This paper is devoted to the problem of analysis of literary text  in terms of discourse. Such notions as “discourse” and  “discourse analysis” are widely used in modern linguistics and even in some other disciplines and certainly need comments. But we shall begin with the very beginning - with the text of literature.

I am going to concentrate on the text of a story Just Good Friends by modern British writer Jeffrey Archer who is well-known for his novels Kane and Abel, Shall We Tell the President?, The Prodigal Daughter and some others and whom Mail on Sunday called “Probably the greatest storyteller of our age”. He was specially praised for his “cunningly constructed, fast-moving, entertaining set of stories called A Twist in the Tale (1988) which the above-mentioned story Just Good Friends is borrowed from.
But what is so remarkable about the story itself? It begins as follows:
“I woke up before him feeling slightly randy but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. I blinked and my eyes immediately accustomed themselves to the half light. I raised my head and gazed at the large expanse of motionless white flesh lying next to me. If only he took as much exercise as I did he wouldn’t have that spare tyre, I thought unsympathetically.
Roger stirred restlessly and even turned over to face me, but I knew he would not be fully awake until the alarm on his side of the bed started ringing...”

We have good reasons to conclude that a narrator is a woman who does not particularly like her partner. Certainly, he is described very emotionally and seems to be disgusting after such characteristics as “the large expanse of motionless white flesh” or “spare tyre”. These characteristics follow the confession that she felt slightly randy. The word “randy” is highly connotative and marked as informal in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary where it is explained as “sexually excited; lustful”. It makes us think that she is thoroughly dissatisfied with her partner.

After such an opening what should a more or less experienced in terms of literature reader expect? Obviously, these emotional words of a dissatisfied woman should be followed by some sort of explanation which usually lies in the life story of a character and in her analysis of the relations with the partner. Thus, you are quite right to expect this lady to tell you how she found herself in such situation. And this exactly the case with the story under discussion. It proceeds with the story of their acquaintance and of her life before him. Nothing particularly remarkable except the fact that she mentions his former girl-friend and that she was patiently waiting her to leave him which finally happened. Another interesting detail is that all that took place in a bar called Cat and Whistle where she could regularly see him. But there is nothing strange about it for she said she had got part-time work at this bar.

Other details of her life story do not seem strange to modern reader: she was the youngest in a family of four, she never knew her father, her mother ran off with another man, she met someone called Derek “whose sensual looks would have attracted any susceptible female” as she describes him. He told her that he had been on a merchant steamer for the past three years. That is why he never set eyes on her twins, two girls, because he had returned to sea even before she could tell him she was pregnant. Then she got that part-time work at the bar where she was watching Roger (the man she described as her partner at the beginning of the story) with “the blonde with the shabby fur coat” as she describes his girl-friend.

The story unfolds quite smoothly and reveals her thoughts and reminiscences during this ordinary morning and contains nothing unpredictable until you come to the very end of it. The last paragraphs ruin all your impression and deviate from any expectations.

    “...A few seconds later I was downstairs. Although he had already taken his first mouthful of cornflakes he stopped eating the moment he saw me.
    ‘Good of you to join me,’ he said, a grin spreading over his face.
    I padded over towards him and looked up expectantly. He bent down and pushed my bowl towards me. I began to lap up the milk happily, my tail swishing from side to side.
    It’s a myth that we only swish our tails when we’re angry.”

How could you actually predict that this lady would turn into a cat at the very end of the story? There are no clues in the text which could have prepared us to such a twist in the tale.

Of course, having found out the truth about the actual narrator and having carefully reread the story we begin enjoying the subtle humour of many phrases and the whole text. But if you do not know who tells the story everything seems perfectly normal for a woman, it coincides with our stereotyped ideas of women behaviour (at least some categories of women). There are no lexical clues, no stylistic devices signalling to the reader who could be the real narrator, and while reading this text we have no doubts that we have come across another woman’s story.

But the idea of this paper is to try to answer the following question: how should we analyse this sort of text?

There are different strategies of text analysis - bottom-up (from the word, sentence to the whole of the text which is purely linguistic approach) and top-down (from the point of view of general meaning, so called predictive way which is mainly employed by literary criticism).

