31 (2008)

This paper will attempt to illustrate the innate capacity of coordinate structures to be receptive nesting places for diverse narrative voices in a literary text. The literary text I have chosen is Alice Munro’s “Friend of my Youth” from the collection of short stories of the same title. On the surface “Friend of my Youth” is the rather sordid story of the Grieves sisters, Flora and Ellie, with whom the narrator’s mother spent a year, when, as a brand new teacher, she was named to a rural schoolhouse in the Ottawa Valley. The Grieves belong to a Bible beating fundamentalist Protestant sect called the Cameronians. The surface story, which I have named narrative 1 (N1), tells of the relationship the sisters weave with their hired man / distant cousin, Robert Deal. Ellie, though it is never said outright, is implied to be slightly mentally disabled. Flora, the more enigmatic of the two, becomes a friend of the young teacher. Years prior to the teacher’s arrival, Robert, Flora’s fiancé, gets Ellie pregnant and marries her. The pregnancy and all the subsequent pregnancies end in miscarriages. Ellie dies and Robert marries the hideous and lustful Nurse Atkinson who had come to care for Ellie as she waned away from cancer. The story thus told could be found in a collection of Harlequin romances. But of course, the story thus told is not the story. In other words, it is not the events, thus related which make “Friend of My Youth” a masterpiece, sending the reader back for multiple readings. What might first appear as a simple mouthpiece for the extradiegetic narrator, telling the story of the Grieves, is in fact a pre-text for Munro to orchestrate a whole choir of narrative voices, enabling her to weave into the very fine texture of her short story another more intricate one, which I have called narrative 2 (N2). We will show how the coordinate structures in “Friend of My Youth” enable Munro to surreptitiously weave these voices into the text.

The first evidence for the role played by coordination¹ in our text is the massive use Munro makes of this structure in her short story. For 551 sentences, 294 are built with coordinate structures. For comparison’s sake, a short story of similar length, The Orlov Sokolovs by L. Ulitskya, only has 175 coordinate structures for 405 sentences.

Our main hypothesis is the following. Coordinate structures are expected to follow a definite set of grammatical rules. Our findings have led us to discover that it is by working within and without the margins of these grammatical rules that these structures allow an author like Munro to construct such a complex story.

In order to demonstrate this complexity we shall be working with two types of coordination : joint coordination and segratory coordination. In joint coordination there is one predication for the two elements coordinated and in segratory coordination there are two.

Joint Coordination :

Segratory coordination

Halliday and Hasan in their work Cohesion in English (1976 : 8) explain how a text cohesively holds together :

Strictly speaking, for Halliday and Hasan, coordinate structures do not play a role in cohesion, because according to prescriptive grammar, a sentence cannot begin with coordinate conjunction and cohesion is interested in links that go beyond the limit of the sentence. But our hypothesis points to the contrary. Our hypothesis points to the innate capacity of coordinate structures to establish links, not only within the confines of the sentence, and those of the neighboring sentences, but also in preceding and following parts of the text.

The opening passage of FOMY is composed of 15 sentences, 78 per cent of which contain coordinate structures. There are two interesting things about this passage. The most outstanding one is that it does in no way deal with N1. The opening passage begins thus ²:

Russel Banks says of Munro’s opening passages:

The second interesting aspect of this passage is its prosody. Indeed, it is in the prosody of this opening passage – prosody which owes a great deal to coordinate structuring – that we can find the cohesive factor in the text.

It is of course the opening passage that puts the short-story reader on the track to follow to get to the key. For Joly (2001 :151) the first sentence is the container for the rest of the text. So an opening passage that begins with the notion of “dream”, “illness” “death” and denied guilt is already, to say the least, a loaded passage. But how does Munro do it? How does she link this beginning with the story of the Grieves? To say that she does it only thanks to coordinate structures would of course be an oversimplification. But an analysis of the prosody of this opening passage – will be the first step in our encounter and understanding in how the coordinate structure sets the tune for things to come.

The question is, how does Munro enable us to hold on to this narrative, which is that of the uneasy relationship between the narrator and her mother, of unhealed wounds and ultimately a story of mourning.

