Listening to people reading 231The study of metrical organization—of the conformity of the language of
a verse to certain conventional patterns involving ‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed’
syllables’ —has a long history, and suggestions that it can be aided by the
kind of analysis linguistics provides have not always been welcomed.
Nevertheless, it would seem unlikely that there is no describable relationship
between the categories of metrical theory and those of such an analytical
procedure as the one this chapter is concerned with. I shall try to go some
way towards clarifying that relationship by seeing how far we can get, on
the assumption that poetry is engaged communication.
Before doing so, however, I must consider briefly one way in which
poetry differs from the kind of language that we looked at in the last
section. We said there that the newsreader related her performance to
assumptions about an audience, and in doing this she was dependent on
her apprehension of a ready-made community of interest. She assumed
that she knew what could be taken for granted and what needed to be told.
She assumed, moreover, that members of the audience knew these things
as well. The activity could therefore be seen as a co-operative matching
of performance with expectation, something that is fairly apparent in the
opening sentence: ‘This is what I know you want to know about: this is
what I have to tell you about it.’ Readers of poetry have a different situation
to operate in, and it is one which distinguishes very much of what we can
informally speak of as fiction.
When a reader begins the first chapter of a novel like this:
//r NICHolas BUDE //r SIGNED his NAME //p at the BOTtom of a page
of NOTEpaper //
she addresses an interest in where a person of that name signed it. If she
begins
//r NICHolas BUDE //p SIGNED his NAME //p at the BOTTom of a
page of NOTEpaper //she addresses an interest in what he did and where he did it. Both assume
that Nicholas Bude is known to the hearer. Now it is highly unlikely that
any of these assumptions are based on the reality of the situation. The title
of the novel The Chinese Room gives no prior indication of what the
characters will be called; in fact both readings seem to be in line with a
common authorial practice of introducing one character at the very beginning
of the novel as if they were known, and as if their activities were an object
of already negotiated concern. We can say, then, that in examining the
reading aloud of fiction, the notion of projection is likely to be of considerable
importance. Instead of matching their performances to an already existing
state of understanding, readers must project such a state by acting as
though it existed; and it is part of what is required of co-operative hearers
that they accept the presuppositions that the projected state attributes to
them.