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Corpus Stylistics in Principles

and Practice

Advances in Stylistics
Series Editor: Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UK
Editorial Board:
Beatrix Busse, University of Berne, Switzerland
Szilvia Csbi, Etvs Lornd University, Hungary
Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany
Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK
Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK
Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University, UK
Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA
Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, France
Titles in the series:
Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice
Yufang Ho
D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint
Violeta Sotirova
Opposition In Discourse
Lesley Jefferies
Stylistics and Shakespeares Language
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper and Mireille Ravassat
The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond
Roberta Piazza
I. A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics
David West
Style in the Renaissance
Patricia Canning
The Stylistics of Chick Lit
Roco Montoro

Corpus Stylistics in Principles


and Practice
A Stylistic Exploration of John Fowles
The Magus

Yufang Ho

Continuum International Publishing Group


The Tower Building
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New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Yufang Ho 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-26178 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India


Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

viii
1

Part I Corpus stylistics general principles


Chapter One: What is corpus stylistics?
1.1 History
1.2 Current state of corpus stylistic research
1.3 Striking a balance between quantitative and
qualitative analyses
Chapter Two: Exploring The Magus using corpus
stylistic analysis
2.1 The Magus comparison research rationale
2.2 Possible worlds, possible viewpoints in The Magus
2.3 A corpus approach to point of view investigation
2.4 Structure of Part II of the book

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5
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9

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30

Part II Corpus stylistics in practice a comparative analysis


of The Magus
Chapter Three: Introduction to The Magus (M1) and its
revision (M2)
3.1 The Magus original: plot summary, narrative structure,
characters
3.2 An overview of The Magus revision

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vi

Contents

Chapter Four: Quantitative comparison measuring the


degree of text similarity
4.1 The Magus corpus
4.2 Corpus tool 1: TESAS/Crouch
4.3 Corpus tool 2: WCopyfind
4.4 Measuring the unmeasurable? advantages and
disadvantages
4.5 Summary and implications
Chapter Five: Qualitative stylistic comparison
generating hypotheses
5.1 Review of previous stylistic research on The Magus
5.2 Textual comparison 1: A man satyr with an arrow in
his heart
5.3 Textual comparison 2: Nicholass first self-reflection
5.4 Hypotheses concerning the revisionary tendency
in The Magus
5.5 Summary and implications
Chapter Six: Comparing lexical semantic patterns
testing hypothesis 1
6.1 Corpus tool 3: Wmatrix
6.2 Sampling texts for further comparison
6.3 Comparing the lexical semantic patterns
between M1 and M2
6.4 Statistical results and data analysis
6.5 Summary and implications
Chapter Seven: Comparing figurative patterns and
density testing hypothesis 2
7.1 Corpus tool 4: WordSmith
7.2 Figurative language overview: simile and metaphor
7.3 Comparing figurative language in an extract-pair
from M1 and M2
7.4 Corpus research into figurative language comparison
7.5 Simile a starting point
7.6 Metaphor further extraction

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170

Contents
7.7 Figurative data analysis: journey, play and game?
7.8 Summary and implications
Chapter Eight: Stylistic differences between The Magus
and its revision
8.1 playing language games: metaphorical / metafictional
move in M2
8.2 A Possible-World and linguistic account of
stylistic effect
8.3 Fiction emotions in M1 artifact emotions in M2

vii

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185

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195

Part III Further issues in corpus stylistics


Chapter Nine: Pros and cons of a corpus stylistic approach to
literary studies
9.1 Assessment of the corpus stylistic approach
9.2 Suggestions for future research

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199
203

Appendix A: TESAS algorithm computation of text


similarity score
Appendix B: TESAS/Crouch statistics
Appendix C: Texts for analysis
Appendix D: Wmatrix statistics
Appendix E: Figurative examples

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Notes
References
Index

241
244
253

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd for


permission to use material from The Magus (original), first published
by Jonathan Cape; The Magus (a revised version) first published by
Vintage, copyright John Fowles.

Introduction

The book sets out to explore the stylistic differences between the two
different editions of The Magus by John Fowles, and to demonstrate
how the corpus methodology can contribute to the stylistic approach
to literary study. By comparing the textual differences between two
explicitly printed versions in more detail, I aim to investigate: (a) how
the second edition is linguistically different from the original and
(b) whether the textual revisions Fowles has made create different
stylistic effects or not.
To tackle the issue of how to compare and to ascertain the overall
text style differences between the two versions of a very long novel
like The Magus, I adopt a corpus stylistic approach. Different corpus
tools are exploited for this research:
(1) TESAS/Crouch and WCopyfind for identifying the overall
pattern of the revision in quantitative terms (i.e. measuring
the degree of text similarity across the 78 chapter-pairs of the
novel);
(2) Wmatrix for locating significant linguistic (semantic) differences
between the two editions, and the changing patterns in narrative
point of view presentation; and
(3) WordSmith Tools for identifying the patterns of metaphorical
language in the two editions.
Along the course of the research, detailed and systematic stylistic
analyses are always applied, not only to the comparison of pairs of
extracts from both editions to generate hypotheses concerning the
revisionary tendency, but also to the analysis of the linguistic evidence
uncovered by the corpus tools.

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

This book, hopefully, will appeal to two main audiences: those who
are interested in the literature of John Fowles; and those who are
interested in the theory and practice of corpus stylistics. Through the
analysis of The Magus, the book demonstrates that computer-assisted
methods can identify significant linguistic features or patterns which
literary critics have not noticed, and provide a more detailed descriptive basis for literary interpretation of (either edition) of the novel
and, of course, for other texts. The analysis of The Magus serves as a
case study and exemplar for the reader of how corpus techniques
may be used generally in the study of stylistics. It shows that a productive interaction between corpus linguistic analysis and literary
study is attainable without the sacrifice of either the methodological
rigour of corpus linguistics or the interpretive subtlety of literary
study. Most importantly, the overall findings through this combined
corpus stylistic approach reflect Fowless communicative intention to
reinforce the metafictional theory and its strategies in his revision of
The Magus, and accordingly enrich our appreciation and understanding
of the language games Fowles plays in his literary works.

Part I

Corpus stylistics general


principles

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Chapter One

What is corpus stylistics?

Corpus stylistics, an emerging field in the discipline of linguistics,


has become increasingly popular in recent decades. It is a combined
approach to the study of language of literature. This chapter briefly
outlines the history, the current state, and the fundamental tenet of
corpus stylistics. In order to get a clearer picture of its characteristic
features, we shall first have a look at the underlying principles of
stylistics and corpus linguistics, and then further discuss the advantages and aims of applying corpus methods and techniques to stylistic
analysis of literary texts.

1.1 History
Stylistics could be broadly defined as the study of the language and
style of literature. Stylistic analysis relies on linguistic evidence in the
literary work, and thus makes use of various tools of linguistic analysis
(e.g. using theories relating to phonetics, syntax, semantics and/or
theories from other areas such as pragmatics, cognitive linguistics,
etc.). During the history of linguistic stylistics, many scholars (e.g.
Andersson 1975; Enkvist 1964, 1971, 1977; Fowler 1971; Hough 1972;
Mller 2001; Short 1994; Ullmann 1964; Verdonk 2002) have suggested
that the notion of style should not be considered as an attribute but
as an implicitly relational concept. That is, to state that a text has a
certain style is equivalent to stating that it differs in some respects
from other texts.
Given that comparison is the basis of stylistic study, our next questions
should be: what exactly should we compare with, and how? Stylisticians
have long argued that the stylistically significant linguistic features
of a text can often be more clearly observed and more effectively

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

presented when an explicit comparison with another text is made.


