Session 4 - Spoken Discourse (11 September 2009)

Today’s session covered quite a lot of ground – telephone conversations, narratives and listener responses (not much time for the last one). Can’t comment much on telephone conversations as I don’t have a lot of them at the moment (if a grand total of zero can be considered ‘not a lot’), but I can certainly identify with some of the phone closings mentioned, particularly the philosophical summing-up, which I’ve unfortunately been guilty of more than once. ‘Well, that’s how things are... can’t do anything about it’; ‘Ah, such is Murphy’s Law’; ‘Guess we’ve all learned something from this...’ So lame that I should be walking with a limp for the rest of my life.

The part I personally found most interesting was English and Chinese narratives, and the differences between them. Since my last real contact with Chinese narratives was back in secondary school (and I wasn’t very good at deciphering them even then), the realisation that stories were still told in Chinese came as quite a shock, not to mention the realisation that languages other than English still existed (‘I thought everyone speak Engerland, what!’). In any event, English writers apparently provide more information and background for their characters (names, backstories, relationships etc.), focus more on actions and activities, and make more direct statements, while Chinese writers tend to withhold information and emphasise the temporal aspect of the story. Where moral statements are concerned, English writers tend to present them implicitly while Chinese writers are more explicitly didactic (again, big shocker there): ‘Confucius say, man who walk sideways through airport sliding door is going to Bangkok!’

Anyway, to conclude, I thought it would be interesting to analyse a short passage in English to see how far it conforms to the conclusions about English writing above; for obvious reasons, I can’t analyse a Chinese passage too. The one I’ve chosen should be quite familiar – the celebrated opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813):

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
‘My dear Mr Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’
Mr Bennet replied that he had not.
‘But it is, returned she, ‘for Mrs Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.’
Mr Bennet made no answer.
‘Do you not want to know who has taken it?’ cried his wife impatiently.
‘You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.’
This was invitation enough.
‘Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Bingley.’
‘Is he married or single?’
‘Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!’

As can be seen, personal details for character identification – names, human relationships, backgrounds, marital status and financial information – are provided in abundance, while temporal ‘identifiers’ are in shorter supply, with cursory references to ‘Monday’, ‘Michaelmas’ and ‘next week’. At first glance, the famous opening line, and the one immediately following it, seems like an explicit moral statement of the kind that Chinese writers, rather than English, would favour, but of course Austen is being heavily, and amusingly, ironic – the lines are poking fun at social convention, exposing the ridiculous nature of contemporary social views of ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune.’ Hence Austen is not being explicitly didactic, but instead working through implication in elegant and amusing fashion. ‘Truth’, when presented in such a way, is seriously undermined, and is anything but the same kind of ‘truth’ that Chinese writers might expound in their narratives. This might not be the best or most suitable passage available for analysis, but it’s interesting to see how English writing from almost two hundred years ago can still be shown to meet the basic ‘expectations’ of English narratives.