Transcript Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The language of literature
Russian Formalists (early 20th cent.).
Literary language transforms, distorts, violates
ordinary language – why?
habitual, automatised, economical existence
energy-saving mode of living and communicating
we recognise things and people (instead of
noticing)
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
“I see everything. That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or
school, or the bus, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have
to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. But most people are lazy. They
never look at everything. They do what is called glancing. And the information in their head is
really simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be
• 1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass.
• 2. There are some cows in the fields.
• 3. It is sunny with a few clouds.
• 4. There are some flowers in the grass.
• 5. There is a village in the distance.
And then they would stop noticing anything. But if I am standing in a field in the countryside I
notice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994
because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and I had to
stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped
and looked at the field and noticed these things.
1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white.
2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square tower and not
a spire.
3. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on, and a
long piece of orange string.
4. I can see two different types of grass and two colours of flowers in the grass.
And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them
all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all these things, and if
someone asked me afterwards what the cows looked like, I could ask which one, and I could do a
drawing of them at home.”
Art:defamiliarisation – making strange
• Revisiting (recognising) the world as a new
place
• Viktor Shklovsky:
• “Art exists that one may recover the sensation
of life; it exists to make one feel things...The
technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’
to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception.”
Art as defamiliarisation
• How does art defamiliarise the familiar?
• Form = (de)formation of raw material
• E.g. film: focus, perspective, slow-motion,
colour, cuts, soundtrack (or silence), lighting
etc
• What is the ‘raw material’ of literature?
• Ordinary language
“Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to mee returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine”
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Three, lines
40-44)
• When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
• “Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off”
•
•
•
•
•
Ordinary language is deformed
Rhyme, rhythm, prosody, repetition
Images, metaphors
Point of view, style
Defamiliarisation in fiction
“In the coat-pocket of the Great Man-Mountain
we found … a globe, half silver, and half of
some transparent metal: for on the transparent
side we saw certain strange figures circularly
drawn, and thought we could touch them, till
we found our fingers stopped with that lucid
substance. He put his engine to our ears, which
made an incessant noise like that of a watermill. And we conjecture it is either some
unknown animal, or the god that he worships.”
“Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a
seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene.
Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was
very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile
or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty
was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly,
so the body she rode around in was only now
mature.” (Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions)
Culture
Hans Johst (often attributed to
Hermann Göring): “When I
hear the word ‘culture’ I
reach for my gun” (“I release
the safety catch of my
Browning”)
Cyril Connolly
(English writer):
“When I hear the
word ‘gun’ I
reach for my
culture.”
„I don’t know how many
times I’ve wished that
I’d never heard the
damned word.”
(Raymond Williams,
British cultural theorist)
• The word has been
reinterpreted and
used so much: It has
reached the point that
when you hear the
word “culture,” you
reach for your
dictionary
• (Kwame Anthony
Appiah, The Ethics of
Identity, 2004)
Binary oppositions (binarities,
dichotomies) (kétosztatúságok)
• More than mere contrast: explanatory function,
covering an entire field, establishing hierarchy
• subject – object (self – world)
• soul (spirit) - body
• essence – appearance (depth – surface, truth – lie)
• male- female, sun – moon, day – night
• good – evil, right – wrong
• democracy – totalitarianism
• individual – community, public – private
• Culture - ???
Culture: its etymology
to inhabit
colere
– colony
cultivate
–
protect, worship –
coulter, agriculture
cult
I. Culture as cultivation
• Cultivating a field: making it suitable for
human needs
• (agriculture, body culture, cell culture)
• This meaning applied to the mind/soul
Culture as cultivation/2
•
•
•
•
cultura animi - cultivation of the soul
F. Bacon: „culture and manurement of minds”
Nature+culture = fully human
nature is unfinished; culture: perfection of
nature and not its opposite („cultural
instructions”)
• Culture as process
II. Culture as civilisation
An ideal of civilisational attainment
The opposite of culture:
barbarity, savagery, primitiveness
(European idea)
III. Culture as (collective) identity
2. Culture (Kultur) = expression of collective
(national) spirit, the possession of a Volk
(Völkergeist, J. G. Herder)
The opposite of culture:
„others”, aliens
Culture: belongs to a community
Civilisation: a universal ideal, attainable by all
World War One
poster (UK, then
US, 1917)
On club: „Kultur”
On helmet:
„Militarism”
IV.Culture as elite culture
• Matthew Arnold: culture is “a study of
perfection, … perfection which consists in
becoming something rather than in having
something, in an inward condition of the mind
and spirit.” (Culture and Anarchy, 1869)
• Its opposite term:
• Vulgarity, commonness, coarseness
V. The anthropological meaning of
“culture”
- Late 19th century: rise of ETHNOGRAPHY and
ANTHROPOLOGY as a discipline
- Anthropology:
study of all human phenomena that are not
biological
Arnold Gehlen, Norbert Elias (German
anthropologists):
Human being unable to survive in nature
→ puts culture between
himself and nature
culture = second nature
Anthropology and ethnography (from
mid- C19)
Study of “primitive” societies
Small communities ~ laboratories: easy to have
the “full picture”
Two conclusions
1. “primitive culture” is not really “primitive”
E. B. Tylor (Vict. anthropologist): we should
appreciate “the real culture which better
acquaintance always shows among the
rudest tribes of man” (e.g. Aborigines)
2. Cultures are all different, but the fact of
having a culture is a universal human feature
Anthropological meaning of „culture”
- broad meaning: a distinct way of life (Tylor: culture is
“that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member
of society” (1871)
- neutral
- plural: „cultures” rather than „culture”
- culture: a human universal
Raymond Williams (English critic):
“Culture is ordinary. …Every human society
has its own shape, its own purposes, its
own meanings. Every human society
expresses these, in institutions, and in
arts and learning. The making of society is
the finding of common meanings and
directions.” (1958)
• T.S. Eliot: culture in the widest sense
“includes all the characteristic activities
and interests of a people: Derby Day,
Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of
August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin
table, the dart board, Wensleydale
cheese, boiled cabbage, beetroot in
vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic
churches and the music of Elgar” (1944)
Anthropological meaning of culture
- The opposite term of culture:
- nature
- Every culture is an adequate response to its
environment, working effectively
- Culture: second nature (of meanings, symbols)
Ethnocentrism
Eskimo – „eaters of raw meat”
inuit
Pygmy – „size of a fist”
baka
Apache – „enemies”
dine
Tsigan – „outcasts”
roma
Our own ethnos is always the standard of the normal,
of the human