to approach characterisation starting from a character's con-
versational behaviour, and from dialogue in particular (Locher and Sage
2010; Haugh, Kadar and Mills 2013; Bednarek 2018). This section will
cover two main areas of interest for the study of dialogue: politeness and
impoliteness, and expressive identity.
2.3.6.1 Politeness and impoliteness
(lm)politeness frameworks have been used in stylistics mainly for the
study of drama (Leech 1992; Simpson 1989, 1993) and, more occasionally,
prose (Martinez-Cabeza Lombardo 1994). More recently, the framework
has also been used to approach characterisation in TV or film dialogue,
(Mandala 2011; Bednarek 2012; Dyne] 2012, 2015;). In their seminal work
on politeness, Brown and Levinson ( 1987) had already pointed out that "an
understanding of the significant dimensions on which interaction varies
should provide insights into the dimensions on which personality is built,
as well as social relationships" (1987, 232).
Central to the analysis of politeness is the concept of face, which is
often associated to notions such as reputation, prestige and self-esteem.
Face can be positive or negative, positive face coinciding with the "want
of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others [ ... ]
in particular, it includes the desire to be ratified, understood, approved
of, liked or admired" (Brown and Levinson 1987, 61 ). Negative face, on
the other hand, is defined as "the want of every competent adult member
that his actions be unimpeded by others" (Brown and Levinson 1987, 62).
Any action encroaching upon a person's face is considered a/ace-threat-
ening act (FTA): orders, insults and criticisms are typical examples of
it. In order to maintain their face, people constantly use redressive strat-
egies, typical examples being certain linguistic elements that soften the
force of a speaker's utterance: Culpeper (2001, 239) reports the example
"I wondered if I could trouble you to do this", which threatens the neg-
ative face of a speaker's interlocutor similarly to "Do this!" but is much
more softened, therefore much more polite. Moreover, the degree of face-
threat of a particular act varies significantly according to three factors:
the social distance between participants, the relative power of the hearer
above the speaker and the absolute ranking of the imposition involved in
the act. In human relationships, it is essential to "minimize ( other things
being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs" and to "maximize ( other
things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs" (Leech 1983, 81 ).
The type of relationship between the interlocutors is central in these re-
gards, 'directness' being closely related to the degree of intimacy be-
tween the speakers.
The power of (im)politeness configurations for characterisation can
be better understood with reference to a well-known scene from the movie
Scent of a Woman ( 1992), already analysed by other stylisticians (Culpeper
2001; Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanila 2017) for its power of exempli-
fication: set in the US, the movie narrates the relationship between Charlie,
a student at a prestigious private school supported by student aid, and the
'colonel', and old and very educated man who is now blind and occasion-
ally looked after by Charlie in exchange for some money. The following
extract reports their first encounter:
CH: Sir? (1)
COL: Don't call me sir. (2)
CH: I'm sorry, I mean mister, sir. (3)
COL: Uh-ooh, we've got a moron here, is that it? (4)
CH: No mister .... I....er .... that is .... er ... .Jieutenant, yes sir .. .lieu - (5)
COL: Lieutenant-Colonel. 26 years on the line, nobody ever busted
me four grades before. Get in here, you idiot. [Pause] Come a
little closer, I want to get a better look at you. How's your skin,
son? (6)
CH: My skin, sir? (7)
COL: Ah, for Christ's sake! (8)
CH: I'm sorry, I don't- (9)
COL: Just call me Frank. Call me Mr. Slade. Call me Colonel, if you
must. Just don't call me sir. (10)
CH: Alright, Colonel. (11)
COL: Simms, Charles, a senior. You on student aid, Simms? (12)
 CH: Ah, yes I am. (13)
COL: For student aid read crook. Your father peddles card telephones
at a 300 per cent mark-up; your mother works on heavy commis-
sion in a camera store, graduated to it from expresso machines.
Ha, ha! What are you ... dying of some wasting disease? (14)
CH: No ... I'm right here. (15)
COL: I know exactly where your body is. What I'm looking for is
some indication of a brain. ( 16)
Considering that the characters are complete strangers and that the
young one is taking care of the older, viewers' schemata regarding inter-
personal relationships in this context are frustrated from the start: indeed,
since the outset the colonel's conversational behaviour 'slaps' Charlie in
the face - negative face. In other words, readers' prior knowledge of the
role relationship between Charlie ( carer) and the Colonel ( cared for) and
its power implications may more easily have given rise to contrary expec-
tations about their behaviour.
In tum 2, for example, the Colonel uses an imperative form to carry
out a command, and the same verb tense is repeatedly used throughout the
whole dialogue. The Colonel's turns are brusque and transgressive of social
rules: first, he is interested in taboo information (the student's income, for
instance), then he offends Charlie's parents without any evidence - thus
breaking Grice's maxim of quality. He also threatens Charlie's positive face
by using the term of address "moron" or "you idiot" in turns 4 and 6. De-
spite the Colonel's provocations, Charlie's behaviour is polite and respect-
ful of social rules: he speaks much less, uses deferential terms of address
("sir", turns 1 and 7; "Colonel" tum 11 ), apologises and keeps trying to
comply with h1s interlocutor's requests to do something. The correspond-
ent inferences readers are likely to draw from the Colonel's conversational
behaviour go in the direction of a warped personality, perhaps with misan-
thropic traits (see also Culpeper 2001, 257). Charlie, on the other hand, is
likely to be perceived as a prototypically shy, a bit passive, and a generally
positive character thanks to his consistent and somehow unexpected polite
behaviour, which does not change despite the Colonel's attacks.
As observed above (see, in particular, 2.1 and 2.2), the impression
of characters in readers' minds results from the combination of top-down
and bottom-up information. The former coincides with readers' schemata
about people and situations, those schemata being reinforced or refreshed
by the information coming from the text (bottom-up). Interestingly, in
Scent of a Woman readers' inferences tend to be reinforced by both charac-
ters' conversational behaviour, which remains the same for almost the total
duration of the movie. Therefore, inferences are likely to be interpreted as
personality traits of the characters.
Very interestingly, towards the end of the movie the following ex-
change seems to sharply deviate from the norm established by the previous
conversation behaviour:
COL: Get out of here. (I)
CH: I'm staying right here. (2)
COL: Get out of here. (3)
CH: I'm staying right here. (4)
COL: I'll blow your fucking head off. (5)
CH: Do it. You want to do it, do it. Let's go. (6)
COL: Get out of here. (7)
CH: Look, you fucked up, alright, so what? So everybody does it.
Get on with your life would you. (8)
COL: What life? I got no life. I'm in the dark here, you understand?
I'm in the dark. (9)
CH: So give up. You want to give up, give up. Because I'm giving
you up too. You say I'm thorough, you're right. I'm through.
We're both through. It's all over. So let's get on with it, Jet's
fucking do it. Let's fucking ... pull the trigger ... you miserable
blind motherfucker. Pull the trigger. ( 10)
The Colonel is preparing to kill himself with a gun and Charlie has
tried to stop him by resorting to a series of politeness strategies, as we
would expect. When he realises he will not be able to get the gun from the
Colonel's hands, however, his conversational behaviour changes abruptly:
for the first time he defies the Colonel's commands (turns 2 and 4) and uses
taboo words (turns 8 and 10) in order to become impolite (tum 10) and
cause maximum face damage (see also Culpeper 2001, 260). By deviating
dramatically from his usual pattern of behaviour, he thus triggers a new se-
ries of correspondent inference: traits like determination or bravery might
be now attributed to him. By being now ready to use any means to achieve
his goal, in other words, he shifts from the status of flat character to the
status of round character in readers' minds, i.e. to the status of a character
who can surprise and evolve (see Part 1 of this volume for the distinction
between flat and round characters).
The role of (im)politeness strategies, as can be seen from these illus-
trative examples, may crucially contribute to the construction of charac-
ters: by combining with the many other factors introduced in the previous
sections, it plays one of the most important roles in the analytic model of
characterisation outlined in this volume.
2.3.6.2 Expressive identity
Traditionally, emotion and affect have been investigated by looking at a
range of linguistic features that include, among the others, evaluative lexis,
hedges, emphatics, modal verbs, lexical repetitions and pronouns, in com-
bination with non-verbal clues (Caffi and Janney 1994).
More recently, a great amount of research in this area has been con-
ducted by Bednarek (2010, 2011, 2012, 2018), who has focused mainly
on characterisation in televisual discourse. Starting from the assumption
that one of the functions of dialogue is "the revelation of character, telling
viewers something about characters' mental states and personality" (2010,
101 ), she has used the term expressive character identity to refer to identity
encompassing both the emotionality and the attitudes/values/ideologies of
characters. In her study, the term 'expressive' is preferred to the more tradi-
tional 'affective', or 'evaluative' as it captures different kinds of attitudes,
including emotions, values and ideologies: therefore, under the same label,
she groups traditionally emotive interjections like "Oh my God!", evalu-
ative statements like "that was a good kiss!" and announcements of ide-
ological beliefs like "I don't see how anybody can resist eating meat".
Additionally, she also focuses on less explicit resources and multimodal
features that might not be immediately evident.
Broadly speaking, Bednarek provides an overview of selected resourc-
es that can be classified as potentially expressive: they include speech acts
like apologising, congratulating, complimenting, complaining, praising,
boasting, etc.; linguistic resources linked to emotion, affect, evaluation,
stance, appraisal, subjectivity like rhythm, pitch, loudness, evaluative lex-
is, the emotion lexicon, connotative meanings of lexis, modal adverbs/ad-
jective/verbs, nouns, hedges, intensifiers, emphatics, exclamations, swear-
ing, style markers, metaphor, affective morphology, etc.