A detailed comparison of one text with other text(s) can help the
analyst to view the linguistic features of the central text with a due
sense of proportion (Spencer and Gregory 1964: 1023). This view
of stylistic differences between texts in proportional terms is similar
to Enkvists (1985) suggestion that stylistic examination can be carried
out by comparing the densities of specific linguistic features in one
text with the corresponding densities in the other text(s) it is to be
compared with. Features which are significantly more frequent, or
rarer, in the text than in the other(s) are by definition style markers
for that text (Enkvist 1985: 20). The higher percentage of certain
linguistic features recurrence in a literary text indicates certain
aesthetic emphasis. They give the text its distinctive stylistic flavour.
The idea of comparing linguistic features to discern style in literary
work (be it text style or authorial style) links up stylistic study with
corpus linguistics, and so adds quantitative elements to qualitative
linguistic analysis. To tackle the issue of how to compare the style of
different texts with a corpus quantitative approach, we should first
address some basic issues in corpus linguistics, including a definition
of corpus as used in modern linguistics, a discussion of the advantages of corpus methodology to stylistic analysis of literary texts, and
an explanation of why it is particularly essential to combine both
quantitative and qualitative approaches in stylistic research to large
amount of texts or long texts such as novels.
Corpus linguistics, the use of corpora for language studies, has
become more widespread and more mainstream in the discipline
of linguistics. There are many ways to define a corpus, but there is
an increasing consensus that a corpus is a collection of (1) machinereadable (2) authentic texts (including transcripts of spoken data),
which is (3) sampled to be (4) representative of a particular language
or language variety (McEnery et al. 2006: 4). Machine-readability is
considered the most important attribute of modern corpora. There
are many advantages of using a computer and electronic data for
language study. First, computerized corpora can be processed and
manipulated rapidly and easily (e.g. searching, selecting, sorting and
formatting) with great accuracy and consistency. Secondly, corpus
linguistic techniques provide useful tools to identify textual features

What is Corpus Stylistics?

that are not striking enough to be perceived or discovered by a human


observer. For example, software tools such as concordances can classify and arrange data, and thus changes what is empirically observable.
By organizing huge amount of data, we can then observe patterns
across long texts, which lie outside unaided human perception and
no manual analysis could possibly discover. Thirdly, by generating
quantitative data and providing linguistic evidence in analysis, corpus
linguistic approaches to language study can avoid human bias and
thus make the result more comprehensive and reliable. Finally,
electronic data allow further automatic processing to be performed
so that corpus texts can be enriched with various linguistic analyses
(McEnery et al. 2006: 5; see also Stubbs 2007a: 1301). Given the
advantages, corpus methods and technology accordingly open up
research topics which were previously inconceivable.
In terms of analytical principle, corpus linguistics relies on the
evidence of language usage as collected and analysed in corpora,
and aims to be as objective and as insightful as possible. Actual
occurrences in corpora are the primary object of study, and analyses
are firmly based on the accessible observational data. The principle,
as Stubbs (2007a) states, is to use inductive arguments where many
observations and statistics drawn from the corpus data are interpreted
as evidence of probabilistic generalizations. There seems be no doubt
that the quantification of language use and the observational data
generated through corpus-based studies provide a required level of
sophistication in objective analysis and help scientifically interesting
generalizations.
The common ground between stylistics and corpus linguistics is that
both approaches emphasize the importance of linguistic evidence
and require the more scientific and objective analysis. Stylistics aims
to describe as accurately as possible the various linguistic elements
and configurations one encounters in literary works and their resulting
effects. The fact that we encounter the language in its most condensed
form in literature is one reason for applying the most sophisticated
tools or methods of analysis available. Given the advantages of using
corpora and computers for language study in general, stylisticians have
become more aware of the possibilities offered by corpus resources
and techniques, and consequently corpus stylistics is becoming

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

a major feature of literary linguistic investigation in recent years. As


Wynne (2006) defines, the term corpus stylistics merges a range
of methods, including the plain use of digitized literary texts, as
well as the deployment of statistical analyses of literary works or of
contrastive and comparative corpora. This new approach aims to
encapsulate the rigour of linguistics, satisfy the demand for empirical
evidence, and offer a means of interrogating literary texts in a systematic manner. Mahlberg (2007: 219) views corpus stylistics as a way of
bringing the study of language and literature closer together: making
use of innovative descriptive tools that not only fit into linguistic
frameworks but also leave room to account for individual qualities of
texts and thereby link up with literary interpretation.

1.2 Current state of corpus stylistic research


Corpus stylistic approach to literature has come in a variety of forms.
Stylisticians have started to make use of corpus resources and techniques in a number of ways, for example, the study of prose style
and discourse presentation; the study of individual authorial styles
and authorship attribution, and literary appreciation. The increasing
numbers of publications have suggested the fruitfulness of the joint
corpus stylistic approach to literary studies. For example, Louw
(1993) analyses literary effects (i.e. semantic prosody and ironic
effect) through the study of collocations. He argues that the semantic
prosodies associated with particular words are generally hidden from
our perception and inaccessible to our intuitions; they can only be
revealed computationally. Semino and Short (2004) report a project
of using a specially constructed and annotated corpus to investigate
the adequacy of Leech and Shorts (1981) model of speech and
thought presentation, which was based on scholarly intuition and has
been influential in stylistics. They use the insights derived from the
empirical data to refine the model and make their theorizing about
discourse presentation more accurate.
The corpus-based approach has also been used to study the authorial
styles of individual authors. For example, Watson (1997) conducts an
empirical study of the complete prose fiction of an Australian aboriginal

What is Corpus Stylistics?

author to test his intuition of a perceived diachronic stylistic shift.


He also investigates how certain linguistic features may trigger reader
involvement with a text. Hoover (1999) uses comparative data from a
corpus of more than thirty British and American novels to compare
and contrast with William Goldings The Inheritors. He provides a
discussion of Goldings manipulation of transitivity to produce the
animistic character of the novel, and a statistical analysis of its readability, sentence complexity, and vocabulary complexity, followed
by an analysis of diction. His study also demonstrates the usefulness
and effectiveness (and some of the limitations) of linguistic and
computer-assisted approaches to literary studies. Hardy (2003) investigates three linguistic patterns (presupposition, negation, and verbal
complements) that are spread throughout Flannery OConnors
fiction. He demonstrates how the corpus technique and statistical
analysis can enrich our appreciation and understanding of the style
and the central thematic concern in OConnors fiction. Stubbs
(2005) applies corpus quantitative analysis to a stylistic interpretation
of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness. He shows that computer-assisted
methods can identify significant linguistic features which literary
critics have not noticed, and thus provide a more detailed descriptive
basis for literary interpretation of the novel. Mahlberg (2007) suggests
that clusters (i.e. repeated sequence of words) can be taken as pointers
to local textual functions. She introduces five functional groups of
clusters for the description of stylistic features in Dickenss Bleak
House. These examples of corpus stylistic studies, among others, have
complemented traditional studies, and shed new light on various
literary texts through the techniques of corpus linguistics.

