FICTION INTERPRETATION_4

FICTION INTERPRETATION. Translators’ department.

4^th year. Lecture 4

IMAGERY

This term is one of the most common in modern criticism, and one of the most ambiguous. Its applications range from the “mental pictures which are experienced by the reader to the totality of elements which make up a literary work.

An image in art is a subjective reflection of reality. It is affected by the author’s power of imagination. Since images in art reflect the writer’s subjective attitude to them they are always emotive: they not only call up visual pictures, they also arouse feelings such as warmth, compassion, affection, delight or dislike, disgust, resentment.

Our emotional responses are directed by the words with which the author creates his images. However when we read books it is not words that we actually respond to, it is images which these words create that arouse the reader’s response.

Compare:“He was a stout man.”And:

“His features were sunk into fatness. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. He sat in his chair … his great belly thrust forward”

(S. Maugham. Red)

The images of a literary work form a system which comprises a hierarchy of images beginning with micro-images (formed by a word or a word combination) and ending up with synthetic images formed by the whole literary work. Between the lowest level (micro images) and the highest level (the synthetic images) there are images which may be termed “extended images”.

The system of images in a work are called imagery.

The word has two main meanings: a) it signifies all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a work of literature whether by literal description, by allusion or through some stylistic means, b) it also signifies the figurative language, or stylistic means (metaphor, simile, metonymy, synechdoche, onomatopoeia, etc) .

Forms of imagery (according to the senses involved in perception):

1. Visual imagery is perhaps the most frequently used form: A dim light, a dirty rag, a golden daffodil;

2. Auditory imagery represents sound: A pounding surf, a screeching siren;Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates a sound accurately;

3.Kinesthetic imagery represents movement: as in Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils: “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

4. Tactile imagery represents touch (thermal – heat and cold): A scratchy beard, an ice-cold hand;

5. Olfactory imagery represents smell: The scent of apple blossoms;

What is Poetry? Who knows?

Not a rose, but the scent of a rose;

6. Gustatory imagery represents taste: The bitter tang of gin, coffee tinged with vanilla.

Thus, imagery is the mental picture or pictures that a writer conjures up in the reader’s imagination by means of words. Imagery also refers to descriptive language that evokes emotional responses. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a work of literature, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. In fiction, it can have a very important symbolic value.It adds to the depth and understanding of a literary work.

Imagery is sometimes described as “painting a picture with words,” but it is actually a lot more than that. Imagery contains more than just a view of what a writer thinks. Imagery is a collage of senses that the writer imagines and feels. Imagery can best be described as “witnessing an entire world made up of words.”

The main object of interest for a writer is a human being – his/her character and behavior. Thus character images are considered to be the main element of a literary work; other images - of things and landscape are subordinated to the character image (the theme of another lecture). Landscape images may be introduced to describe the setting, to create a definite mood or atmosphere. Sometimes, however, they may become the central character of a work, e.g The Man and the Sea by E. Hemingway.

We should differentiate between the literal, the perceptual and conceptual .these lines from Robert Lowell’s poem Our Lady of Walsingham illustrate the basic differences:

There once the penitents took off their shoes

And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;

And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file

Slowly along the munching English lane,

Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose

Track of your dragging pain.

The stream flows down under the druid tree,

Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad

The castle of God.

(Penitents –кающиесягрешники, to file–выстраиваться в ряд, to munch –жевать, чавкать, shrine – гробница, to gurgle – журчать)

The first two lines are a literal image (without figurative language) which may or may not convey a visual image also. The phrase ‘hedgerows file slowly’ is a perceptual image because of the metaphorical use of the word ‘file’. The phrase ‘castle of God’ is conceptual image. One can hardly visualize it but one may have an idea of it.

Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and analyze its imagery. In what meaning can the word “image” be used when analyzing it? What senses are involved in the imagery?

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I on her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Types and Functions of Imagery in Literature: Theory into Practice

1. Which words in the following excerpt appeal to the sense of hearing? sight? touch? smell? Dwell on the types of imagery J. Joyce resorts to.

2. What qualities of the protagonist are emphasized by means of various types of imagery? What does the imagery the writer creates in this part of the novel reveal about the protagonist’s state of mind and the central conflict of the work?

3. What mood does the author create through his use of imagery?

4. Explain how the imagery affects your emotions. By his skilful use of varied imagery what feelings in the reader does J. Joyce appeal to?

From: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (p. 67–71)

The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battle-worn mail armour of angels<…>.

<…>The preacher’s voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

• Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitnessof this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

• They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light.As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but notits light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity ofits heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

• The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption.

Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

• But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner<…>

<…>As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.

• Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned–there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss <…>.

He [Stephen Dedalus] could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening one of his books at random and poring over it<...>.

<…> He leaned back weakly in his desk. He had not died. God had spared him still. He was still in the familiar world of the school.

Symbol can be a person, object, action, place, or event that, in addition to its literal meaning, suggests a more complex meaning.

Something that stands for or represents something else.

Some symbols are relatively obvious.

Examples:

Rose

Lion

White

Serpent

Leaf

“The Sick Rose”

Daffodils

Chapter 42 from Melville’s “Moby Dick” - whiteness

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