We might have the impression that this intradiegetic voice gives way to a solely extradiegetic one telling the story her mother told her. The huge gap on the page between this introductory passage and the story do signal a breakoff and a new start³. But, this is not entirely the case as the “my mother” references are replete throughout, and though in a radio interview Munro testified to telling her mother’s story, the analysis of coordinate structures throughout the text enables us to hear with increasing clarity the voice of the narrator, ultimately making it her story.⁴

In his 2001 article, Marc Arabyan explains the link that exists between silent reading and intonation. Arabyan underlines the fact that the written word implies anticipating on the oral reading of a text because reading always precedes the writing of a text. He gives us the following definition:

But as readers, also do the same thing, we simulate the contours of the human voice. As READERS we bring these talents along with us when we read a text.

English is a stress-timed language. In French, on the contrary, it is neither possible nor is it necessary to distinguish four degrees of accentuation, for it is almost always the last syllable that receives the tonic accent. In English, the accentuated syllables of the words will alternate. In French the tonic accent falls systematically on the final syllable and the intonation scheme of French tends to follow the same principle, in that the speaker aims for the end of the sentence. There is thus a regularity in the music of French that is not present in English. Of course it is impossible to imagine that any two readers given a text to read would read it in exactly the same way. But there are certain prosodic characteristics of this opening passage which will help us to understand why, no matter what the alterations brought to the reading, it remains present in the reader’s consciousness and functions a little like a lament. And it is because it remains in his/her consciousness that we are attuned when we are called upon to hear it again further on in the text.

It will not be possible to go into all the phonological details that go into the making of this passage.6 However, to neglect the intonation and rhythmical scheme altogether would be to deprive us of what I have termed the silent prosody of coordination (Hetherington-Blin 2006 : 23-35).

Sentences are divided up into different information units and, as is the case in French, the focus will be on the final element of the unit. A sentence can be normally an intonation unit with the focus falling on the last element, but Quirk et al. (1972 : 73) distinguish four factors that are going to stretch the focus onto different spots in the sentence:

– Adverbials

– Nonrestrictive relative clauses

– Vocatives, disjuncts or polysyllabic conjuncts7

– Coordinate conjunctions introducing clauses

Quirk adds that if the sentence is 10 words or more long the focus will subsequently be stretched out on different spots in the sentence. But as Herment-Dujardin (2001) points out, it is not so much the number of words that is important, as how many breaths / pauses we have to take.

Not only are all these factors present in the opening passage they enter in competition with one another. Philip Carr, however, has pointed out to me in a discussion, the coordinate conjunction before the clause will always mark the beginning of an intonation unit.

The fact that English is a stress-timed language implies that the rhythm tends to be isochronal. So, on top of the intonation groups, we must additionally be attentive to the “feet” of a sentence. Cruttenden gives the example of a sentence with 6 rhythmic groups:

These six groups have a varying number of syllables which are indicated within brackets, but will have the same length.8 However, Cruttenden points out:

According to Cruttenden there are four different accents9 that also have to be taken into consideration when dealing with the sentence :

– the nuclear accent which falls on the kernel of the intonation group

– lexical words that are accentuated at a sentence level

– word pitch which implies the accentuation produced by the length and the force of the word

– neutral intensity of the nonaccentuated syllables

When you consider that we have to take into consideration the intonation group, the number of breaths, the pitch, the tone, the varying stress accent, we begin to get a clearer picture of the complexity of the prosody.

We shall look at the first sentence. The slashes mark off the information units. The F following the final underlined element signals a fall, the underline the normal end focus bestowed upon the final element of the unit, the stress signs mark off the beginning of the rhythmical feet, and the words in bold character those with intensified pitch  

What we have here is simply default intonation. So, on the one hand Munro’s text reads in a very canonical way. On the other, the rhythm of this opening passage, made up of very long sentences thanks in part to polysyndeton (multiple coordination) and asyndeton (coordination via the comma), renders the prosody of this passage more complex.