1.3 Striking a balance between quantitative and


qualitative analyses
The obvious strength of corpus stylistics lies in its ability to show
stylistic features recurring or developing over whole text or text
collections in quantitative terms. Nonetheless, the strength itself is
also the target of criticism. There are still trends of resistance to all of
the more scientific, mathematical and empirical studies of literature,

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

as the computational procedures and the quantitative approach seem


to destroy the very literariness of the texts under study and epitomize
the non-humanist approach to literature.
Some scholars, for example, van Peer (1989) and Wynne (2006),
thus remind stylisticians of the danger of literary research becoming
preoccupied with computational procedures and leading to a regrettable lack of attention to textuality and the meaning of literary
works. As van Peer argues, when stylistic features of a text have been
transformed into numerical form, in the very act of turning textual
qualities into counts, their essentially process-like character, that is,
the dynamic process of meaning constitution in a literary work, is
irretrievably lost (1989: 302). Quantitative studies thus undermine
the very foundations upon which the study of literature must necessarily be based, and no level of mathematical sophistication seems
to be able to overcome the problem. Besides, the different levels
of language organization (lexis, grammar, meaning) yield a cline of
increasing difficulty in objectively quantified analysis. That is, the
higher level and the more abstract aspects of linguistic organization,
namely, the range of figurative meanings and the core of textuality,
are much harder to quantify than issues of lexis and grammar. While
involving in an act of reification and thus trapped in lower levels
of linguistic organization, quantitative studies sacrifice not only the
analytic significance of textuality and the meaning, but also the generalizability of its own findings (van Peer 1989: 305).
Van Peer indeed points out the fundamental shortcomings of
quantitative approach to literature. Quantification runs the risk
of reducing a literary text to a non-literary entity, by eliminating
all relevant contextual factors and neglecting the significance of
meaning and textuality. However, it should be recognized that
corpus stylistics is not purely a quantitative study of literature.
Rather, it is still a qualitative stylistic approach to the study of language of literature, combined with or supported by corpus-based
quantitative methods and technology.
To conduct a corpus stylistic study, we need to bear in mind that
our primary concern should always be the artistic totality of style, a
trait which transcends the mere counting of the components of the
surface structure of the text. Quantification and statistics should

What is Corpus Stylistics?

11

always be utilized as a means rather than an end, to verify or refute


our intuition-based analysis. The use of computers for analyzing
electronic versions of texts is to generate and display linguistic
evidence in support of our interpretation and stylistic analysis.
As McEnery et al. (2006: 6) suggest, the key to corpus methodology
is to find the balance between the use of corpus data and the use of
ones intuition. The corpus-based approach and the intuition-based
approach are not mutually exclusive. They are complementary and
must be so in order to address research questions as comprehensively as
possible. Semino and Short (2004) emphasize the need to combine
corpus methodology with more intuition-based approaches for the
study of style. They also point out that the corpus-based approach can
achieve reliability only if it does not go to the extreme of excluding
intuition and qualitative textual analysis.
Hence, striking a balance between quantitative and qualitative
analyses should be held as the fundamental tenet of corpus stylistics.
If a researcher is unable to incorporate or weave his/her quantifications into a synthetic discussion of literature, the findings will always
remain cold numbers, alien to the field of the humanities (Ardat
1986: 95). What is needed, as van Peer (1989: 3056) proposes, is
both an awareness and a readiness to explicate and operationalize
stylistic intuitions: not merely to compare them to the linguistic
structures encountered in the text, but also to relate detailed
linguistic description to general matters of textuality. My stylistic
comparison between the two editions of The Magus aims to achieve
such a balance, to uncover Fowless seemingly unobservable revisionary process.

Chapter Two

Exploring The Magus using corpus


stylistic analysis

2.1 The Magus comparison research rationale


John Fowless The Magus depicts the progress of the main protagonist
Nicholas Urfes transformation, from ignorance and false belief
into self-knowledge. On a Greek island, he meets an old man called
Conchis (the title character), who creates a series of real-life masques
and a godgame in which Nicholas becomes enmeshed. He is continually involved in a quest to find out the truth behind Conchiss
illusions, but each truth is later seen as yet another illusion which
Conchis has created in order to fool him and ultimately lead him to
self-knowledge.
The Magus was first published in 1966. Fowles then revised and
republished it in 1977 because he claimed that its original publication had been premature. He commented on his revision in the
foreword of the second edition: Though this is not, in any major
thematic or narrative sense, a fresh version of The Magus, it is rather
more than a stylistic revision (Fowles 1977: 5).
Clearly, Fowles thinks that the second edition is better than the first.
Many critics agree (e.g. Binns 1977; Boccia 1980; Wade 1979; Wight
and Grant 1987). However, Short and Semino (2008) who compare
the textual detail of two equivalent small-scale extracts with roughly
equivalent functions from the two editions of The Magus, say that they
prefer the extract in the first edition (see section 5.1). This disparity
of opinions (albeit on the novel in general and a specific passage in
particular) raises some issues that I investigate in this book:
(1) What are the changes/differences between the two editions of
The Magus?

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

13

(2) What makes John Fowles, and most critics, believe that the
revised version is better than the first edition?
(3) Does the meaning of The Magus, as the critics claim, become
more accessible in the second edition, and if so, how?
(4) What differences of overall interpretation and effect are there,
if any, between the two editions?
(5) How can the changes that Fowles has made in the second
edition be described in stylistic and narratological terms?
In brief, the focus of the study is on the text style differences
between the two versions of The Magus. For ease of reference, the first
edition of The Magus is hereafter referred to as M1 and the revised
edition as M2. All references to the first edition are to the World Book
edition (1966), and all references to the second edition are to
the Vintage edition (1977). By comparing the textual alterations
between the two explicitly printed versions in more detail, I aim to
explore: (a) how the M2 edition is linguistically different from M1 and
(b) whether the textual revision Fowles has made creates different
stylistic effects on readers or not. I will also reflect on Fowless description of the revised version as rather more than a stylistic revision.
What does he mean by stylistic revision and what communicative
intention is implicated in rather more than?
Given that both editions of The Magus are about 600 pages long, it is
almost impossible to identify manually all of the linguistic changes
Fowles has made, and compare them in stylistical detail. Hence, a
corpus stylistic approach is adopted for the research. I combine qualitative and quantitative comparison in order to ascertain the overall
text style difference. The two issues (a) how to identify stylistically
significant linguistic features in the two editions and (b) how to compare those identified linguistic features will be explored further in
the subsequent chapters of the book, both quantitatively with the aid of
corpus techniques and qualitatively with traditional stylistic analysis.

2.2 Possible worlds, possible viewpoints in The Magus


This section gives a general review of the stylistic analytical approaches
and the theoretical frameworks that I use in a number of different
chapters through the book. One of my central arguments concerning

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

the changes in the M2 revision lies in the (re)presentation of narrative point of view. Fowles seems to make a shift in narrative focus away
from the story/event towards Nicholass internal possible worlds as
he struggles to comprehend the purpose of Conchiss manipulation
and the bizarre experiences in the fictional world. This shift in
narrative focus inevitably results in more linguistic indicators of
Nicholas-as-characters internal psychological viewpoint in the revision (see my discussion of this hypothesis in Chapter Five). Hence, to
prepare the ground for my analysis, it will be useful to review possible
worlds theory, and then to tackle the issues regarding what kind
of linguistic features can be marked as indicative of a characters
internal possible viewpoint (cf. McIntyre 2006). The issues I raise in
this chapter will all be investigated using the corpus methodology in
Part II of the book.