Additionàlly, she combines linguistic research with corpus methods
and shows how characters are construed and kept credible also by means of
expressive resources. In particular, she focuses on the American TV show
Gilmore Girls and analyses the frequency of interjections in the characters
with more turns and the frequency of breaking the norm. In the first case,
corpus methods allow her to conclude that some characters in the show are
construed as more emotional than others, while others have very similar
emotional patterns. In addition to frequency, she also uses techniques like
key-words and n-grams that show how evaluative language is employed:
in particular, she investigates which words tend to occur together in char-
acters' conversation, which is also indicative of their peculiar idiolect. In
the second case, she does not focus on repeated and patterned semiotic be-
haviour, but in the disruption of such patterns. In other words, she investi-
gates what happens when a character's one-off use of an interjection breaks
the norm that has been set up previously in the show (2010, 132): when
characters use an interjection they normally would not use, the context in
which this deviant behaviour takes place is emotionally foregrounded. For
example, a character called Rory tends not to use strong expletives such
as 'hell', in line with her expressive identity; similarly, a character called
Luke would not use an interjection like 'yay', which is instead used largely
by the other characters. Therefore, the very few instances of 'hell' by Rory,
or of 'yay' by Luke are to be interpreted as a departure from a text-internal
norm or target-based expectancy set up for the characters, resulting in the
construal of strong emotionality.
To be noted, only interjections are taken into consideration here.
However, corpus techniques provide the possibility of focussing on all
the linguistic resources expressing emotions listed above. Therefore, a
very large amount of information might be considered in approaching
characterisation from the point of view of emotionality, potentially an
almost infinite number of variables. Also of some note is the fact that, as
pointed out above, the term 'expressive identity' does not only encom-
pass emotions, but also attitudes/values/ideologies of the character. The
discussion of these other resources goes beyond the scope of this volume
(if interested, see Bednarek 2010, chapter 8), however in some particular
novels or TV shows they might prove very central for the construal of
characters.
2.3. 7 Characters as 'inhabitants of possible worlds'
Traditionally, the term 'modality' has been used to refer to the "judgement
of belief and obligation that speakers attach to their utterances" (Simpson
2005, 313): in other words, the term covers those linguistic expressions
that relate to the truth of what is being declared in a given proposition. In
phrase 'Mary's words could be true', for example, the modal verb could
signals the degree of certainty of the speaker about Mary's words, and is
therefore central for conveying epistemic modality. Other words or expres-
sions that convey epistemic modality are: maybe, perhaps, may, might, I
think, I believe, to quote but a few. The term 'modality' in the linguistic
tradition is also used to refer to the degree of obligation or permission con-
veyed by a certain utterance: in the sentence 'You should read that book',
for example, the modal verb 'should' conveys deontic modality, in the
same manner as alternatives like 'must', 'ought to', 'may', 'it's necessary',
'you're obliged to', and so on.
As regards characterisation, modality can quite intuitively be used to
analyse the interpersonal metafunction of language (see section 2.3.5): it
can provide important clues for investigating the relationship among char-
acters, how certain they are about what they say, how polite they are to
each other in their requests, etc.
The study of modal structures and systems has also been carried out
within a more narratologically-oriented framework, with the emphasis be-
ing placed on their capacity to shape narrative worlds and their potential
to produce stories. The pioneering work in this area is Lubomir Dolezel 's
Heterocosmica. Fiction and possible worlds (1998), where it is argued that
narrative worlds, also referred to as fictional universes, or fictional worlds
are themselves organised according to modal systems. As a consequence,
one of the first aspects to consider for character analysis is the structure of
the fictional world in which he/she is embedded. The internal furnishing of
the worlds of fiction may in fact vary a lot according to the type of narra-
tive being produced: in some cases the attributes of a fictional universe are
very similar to the ones of our real world, but this is not always the case:
very different sets of properties characterise, for instance, the narrative
worlds of so-called Science Fiction, therefore we could expect characters
to be affected by the particular fictional worlds they inhabit.
The internal structure of the worlds of fiction - and the properties
characters may have in them - has been studied extensively by possible
world theory, a field developed from 'possible worlds' in logic in the early
1960s (Ryan 1985, 2004; Pavel 1986): according to those studies, our ac-
tual world is just one of a number of possible worlds, each of which could
be regulated by different sets of possible laws. The same holds true for
narrative: as Dolezel points out (1988, 475-96), traditional mimetic criti-
cism has always tied fictions exclusively to the actual world, thus relating
even the most fantastic narratives to one sole universe of discourse, i.e. our
actual world. Narrative, however, often makes use of alternative conceptu-
al systems, a reason why it is necessary to also make use of different sets
of tools. The actual world usually participates in the formation of fictional
worlds by providing models for its structure or by anchoring the fictional
story to a historical event: yet, the ontology of a fictional world is very
different from the ontology of the real world:
Possible-worlds semantics makes us aware that the actual material
has to undergo a substantial transformation at the world boundary:
it has to be converted into non-actual possibles, with all the
ontological, logical and semantic consequences. We have already
noted this conversion in the special case of fictional individuals;
actual world (historical) persons are allowed to enter a.fictional
world only if they assume the status of possible alternates (1988,
485).
In analysing characters, the starting point should therefore be the iden-
tification of the internal structure of the world they inhabit, which may
consist of a single ontological domain, governed by a single set of laws, or
of several ontological domains, governed by separate sets of laws. Single
ontological domains are worlds dominated by homogeneity: in traditional
realistic narratives, for example, the only domain underlying the fiction-
al world has very different laws to the world of reality (natural fictional
world). Similarly, most fairy tales are dominated by a single domain, that
breaks the laws of our world (supernatural fictional world), but no other
domains are present. Heterogeneous world structures, on the other hand,
are dominated by multiple domains within the same narrative: in tradition-
al epics, for example, the laws underlying the world of Gods are totally dif-
ferent from those governing the world of human beings, yet both domains
are present at the same time.
Once the specific domains characterising a particular fictional world
have been identified (single or multiple, factual or counterfactual), it is
necessary to proceed with the analysis of the modal structure underlying
that fictional universe: according to Dolezel, a limited set of basic mac-
ro-constraints underlying the formation of all stories can be identified, such
constraints coinciding with one of these four modal systems introduced
below:
A. Deontic modalities are concerned with the notions of permission,
obligation and necessity: they rule what is permitted or forbidden
in a particular fictional world and are therefore crucial for the ac-
tions of characters. In different deontic conditions, the same ac-
tions may indeed acquire totally different values and cause very
different consequences: for example, the same behaviours could
be considered neutral in one deontic environment and dangerously
transgressive in another deontic environment.
As a consequence, the deontic dimension of actions is one of the
richest sources of narrative creation: prohibition or obligation
produce stories dominated by the prohibition-violation-punish-
ment structures, where characters struggle to carry out prohibited
actions, or stories dominated by an obligation-fulfilment-reward
structure, where characters struggle to fulfil tasks that are required
of them.
Quite interestingly, the deontic structure of a particular fictional
world may undergo drastic changes during the story unfolding:
deontic acquisitions, for instance, generally coincide with the can-
cellation of particular prohibitions or obligations, thus typically
producing stories of personal, national, or racial liberation; deon-
tic losses, on the other hand, generally coincide with the establish-
ment of new prohibitions or obligations, thus producing stories
characterised by sudden oppression, lack of freedom, slavery, etc.
B. Axiological modalities are concerned with notions of goodness,
badness and indifference and involve people's personal system of
values: because values for one character may be considered dis-
values by another one, axiological modalities are among the most
powerful triggers for characters actions. Indeed, the presence of
values or disvalues originates desires or repulsions, in tum respon-
sible for characters' decisions to undertake specific actions and not
others.
::, .
C. Epistemic modalities are concerned with characters knowledge,
belief or ignorance of particular aspects of the fictional world:
usually, this may coincide with scientific knowledge, ideology, re-
ligion, cultural mythology, etc., but it is not only that. Epistemic
also refers to characters' awareness of what is going on in the fic-
tional world in terms of other characters' lives, actions, thoughts:
all detective stories, for example, are characterised by the need to
acquire the necessary knowledge for solving a particular problem
or better understanding a particular situation happening in that sto-
ry-world. Similarly, in 'bildungsromans' characters are described
through their diachronic acquisitions or losses of knowledge pat-
terns, usually from a particular moment in time when there is little
knowledge of the world to a moment in which a proper knowledge
opens up new possibilities for living in different manners.
D. Finally, al ethic modalities are concerned with notions of possibil-
ity, impossibility and necessity: they determine the fundamental
conditions of the fictional world, starting from spatio-temporal
parameters, causality, and characters possibility of action. The
manipulation of such conditions determines what may or may not
happen in a particular fictional world: as Dolezel points out (1988,
479), when the fictional world shares very similar characteristics
and possibilities with the real world, it can be referred to as a nat-
ural fictional world, which is a realisation of all the physically
possible worlds. On the other hand, there are many examples of
fictional worlds regulated by alethic possibilities that do not exist
in the real world: characters may have supernatural powers and
therefore being able to fly, travel in time, etc.; animals may have
anthropomorphic traits and talk like humans, etc. These worlds are
called supernatural fictional worlds.
According to this model, when something is possible within a nar-
rative universe, it is possible with reference to the characters - or at least
to some of them. Dolezel has used the term 'alien' to refer to characters
who differ from their world-mates for one or more modal possibilities: a
deontic alien, for example, is a character who decides not to follow the
moral prescribed Jaws of that particular fictional world, and therefore acts
according only to his or her own will; an axiological alien is a character
who deliberately denies the axiological order of the world: he/she is often
a nihilist - a person who replaces the values shared by the other characters
with some specific values of his/her own - or a rebel - a person who re-
places the axiological code of the world with an opposite, subjective one;
an epistemic alien is a character whose knowledge ofreality is particularly
rich or, on the other hand, particularly poor: some characters have access to
some aspects of reality in much more detail than the others, and thus may
have the possibility to control them; finally, an alethic alien is a character
whose physical and mental abilities differ significantly from those of the
other characters: in some fictions, for example, some characters are able to
fly, or read other characters' thoughts, while others may suffer from alethic
restrictions, i.e. they may not have the same physical or mental abilities as
the other ones.
When used in combination with other analytical tools, possible world
theories provide a stimulating and very useful framework for the analysis
of literary worlds, and of characters in particular. Practical examples will
be provided in part 3 of the volume.