The rhythm of a long sentence is not less intense than that of a short one, but a sentence like the one we are looking at (where full vowels are dominant but where there is also an onslaught of lenis consonants)¹⁰,  dream, about though, details, dream, varied, the all contribute to the lingering dimension of the sentence enhanced by the coordinate conjunction. The rhythm contributes – in the same way that “and” does – to put the reader on hold. And functions somewhat like a signal, warning the reader that the end is nigh, but that they must keep in mind all that precedes.11

In the introductory passage (see above) I have measured off the intonation groups taking into consideration Quirk’s rules. Notice however that in order to maintain the tendency in English towards the isochrony that Cruttenden speaks about, the reader is going to have to take an extra long breath for many of the sentences in this passage. Look at what happens to sentence 8 (The number of syllables are marked at the beginning of each group). It is a passage that literally takes your breath away.

The coordinate structures in this opening passage – syndeton, asyndeton, polysyndeton – contribute therefore to very long sentences thus establishing rhythmical groups that are multi-syllabic, with a stress and accent scheme which help explain the alternative stories Russel Banks was speaking of. On the one hand we have “I’m going to tell you a little story about the Grieves sisters” and on another “the story that I’m really going to tell is about the wounded relationship I had with my deceased mother and the mourning that has not yet been accomplished.”

As Dubois-Charlier and Vautherin have pointed out :

We are going to examine examples of phrasal coordination other than that of adjective phrases. After commenting on the ambiguity inherent in these structures we will examine how these structures contribute to the surreptitious slipping in of the voice heard at the beginning of the short story and others. Other narrative voices that we will be called upon to hear are :

– the voice of the mother

– the extradiegetic narrator

– the intradiegetic narrator

– the voice of the community

– the unreliable narrator12

Noun phrases can be joined by combinatory coordination – in which case what is predicated for one is predicated for the other: or segratory coordination where it is possible to paraphrase Clause1 and Clause2 (Dik :1968; Girard :1998).

– Joint coordination: John and Mary are married.

– Mutual coordination: Peter and Mary are alike.

– Unitary coordination: Fish and chips is my favourite dish.

In John and Mary are married, the obvious interpretation is John and Mary are married to each other. But, there is nothing preventing an interpretation in which John is married to Karen and Mary is married to Donald, wherein the coordination can be interpreted as segratory.

In order to disambiguate one type of coordination from the other there are various devices that can be used : for example a preposition like between demands a joint coordination 

*there should be a year between it

*there should be a year between her father’s death.

Also:

Now, of course, this last sentence is to be understood as :

Reciprocal verbs are all verbs that demand joint coordination and in this case there is always the implicit understanding of to one another / together.

Once the couple is established by the context, in any further mention the reader can easily identify the coordination as being joint with an implicit understanding of “together” to be read between the lines.

Since the couple Flora and Robert has already been established by the context, there is no difficulty identifying it as a joint coordination.

The verb correspond is another verb that spontaneously implies two participants :

And in the following, the characteristic ‘joint’ of the coordination has also been firmly established by N1.

There is to all evidence, no ambiguity in these sentences. Robert and Ellie, and Robert and Nurse Atkinson are fully established couples. Quirk et al. tell us that one thing that can help us decide whether we are dealing with one type of coordination or another is to find a cover term. Munro has conveniently provided us with cover terms which help us identify the jointness of the coordination – Ellie’s share and the shameless pair in this last example.

In segratory coordination, the coordinated elements are not to be considered as a couple and it is possible to paraphrase the sentence by breaking it up into two clauses. In the case of this type of coordination, both is either present or implied in the sentence.

When there is no term to disambiguate, the context will usually come to our rescue and enable us to decide which kind of coordination is being used. But we shall look at our examples once again to see how Munro exploits this characteristic of coordinate structures to weave a web of ambiguity which will serve as the fibre of N2.

Let us examine once again our previous examples.

Through the context, the reader who has been following the story easily identifies the following coordination as being joint :

In this imagined rendition (i.e. it is the narrator imagining how her mother would have told the story, if she could have fulfilled one of her dreams, i.e. to become a writer) the coordination here enables the narrator to join three distinct moments of N1.

It is by filling in the blanks – where Robert appears each time – that this merry-go-round of couples begins to come into focus and enhance the question that Dubois-Charlier and Vautherin invite us to answer – what indeed authorizes us to talk of couples.