If we stop at the first stage we get to nowhere because it allows us to describe only formal characteristics of a text but may hardly allow us to interpret it adequately. If we turn to the other it may also be not enough to decipher the message of the writer because in this case we somehow “read in” some sort of a general idea underlying this particular linguistic form. The absence of any specific linguistic means indicating the real storyteller makes linguopoetic analysis almost useless as soon as it does not help us to understand and interpret this text adequately. This makes us turn to modern theories of discourse analysis.

It seems more fruitful to treat text as a unit of discourse. We consider discourse to be a reflection of our thinking with the help of linguistic means, and thus discourse implies both the process of linguistic activity and its result, i.e. text.

(In fact, there are several interpretations of the term “discourse” (see English-Russian Dictionary of Linguistics and Semiotics edited by A.N.Baranov and D.O.Dobrovol’skij.) but we are going to base our studies on this particular understanding which to a certain extent follows a definition suggested by V.Krasnykh in her monograph “Виртуальная реальность или реальная виртуальность?” devoted to the linguo-cognitive problems of communication:
“под дискурсом мы понимаем вербализованную речемыслительную деятельность, включающую в себя не только собственно лингвистические, но и экстралингвистические компоненты.” (p.190)).

In this case text may be considered an object of discourse analysis which, in its turn, may be understood as a sort of analysis which, on the one hand, includes the study of linguistic forms and, on the other hand, involves a consideration of the general principles of interpretation by which people normally make sense of what they hear and read.

Actually at the beginning of our talk we have already exercised one of the discourse analysis procedures. We have appealed to our readers’ experience and suggested the expected development of a story. Modern linguistics has introduced several terms for such kind of experience: frames, scripts, scenarios, schemata, mental models corresponding to stereotyped situations stored in memory and representing background knowledge which is used in the production and understanding of discourse.

Later on we have mentioned the deviation from expectations of the reader which comes as a result of reading this particular text. Modern British scholar Guy Cook in his book Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind describes this process as schema disrupting and schema refreshing. If we apply this approach to the story by Jeffrey Archer we must admit that, indeed, the author managed to mystify us till the very end of the story because he deliberately used the situations and reactions typical to women behaviour and they coincided in our mind with the schemata of such behaviour. For example: “Her exit was my cue to enter. I almost leapt from behind the bar and, moving as quickly as dignity allowed, was seconds later sitting on the vacant stool beside him. He didn’t comment and certainly made no attempt to offer me a drink, but the one glance he shot in my direction did not suggest he found me an unacceptable replacement...” (p.117)

“...I began to flutter my eyelashes in a rather exaggerated way...He leaned over and touched my cheek, his hands surprisingly gentle. Neither of us felt the need to speak...” (p.117)

“My only anxiety was that he didn’t seem aware of my existence, just constantly preoccupied, his eyes each evening and his thoughts each morning only for Madeleine. Now I envied that girl. She had everything I wanted - except a decent fur coat, the only thing my mother had left me. In truth, I have no right to be catty about Madeleine, as her past couldn’t have been more murky than mine.” (p.118)

Hence, the author has deceived us because we couldn’t expect a cat to be so similar to a woman in her reactions to situation and even her feelings. In terms of Guy Cook it means that our schemata have been first disrupted and then refreshed.

So, we have tried to demonstrate the applicability of discourse analysis to literary text and the possible help of this method in teaching literature. Of course, this method can hardly be called universal and its applicability depends on the purpose of reading literature. If you read it for pure aesthetic enjoyment you will definitely get it without any sort of analysis. If you read it philologically, i.e. trying to understand how this aesthetic effect is produced then you need some method of interpretation of the communicative message and the aesthetic impact of a work of verbal art.

I would like to finish my paper with the quotation from the book Discourse Analysis by Gillian Brown and George Yule: “There is a dangerous tendency, among established scholars as among students, to hope that a particular line of approach will yield ‘the truth’ about a problem. It is very easy to make claims which are too general and too strong. We have tried to show that some of the established wisdom in the area of discourse analysis may illuminate some aspects of discourse processing and of language use, but that all approaches open up yet more gaps in our understanding.” (P.270).
 

References

1. Brown, Gillian; Yule, George Discourse Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
2. Cook, Guy Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford University Press, 1994.
3. English-Russian Dictionary of Linguistics and Semiotics. Edited by A.N.Baranov, D.O.Dobrovol’skij. Moscow, Pomowski and Partner, 1996.
4. В.В.Красных, “Виртуальная реальность или реальная виртуальность?”. М.,1998.
5. Archer, Jeffrey, A Twist in the Tale. Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.