2.3.8 Characters and 'intertextuality'
Even if readers do not always realise it, several characters are construed
through a net ofreferences to other characters from novels of the past. The
phenomenon is usually referred to as intertextuality, a term which originat-
ed in the l 960s21. A text can refer to another one in different ways, some
examples of which are parody, allusion, direct quotation and structural par-
allelism.
As far as characters are concerned, intertextuality can function at dif-
ferent levels, starting from their very first attribute, the name. In David
Lodge's Small World, for example, most of the names recall mythical char-
acters of the past, therefore they inevitably create some expectations in the
readers, at least in the ones that recognise the allusion: a character called
'Morgana', for instance, will trigger schematic knowledge about Arthurian
legends and about the traits of the characters belonging to those cycles. The
same may happen when a character's name is very similar to the one of
another character: 'Hubert' and 'Hubertine' in Zola, for instance, are likely
to trigger expectations of similarity in the readers.
A character may also recall another one by means of allusions to ac-
tions and settings of the past, a strategy which 'enriches his/her meaning':
Don Quixote, for example, insists on trying to imitate the actions of legend-
ary heroes from the past, therefore at least part of his characterisation uses
parody strategies. Something similar happens with settings: characters are
often described while living or working in places that look very similar to
those from other fictional worlds. In Lodge's Nice Work, for instance, Vic
Wilcox - one of the two protagonists - is often portrayed while fulfilling
his job as a boss in a foundry, a location described in almost identical terms
to those used by Dickens's 191h century novels. In order to fully understand
and enjoy Lodge's character, the reader needs to be familiar with Dickens's
characters, who are, in some ways, Vic Wilcox's prototypes.
21
The term was first coined by the critic Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, and since
then has become very important within literary and cultural studies. It refers
to the several connections that link a text to other texts that have preceded it.
A very good introduction to the concept can be found in Allen (2007).
 Finally, intertextuality may also regard the use of specific narrative
techniques: some novels are in fact emblematic for highlighting a very par-
ticular character's type of speech over the others. In Don DeLillo 's The Body
Artist, for example, the narrative technique foregrounds the consciousness
of Lauren, the female protagonist: almost every aspect of the fictional world
is filtered through her own mental experience, in a very similar way to re-
nowned novels of the past like Woolf's Mrs Da!loway or To the Lighthouse.
Again, some readers will identify, in the dense net of intertextual allusions,
some features belonging to Woolf's characters, which will probably acti-
vate the prior knowledge they have acquired during their 'encounters' with
Woolf's characters. In tum, Don DeLillo's Laureen will be elaborated by
those readers through extra layers of meaning: in other words, she will be,
at least in some ways, a different character for those readers.
Taken together, the processes introduced in the various sections of
2.3 can be thought of as a toolkit for the creation of an analytical model
for character investigation: analysts could start by looking at the attributes
of the characters' story-world (see 2.3.7), before addressing all the other
points discussed from 2.3.1 to 2.3.8. As will be discussed in Part 3, not all
these points can be addressed in all narratives: in some cases, for exam=
pie, mind style may not be prominent, therefore it will not be analysed.
Similarly, some novels may foreground politeness patterns but disregard
intertextuality, or vice versa; characters' use of language may cue their
belonging to a specific social class, but in some other cases this may not
be the case, etc. All the aspects discussed, however, are all very crucial to
characterisation, and should be addressed if possible.

2.4 CONCLUSION

In Part 2 of this volume a series of stylistic approaches to characterisa-

tion have been introduced and discussed, with examples drawn from the
author's work or from other scholars'. The models singled out are not the
only ones elaborated for the study of character, but are, in the author's
view, the optimal ones for a systematic and comprehensive approach en-
compassing both the 'person' and the 'part of a design' dimension.
In particular, it has been observed that the formation of a character's
image in readers' minds emerges from at least two sets of processes: the
first ones are called top-down and describe readers' cognitive mechanisms
while they are engaged with reading fiction. As discussed, prior knowl-
edge, short-term rpemory, long-term memory and schemata all contribute
to readers' personal experience of meaning-creation with texts and char-
acters: other things being equal (the text itself), those mechanisms are re-
sponsible for the different types of experiences different readers may have
with texts. Additionally, it has also been pointed out that the same concepts
can be applied to characters' minds: Briony Tallis in Atonement, for exam-
ple, fails to properly make sense of the situation in the story-world for lack
of proper schemata, which are replaced by others which are more aligned
with her prior knowledge. This causes tragic events.
Top-down processes interact with bottom-up ones, i.e. with the lan-
guage used in the texts. The interaction flows continuously during the
progression of the plot, even if for analytical purposes the two operations
are presented separately. Bottom-up processes include all those strategies
used by authors in order to construe characterisation: narrative techniques,
presentation types, implicit/explicit information about the characters, met-
aphorical/deictical/pragmatic patterns that make mind style explicit, tran-
sitivity profiles, politeness or impoliteness behaviours, intertextuality, etc.
 Part 3: A Case-Study: 'The Body Artist'

3.1. INTRODUCTION

In the second part of this volume a model of characterisation combining

top-down and bottom-up processes has been proposed, along with exam-
ples taken from narrative extracts. The processes introduced belong to sty-
listics and to narratology domains, both contributing for their part. This
chapter will provide another example of analysis based on a single novel:
Don DeLillo's The Body Artist (2001).
Ideally, as made clear in Part 2, analyses should address all the tech-
niques introduced in that section: characters' 'habitat' m the story-world,
narratorial control, self and other-pr'eS"enumon, 1mphc1t and explicn m-
formation about characters, narratorial filters mcluding point of view and
mind style, transitivity patterns, (im)politeness attems and expressive
identity, intertextuafity. Actct16onal1y, readers' schemata sliou a so e a -
dressed. In practical terms, since not all characters are construed according
to the same criteria, analyses are likely to focus on only some of them,
while others will be omitted. Additionally, some points may be addressed
together for analytical purposes.
r The-novel under.Jnvestigation in this cha.12ter narrates the.Jife-of a
character called Lauren Hartke: slre~works as a~conce12tual artist and con-
tinuously transforms her body on stage in various ways. Lauren lives alone
in a very bigseaside house she had rented.wiifîher.husband'Rey. G:\fu!r .his
deaili';she realises someone else is sharing-the house with h.£!:, a mysterious
childlike man hidden in one of the bedrooms on the first floor. The man,
whom she baptis-~uttle', seems to have-supernatural p.oW'ers.&f ost
of.rhe story narrates the-relationship betweerîfhem.jfocussihg.mostly on
L Lauren's----inner thoughts=ând feelings. For analytical purposes, some ex-
tracts from the novel will be fully reproduced when necessary.
3.2 CHARACTERISATION
FEATURES
THROUGH 'FICTIONAL WORLD'
I s,ibJ..e ~tlds.
As stated in section 2.3.7 above, the attributes of the fictional world inhab-
ited by characters can help to shed light on their traits. In particular, the
modal structure of the fictional environment may recall the real world, or
it can be very different from it; additionally, narrative worlds can be cJ:IBI-
acterised both by single ontological domains and by 'multiple ontological
-
domains' (alethic, epistemic, deontic axiolooi a - ~
In The Bo y Anist (BA henceforth), a natural fictional world is ini-
tially ~at~.d: an American married couple of artists decides to spend six
months in a rented house near the sea in order to find rest and concentra-
tion. Such a plot does not seem to present anything strikingly different
from what could happen in the real world: since the laws underlying the
narrative are of one type only, we can refer to this ontological domain as
'homogeneous'. However, things are very soon doomed to change abrupt-
ly: during a business trip to New York, the male character Rey commits
suicide; although in deep sorrow and very lonely, Lauren decides to keep
living in the isolated house on her own for the remaining months of rent,
but during her isolation she begins to realise that someone else is sharing
the house with her. After some days of great apprehension, she manages to
understand what is happening: a "smallish and fine bodied human being"
(BA, 43), whom she initially considers a child, is found sitting on the edge
of a bed on the first floor of the house. This character does not seem able to
speak, and initially she persuades herself that he is a patient escaped from
some hospital or psychiatric facility. But suddenly something bewildering
happens: the person, whom she baptises Mr Tuttle after one of her high
school teachers, begins to speak: in doing so, he manifests his capabilities
to reproduce the voices of Rey and Lauren. Not only does he speak exactly
as Rey and Lauren used to do when Rey was still alive, reproducing their
pitches and sounds, but he is also able to reproduce some of the conver-
sations the two had had in the house in the previous months. As the story
unfolds, we realise that Mr Tuttle's abilities are not the only unexpected
things that take place in the narrative: Lauren is in fact able to totally trans-
form her body during her artistic exhibitions, giving it either a male or a
female shape scene after scene.
The introduction of Mr Tuttle's and of Lauren's supernatural abilities
thus produces a modification in the readers' previously-formed schema-
ta about the modal structure of the novel: the fictional context is in fact
----
no longer regulated by a homogeneous ontological domain, as it suddenly
becomes clear that a a1wensin. the.narrative could never be possi,ble
in t e real world. To put it different!):'. and someho.v..wnot'e..technically, a
modification of the afëthic modalities that determine.the conditions of the
fictional w'OTlcrsudcterrty-o-ccurs, thus turning the fictional universe into a
supernatural fictional w..o_.rld,Jhat is a realisation of all the physically pos-
Such modality manipulation in the story-world is not without conse-
quences for the characters: as pointed out in 2.3.7, when something be-
comes possible in a particular fictional world, it primarily affects the in-
habitants of that world, or at least some - or one - of them. In The Body
Artist, then, Don DeLillo_has-created-an heterogeneous world structure
regulated by twÜ different ontological domains: the first of them is the
domain m which.most of the characters act, a domain which displays the
same laws Ôfthe actual world, whereas the second one - the supernatural
domain - is only .inhabited by Lauren and Mr Tuttle. Here, the laws that
hâve been stipulated confer supernatural powers on the characters: they
are able to reproduce perfectly other characters' speeches or they are able
to use their body to reproduce other people's bodies and movements. In
Dolezel's words introduced in 2.3.7, bo.th...Mr Tuttle and Lauren_can be
referred to as 'aliens', 'al ethic aliens' in particular.