2.2.1 Ryans (1991) possible worlds theory


Possible worlds logic is a theoretical framework introduced in the 1950s
and 1960s by logicians for the purpose of defining the semantics
of modal operators (primarily necessity and possibility) and the
truth-values of propositions. It was later applied by literary theorists
(e.g. Doleel 1998; Maitre 1983; Pavel 1986; Ronen 1994; Ryan
1991) to fictional worlds that are constructed by literary texts, to
address notions of literary truth, the nature of fictionality, and
the relationship between fictional worlds and reality (see Semino
1997: chapter 4 for an overview of the development of possible
worlds theory).
Perhaps the most comprehensive account of the variety of possible
worlds in fiction is provided in Ryan (1991). According to Ryan,
possible worlds theory is applicable not only to explaining the relation of fictional world to our own actual world, but also to examining
the internal characterization of fictional works, which she describes
as having two distinct properties fictionality and narrativity: While
fiction is a mode of travel into textual space, narrative is a travel within
the confines of this space (Ryan 1991: 5). Fiction theory explores
the nature of fictionality (i.e. the relations between the actual world

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

15

we inhabit and the world evoked by the text). Narrative theory, on


the other hand, describes the internal structure of fictional worlds
(i.e. the relations between the components within the narrative
world, for example, how the tension is built up and maintained; what
the roles of the different characters are, etc.). Below, I will first briefly
review the central ideas of Ryans possible worlds framework, and
then explain why I have drawn on this theoretical framework for the
comparative study of the two versions of The Magus.

2.2.1.1 Narrative semantics: the internal structure of


fictional worlds
Ryan (1991) provides a thorough account of the semantic universe
projected by a text. She starts from the premise that reality has a
modal structure, that is, it consists of a world that is regarded as actual
and an infinity of alternative possible worlds. Similarly, the concept
of modality is used in describing and classifying the various ways of
existing objects, states, and events that make up the semantic domain
of narrative texts. Within the semantic domain, the text may outline
a system of fictional reality: a textual actual world (TAW), surrounded
by a variety of alternative possible worlds (APWs), which are textually
presented as mental constructs of the fictional characters (Ryan
1991: 114). Such non-actualized alternatives are represented by the
beliefs, wishes, intentions and fantasies and so on, of the characters
that populate the actual domain. Ryan (1991: 11419) proposes the
following types of alternative possible worlds that may be included
within a fictional universe:
z
z

z
z

Knowledge worlds: what characters know or believe to be true in


the actual domain;
Obligation worlds: a system of commitments and prohibitions
defined by social rules and moral principles that characters are
subject to;
Wish worlds: characters own judgements of what is desirable and
undesirable;
Intention worlds: characters plans and goals;

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

Fantasy universes: universes which incorporate characters


fantasies, hallucinations, dreams and fictional stories told to or
composed by characters.

As Ryan explains, the relations among the worlds of the narrative


system are not static, but change from state to state. The alternative
worlds that are included in a fictional universe may have a variety of
relationships with each other and with the actual domain. When
there is a perfect correspondence between the actual domain and all
subworlds within the fictional universe, the situation may be described
as one of equilibrium: everybodys wishes are fulfilled, all laws are
respected, everybody has complete knowledge of the actual domain,
and so on (Ryan 1991: 120). When the correspondence is less than
perfect, the situation falls into a state of conflict and drives the plot
forward.
Ryan further identifies the different types of conflict that may arise
within a fictional universe (and suggests that each type of conflict may
generate specific narrative themes, see Ryan 1991: 11923): conflict
between the textual actual world and the private worlds of characters;
conflict between the private worlds of an individual character;
conflict inside a characters private world (e.g. contradictory desires);
and conflict between the private worlds of different characters.
By and large, the narrative framework of Ryans possible worlds
theory is useful for text analysis. An indication that a character wants
a state of affairs different from the one actually pertaining at some
moment in the text world can help simultaneously to drive the plot
forward and expand our understanding of the character involved.
On the other hand, a detailed understanding of how the words
and thoughts of characters are presented in stories also contributes
to explanations of viewpoint, reader-involvement, characterization
and related meanings, and consequent effects (Semino et al.
1999: 308).
Nonetheless, possible worlds theory is not without its problems. For
example, Semino (1997: 84) points out that the theory fails to take
account of the cognitive process whereby readers interact with the
language of texts and arrive at the construction of the fictional worlds.
She thus suggests that the theory needs to be complemented by

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

17

linguistic and cognitive approaches. I will discuss, in section 2.2.3,


McIntyres (2006) proposal for mapping Ryans possible worlds
theory onto the cognitive frameworks of Duchan et al.s (1995)
deictic shift theory and Emmotts (1997) contextual frame theory, to
explain how it is that readers are made aware of different worlds
within a text.

2.2.1.2 Fictionality: fictional recentering, a game of


make-believe, and authentication
With regard to the notion of fictionality, Ryan (1991: 46) claims
that it is decided neither by the semantic properties of the textual
universe nor by the stylistic properties of the text, but is settled a
priori as part of our generic expectations. Reading fiction is like
being engaged in a game of make-believe. As Ryan states, in fiction,
we know that the textual universe, as a whole, is an imaginary alternative to our system of reality, but for the duration of the game, as we
step into it, we willingly suspend our disbelief and assume that the
textual actual world is the actual world. The gesture of stepping into
the fictional world is called fictional recentering:
For the duration of our immersion in a work of fiction, the realm
of possibilities is thus recentered around the sphere which the
narrator presents as the actual world. This recentering pushes
the reader into a new system of actuality and possibility. (Ryan
1991: 22)
In other words, fictional worlds are a special kind of possible world.
According to Doleel (1998: 145), for fictional worlds to be credible
depends on the authentication force of fictional construction.
Within a fictional universe, different states of affairs may be regarded
as more or less true in the actual domain or may carry different
degrees of authentication, depending on the source of the relevant
narrative statements. A third-person omniscient narrator has the
authority to authenticate the properties of the fictional world. A firstperson narrative authenticates the narrator/characters subjective
perception, and readers have to sift what belongs to the actual domain

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and what to the private worlds of the character. In contrast, unreliable


narrators, contradictory stories, and postmodern language games that
abolish spatio-temporal logic all subvert authentication and expose
the fragility of fictional world-construction. The authentication force
can be challenged or ultimately repealed by means of what Doleel
describes as self-voiding narrative (i.e. it is not performed seriously)
or by a semantic strategy (e.g. a reliable narrator giving contradictory, or logically impossible, accounts of what is the case in the
fictional world).
With the central ideas of possible worlds theory in mind, I am now
in a better position to illustrate more clearly why I draw on possible
worlds theory in my study. It is perhaps useful to start with two
quotations from The Magus:
I had somehow landed myself in the centre of an extraordinary old
mans fantasies. That was clear. Why he should hold them, why
he should so strangely realize them, and above all, why he should
have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total
mystery. (M1, chapter 23, 134, emphasis added)
The smallest hope [. . .] is enough for the anti-heros future; leave
him [. . .] at a crossroads, in a dilemma [. . .] because we too
are waiting [. . .], waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of
humanity, this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say
she returns is a lie. (M1, chapter 78, 606, emphasis added)
The first extract is from Nicholass narrative in the earlier stage of the
novel when he begins to get enmeshed in Conchiss godgame or
masque, which Nicholas perceives as an extraordinary old mans
fantasies and a total mystery. This simple extract points out the
relations (conflicts) among the characters within the fictional world
(e.g. Nicholass knowledge worlds and Conchiss intention worlds,
in Ryans terms). In this regard, possible worlds (narrative) theory
provides a framework for me: (a) to describe the worlds projected
in narrative texts in The Magus, and to understand better how the
presentation of characters alternative possible worlds contributes to
plot development and characterization (or the re-characterization of

