Fienberg 1992:9–10The scene from the movie is presented in the conventional register of the Gothic (dusk,
shadows, bled, moaning wind, an owl hooted), though the unusual metaphor ‘shadows
bled’ reconfigures the conventional elements with the effect of foregrounding the Gothic
trait of overwording (or semantic overload). By then switching the retelling to the
audience’s perceptions and responses, Fienberg builds in a common Gothic narrative
strategy, that of determining emotional response to scene or incident by building it in as
a character’s response. The switch also enables a version of the suspense so necessary
to horror (‘him...behind that bush’; ‘the nurse...leaving’; ‘his clawed hands’). These
narrative strategies set up the deflation occurring with Ariel’s response and the register
shift which expresses it: detached and analytic, she epitomises the resistant reader who
refuses the positioning implied by the genre. The deflation has the effect of
retrospectively defining how far a genre can depend on its audience’s unthinking
acceptance of the emotional codes implied by its register.
Fienberg is making an important point about how fiction works (her novel is
pervasively metafictive), and it is a point which is well applied to modes of fiction in
which register is much less obtrusive. It is easy to assume that realistic fiction is based
on a neutral register, though this is not really so, and a stylistic account can help
disclose how its registers position readers even more thoroughly than do obvious
registers such as that of Gothic. This is readily seen in the tradition of realism in
adolescent fiction in the USA, which developed in the 1960s out of a psychology of
adolescence based in the work of Erik Erikson re-routed through the textual influence of
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Thus a first-person, adolescent narrator represents
significant issues of adolescent development, such as ‘experience of physical sexual
maturity, experience of withdrawal from adult benevolent protection, consciousness of
self in interaction, re-evaluation of values, [and] experimentation’ (Russell 1988:61).
Cultural institutions, genre and style interact with a material effect, not just to code
human behaviour but to shape it. A stylistic analysis offers one position from which we
can begin to unravel that shaping process. Danziger’s Can You Sue Your Parents for
Malpractice? is thematically focused on the five concepts of adolescent development
listed above; most are evident in the following passage:
[Linda] says, ‘How can you stop a buffalo from charging?’
‘Take away his credit cards,’ my mother answers.
My father turns to her. ‘You should know that one. Now that you’re going back to
work, I bet you’re going to be spending like mad, living outside my salary.’
‘Why don’t you just accept it and not feel so threatened?’ My mother raises her
voice. She hardly ever does that.
I can feel the knot in my stomach and I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin.
‘Who feels threatened?’ he yells. ‘That’s ridiculous. Just because you won’t have
to depend on me, need me any more, why should I worry?’
So that’s why he’s acting this way. He thinks it’s the money that makes him
important, Sometimes I just don’t understand his brain.
‘Why can’t you ever celebrate anything?’ she yells again.62 LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS