Mistaking Appreciation For Judgement

Martin & Rose (2007: 32-3):

We’ll start with personal judgements - positive (admiring) and negative (criticising). As we showed in Chapter 1, Helena’s story is an exemplum. Exemplums relate an incident in order to comment on the behaviour of the people involved. This means that alongside telling how people feel emotionally, Helena judges them, she evaluates their character. 

Helena’s first love is at first characterised admiringly as bubbly, vivacious, energetic, intelligent, popular and later, retrospectively, as beautiful, big and strong. And he is also admired implicitly as working in a top security structure, i.e. an admirable role. Helena’s second love is not quite so special, but described initially as exceptional, special, bubbly and charming. In both cases her lovers change, as a result of their security operations. Helena doesn’t explicitly re-assess her first love, rather she implies criticism by telling us how she felt when she saw what was left of him:

I can't explain the pain and bitterness in me when I saw what was left of that beautiful, big, strong person.

But she does directly criticise her second love as having something wrong with him, as maybe having gone mad, and as wasted. Their transformations from admiring judgements to critical ones are central to the impact of the two Incident stages of the story.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is presented as a gloss of the interpersonal system of affect: appraising by reference to emotion.  However, 'telling how people feel emotionally' takes the perspective of construing experience as meaning, which is ideational in terms of metafunction.  That is, it misinterprets affect in terms of metafunction.

[2] This discussion largely mistakes appreciation for judgement. According to the foundational work on the system of attitude:

JUDGEMENT is concerned with the evaluation of human behaviour with respect to social norms. Thus, under JUDGEMENT we may assess behaviour as moral or immoral, as legal or illegal, as socially acceptable or unacceptable, as laudable or deplorable, as normal or abnormal and so on…

whereas

APPRECIATION is concerned with the evaluation of objects and products (rather than human behaviour) by reference to aesthetic principles and other systems of social value. It encompasses values which fall under the general heading of aesthetics, as well as a non-aesthetic category of 'social valuation' which includes meanings such as significant and harmful.

[3] This is misleading because it is untrue.  The criticism here is not made of Helena's first love, but of the experiences that had diminished the qualities in him that she appreciated.