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

19

Nicholas in the revision) and (b) to compare the differences between


the text worlds projected in M1 and M2.
The second extract signals an authorial intrusion at the end of the
novel (as the narrator moves abruptly from first-person past tense
into third-person present tense), reminding the reader that the story
is merely a reality lost through imagination and there is no way
to know the ending of the story (see section 3.2.3). The authorial
intrusion indicates what Ryan (1991: 93) calls the metatexts of a
fiction (i.e. metafiction), which acknowledges the fictional status of
its object text. This is an example of what Doleel calls self-disclosing
narrative (1998: 162, one mode of self-voiding narrative), in which
the act of fiction-making is laid bare. Possible worlds (fiction) theory
explores the nature of fictionality the relation between fiction and
reality which is also a major thematic concern for a postmodern
novelist like John Fowles. As I will show in my analysis, with corpus
evidence, the so-called metafictional strategies are made more
prominent in the M2 revision and thus affect the readers sense of
involvement into the fictional world. The theory thus provides one
possible account for the stylistic differences between the two editions
of The Magus (see section 8.2).

2.2.2 Simpsons (1993) modal grammar of point of view


Given that a possible world, in the literal sense of the term, is a set of
modalized propositions (Ryan 1991: 111), modality is probably one of
the major linguistic markers of characters alternative possible worlds.
At the end of the 1970s, Doleel developed a theory of narrative
semantics based on the idea that it is possible to isolate a limited set
of basic macro-constraints that underlie the formation of stories. He
identified such global story-forming constraints as the four modal
systems (Doleel 1998: 11332):
z
z

Deontic system: consists of the concepts of permission, prohibition,


and obligation;
Axiological system: consists of the concepts of goodness, badness and
indifference;

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

Epistemic system: consists of the concepts of knowledge, ignorance


and belief;
Alethic system: consists of the concepts of possibility, impossibility
and necessity.

Stories can be classified on the basis of the modal system by which


they are governed. Some stories are formed under the constraints
of a single modal system, whereas some others are based on more
than one modal system. Doleels system has been applied to the
description of the internal structure of fictional universes. Ryans
notions of obligation worlds, wish worlds, knowledge worlds and
fantasy universes introduced earlier draw on Doleels suggestion
that the systems of deontic, axiological, epistemic and alethic modality can act as basic world-building constraints (Ryan 1991: 111).
Doleel does not provide a detailed linguistic description of each
modal system, which we can find in Simpson (1993). Central to Simpsons modal grammar of point of view is the concept of modality,
which refers broadly to a speakers attitude towards, or opinion
about, the truth of a proposition expressed by a sentence (Simpson
1993: 47). He identifies four modal systems of English: deontic system,
boulomaic system, epistemic system, and perception modality. He uses
the following schema to summarize the function of each modal
system (see Figure 2.1). The boxed enclosures are used to capture
the interrelatedness of some categories, with explanations of the
non-linguistic concepts which each category represents on the right
(see Simpson 1993: 51):

Modal system

Non-linguistic concepts represented

DEONTIC

obligation, duty and commitment

BOULOMAIC

desire

EPISTEMIC

knowledge, belief and cognition

PERCEPTION

perception

Figure 2.1 Modal Systems outlined by Simpson (1993)

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

21

Below is a brief summary of the functions and linguistic features of


the four modal systems (for detail, see Simpson 1993: 4755):
(1) Deontic: modal system of duty, concerning a speakers attitude
to the degree of obligation attached to the performance of a
particular action. It is sometimes expressed through modal
auxiliaries such as may, should and must, as well as constructions
such as it is necessary that, you are obliged to and you are forbidden to,
forming a continuum of commitment from permission through
to requirement.
(2) Boulomaic: modal expressions of desire. This category includes
modal lexical verbs such as hope, wish and want, and constructions such as hopefully, it is hoped that, and it is good that.
(3) Epistemic: modal expressions concerning the speakers confidence
or lack of confidence in the truth of a proposition expressed.
Varying degrees of epistemic distance may be expressed through
epistemic modal auxiliaries such as must, could and might, as well
as certain modal lexical verbs, such as think, suppose and believe.
Epistemic distance can also be indicated through constructions
such as it is certain that, it is sure that and it is doubtful that, as well as
through the use of a number of epistemic modal adverbs, including maybe, perhaps, possibly, certainly, definitely and arguably.
(4) Perception: a subcategory of epistemic modality. The degree of
commitment to the truth of a proposition is based on some reference to human perception, normally visual perception of
external signs. Examples of perception modality include constructions such as it is clear that, it is apparent that and it is obvious
that, as well as the use of related modal adverbs such as clearly,
apparently and obviously.
The semantics of modalized propositions presented in Simpson
(1993) seems to align with Ryans typology of alternative possible
worlds (cf. also Gavins 2005: for the application of Simpsons modal
grammar to the text-worlds created by the presence of modalized
propositions in literary fiction). Simpsons systematic account of
the features of modality is useful for identifying linguistic features
indicating characters alternative possible worlds. Nonetheless, the

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cognitive process whereby readers are made aware of different worlds


within a text and arrive at the construction of the fictional worlds
remains unexplained. To this end, McIntyre (2006) proposes a
cognitive model of point of view.

2.2.3 McIntyres (2006) cognitive model of point of view


In his study of how viewpoint is manifested linguistically in dramatic
texts, McIntyre (2006) points out that movement between different
points of view is an aspect of viewpoint that has been long neglected
and needs to be explained in more detail. He thus refines the cognitive
model of Duchan et al.s (1995) deictic shift theory by incorporating
Emmotts (1997) contextual frame theory, and maps them into Ryans
(1991) possible worlds theory.
Deixis means point of reference in contemporary linguistics.
Deictic shift theory is a cognitive model of deixis outlined in Duchan
et al. (1995), in an attempt to explain how it is that readers become
involved in the world of literary texts as if they were experiencing
them from a position within the fictional world. As Segal (1995b: 15)
puts it, the reader often takes a cognitive stance within the world
of a narrative and interprets the text from that perspective. This
happens as a result of deictic shifts within the narrative, that is, the
change of deictic centre across the sentences in a text. According to
deictic shift theory, readers assume the spatial, temporal and social
coordinates of numerous deictic fields1 to be anchored within the
narrative. Reading narrative fiction, then, involves suspending our
normal egocentric assumptions about deictic terms of reference, and
assuming that the deictic centre is somewhere within the story world
of the text.
As Galbraith (1995: 47) suggests, we can move in two ways, either
via a PUSH (e.g. submerging into the deictic fields of fictional world)
or a POP (e.g. emerging from a deictic field). This is the first deictic
shift that we make when reading a fictional text, in order take up a
cognitive stance within the fictional world and then begin to mentally
construct the world as we read. Once we have taken up a position
within the fictional world, we move among the various deictic fields