The interpretation of this sentence is clear enough as I suggested above. But another interpretation is also possible:

It is perhaps pushing things a little to conclude that we are to interpret this as a tongue-in-cheek insinuation that these three were into unorthodox practices, but it is in these gaps that Munro not only enables us to play our role of active readers by inviting us to fill them in, it is also in these gaps that she constructs the space in her text which enables other narrative voices to be heard.

Even in a sentence as unassuming as the one that follows, Munro is in fact taking one of the “swift turns” that Banks was speaking of above.

The interesting thing about this sentence is that it is found well after the story has begun and that Robert was introduced at the beginning as being married to Ellie! So when we come to this sentence we go back for a second read. Of course we do not interpret it as he was engaged to Ellie and Flora was engaged to someone else. But N1 has been telling us a completely different story up until now. This coordinate structure invites us to take a closer look. The narrator is not telling the story the way her mother told it to her, most probably in chronological order. She is telling her own story, and though it is not yet the same voice we heard at the beginning of the narrative, it is not simply the detached extradiegetic narrator telling a tale.

And what about :

No ambiguity here, but we should notice that the narrator designates them via a cover term – “a pair”– modified by “shameless”, which on top of everything is placed at the end of the sentence and hereby gaining what is known as end-focus. If Robert and Nurse Atkinson have attained the status of couple, they have attained a whole new status in this sentence as being “a pair”.

So what about the pair?

The Oxford Dictionary of English confirms the use of the pair as a possible synonym for couple; but in the examples given in the dictionary “pair” is always preceded by an attributive adjective i.e. silly pair, or an adverb they make quite a pair, or to designate objects: a pair of scissors, gloves, pyjamas etc. So when “pair” is used to designate a couple, there is always a modal quality to it.

What at first glance appears to be the mother’s voice, is in fact the imagined voice of the narrator’s mother. But the use of the pair, this disambiguator of joint /segratory coordination, in introducing a modal commentary, is in fact a subtle way for the narrator to comment on the rather close-minded way she perceived her mother to be. She becomes here the unreliable narrator. Thus, in this passage we have :

– the voice of the mother who is the mouthpiece for the “community”.

– the narrator and the narrator’s rendition of her mother when she was 15.

What interests us here is the fact that through the analysis of this disambiguator we catch a glimpse of the other narrative, N2 – and it is through the uneasy relationships between Flora, Ellie, Robert, and Nurse Atkinson that the narrator lets slip in the uneasy relationship between her and her mother.

The verb correspond, like engage, marry, etc. is also a verb that implies two participants

But if for engage and marry the diverse narrative voices imply a possible third party, the verb correspond functions differently. Flora indeed stops corresponding with the mother after the latter writes a commiserating letter to Flora whom she considers to have been ditched a second time – this time for Nurse Atkinson. So another couple, the one of the mother and Flora, break off.

The mother can no longer correspond because of “the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death” (see introductory passage above).

The mother therefore sets off on a correspondence that is not only unique, but that goes nowhere. A verb that normally needs a couple has its usage modified by the narrative to one painfully solitary participant.

Friend of my Youth is in italics in the text with upper case letters.¹³ As far as the coherence of a text is concerned, this reference is remarkable. Not only does it send us back to the title of the short story, it sends us back to the title of the whole collection. We can surmise that the interrupted correspondence has been taken up by the narrator and it has taken on the form of a short story.

In analyzing joint and segratory coordination we can catch a glimpse of how Munro uses the inherent ambiguity in these structures to allow other narrative voices to express themselves and create a much greater complexity than the story of the Grieves would first imply.

If in structures as unassuming as joint and segratory coordination, Munro manages to introduce a certain degree of ambiguity, she confirms this in all the other ways she plays with the other coordinate structures throughout the text (Hetherington-Blin 2006).

In telling the story of the Grieves sisters, the narrator has been able to tell the story of her own grief. The lament heard in the opening passage resurges throughout the text, joining in with other narrative voices. It is in the study of the various aspects of coordination that the lament comes in louder and clearer.

The one constant in “Friend of my Youth”, from page 2 right through till the end, is the character of Flora Grieves. And the word “grieve” can also give us a clue as to one of the sources of ambiguity in the short story.

It is perhaps not superfluous to mention that Flora Grieves can be read as “Flora is in mourning.”