PDF. - full text - Dunarea de Jos

Either none, or else tranquility swallowed up everything, as it appeared to do for
Professor Godbole. Here was Aziz all shoddy and odious, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested
both silly, and he himself and Heaslop both decorous on the surface, but detestable
really, and detesting each other.
The repetitive use of Good-bye may be interpreted as stylistically summing up and
marking the moment when tension diminishes and disappears, as well as completing the
formal dimension of the language employed when associated with elliptical sentences that
are characteristic of formal social conversation, e.g. […] thank you so much. … What lovely
College buildings! Such an interesting afternoon. …
Text 2. “‘[…] I have had twenty-five years’ experience of this country’ – he paused, and
‘twenty-five years’ seemed to fill the waiting-room with their staleness and ungenerosity
– ‘and during those twenty-five years I have never known anything but disaster result
when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially. Intercourse, yes.
Courtesy, by all means. Intimacy – never, never. The whole weight of my authority is
against it. I have been in charge at Chandrapore for six years, and if everything has gone
smoothly, if there has been mutual respect and esteem, it is because both peoples kept to
this simple rule. New-comers set our traditions aside, and in an instant what you see
happens, the work of years is undone and the good name of my District ruined for a
generation. I – I – can’t see the end of this day’s work, Mr. Fielding. You, who are imbued
with modern ideas – no doubt you can. I wish I had never lived to see its beginning, I
know that. That a lady, that a young lady, engaged to my most valued subordinate – that
she – an English girl fresh from England – that I should have lived – –’” (pp. 147-148)
Text 2 continues the same cultural clash that permeates the entire novel, but it develops
the perspective of the accuser, as it consists in a plea of the ‘ruler’ against the ‘ruled’. The
vocabulary in this case is blatantly formal, obeying and exaggerating the norms of high
society members being appalled at the behaviour of the lower classes or ‘savages’ in foreign
lands.
The power of the accuser’s beliefs permeates all linguistic levels of the text,
manipulating language into stylistically supporting the ideas expressed by artful pleating of
stylistic functions of language. The clash of two cultures that are very different is to be seen
in the dominance of nouns marked [+ABSTRACT], e.g. years, experience, country, staleness,
ungenerosity, disaster, Intercourse, Courtesy, Intimacy, weight, authority, respect, esteem, rule,
traditions, instant, work, name, generation, ideas. The few intrusions of nouns marked
[+CONCRETE] seem to merely support the battle of ideas by appointing concrete entities to
keep the ‘combat’ going, e.g. waiting-room, people, New-comers, District, lady, subordinate, girl.
In their turn, the adjectives unfold a similar axis of ideas, an axis that may be regarded
as threefold, namely the accuser defining a) himself and the culture he stands for, deeply
dependant on tradition, e.g. whole, mutual, simple, good; b) the change that comes with people
who are open-minded to embrace social development, e.g. imbued, modern; c) the innocent
victim, still part of the accuser’s culture, e.g. young, valued, fresh. As it can be easily noticed,
all adjectives serve a clear stylistic function, that of qualifying characters and what they
symbolize in the complex background of the novel.
Considering the fact that there are only four adverbs present in the fragment, e.g.
never, socially, smoothly, aside, mention must be made that their scarcity seems to be made up
for by the repetitive use of never (4 instances), which may semantically express the accuser’s
refusal to accept the situation at hand or to reconsider the angle of analysis of the respective
situation.
Similar to the previous text, the great variety of verbs, as well as their considerable
number, account for the stylistic impression of actual conversation taking place, of
63