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

23

of the characters in the text, as directed by the textual cues that


we encounter. It follows that such changes in the deictic centre
across the course of a text will result in changes in the point of
view that readers are exposed to. Shifting deictic centres across the
course of a text, and thereby projecting a series of different deictic
centres, is what draws readers into the narrative by allowing them to
experience (albeit vicariously) events from various viewpoints (Segal
1995b: 15).
Deictic shift theory, then, is a potentially useful model for investigating how particular viewpoints are realized in texts. McIntyres
work (2006) demonstrates that the model of deictic shift is useful in
explaining how readers are moved around within a text and enabled
to experience different viewpoints in dramatic texts (as well as the
texts in prose fiction). Nonetheless, he also identifies some of the
weaknesses of the deictic shift model (see McIntyre 2006: 92111, for
a detailed review and critique of the theory), and attempts to circumvent these by introducing concepts from Emmotts (1997) work on
narrative comprehension.
Emmott (1997) draws on research in linguistics, psychology and
artificial intelligence in an attempt to explain the means by which
readers are able to keep track of characters and events in the fictional
worlds. She describes a contextual frame as a mental store of information about the current context, built up from the text itself and from
inferences made from the text (1997: 121), and suggests that as we
read, we retain (at least temporarily) the information within these
contextual frames and use it to create an overall context for the story.
Emmott goes on to explain that readers are able to hold information
about more than one context at any one time, but that we usually
tend to concentrate on one context in particular. To fully explain
the means by which this is made possible, she introduces the terms
binding and priming. Binding occurs when characters and locations
are linked to a specific context, and priming refers to the process by
which one particular contextual frame becomes the main focus of
attention for the reader (1997: 123).
McIntyre incorporates the concepts of binding and priming to
Deictic shift theory and maps the modified framework into Ryans

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possible worlds theory. The key differences in his revised model are
outlined as below:
(1) Discarding the distinction between PUSHes and POPs: PUSHes
and POPs are the means by which the deictic shift theorists
suggest we move among deictic fields. Given the oversimplified
conceptualization, McIntyre proposes to use the term shift and
specify different types of shift that occurs, for example, spatial,
temporal, discoursal (cf. also Stockwell 2002: 535).
(2) World shifts: McIntyre notes the correlation between what the
deictic shift theorists refer to as the first shift into a fictional
world (i.e. being PUSHed into the deictic field of fictional world)
and Ryans notion of fictional recentering as we begin to read.
Within the fictional world, there are boundaries between discourse that refers to real events in the storyworld, and discourse
that refers to subjective events thoughts and perceptions of
characters in the world (Segal 1995a: 76). In order to account
for how readers are exposed to such subjective viewpoints,
McIntyre suggests that, in addition to shifting between particular
deictic fields, it is also the case that as a result of linguistic and
contextual triggers, we move in a similar way between characters
alternative possible worlds. Hence, it is necessary to account for
movement between different deictic fields, and also movement
between the deictic fields of whichever possible worlds the reader
is exposed to within the text.
(3) The binding and priming of worlds and deictic fields: In order
to explain better how it is possible for readers to be aware of
and monitor multiple worlds and deictic fields, McIntyre incorporates the concepts from Emmotts (1997) contextual frame
theory. He explains how it is possible for more than one world
or deictic field to be bound at any one time, and one particular
world or field of these will be primed, in Emmotts terms.
(4) Prominence: In addition to incorporating Emmotts (1997)
notions of binding and priming, McIntyre also introduces the
term prominence, to refer to the extent to which a world or deictic
field might be primed. He suggests that worlds or deictic fields
that are at the forefront of a readers mind might be said to have

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

25

a high degree of prominence. Conversely, a world or deictic field


that is decaying might be said to be low in prominence.
I use the following quotation from McIntyre (2006) to sum up the
central ideas of his modified cognitive framework of possible
viewpoint:
as well as being made aware of various different deictic fields over
the course of a text, readers are also made aware of the various
APWs of fictional characters. These can be bound or unbound and
primed or unprimed and made more or less prominent in the same
way that deictic fields are. And when a reader is made aware of a
bound, primed and prominent APW, in effect, they are being
exposed to a particular characters point of view within the fictional
world. (McIntyre 2006: 1345)
When characters express their APWs, this can give the readers insight
into their thoughts and feelings. What is interesting for stylisticians
are those instances where the APW of a particular character is
cued by narrative devices, and in such cases we often get a much
more explicit presentation of a characters viewpoint. McIntyres
modified cognitive framework of point of view usefully addresses
the limitations of Ryans (1991) possible worlds theory that Semino
(1997: 84) points out. By taking into account the cognitive process
of readers interaction with the viewpoints of texts, we have a better
understanding of how readers arrive at the construction of the
fictional world in general and characters alternative possible worlds
in particular.

2.3 A corpus approach to point of view investigation


For the purpose of a corpus approach to point of view investigation,
this section concentrates on how viewpoint is linguistically signaled
in texts (in addition to deixis), and what kinds of linguistic features
more specifically mark characters internal possible viewpoints.

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2.3.1 Biber and Finegans (1989) list of stance markers


One study that I consider useful for my linguistic identification of
characters internal possible viewpoint is the list of stance markers
identified by Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) in 500 texts, drawn
principally from the LOB and London-Lund corpora (of written
and spoken British English). By stance, they mean the lexical and
grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgements, or commitment concerning the propositional content of a message (Biber
and Finegan 1989: 93).
The purpose of Biber and Finegans study is to identify and describe
various speech styles of English as marked by stance. Their research
comprises three major steps. First, in order to identify potentially
important stance markers, they conduct a comprehensive survey of
previous studies, examine English grammars (principally Quirk et al.
1985), check dictionaries and a thesaurus for functionally related
lexical items, and survey the 500 texts taken from 24 genre categories
in their corpus data. Second, they categorize the identified stance
markers initially under two pragmatic functions: affect and evidentiality.
Affect involves the expression of a broad range of personal attitudes,
including emotions, feelings, moods, and general dispositions (Biber
and Finegan 1989: 94). Evidentiality, on the other hand, refers to the
speakers expressed attitudes towards knowledge (Chafe 1986: 271),
indicating the probability of something being a fact or not being
a fact. Each pragmatic category is then further divided into two
semantic categories: affect is divided semantically into positive and
negative, whereas evidentiality is divided into certainty and doubt.
A further distinction is made between adverbs, verbs, adjectives and
modals as grammatical markers of these stance features.
In their third step, Biber and Finegan use a statistical technique
called cluster analysis to identify stance features of the texts from
their corpus data. Texts that are maximally similar in their use of
stance features are sorted into clusters. They interpret each cluster
as one stance style by considering: (1) the predominant stance
features in this cluster; (2) the situational characteristics of the texts
constituting the cluster and (3) a functional analysis of individual
texts. Overall, Biber and Finegan identify six major stance styles, for
example, emphatic expression of affect (texts with extensive use of

