Construing A Lover As "An Organism Composed Of Parts"

Martin & Rose (2007: 79-80):

In the ‘repercussions’ phase of the second Incident in her story, Helena construes her second love as a tortured organism composed of various parts, including his anatomy and physiology, and his soul, highlighted below.

Sometimes he would just press his face into his hands and shake uncontrollably. I realised he was drinking too much. Instead of resting at night, he would wander from window to window. He tried to hide his wild consuming fear, but I saw it. In the early hours of the morning between two and half-past-two, I jolt awake from his rushed breathing. Rolls this way, that side of the bed. He's pale. Ice cold in a sweltering night - sopping wet with sweat. Eyes bewildered, but dull like the dead. And the shakes. The terrible convulsions and blood-curdling shrieks of fear and pain from the bottom of his soul. Sometimes he sits motionless, just staring in front of him. 1 never understood. I never knew. Never realised what was being shoved down his throat during the 'trips', I just went through hell. Praying, pleading: 'God, what's happening? What's wrong with him? Could he have changed so much? Is he going mad? I can't handle the man anymore!

We will refer to the relation between one part of a whole and the next as a co-part relation. The parts of Helena’s man are analysed as a lexical string in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 Parts of Helena's second love
the man
part
his face
co-part
his hands
co-part
eyes
co-part
the bottom of his soul
co-part
his throat

In contrast to the classifying taxonomy in Figure 3.4 above, these parts of the man together make up a compositional taxonomy, consisting of wholes and their parts and sub-parts, which we can express as a tree diagram in Figure 3.5.

Figure 3.5 Parts of Helena's second love

Blogger Comments:

[1] Martin & Rose's absurd — though highly amusing — claim, that the author is construing her lover as an organism composed of parts, arises from their re-interpreting the textual system of lexical cohesion at the level of lexicogrammar (Halliday & Hasan 1976) as an experiential system at the level of discourse.  The theoretical inconsistency is primarily one of metafunction.

In the original work that provides the source for these ideas — unacknowledged by Martin & Rose — meronymic relations between lexical items help to create the texture that differentiates a unified text from a collection of unrelated instances.

[2] To be clear, a lexical string is a string of lexical items, not of nominal groups; that is, here Martin & Rose confuse lexis with grammar.  Moreover, lexical items, as the term suggests, are located at the level of lexicogrammar, not discourse semantics.  In this latter case, the theoretical inconsistency is one of stratification (levels of symbolic abstraction).