3.3. THE IMPACT OF CHARACTER PRESENTATION MODES
As observed in 2.3 .2 above, some methods of character presentation are
generally considered more reliable than others: for example, r.resentations
carried out by a third person omniscient narrator ~e._g~nerally considered
more cred!61e than presentations made by other characters or by a single
character speakingabout him/herself.
Very interestingly, in The Body Artist most of the information about
Mr Tuttle i e ed thrQYgQ Lauren's lelill§., since narration.is almost.to-
t _carrieci.ouLthrough.her point of view. The following extract describes
the exact moment in which she discovers him in one of the rooms of the
big house:
He didn't raise his head. There was something so strange about him
that she heard her words hang in the room, predictable and trite. She
felt no fear. He had a foundling quality- lost and found- and she
was, she guessed, the.finder (BA, 45).
Is it possible to legitimately infer that "strangeness" and "a foundling
quality" are Mr Tuttle's personality traits? In other words, is strangeness an
attribute of the character or does it need to be ascribed to someone else's
conjecture? Does Mr Tuttle exist or is he merely the product of Lauren's
imagination? When Mr Tuttle is introduced for the first time in the text,
 for example, readers have already had more than one chance to realise that
Lauren's perceptions tend to be altered by the grief caused by Rey's death,
and by the long time spent in total isolation in the remote house. Moreover,
unreliability may also be corroborated by the fact that 'Mr Tuttle' is a name
Lauren herself has created, therefore the traits of the character she has just
discovered are unlikely to be totally objective - they may indeed coincide
wi!b-so.m-e-idios-yncrnti&-projectiGns-o.fher mind. Mr Tuttle, in other words,
might perhaps display such traits as strangeness and a foundling quality,
but in order for them to be classified as personality traits of the character
they should come from more reliable voices, or emerge from other textual
_ ···-· -·· -·-o.1. for_sba.racteLptesentation is action: personality.J.ra1ts
may be lm lied either by one-time actions or b.y...habitual ones, One-time
ctions tend to evo e t e ynamic aspects of the character, whereas ha-
bitual actions are likely to reveal the character's more static aspects, quite
Ll
often combined with a comic effect. Although a one-time action may not
reflect permanent qualities, however, it is no less peculiar to the character
(Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 61). Rey's act of shooting himself is emblematic in
these respects, and readers may infer some particular traits of his personal-
ity, e.g. emotional instability, or tendency to depression. Indeed, such traits
are somehow anticipated by a series of repeated actions reported in the
first part of the book: the first chapter of the book is entirely devoted to the
description of Rey and Lauren's breakfast, but it soon becomes clear that
the actions described (reading the newspaper in a particular way, asking
the same questions several times, repeating the same acts more than once)
have the function of conveying crucial information about the emotional
condition of the character. Indeed, the traits readers may infer from those
descriptions are later reinforced by the character's tragic, ultimate one-
time action.
Externai appearance is also Jilsely to con.ve~_the traits of a ch
ter. Conversely, the total lack of references to physicality is equally sig-
nificant: in The Body Artist, for example, both Lauren and Mr Tuttle are
not described from the physical point of view, and this may be related to
their identity: indeed, both characters are presented as 'troubled' from.the
identi point of view, at least in this part of their lives. Lauren feels that
she woul e to issolve", to be someone else, to "disappear in Rey's
smoke" (BA, 36), whereas Mr Tuttle's own words are mostly incoherent,
fragmented, and a-semantic - a fact that is linked to identity.
Environment is also important in the in1!:29.yction ofa_char].Çj_er. ;Yb.se
does the action tend to take place'? Do characters act mostly indoors or out-
'oors'? ln 1'hë..B__Që/iAr.tüt, mos.t..oLthe a_çtiQ.11,.take§_place indoors: the first
chapter of the book is entirely devoted to Lauren and Rey's breakfast in the
kitchen; the rest of the novel mostly describes the time Lauren spends with
Mr Tuttle on the second floor of the house, or in the kitchen; the chapter de-
scribing her job as a body artist is entirely set in a theatre. Quite intuitively,
in indoor settings there tends to be less action than in outdoor on.es, there-
forelfarrativesTend to coincide with a predominance of inner life report-
ing: it is not a coincidence that in The Body Artist, almost entirely narrated
through FDT ( see section 2.3 .1 above) ~ters think rather than act. In
addition, it is not to be ruled out that cumulative narrative parts which take
place indoors might generate some feeling of distress or claustrophobia, at
least in some readers.
ln conclusion, character introduction-in.Ihe Body,jrti§f mainly comes
fr~mimplici_Lçu~s (see 2.3 .3): the~narrator does not tell readers about them,
but mainly leaves them to infer their traits from contextual factors and
verbal/non-verbal behaviour. Conversational features, in particular, trigger
important inferences: as will be discussed in 3.4, the characters' use of
lexis is highly indicative of their social status; in Rey and Lauren's break-
fa~ lexicalchoices are often sophisticated and uncommon.
As reg~~-Mi:-T-1:1tt-fe;:'hi~;-paralingu1Stic features (mostly variation in pitch
and pitch range), together with the idiosyncratic use of lexis, suggest a
character who is hard to capture from the identity point of view, someone
who is troubled in some ways, even if it is not clear how. When it becomes
evident that he is able to precisely reproduce other people's speeches, new
traits are likely to be ascribed to him by readers, even ifhe tends to remain
a mysterious creature: it is never clear to what degree his traits are actually
his traits, and to what degree they derive from Lauren's own individual
elaboration of the situation.
3.4. CHARACTERISATION THROUGH LEXIS
As observed in Part 2, the words charac~ use.in their conversations can
be highly revealing of some of their personality traits: in particular, Cul-
peper)2001, 183) has argued that associating people's choices of words
with particular personalities is not straightforward, yet it is undeniable that
such choices play a pivital role in the general idea readers form of a person
---
or of a character. The more informative c!!Qi_ceê_ involve etymological ori-
gin of the words,Jexical richness and surge features.
As regards the etymological origin of the words, since The Body Art-
ist is largely the recording of a personal, quite intimate experience of a
character, lexis tends to be QllÏlejnformal, mainly derived from Qerm~nic.
On the other hand, the onlyJ.):~.o-parts of.the book which do not report the
intimate life of.the character - the two journalistic reports, one about Rey's
death, the other one about Lauren's work - are much mor_ç fQ_rmal and dis-
plaµ_.greater number of words of Latin origin. The inner-life nature of the
novel, however, makes it hard to focus on the role of formal and informal
language, since Lauren is portrayed mostly while speaking either to herself
 or to Mr Tuttle, i.e. therefore in contexts which are not particularly inform-
ative of her personal attitude in more formal social relationships.
Lexical richness, on the other hand, can be quite informative even in
r
nore private contexts: we would not expect a character to use a formal
vocabulary when he or she speaks to him/herself or to his/her family, yet
a higher or lower diversity of usage in these same contexts can be expect-
ed. As pointed out in Part 2, a lower diversity of lexis "results in receiver
judgement oflower communicator competence, lower socio-economic sta-
tus, and higher anxiety" (Bradac 1982, 107), whereas a.higher diversity of
lexis generally_stands for higher competence. and social status.
InJhe BodyArtist, access to Lauren's lexis comes mainly iruwoways:
direct aridïi'ëe1ndirect diSCOÛp,€. The short text below is an example of
direct discourse and is pronounced by Lauren in a very private setting, yet
it provides useful information about her communicative competence, and
therefore about her education22:
You see there is a chest of drawers. Its stored in a room somewhere
upstairs. Wrapped, I think. Probably wrapped in that padded fabric
they use. Maybe you've come across it. Because it was about to be
moved, shipped, and then somehow, well, you know how these things
don't always happen when they are supposed to. Its a delicate piece,
in two parts, and fairly old (BA, 72).
Out of 55 total words pronounced, 38 are different words, and the
remaining 17 coincide mainly with grammatical words23. Lauren's degree
of lexical richness is therefore the result of38/55, namely 0.7, a ratio quite
close to 1. Her language in this extract is therefore to be interpreted as quite
rich and conveys the feeling of a character belonging to a medium-high so-
cial class, endowed with a good education level. This fact is not surprising:
i
she has been married to a film director for many years and works regularly
in the most important American theatres. As for Mr Tuttle, his language is
generally very fragmented and displays a very large number of words or
expressions repeated over and over again: the degree of lexical richness is
thus, not surprisingly, very low, and projects the image of a character with
low communicative competence and socio-economic status.
22
It goes without saying that this is just for the purposes of exemplification. De-
tailed analysis of much longer stretches of text would be needed. Generally
speaking, however, Lauren's language in different parts of the text is fairly
rich in number of different words.
23
In order to sort out the words for calculation, see Halliday (1989, 61-75). As
far as the distinction between lexical items and grammatical items is con-
cerned, it is important to remember that lexical items are 'content words',
whereas grammatical items are 'function words'. Grammatical items are
those that function in closed systems in the language: determiners, pronouns,
most prepositions, conjunctions, some classes of adverbs and finite verbs.
As far as surge features are concerned, the appraisal framework initial-
ly elaborated by Martin and White (2005) can be used in order to approach
this aspect, among others. Some examples are singled out below to account
for the affective relationship established among the characters in The Body
Artist. The first example uses the first system of appraisal theory, 'Affect':
- "You like everything. You love everything. You 're my happy home.
Here," he said (BA, 19).
- "Then its not gone. Good. I'm happyforyou" (BA, 20).
Both turns are uttered during Lauren and Rey's breakfast in the first
chapter of the book. In the first of them, Rey uses two mental processes
("like" and "love") to refer to Lauren's attitude towards the house they
have just rented, and he speaks about his wife in metaphorical terms ("You
are my happy home"). More realistically, he is here using the system of
'Affect' with an ironic purpose, since the character's suicide will soon
make it clear that Lauren is anything but a "happy home" for him. The
second tum is similar to the first one: it occurs during the same breakfast,
while Lauren is trying to communicate with him with no success. Rey
keeps reading the newspaper while Lauren anxiously asks questions about
some noises on the second floor of the house. Their conversation is a sort
of nonsense, and it is quite evident that Rey is getting more and more nerv-
ous (He said, "What? You insist you will drag this thing out of me. Lucky
we don't normally have breakfast together. Because my mornings" BA,
20). The attributive relational of affect "I'm happy" sounds therefore total-
ly unnatural and signals an attitude much closer to an ironic position than
to real personal involvement. Though very short, the two turns are symbol-
ic of Rey's interpersonal attitude throughout the only chapter in which he
interacts with Lauren: in most of his interactions, he uses the grammar of
'Affect' to communicate a fundamental lack of it.