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

27

affect markers); faceless stance (texts marked by relative absence of


all affective and evidential stance features). For details, see Biber and
Finegan (1989: 10518).
What interests me the most is not the six stance styles they identified
from the cluster analyses of their corpus data, but their exhaustive
compiling of an extensive list of lexical and grammatical features
used to mark stance (see Biber and Finegan 1989: 11922). There are
some restrictions in Biber and Finegans study: first, they may not
have identified all the stance features of English, and secondly, for
ease of operationalization, they have only dealt with overt and
explicit stance markers and ignored more integrated markers of
speakers affective or evidential attitude. Nonetheless, their list of
stance features is a useful reference tool for identifying linguistic
features marking Nicholass alternative possible worlds, that is, his
possible viewpoints in McIntyres (2006) terms.
In The Magus, Nicholas is constantly in a quest for the truth (knowledge) in Conchiss godgame, and is continually baffled by Conchis
and his henchmen. Hence, speakers attitudes of certainty or
doubtfulness with respect to expressed information, as well as the
emotive or affective features in their language, are highly relevant to
my investigation of the ways in which Nicholas as the first person narrator/character (re)presents his bizarre experiences in the fictional
world, and in the differences between the two editions of The Magus.
The list of the stance markers involve twelve categories: (1) affect
markers (adverbs, verbs, and adjectives); (2) certainty adverbs;
(3) certainty verbs; (4) certainty adjectives; (5) doubt adverbs;
(6) doubt verbs; (7) doubt adjectives; (8) hedges; (9) emphatics;
(10) possibility modals; (11) necessity modals and (12) predictive
modals. Given that I draw heavily on Biber and Finegans list of stance
markers for the viewpoint identification from my corpus concordancing data, I will take up the discussion of the details in section 6.3.

2.3.2 Shorts (1996) checklist of linguistic indicators


of viewpoint
Shorts (1996) approach to point of view differs from that of other
narratologists and stylisticians, in that he does not attempt to categorize narration, but rather concentrates on the linguistic phenomena

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within texts that give rise to viewpoint effects. He develops a checklist


which captures many of the important facets of linguistic indicators
of viewpoint. The checklist was a useful tool when I conducted my
stylistic analyses in the book (particularly in comparing the differences in the way viewpoint is presented between the two versions of
equivalent extracts from The Magus, see Chapter Five). I summarize
what is included in the list as below (see Short 1996: 26387):
(1) Schema-oriented language: In psychology and cognitive science,
a schema (pl. schemata, e.g. stereotypes, social roles, scripts,
worldviews, etc.) refers to a mental structure that represents
some aspect of the world. People use schemata to organize
current knowledge and provide a framework for future understanding. According to Short, schemata help us understand
situations and viewpoint presented in texts: to interpret what is
said and done in ways very similar to one another. And where
things occur which go against these expected norms they become
foregrounded and hence highly interpretable (Short 1996: 228).
(2) Value-laden language: Value-laden language expresses an attitude
to whatever is being described or perceived, and as such can be
indicative of viewpoint. The use of evaluative lexis indicates ideological point of view in Uspenskys (1973) and Fowlers (1986)
terms, and conceptual point of view in Chatmans (1978) terms.
(3) Given vs. New information: One method by which writers can
control the point of view of a reader is by manipulating the
amount of information they are given about a particular scene,
event or character. One of the ways in which this can be done
is by particular use of definite and indefinite reference: for
example, indefinite/definite articles (a/the); textually referring
(anaphoric) pronouns (you, it, they, etc.).
(4) Deixis: Deixis, as discussed in section 2.2.3, meaning pointing
or indicating in Greek, is concerned with the issue of distance
and proximity in space, time and social relation, and how speakers encode this in language. By default we assume ourselves to be
at the deictic centre of our world. This assumption controls how
we interpret deictic terms, and how we do this is indicative of
our point of view. There are various types of deixis, for example,
place deixis, temporal deixis, person deixis, social deixis (cf. Short 1996:

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

29

26974), and empathetic deixis (cf. Lyons 1977). Deictic terms tend
to come in pairs, for example, here/there, now/then and come/go.
(5) Representation of a particular characters thoughts or perceptions:
Short explains that character viewpoint can be indicated in
descriptions through the use of (a) verbs of perception and
cognition (e.g. see, imagine, think, believe) and (b) verbs (including modal verbs) and adverbs related to factivity (e.g. seem,
pretend, can, could, may, might, must, actually, apparently).
(6) Psychological sequencing: This is the phenomenon where the
order in which events are presented reflects a particular point
of view (cf. also Leech and Short 1981: 17680). Consider the
example from The Magus: A faint light shape came running out of
the dark tunnel [. . .] It was a girl. The running girl is first vaguely
identified as a faint light shape, and then more precisely as
a girl. The vague reference and the psychological sequencing
indicate Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint at that particular
moment.
In addition to the features noted on Shorts (1996) checklist, more
linguistic indicators of point of view are further identified (see
McIntyre 2006: 513), including:
(7) Graphological deviation: Short (2000) discusses how graphological
deviation in Irvine Welshs novel Marabou Stork Nightmares is used to
reflect the point of view of the main protagonist. (An important
example of graphological deviation indicating Nicholass ideological viewpoint will be discussed in section 3.2.1).
(8) Presupposition: As McIntyre (2006: 52) notes, presupposition
can also indicate what a character believes to be the case within
the fictional world (cf. Levinson 1983: 1815, for presupposition
triggers). It can also indicate the extent to which one particular
character takes into account the point of view of another.
(9) Grices (1975) co-operative principle and implicature: Characters
observance or nonobservance of Grices co-operative principle
can also indicate a particular point of view.
In brief, my textual analyses and identification (from the corpus
concordancing data) of the linguistic features anchoring Nicholass

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internal possible viewpoint will take account of all the linguistic


indicators of point of view that I discussed in sections 2.2 and 2.3.
Shorts (1996) checklist captures many of the important facets of
linguistic indicators of viewpoint, which is useful for my detailed
stylistic comparison of the ways viewpoint is presented in the two
editions of The Magus. Simpsons (1993) modal grammar of point
of view is useful in conceptualizing how the characters alternative
possible worlds are constructed by the presence of modalized propositions in the narrative texts. McIntyres (2006) modified cognitive
model of point of view largely improves on deictic shift theory and
complements possible worlds theory. The refined framework fosters
a better understanding of how we arrive at the construction of the
fictional world and characters alternative possible worlds. The notion
of prominence indicating the extent to which a world or deictic field
might be primed, provides a means of explaining differences in the
viewpoint presentation and text world projection in the two editions
of The Magus. As I will demonstrate in Chapter Six, with recourse to
corpus evidence, there is an increase of prominence in the presentation of Nicholas-the-characters psychological viewpoint which exposes
his alternative possible worlds more obviously to the reader in the M2
version. The linguistic identification of Nicholas-as-characters viewpoint from the corpus concordancing data will be largely based on
Biber and Finegans (1989) list of stance features, complemented by
Shorts (1996) checklist.

