“ The Statistical Analysis of Style: How Language Means
in Beckett”
C.
W.
F.
McKenna
The University of Newcastle, Australia
This paper will analyse narrative style in selected fiction of Beckett (French and
English versions). It will use computational stylistics for a formalist
discrimination of patterns of language in the texts and will thus begin with a
descriptive base. Previous published work by Burrows, Love, Craig, Holmes, Forsyth,
Tweedie, Baayen, and Smith has shown the strength of computational procedures,
particularly in such areas as the identification of authorship, genre, period, and
character. This present work builds upon these foundations by examining issues in
narrative theory and translation theory, with particular reference to Bakhtin's
ideas on the way different discourses interact. Whilst Bakhtin recognised "the
positive influence of Formalism" (1986: 169) he exposed its limitations, recognising
the need to extend analysis to broader cultural issues. If, as Bakhtin argues, all
utterance is ideologically governed and can never be neutral then the
differentiations in language patterns revealed in our work cannot be construed as
merely linguistic phenomena. That would be to rest with the formalist approach that
Bakhtin wished to move beyond. The cultural questions arise as soon as one applies
Bakhtinian concepts. Beckett is highly appropriate for such an investigation given
the complexity, subtlety, and significance of his narrative experiments. When
Beckett came to consider an English version of Molloy,
which had been written in French in 1947 and published in 1951, he talked of
producing a "new" text. To ask in what sense the text might be "new" is to open the
large question of what can be and what cannot be achieved in translation - a
question whose implications range from the immediate practical realities of
searching for the nearest equivalent of a given word to the philosophical issues
pertaining to language and how it means. At the philosophic level, translation
raises ontological questions, the very questions raised by Molloy himself early in the text: "But my ideas on this subject were
always horribly confused, for my knowledge of men was scant and the meaning of being
beyond me" (52). The reference to a distinctive phrase in Heidegger's work alerts us
to the link between the problem of translation and central ideas in Beckett's
trilogy: commentators such as O'Hara argue, for example, that Beckett's work 'could
almost be seen as a literary exploration of Heideggerian metaphysics', and that
Beckett's fundamental inquiry in the trilogy centres around the question of how
language means. This question then becomes refocussed through consideration of what
can be achieved in translation. Heidegger's reservations about the way in which
translation violates meaning in the source text appear eventually to be taken up by
Beckett, who is reported as stating during a London rehearsal of Endgame: "The more I go on the more I think things are untranslatable"
(Cockerham 1440. This issue of 'untranslatability', Steiner argues, 'is founded upon
the conviction, formal and pragmatic, that there can be no true symmetry, no
adequate mirroring, between two different semantic systems' (1975: 239). Expanding
this argument concerning 'semantic dissonance' Steiner writes that 'Because all
human speech consists of arbitrarily selected but intensely conventionalized
signals, meaning can never be wholly separated from expressive form. Even the most
purely ostensive, apparently neutral terms are embedded in linguistic particularity,
in an intricate mould of cultural-historical habit. There are no surfaces of
absolute transparency.'
Patterns of prepositionality or conjunctivity, such as emerge in our analyses as a
feature both of Beckett's English and French versions, impact upon our understanding
of each text's meaning. How might these patterns influence our reading of Beckett?
Does Beckett provide one work of literature called Molloy,
or does that title mask two works of literature? How different is it really to read
Beckett in French as opposed to reading him in English? These questions have not, I
believe, been addressed in quite the way that this project proposes. The closest
work is that of Opas (1995), who has studied translations of Beckett's How It Is and All Strange Away into
Finnish, German, and Swedish. Using the University of Toronto's TACT program as the
basis for her computational analysis, and applying the postulate of van Leuven-Zwart
(1989,1990) that 'if there are enough consistent changes between a text and its
translation on the microstructural level, it will affect the macrostructure of the
text also', she has provided evidence of the ways in which common words influence
syntactic structures and of how translations of them can influence the meanings we
read in a text.
The research data used in this paper derives from analyses of word frequencies, using
established statistical techniques (e.g. principal component analysis, t-test,
Mann-Whitney test). In order to produce this computational evidence texts are first
prepared for the computer programs in accordance with protocols developed by
Burrows. Frequency counts are established for each of the 99 most common words in
the texts. These counts are standardized to allow for the variations in the total
size of each section of text and each count is correlated with every other count so
as to produce a matrix (using the Pearson product-moment method of correlation). We
also use a technique of multivariate statistics known as principal component
analysis and plot the results so as to show the relationships between the variables
in the data. The plots show which words behave most like each other and which
sections most resemble each other in their word-frequency patterns.
The significance of this evidence is further tested by using distribution tests such
as the t-test and Mann-Whitney test, which assess whether the variations in the data
occur at a level of probability that statisticians would deem likely to be an effect
of chance or a significant outcome. These procedures enable identification of the
words that discriminate significantly - in computational terms - between narrative
styles. The discriminating words will also be examined through "scatter plots" which
generate the scatter of values for each word in each section of the text. This
procedure will reveal how sporadically or consistently each word discriminates in a
particular comparison.
Although this research therefore begins with computational evidence, it will move
from the quantifiable data to consider the literary significance of a word's use in
context. As McCarty (1996) writes, "no tool is 'just a tool' but is an agent of
perception and means of thinking". Common words are significant because they point
to the larger linguistic structures in which they participate. With Beckett's work,
investigations of stylistic differentiation show how translated texts maintain in
the second language similar kinds of discriminations as those operating in the first
language. The present work on a range of Beckett's early, middle, and late fiction
extends previously published work by McKenna, Burrows, and Antonia on Molloy (1999) and on the trilogy (1999 forthcoming).
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