The attitudinal subsystem of Judgement comprises meanings which
serve to evaluate human behaviour positively and negatively: this subsys-
tem thus emerges when a speaker provides an assessment of some human
participant with reference to that participant's acts or dispositions. There-
fore, under Judgement behaviour can be assessed as moral or immoral,
legal or illegal, socially acceptable or unacceptable, normal or abnormal,
and so on. In the three sentences below, for example, Judgement is used to
assess the character's dispositions:
- She has transformed herself shockingly for this event, and although
the brief run is over, she continues to look well, wasted (BA, 105 my
emphasis).
- Her hair looks terroristic (BA, 105 my emphasis).
.LUO
- This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed
(BA, 106 my emphasis).
The sentences are pronounced by Mariella Chapman, a character who
appears in one of the last chapters of the book. Her aim is to interview Lauren
and create a reliable account of her skills as a body artist: in order to do so,
she describes her appearance and at the same time provides the reader with a
series of judgements that are entirely hers, subjective. The adjective "shock-
ingly" in the first sentence evokes a token of subjective judgement, similarly
to the last verb in the sentence, "wasted". In terms of characterisation, nei-
ther "shockingly" nor "wasted" necessarily represent objective traits of the
character, since they come from another character with a specific purpose:
corroborating the description of Lauren's qualities for the article she is pro-
ducing. Similarly, the adjective "terroristic" in the second sentence has the
aim of conveying a positive judgement. The third sentence glorifies Lauren's
art through a negative judgement: those who decide to leave her show be-
fore it is finished are described by the journalist as "less committed", which
strategically asserts that only the 'most committed', i.e. the most gifted can
understand Lauren's art. Although very circumscribed, the three examples
may help understand how the Appraisal system is ultimately connected with
ideology: the aim of the journalist is to use a language supporting her own
purpose, i.e. writing an article for an important American newspaper, and the
language used to assess the character meets this end.
The second broad semantic domain of Appraisal theory is Source,
which is concerned with the resources for positioning the speaker's voice
with respect to the various propositions and proposals conveyed by a text.
The focus is here on who is making the evaluations: how is he/she posi-
tioned with respect to what is being said? Is he/she totally certain of it?
Are there any significant doubts? Source has been developed in order to
explore how texts are construed not only to persuade explicitly, but also to
influence and ultimately 'naturalise' attitudes, beliefs and assumptions in
more indirect and implicit ways. Two terms are usually associated with this
notion: monoglossic and heteroglossic. The first one, as White points out,
is used for a "bare, 'undialogized' assertion" (2002, 2), which admits no
engagement with alternative positions and voices: it is therefore concerned
with what is taken to be shared knowledge or beliefs. In heteroglossic as-
sertions, on the other hand, the speaker/writer leaves room for alternative
viewpoints, thus not presenting it as an 'absolute truth':
At the funeral we barely talked So you avoided me a little, which I
understand it, believe me, and can sympathize. I also accept what he
did because I know him forever. But for you its different. I feel bad
we didn't talk. I could see it coming for years. This is a thing that
was going to happen. We all knew this about him. For years he was
going to do this thing. It was a thing he carried with him. It was his
way out. He wasn't a man in despair. This thing was a plan in his
mind It was his trick that he knew he could do when he needed it. He
even made me see him in the chair (BA, 60).
The character talking on the phone with Lauren is Isabel, Rey's first
wife. Some days have passed since Rey's funeral, and the two women are
talking to each other for the very first time in their lives. The extract is
therefore quite significant in revealing interpersonal styles. FQL.lbi.~_plll:=
pose, we will focus on...the use of.modalisation patterns: a character .using
I màm!f"unï;;:odalised clauses is likely to be perceived as leaving littl.LJ:Q.QJ.n
7 for doubt-.i.a.Jitrle-room for.altematize positions. On the other hand, a
character who tends to modalise his/her assertions is more lik(jyJo be
perèeivea as more open to alternative voices and-Positions. In other words,
th; distinction1s between a 'monoglossic' or a 'heteroglossic' personal
style. Quite significantly, Isabel's clauses in the extract above are most-
ly unmodalised, with the exception of "can" in the second sentence. The
image she projects is one of a very self-confident character, someone who
knows what she is talking about and does not leave room for doubts. For
t explanation's sake, let us re-write the paragraph, changing the different
modalisation patterns:
At the funeral we barely talked So you avoided me a little, which I
understand it, believe me, and can sympathize. I also accept what
he did because I think I know him forever. But for you its probably
different. I feel bad we didn't talk. I could see it coming for years.
This is a thing that was likely to happen. We all thought we knew
this about him. For years it seemed he was going to do this thing.
It was apparently a thing he carried with him. It was probably his
way out. In my opinion he wasn't a man in despair. This thing was
perhaps a plan in his mind. It might have been was his trick that he
knew he could do when he needed it. He even made me see him in
the chair.
By opening up many possibilities to doubt, this second option would
be an instance of heteroglossic style, with much room left to alternative
standpoints. Th.e italics-uv factsignal.rhe non-objectivity-of what is being
s~I.l..lhYs the.possibility.of different points of. view. The two versions
of the same conversation contribute to construing two different character
identities: on the one hand, one who seems more self-confident and less
open to alternative positions; on the other hand a character who consist-
ently admits the possibility of being wrong, thus projecting a more open
disposition to otherness. The interpersonal style recorded in the first extract
is further reinforced in the last exchange between the two characters:
But I want to say it. I insist to say it. This man hated who he was.
Because how long do I know this man and how long do you know
him? I never left. Did I ever leave? Were we really separated? I knew
him in my sleep. And I know exactly how his mind was working.
 He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And
maybe she will not mind the mess (BA, 61-2).
Again, no room is left for alternative points of view: Isabel is very cat-
egorical in her assertions as the very short unmodalised sentences "I want
to say it"; "I insist to say it" make clear. She also uses rhetorical questions,
the answers to which are quite clear, according to her. Additionally, it is
not hard to perceive that Isabelle's aim is also to create competition with
Lauren: "how long do I know this man and how long do you know him?
I never left" significantly positions Isabel interpersonally. No negotiation
is possible between the speaker and her interlocutor, a fact that helps the
creation of character inferences in the readers.
The third broad semantic domain of Appraisal Theory is Graduation.
This domain comprises a set of resources for strengthening and weaken-
ing feelings and attitudes. According to Martin and Rose, graduation is
a resource "for adjusting the volume of gradable items" (2003, 41 ). The
amplification or reduction can take different forms, from the use of inten-
sifiers like 'very', 'really', etc. to the use of attitudinal lexis, i.e. lexis that
.l:Lttributes different semantic values to the same action:
- "Its such astonishing shit" (BA, I 6)
- The piece, called Body Time, sneaked into town for three nights
[. . .] (BA, I 06).
In the first sentence, pronounced by Rey at breakfast time, the ad-
jective "astonishing" works as an intensifier, in that it adjusts the volume
of an attitude that is already very clear. Indeed, *'It's such a shit' could
have been strong enough for conveying his point of view on what is be-
ing broadcast on the radio, yet Rey feels the need to amplify it by means
of an adjective. In the second sentence, written by the journalist who has
interviewed Lauren, the amplification is realised by means of highly con-
notative lexis: the verb "sneaked", which refers to Lauren's show, is in fact
used in place of a more common one, such as 'perform'. The sentence:
*'The piece, called Body Time, was performed in town for three nights',
could have been a more congruent option, yet the journalist uses a less
neutral verb in order to create a more colourful connotation. Declaring that
the show sneaked into town somehow provides a value judgement, since it
is clear that the success of a show which silently sneaked into town, rather
than being advertised, is more well deserved than the success of perfor-
mances highly promoted.
The Appraisal System is much more complex than what appears from
this short account, yet these examples may be sufficient to understand that,
once it is applied systematically to a character's conversational pattern, it
can significantly strengthen the formation of that character's image in the
minds of the readers. Crucial cues can be formed regarding that character's
ideological positions and styles of interaction with the other characters in
the story-world."?" - - -
3.5. CHARACTERISATION THROUGH 'MIND-STYLE'
Linguistic patterns often project a particular world view, i.e. a particu-
lar way of making sense of the textual world: since 'reality' derives from
Rerce12tual..filld_c_ogpitive processes which vary.from.person to persgn, con-
ceptualisations of the same experiences may be very different from indi-
vidual to individual. In other words, some representations ofreality can be
more idiosyncratic than others, thus projecting individual understandings
of the world that are strikingly different from those projected by the other
characters: it is on those deviant, distinctive elaborations of the world that
stylistics studies have focused the most.
As discussed in Part 2, important info.nnati.Pn..abouLcharacters:.minds
comes from the analysis of the metaphors they use.even.though metaphors
are not the only cues. Imagine, for example, a character using two dif-
fèi-eni;"ë!istinct languages throughout the novel: a Language A, structured
into grammatically correct sentences and appropriate lexical choices, and
a Language B structured in a totally different way, characterised by sever-
al grammar mistakes and inappropriate lexical choices. Though not being
metaphoric, such a language would provide significant insights regarding
that character's mind, for example indicating a possible split self.
In, The Body Artist, the role of language is particularly_im_portant for~
approaching the-min.d._of.Mr Tuttle: from his first appearance in the novel,
it soon becomes cl~r that his identity is heavily dependent on the languag£,_
he uses, which strikingly devrntes from tnewliat readers would normally
expect. Some of the initial exchanges between himself and Lauren are re-
ported below:
'What do you see?' she said, gesturing towards the boat and the
advancing cloudline.
'The trees are some of them', he said (BA, 46).
'If there is another language you speak', she told him, 'say some
words'.
'Say some words'.
'Say some words.Doesn't matter ifl can't understand'.
'Say some words to say some words' (BA, 57).
She whispered, 'What are you doing?'
 'I am doing. This yes that. Say some words'.
'Did you ever? Look at me. Did you ever talk to Rey? The way we
are talking now'
'We are talking now'.
'Yes. Are you saying yes? Say yes. When did you know him? '
'I know him where he was' (BA, 64).
'How could you be living here without my knowing?
'But you know. I am living'{BA, 71).
Apart from the sentences "I know him where he was" and "This yes
that", all the utterances produced by Mr Tuttle are correct from a grammat-
ical point of view. Most of his sentences in the novel are indeed correct, yet
it is evident that his ~ge 1?!9jects a strQ!igly deviantJl,Dd idiosy.HGFat-
!.f. . relationship with the world outs.füe. Every act of communication takes
place within a particular context, and it is precisely when Mr Tuttle's ex-
changes are analysed in context that deviancy is more evident: his answers
have nothing to do with Lauren's questions, thus breaking Grice's maxim
of relation (See 2.3.4.2.4). Metaphorically speaking, the impression he
I may provide is that of a machine programmed for creating grammatically
acceptable sentences that sound like sheer nonsense from the semantic and
the pragmatic point of view. Within this specific context of situation, he
sounds uncooperative and totally deviating from the norm.
What readers can infer about Mr Tuttle's mental functioning is that his
mind does not .possess the possibility to interact with the other characters.
His mind, to stick to the machine metaphor, is like a hard drive that has the
capacity to store huge quantities of information but cannot communicate
it properly. That Mr Tuttle.is more similar...t-0--a--maGhine-than...to-a_human
being is also confirmed by the fact that, as the J.J.QY_eJ unfolds, Lauren re-
alisès thatlië is able to reproduce exactly all the dialogues she had had
with Rey before his death. Furthermore, he can also replicate the tones of
voices they had used during their exchanges: such an ability is not possible
in our natural world, therefore the modal configuration of the novel is that
of a supernatural fictional world inhabited by a character who is an3lethi
alien. Mr Tuttle, in other words, seems to embody a very typical character
àf-postmodemism, the so-called post-human character. As a matter of fact,
Lauren "amused herself by thinking that he'd come from cyberspace, a
man who'd emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was
from Kotka, in Finland" (BA, 47).
As regards Lauren, although most of her existence is mental (mostly
narrated through FIT), it is not possible to single out particular metaphor-
ical patterns or idiosyncratic representations of reality for her. What goes
on in her mind coincides mostly with her narrative programmes, an expres-
sion introduced by Greimas (1966) to refer to what characters intend to do,
i.e. their programmes of action:
This was her work, to disappear from all her formal venues of aspect
and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every
past resemblance. [. . .} ln the mirror she wanted to see someone who
is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled
of familiar effect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet
(BA, 86).
3.6. CHARACTERISATION THROUGH CONVERSATION AND
POLITENESS PATTERNS
Linguistic research addressing real people has demonstrated that the anal-
ysis of conversational exchanges proves extremely useful in order to un-
derstand how power is distributed and balanced among speakers, among
other things. The extract below, recording a typical conversation between
Lauren and Mr Tuttle, will be used to show how characters' conversational
behaviour can be approached, taking total volume of speech, tum alloca-
tion, topic control and terms of address into account:
(1) She said, 'if you had a name. Just suppose now. Is there anyone
who would know what it is? Where is your mother? When I say
mother; the woman who gives birth to a child, the parent, the female
parent, does this word? Tell me. What?'
He knew what a chair is called and a window and a wall but not the
tape recorder, although he knew how to turn it off, and not, it seemed,
who his mother was or where she might be found.
(2) 'If there is another language you speak', she told him, 'say some
words'.
(3) 'Say some words '.
(4) 'Say some words. Doesn't matter if I can't understand'.
(5) 'Say some words to say some words'.
(6) 'All right. Be a Zen master, you little creep. How do you know
what I said to my husband? Where were you? Were you here,
 somewhere, listening? My voice. It sounded word for word. Tell me
about this'.
When there was a pause in the conversation, the recorder stopped
hissing. She watched him. She tried to press him on the matter but
got nowhere and changed the subject again.
(7) 'What did you mean earlier yesterday when you said, when
you seemed to say what? I don't recall the words exactly. It was
yesterday. The day before today. You said I'd still be here, I think,
when the lease. Do you remember this? When I am supposed to
leave. You said I do not'.
(8) 'I said this what I said'.
(9) 'You said this'. That you somehow'.
(10) 'Somehow. What is somehow?'
(I I) 'Shut up. That you somehow but never mind. When the lease
ends. Or something else completely' (BA, 57-58).
In terms of total volume of speech, the most striking observation is that
most of the words are uttered by Lauren (about 170 - 90% -, including arti-
cles and preposition, versus about 20). Therefore, at least in this particular
context, she is the one who dominates the conversation, with a number
of words about nine times greater than Mr Tuttle's. Interestingly, this is
a recurrent pattern in the novel, with Lauren speaking a lot and asking
questions, and Mr Tuttle being silent or using very short and nonsensical
sentences. Readers might therefore preliminarily conclude that she is the
more powerful character among the two, even though the analysis of other
features may contradict this.
The allocation of turns is quite significant from this point of view: out
of 11 turns, 7 (64%) are spoken by Lauren and 4 (36%) are spoken by
Mr Tuttle. In the light of volume of speech discussed above, however, a
much higher number of turns spoken by her would be expected. Mr Tuttle's
speaking space, in other words, has not been inhibited by Lauren: the deci-
sion to limit the volume of speech and keep turns very short is entirely Mr
Tuttle's, since the space would be there, available for his speech. His speak-
ing behaviour therefore has the potential to trigger some inferences regard-
ing their relationship: although she is anxiously asking for explanations, he
decides not to provide any. Is she really more powerful than him? Does she
get what she wants from him, as more powerful people normally do?
The analysis of topic control may help find answers: the only topic
Lauren seems interested in is Mr Tuttle's present identity and his existence
in the house she used to share with Rey. Mr Tuttle, on the other hand, does
not seem interested in satisfying her curiosity. Tums 3 and 5, for instance,
are entirely inconsistent with Lauren's requests, thus breaking Grice's
maxim of relation. Similarly, in turns 8 and 10 he produces sentences that
are totally disjointed from Lauren's enquiries. The topic she wishes to in-
vestigate throughout the whole extract is therefore repeatedly frustrated,
even if it may be difficult for the reader to understand why this happens. Is
this the result of Mr Tuttle's incapacity to understand and formulate ade-
quate answers? Is it to be interpreted as an explicit refusal to cooperate in
the exchange of information? Whatever the reason, the impression is that
power is not on her side: despite her almost total control of the volume of
speech and of more than half of the turns, she is not in control of the con-
versation, therefore power seems rather to be in Mr Tuttle's hands. This
is further confirmed by the mood structure of most of her clauses, where
the demand for goods and services (Halliday 2004) prevails over all the
other options: she is the one 'in need', not vice versa; the large number of
questions she asks (9) cues her jittery need to know, whereas the lack of
relevant answers cues the lack of adequate power to obtain proper answer.
All this makes her increasingly more anxious, as the terms of address
she uses in exchange 6 clearly remark: "Zen master" is evidently sarcas-
tic, whereas "you little creep" is aggressive and impolite. Lauren becomes
more and more nervous as she realises that she cannot exercise power over
Mr Tuttle, and this does not seem to have any impact on him. In a ma-
chine-like manner, he keeps employing the same patterns despite the emo-
tional reactions of his interlocutor.
The conversational strategies used in this exchange are therefore
useful for the formation of readers' mental impressions of the characters:
anxiety, frustration and some aggressiveness may be attributed to Lauren,
whereas Mr Tuttle appears somehow inscrutable, mysterious and therefore
difficult to categorise.
3.7 TRANSITIVITY PATTERNS AND CHARACTERISATION
As pointed out in 2.3.5, transitivity patterns can be very useful for identi-
fying which characters are agentive and which ones tend to be acted-up-
on, which characters are doers and which ones are thinkers, which forces
dominate the story-world, and so on ( see also Toolan 2001, 111 ). Generally
speaking, identifying a transitivity profile for a character means analysing
the main verb processes used by him/her or by the narrator, while at the
same time focusing on the presence or absence of other key notions like
Goals, Phenomena, etc. It goes without saying that the recurrence of a
particular transitivity structure in a novel does not exclude the occurrence
of alternative options: what generally happens is that, over the course of a
narrative, certain choices are much more frequent than others, thus creat-
. ......
ing a sense of transitivity profile (Simpson 2004, 120) which constitutes a
stylistic mark of a character.
To make things clearer, let us observe how particular transitivity op-
tions are used in an extract from The Body Artist. The following text is
taken from the concluding page of the book: Lauren is again alone in the
big house after Rey has died and Mr Tuttle has disappeared.
She stood a while, thinking into this. She stopped at room s edge,
facing back into the hall, and felt the emptiness around her. Thats
when she rocked down to the floor. backed against the doorpost. She
went twisting/y down, slowly, almost thoughtfully, and opened her
mouth, oh, in a moan that remained unsounded. She sat on the floor
outside her room. Her face still wore a decorative band, a trace
across the eyes of the prospect of wonders. It was a look that nearly
floatedfree of her so she could puff her cheeks, childlike, and blow it
away.
She thought she would not bother looking in there. It was pathetic
to look. The roomfaced east and would be roiled in morning light,
in webby sediment and streams of sunlit dust and in the word motes,
which her mother liked to use.
Maybe it was all an erotic reverie. The whole thing was a city built
for a dirty thought. She was a sexual hysteric, ha. Not that she
believed it.
She sat there, thinking into the blankness of her decision. Then she
worked herself up along the doorpost, slowly, breathing completely,
her back to the fluted wood, squat-rising, drawing out the act over an
extended length of time. Her mother died when she was nine. It had
nothing to do with ha
The room was empty when she looked. No one was there. The light
was so vibrant she could see the true colours of the walls andfloors.
