What Decides Genre – Part Two

So, following on from my previous post of a week or so back ( https://forgedtruth.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/what-decides-literary-genre/), last night I heard someone reading a piece of prose that sounded to me exactly like poetry.  In my defence, the reader hadn’t tried to label the piece herself, so I felt free to rush in and make a judgement (it was, by the way, a fantastic piece, but that’s by the by.)  Afterwards, I wondered how I’d managed to make such a decision about genre.  What clues had I used?

I’ve been doing some research on this, listening to the excellent podcasts on literary theory by Paul Fry on the Yale Open Course (you have to do something while commuting up the M1).  Most theory I take with a pinch of salt, but I reckon Roman Jakobson’s communication model, which Fry describes in some detail, comes into play here.

Jakobson posits that bits  of language (phrase and sentences) have six functions which – to paraphrase badly – are concerned with expressing emotion, passing referential information, issuing commands, poetic expression, and two further modes which act like the handshaking in a communications protocol (one is us just saying things to make sure the communication channel is open, and the other is us confirming that the message has been received.)  Fry gives a brilliant exposition of these functions in one of his lectures using the phrase, “It is raining.”

If you say, ‘It is raining’ and you mean your heart is full of woe, that’s ‘expressing emotion’ (or what Jakobson calls the ’emotive’ function).  If you’re a weather man and you use the same phrase, the chances are you are passing referential information, you mean that water is falling form the sky (Jakobson’s ‘referential’ function).  If you’re addressing a small child going out of the door without his or her coat, then you’re issuing a command: ‘put your coat on’  (Jakobson called it the ‘conative’ function).   If you are somehow using the phrase as a poetic metaphor or because it sounds good (not something I’d normally think about with this particular phrase), then that’s the poetic expression kicking in (the ‘aesthetic/poetic’ function).

To understand the other two functions, you have to imagine two people unable to think of anything to say next, perhaps at a dinner party, so one of them says, “It is raining.”  (It’s rather like Ford Prefect’s theory than humans have to keep talking for fear their brains stop working, or was it ‘start working’?)  That’s the ‘phatic’ function.  And the last one – the ‘metalingual’ function – happens when you say, “I got wet coming here,” and I say, “It is raining” to check that I understood what you meant.

Now, all of this wouldn’t be very interesting at all, if it weren’t for the fact that linguists of the structuralist school would tell us that language always has a dominant function, even if – with one phrase – we might potentially be evoking more than one of the functions.  I might for example be giving you a bit of referential information but also choosing my words poetically, or perhaps you just think that I am, or get upset because you think I’m giving you a command.

So, going back to my ‘is it poetry, is it prose question?’, I now make two hypotheses:

1) How an author labels their work as poetry or prose is important because it gets the reader/recipient ready to interpret the words according to the intended dominant function.  If you’re told it’s prose, you are naturally going to look mainly for the ‘poetic’ and ’emotive’ functions, and take meaning from it accordingly.  If you’re told it’s creative prose, you are going to expect a mixture including some ‘poetic’ and ’emotive’ function, but also more ‘referential’ material (you need to find the plot, right?)  If it’s a news report on the TV, you’re going to expect it to be mainly ‘referential’.    Critically – this is my big point – your expectation shapes how you view the work (or any verbal communication), because- as we have seen with the ‘It is raining’ example – you have to understand the author or speaker’s intention before you know which function the language is supposed to perform and therefore how to interpret it.  The same phrase ends up communicating different things depending on the function you decide is dominant  (This is one very good reason why a piece of work can seem completely different to different readers.)

2) In the absence of a label, the receiver/reader will flounder around until they’ve got enough of the words to decide from context what the dominant functions of the language are.  It took me three or four paragraphs last night to decide I was listening to poetry, and damn good poetry too.

OK, enough of this.  Are there any proper linguists out there who can give a better explanation?