She'd never seen the walls before. The bed was empty. She'd known
it was empty all along but was only catching up. She looked at the
sheet and blanket swirled on her side of the bed, which was the only
side in use.
She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She
threw the window open. She didn't know why she did this. Then she
knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time
in her body, to tell her who she was (BA, 125-6).
Most of the processes used in the text are material (24), and there is
a significant number of relational ( 18) and of mental processes (13). The
preponderance of material processes is usually related to the presence of
characters who act a lot upon the world around them, yet it is not always
so: careful scrutiny of the transitivity patterns soon makes it clear that it
would be problematic to conceive of Lauren as an active character, at least
until the very end of the text. If, on the one hand, she is the main actor in
most of the material processes, it is very significant that in some cases the
processes are carried out by different characters or by parts of her body
(her back, in "her back to the fluted wood, squat-rising[ ... ]"; her face, in "It
was a look that nearly floated free of her"[ ... ]). Despite the fact that Lauren
is the subject in many processes, the material processes used cannot inter-
preted as cues for a 'doer' character.
Moreover, it is crucial to notice that the vast majority of material pro-
cesses are not goal-directed, i.e. they are intransitive': in "She stopped at
the room's edge, facing back into the hall" (line 1), or in "That's when she
rocked down to the floor, backed against the doorpost (line 2)", to quote
but two examples, the actions described by the verbs are not addressed to-
wards any particular object, but involve only the actor carrying out the ac-
tion and a circumstance oflocation/range. The world around the character,
in other words, is not affected by her, remaining exactly the same after her
actions have been carried out. This particular kind of transitivity pattern
strategically conveys an atmosphere of stillness and ineffectual activity, a
text world where nothing seems to really change.
In this part of the text Lauren is therefore construed as a character who
tends to act (and think) a lot, but not according to any particular strategy:
actions and thoughts do not result from a precise plan she has elaborated
for a particular purpose. Other linguistic options operate to reinforce this
general atmosphere of stillness: some processes, which are usually found
in the continuous form, are here employed in the simple form, therefore
they are marked: "Her face still wore a decorative band (sentence 6)" in-
stead of *was wearing; "She sat there, thinking into the blankness of her
decision (sentence 15)" instead of *was sitting; agency can be attributed
to Lauren in the concluding part of the novel, at least in most of it. The
character, though acting, does not act on the world around her, and this
may project the image of an actor who is 'acted-upon'. The text is also
permeated by a general atmosphere of solitude, confirmed by the almost
total lack of verbal processes.
Things seem to change in the last part of the extract, even if this does
not have the power to affect the previously-formed atmosphere: the two
processes - "She opened it [the window]" and "She threw the window
open" - are goal-directed, a fact that restores at least some agency to the
transitivity profile of the character. The actor in the last two sentences thus
performs as a doer, a situation that is further reinforced by the mental pro-
cess "She wanted to feel", highlighting the character's will. The atmosphere
of stillness dominating the preceding sentences of the text now seems to
fade away, an impression reinforced by the repetition of the same syntactic
.L.LO
structure ( one-clause sentences of the 'she+material process' type), which
conveys dynamism24.
In conclusion, the foregrounding of intransitive material processes in
the first part of the extract, together with other options of verb tenses and
participant types, are likely to influence the readers' perception of the char-
acter: in the first part of the extract (but the impression holds in the other
parts of the book), Lauren is depicted as a character who is almost para-
lysed by the situation she is experiencing. Only in the last sentences of the
extract does her will emerge, and her actions are somehow concerned with
an 'identity quest': similarly to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, she ardently wants
to know who she is, a desire that is in both cases fulfilled by the contact
with the world outside through an open window.
3.8 CHARACTERISATION THROUGH A NEWLY-EXPANDED
NARRATOLOGY: ACTIONS AS THOUGHTS, INTERMENTAL
THINKING DOUBLY EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
As made clear in 2.3 .4.2.1, the inner life of characters has traditionally
been analysed through a speech category approach, which was based on
the assumption that the categories applied to fictional speech could be ap-
plied to fictional thought, too. That approach was concerned primarily with
that part of the mind known as inner speech, but did not take other aspects
of mental life into consideration, in particular the whole mind, the social
mind and the mind in action. A newly-expanded narratology of the fictional
mind revolving around the concept of continuous consciousness frame and
its subframes (the relationship between thought and action, interrnental or
shared thinking, doubly embedded narratives) has been proposed by Palm-
er (2004), some examples of which will be discussed below. To start with,
let us consider the following extract from The Body Artist:
She stood looking at him, two bodies in a room. He seemed to
recede under observation, inwardly withdraw, not in discomfort,
she thought, but spontaneously, automatically, guided by some law
of his bodys own devising. She put her hands on his shoulders and
looked into his eyes. She thought, When did people start looking into
each others eyes? This is what she did, searchingly, standing in the
kitchen with Mr Tuttle (BA, 87).
The text reports some actions ( or non-actions) carried out by Lauren
while she is struggling in order to understand the personality of Mr Tuttle,
24 The first verb process of the text is "stood" (first paragraph), followed by
"sat" (second paragraph). This atmosphere of stillness is symbolically re-
solved in the last paragraph, where the verb process used is "walked".
a character whom she is trying to make sense of. The verb "stood", in par-
ticular, can be classified as a material process in systemic functional terms,
yet the text does not describe actions, but thoughts. In other words, rather
than introducing actions as we could expect, the verb "stood" introduces
and captures a moment of stillness: the only movement seems to be the
flow of thoughts that permeates her mind while she is looking at Mr Tut-
tle. Her thoughts seem to say: "I would like to discover who you are", "I
need you to stop being so mysterious", etc., yet these processes are never
explicitly verbalised. ln the example, an action verb "stood" is therefore
to be interpreted as opening up a series of mental process where nothing
physically really happens.
The notion of intermental thought is based on the assumption that
mental functioning can be properly applied to social as well as individual
fonns of activity and is closely connected to the notion of communicative
action, the kind of action that takes place when more than one character
is present. An 'intermental thought approach' to characters can be very
useful to understand the type of affective relationship between them, since
two - or more - characters involved in several actions are more likely to be
emotionally close. By the same token, the absence of interrnental thought
may become equally significant, as the extract below seems to show:
It happened thisfinal morning that they were here at the same time,
in the kitchen, and they shambled past each other to get things out of
cabinets and drawers and then waited one for the other by the sink
or fridge, still a little puddled in dream melt, and she ran tap water
over the blueberries bunched in her hand and closed her eyes to
breath the savor rising (BA, 9).
The extract describes Lauren and Rey's last breakfast before Rey's
suicide. In the first part of the extract, narration is in third person plural,
which typically generates interrnental verbs. However, the verbs used in
the extract ("shambled", "waited") do not possess any intermental fea-
tures: they "shambled past each other" does not indeed describe a joint,
shared decision to carry out an action, and the fact of being in the kitchen
together is to be interpreted as something that simply happened, an event
almost out of the characters' control. As a matter of fact, the sentences
opening the novel do indeed communicate the feeling of lack of control
over the world outside: "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unroll-
ing into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web"
(BA, 9). Additionally, it is not without significance that the first person
plural is very soon replaced by the third person singular, as if the char-
acters were sitting in the kitchen on their own: very interestingly, for the
following 18 pages the third person pronoun 'they' is never used again,
narration coinciding with a very long series of 'she' or 'he' which describe
the actions or the feelings experienced by the character separately. The to-
tal lack of intermental thought in a context where it could reasonably oc-
.L.LO
cur is therefore symbolic of the emotional distance characters experience,
and might generate readers' inferences relating to solitude, loneliness and,
ultimately, suffering. As already remarked, Rey - a very successful busi-
nessman in New York's art context - will commit suicide soon after this
scene, while Lauren will experience a time of confusion and pain until the
very end of the novel.
The third sub-frame of the continuous consciousness frame, doubly
embedded narratives, refers to a character whose mind is contained with-
in another character's: a character's identity, in other words, consists not
just of his/her own embedded narrative, but is the result of all the doubly
embedded narratives of which he/she is the subject. Do doubly embedded
narratives play a role for the characters in The Body Artist? If so, which
characters are involved in the phenomenon? Considering the very limited
number of characters interacting in the novel, the following combinations
are the only ones of some interest: Lauren-Rey and Rey-Lauren; Lau-
ren-Mr Tuttle and Mr Tuttle-Lauren.
As far as the relationship between Lauren and Rey is concerned, their
relationship is characterised by a strikingly small number of doubly em-
bedded narratives. This is one of them:
Now that he'd remembered what he meant to tell her; he seemed
to lose interest. She didn't have to see his face to know this. It was
in the air. It was in the pause she trailed from his remark of eight,
ten, twelve seconds ago. Something insignificant. He would take it
as a kind of self-diminishment, bringing up a matter so trivial (BA,
11-12).
Besides reporting Lauren's thoughts, the extract also grants access to
Rey's mind, since what goes on in the female character's mind is a rep-
resentation of Rey's own one. Embedded in her mind, in other words, is
his mind: the clause "he seemed to lose interest", although reported by the
narrator, is a sensation Lauren is experiencing, in some part of her mind
that does not coincide with inner speech. She senses it somehow, therefore
she mentally constructs Rey's own feelings. Something similar happens in
the following extract:
He stood shaking the container. He shook it longer than he had to
because he wasn't paying attention, she thought, and because it was
satisfying in some dumb and blameless way, for its own childlike sake,
for the bounce and slosh and cardboard orange aroma (BA, 12).
Again, by giving access to Lauren's mind, the narrator also shows
Rey's own thoughts elaborated by Lauren. Quite significantly, however,
the rest of the chapter devoted to the description of their breakfast does not
provide any more examples of doubly embedded narrative, since narrative
coincides with the presentation of the characters' actions rather than of
their thoughts. Moreover, it is also very significant that it is always Rey's
mind that is embedded within Lauren's and not vice versa. It is Lauren, in
other words, who is interested in establishing a series of conjectures about
her husband's mind, while he does not simply show any interest in it. As
Palmer notes, "the lack of doubly embedded narratives demonstrates some
very solipsistic states of mind" (2004, 234): this, therefore, adds to the al-
ready noted feeling ofloneliness that may be one of Rey's traits.
As far as the relationship Lauren-Mr Tuttle and Mr Tuttle-Lauren is
concerned, things go as we would expect them to go: no trace of doubly
embedded narrative is present in Mr Tuttle's mind, whereas Lauren's is
filled with conjectures about his potential mental processes. A few illustra-
tive examples are reported below:
She tried not to press him for information. She found the distance
interesting, the halting quality of his speech and actions, the self-
taught quality, his seeming unconcern about what would happen
to him now. Not apathy or indifference, she thought, but his limited
ability to consider the implications (BA, 46-7).
Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is
here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other
shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a
way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat
(BA, 66-7).
She watched him, his hair looked chalky today. He seemed barely
here, four feet away from her. He didn't know how to measure himself
to what we call the Now. What is that anyway? It's possible there is no
such thing for those who do not take it as a matter of faith (BA, 68-9).
He was not skittish under her touch, or only routinely so, and she
thought that nothing could seem unusual to him, or startling, or
stirring, measured against the fact, the blur, whatever it was - the
breathless shock of his being here (BA, 71).
Several more instances of the phenomenon can be found as the novel
unfolds: Lauren in particular, is very curious about the alethic potential
of Mr Tuttle, and it is for this reason that she constantly tries to interpret
his actions and his words in the light of what is probably happening in
his mind. Even when no apparent sign of doubly embedded narrative is
present, it is easy for the readers to understand that she is always trying
to decode his mental processes to find out what lies beyond his words and
actions.
The scrutiny of doubly embedded narrative therefore contributes to re-
inforce readers' inferences about Lauren being anxious to know, probably
needy to know in order to better overcome her own loneliness and difficult
.LLV
life-moment. As we would expect, Mr Tuttle never makes any hypothesis
about Lauren's mind, either because he is not interested in her, or because
he is not able to carry out any conjectures in general. It goes without saying
that the lack of doubly embedded narratives still contributes to his charac-
terisation.
3.9 CHARACTERISATION AND INTERTEXTUALITY
ln The Body Artist, the role of intertextuality for the constructi.Qn of the
character concerns mainly the selection of narratorial modes: most Qf.lh.e
noveÏ is characterised by a narrative technique that higfilights the con-
'!ëi~ of Lauren: it is tl!!2ligh 1!er_that almost every aspect of the :fic-
fional-world is presented, mediated and filtered.
Readers, at least some of them, will not find it hard to recognise simi-
larities between DeLillo's character-construction method and some writers
from the past, especially from the first part of the twentieth century: in
other words, together with all the points discussed in the previous sections,
'intertextualallusions' to very renowned narrative techniques elaborated in
the past may_als_Qcontribute to the.formation of characters' images in)1!ad~-
ers' minds, at least in some of them. In particular, intertextual allusions of
this kind can be traced with reference to Virginia Woolf's two novels Mrs
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse: similarly to hers, DeLillro,_charactei:s
are far from being 'traditionally conceived' (Woolf 1921, 189), and coin.-
sige rather with what might be called a 'centre of conscious~a-w.in.d.
interacti_ng~ith the outside world without any apparent consequences op
The following extract is the opening of the novel:
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments,
and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a
quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks
of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on
a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is
stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines
and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the
wind-swayed web (BA, 9).
Intertextuality is at work here: indeed, Woolf's To the Lighthouse
contains a section called "Time Passes" (1996 [ 1927], 187-212), where
characters' presentation is carried out in exactly the same manner, through
FIT. The choice of a very similar opening, also characterised by the same
narrative technique, may perhaps be a coincidence, but even in that case it
would arouse a series of inferential mechanisms in some readers.
Virginia Woolf's ideas about character construction are very well
known (see 1.2), thus it cannot be excluded that the intertextual references
in DeLillo's novel may imply that his characters are to be read in a simi-
lar way, namely by focusing on the impact of the real world on the inside
universe of the characters. The importance of the first line, for instance,
bas nothing to do with the obvious assumption that time passes: rather,
DeLillo is interested in the impact of time passing on the character that is
experiencing it. Time does not simply pass, it seems to pass, which is to be
ascribed to the feeling of the character experiencing an atmosphere of.in-
action and passiveness. Quite interestingly from this point of view, the fol-
lowing sentence ("the world happens") describes the world in intransitive
terms, again strikingly conveying the character's feeling of inaction and
paralysis introduced by the first sentence. The same atmosphere is experi-
enced in the rest of the extract, where only mental or relational processes
are used, but not material ones.
Si~y_tq__Woolf's, then, these characters seep to be anything but
'd~rs': they tend to experience the world passively and to be acted-upon,
rajher.than.acting. They are centres of consciousness: eveœhing_is experi-
enced through them and from their point of view, that is the only gateway
-
to the narrated world for the readers.
3.10 STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL AND CHARACTERISATION
Novels are generally structured into parts, chapters, sections, and so on;
such a strategic arrangement of the narrative material constitutes what we
may call the syntax of the novel, a metaphoric expression that should be
interpreted with reference to what goes on above the clause. What happens
above the clause level is very important for character construction: indeed,
somi cbaractersmay appear exclusively in some parts of the nove!, ~y
be assigned unequal space in the general economy of the text: this may con-
--
tribute to sheddinglight on their importance in an ideal textual hierarchy,
The structure of The Body Artist is fairly significant in these respects:
as previously observed, the general atmosphere of the novel is one of sol-.
itude and melancholy, and such feelings are strongly reinforced by the or-
ganisation of the text. The seven short chapters which structure the novel
are in fact symmetrically arranged through a construction that powerfully
isolates the first and the last of them, which are the parts of the novel in
which the protagonists' solitude is stronger and harder to control. In the first
of them Lauren is described during her last breakfast with Rey: everything
in the scene seems unnatural, forced, what emerges being only a strong
sense of non-communion and non-communication, thus of loneliness and
suffering; in the last chapter of the book, then, Lauren is portrayed while
she is living on her own in the big house, after even Mr Tuttle has disap-
peared: here her solitude is highlighted by her incessant questions about
her own identity and by her simulated dialogues with imaginary presences.

Such structural isolation of the first and last chapters is made possible
by the interposition of two voices which do not belong to the main narra-
tive one: the former - just after the end of the first chapter - is an obituary
of Rey after his death, whereas the latter - just before the last chapter of
the novel - is an interview with Lauren before her show in New York. Both
voices have nothing to do with the main one underlying all the rest of the
novel, yet they are emblematic for the structural emergence of a series of
issues which are further conveyed at the thematic level.
The feeling~_haracter are thus echoed and reinforced..by the
St!Uctu~tion of the novel: this is a common strategy and indeed
not the only one at the author's disposal. Sometimes, for_in~tmce, charac-
ters only appear in some chapters of the novel, according to regular pat-
terns whiëFi regulate their presence25: this is likely to create a sense of ex-
pectation in the readers, who may associate a particular character only with
a particular section of the book (the odd chapters, for instance) but not with
the others. Clearly, in those cases the main attributes of the characters tend
to be associated with the recurrent atmosphere in those parts of the book in
which they appear, and not vice versa.
Choices concerned with the arrangement of the narrative material can
therefore be very powerful for characterisation: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dal-
loway, for example, is not structured into different sections or into different
chapters; narration is never interrupted, a choice strongly corroborating
the general effect created by the narrative style of the novel, which fore-
gro~ds the several streams of consciousn~of the different characters.
Victorian novels, on the other hand, were normally structured into several
chapters, themselves divided into sections and sub-sections: such syntactic
choices were dictated by the need to introduce several different characters
from an external point of view, through an omniscient third-person narrator
who often interrupted narration in order to cope with the different charac-
ters, settings and times.
Needless to say, these strategies need to be studied alongside the other
ones introduced above, and always need to be tested: characterisation is the
result of a large ensemble encompassing many factors and processes, this
being only one among them.
3.11 CONCLUSION
In this part of the book the characters of the American novelist Don De-
Lillo 's The Body Artist have been studied through a model of characteri-
sation that draws on stylistic approaches outlined in the second part of the
25
In some novels, for instance, some characters only appear in the even-num-
bered chapters and some others only in the odd-numbered ones.
.LL=>
book. Though considering only very short stretches of text, the analyses
have proved useful to describe the same features of the characters from
different points of view: Lauren's loneliness, for instance, has emerged
both from thedescription of the novel structure and from the account of its
transitive patterns. The analysis of doubly embedded narrative and inter-
mental thought has further reinforced such feeling. AsJar as Mr Tuttle is
concerned, he has been defined as an alethic alien in Dolezel's terms, yet
his alienation has been confirmed also through the analysis of his languâgé"
(the deviancy from what would be the normforegrounds the character, in
Douthwaite's terms) and of his mind style. Different approaches to char-
acterisation therefore often shed the same light, although from different
angles.
- The approaches outlined in this book are, of course, a selection among
several other tools that may be equally useful and rewarding: critical dis-
course analysis, for example, by focusing on inequality in society and the
ways in which texts are used to realise power and ideology, may prove
useful for investigating the relationships among systems of characters and
the way power is managed; Paul Simpson's studies in Language, Ideology
and Point of View have already shown that it is possible to investigate a
point of view through the analysis of linguistic 'modality'; the applica-
tion of staîisficarand computational methods made possible by the current
rate of progress in information technology may open up a range of further
possibilities, including, for example, the study Qf ling-yistic variation in a
character's utterances.
Last but not least, new models are required in order to analyse the
significant diffusion of multimodal narratives permeating the last few dec-
ades: characters in TV series, for instance, are among the most appreciated
ones in today's fictional landscape, therefore new tools need to be devel-
oped to account for the other semiotic modes at play. From this perspec-
tive, even though a lot needs to be done, Bednarek has already established
herself as the leading scholar (2010, 2011, 2012, 2018).