2.4 Structure of Part II of the book


Part II of the book aims to demonstrate how a corpus methodology
can contribute to the stylistic approach to literary study. I use the two
versions of The Magus by John Fowles to exemplify general points
regarding the methodological principals and analytic practices of the
corpus stylistic approach. By comparing the textual differences between
two printed versions, I investigate: (a) how the second edition (M2) is
linguistically different from the original (M1) and (b) whether the
textual revisions Fowles has made create different stylistic effects or
not. The research process of my stylistic comparison between the two
versions of The Magus can be outlined as in Figure 2.2:

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

31

Quantitative
measuring of the degree of text similarity
between M1 and M2

Qualitative stylistic comparison


generating hypotheses concerning the revisionary tendency

Quantitative + qualitative analysis


locating significant semantic differences
(testing hypothesis 1)

Quantitative + qualitative analysis


comparing figurative density and patterns
(testing hypothesis 2)

Final assessment of the


stylistic differences between M1 and M2

Figure 2.2

The research process of the corpus stylistic comparison

I use different corpus tools for this comparative research: (1) TESAS/
Crouch and WCopyfind for identifying the overall pattern of the revision in quantitative terms (i.e. measuring the degree of text similarity
across the 78 chapter-pairs of the novel); (2) Wmatrix for locating
significant linguistic (semantic) differences between the two editions
and (3) WordSmith Tools for identifying the patterns of metaphorical language in the two editions.
Chapter Three starts with a preliminary exploration of John Fowless
The Magus. I give a plot summary that is common to both editions
and explain the narrative structure of the novel. I also review the
literary critics comments on the revision of The Magus (e.g. Binns
1977; Boccia 1980; Nadeau 1980; Wade 1979), and consider in
general terms what types of textual alterations Fowles has made and
why I think he made them. The observed changes/differences
between the two versions are grouped into five mutually inclusive
sets, that is, language, theme, ending, characters, and point of view, which
I relate to two levels of stylistic change: the local small-scale linguistic

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

level and the global, narratological level. I discuss in what respects


Fowles and some critics believe that the second edition is more
refined than the original, and whether the meaning of The Magus,
as Boccia (1980) suggests, becomes more accessible to readers.
Chapter Four addresses the question of the differences between
M1 and M2 in quantitative terms. I introduce how I have used the
TESAS/Crouch and WCopyfind software to detect and measure text
similarity (especially in terms of the matched consecutive word
sequences, i.e. n-gram overlaps) between the two versions of the
novel. With the aid of these two corpus tools, I present the statistical
results of a chapter-by-chapter comparison to show in quantitative
terms the general pattern of Fowless revision of The Magus. I then
discuss in what ways computational measurement is advantageous as
well as limited with regard to the stylistic comparative research.
The main purpose of Chapter Five is: (a) to demonstrate the
advantages of qualitative stylistic comparison of short extracts in
locating and explaining local linguistic differences and (b) to form
my hypotheses concerning the text style differences between the two
versions. I first review Short and Seminos (2008) detailed and
systematic analysis of the linguistic differences between a pair of
extracts from a climactic scene in The Magus. I then compare and
analyse another two pairs of important and representative extracts, to
examine how well my stylistic comparison of the chosen extracts
corresponds to Short and Seminos analytical result. In my analysis,
I isolate three important revisionary tendencies in M2: (1) more explicit
contextual information; (2) a shift of narrative focus from story events
to the I-characters internal possible worlds and (3) a shift from the
literal presentation of what happen in the fictional world to more
figurative (re)presentation of the I-characters bizarre experiences
and his emotions. The first observed revisionary tendency is manifestly apparent in all of the extracts, whereas the other two remain to
be confirmed or rejected. Given the limitation in applying detailed
linguistic analysis to the assessment or confirmation of the overall
text style differences between two versions of a very long novel like
The Magus, I have recourse to other corpus techniques, Wmatrix and
WordSmith Tools, to examine the two hypotheses quantitatively
(combined with qualitative analyses) in the following two chapters.

Exploring The Magus Using Corpus Stylistics

33

Chapter Six explores how a particular corpus tool Wmatrix


helps in macroscopic linguistic comparison between the two editions,
and more specifically, between the sampled chapters which have
undergone the most drastic revision. Wmatrix helps locate significant linguistic differences between the two editions at the word level,
at the part-of-speech level, and at the semantic level. Following Stubbss
(2002) corpus semantics approach, I focus my comparison on the
linguistic differences at the semantic level, to explore the key concept
differences between M1 and M2. In my data analysis, I examine what
kinds of semantic concepts (i.e. words that are semantically related)
are used significantly less frequently or more frequently in M2.
The corpus evidence demonstrates the changing lexical patterns in
Fowless revision; that is, lexical items that are semantically related to
psychological actions and states are used significantly more frequently
in M2. I will discuss how the finding supports my first hypothesis,
namely, there is an increase of prominence in the presentation of the
I-characters psychological (or conceptual) viewpoints which expose
his alternative possible worlds more obviously to the reader in the
M2 version.
In Chapter Seven, I explore whether Fowles has used more sophisticated figurative language in his revision. I focus on two forms
of figurative language, simile and metaphor, as these are the major
figures of speech that Fowles has used in his revision. I start by
concordancing the potential simile signals (e.g. as, like, seem, similar
to, etc.), comparing their relative frequency in both editions, and
observing the figurative patterns shown in the concordances. The
observation shows that metaphorical expressions drawn from the
source domains plays (theatrical performance) and games occur
repeatedly in the data and seem to be the major metaphorical language Fowles uses in The Magus. From the concordance examples,
I then identify a set of vocabulary items related to these two source
domains, for retrieving from the corpus more metaphorical expressions not introduced through the form of simile. The retrieved
figurative data are then compared and analysed in detail. I first deal
with the identical metaphorical expressions that appear in both
editions, to see the original metaphorical patterns Fowles has used.
I then focus on the metaphorical expressions that only appear in

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the M2 version, to see what kinds of changes Fowles has made in


his revision.
Chapter Eight focuses on the overall findings concerning the text
style differences between the two versions. I discuss how the patterns
of the changes uncovered by the corpus tools reflect the fact that
Fowles, as a well-known postmodernist writer, appears to reinforce
the metafictional theory and its strategies in his revision of The Magus.
The more prominent metafictional/metaphorical move in the revision consequently results in different degrees of reader involvement
into the fictional world and generates different kinds of readers
emotions (fiction emotions and artifact emotions) between the two
editions of The Magus.
Before I proceed to my discussion and analysis, it is worth pointing
out two important issues concerning my research at the outset. First,
whatever significant linguistic patterns I identify in M2 also exist
in M1, only the degree of prominence is different. Secondly, the
ultimate goal of my study is not to claim that one version is better
than the other in absolute terms, but to lay bare the patterns of
Fowless revision in linguistic terms, as well as his communicative
intention to his readers, and to consider how readers might perceive
the different effects triggered by those linguistic changes.

Part II

Corpus stylistics in practice


a comparative analysis
of The Magus

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Chapter Three

Introduction to The Magus (M1) and


its revision (M2)

This chapter is a preliminary discussion of John Fowless The Magus


and its revision. It is divided into two main sections. Section 3.1 gives a
plot summary that is common to both editions, explains the narrative
structure of the novel, and introduces the major characters and their
thematic function in the novel. I focus particularly on the changing
characterization of the main character, Nicholas Urfe, and elaborate
on how we may infer his character flaws from his narrative and also
see how he changes after he has gone through his journey to selfrealization (cf. Culpeper 2001, for the theory of narrative characterization). Section 3.2 reviews the literary critics comments on the
revision of The Magus, and considers in general terms what types of
textual alterations Fowles has made and why he made them.

3.1 The Magus original: plot summary,


narrative structure, characters
3.1.1 Plot summary and narrative structure
The Magus involves relatively few major characters, but its plot is so
complex as to make summary both necessary and difficult. The novel is
divided into three parts, narrated in retrospect by the main character,
Nicholas Urfe, a middle-class young English man. I first briefly outline
the plot as in Table 3.1:
Table 3.1

The plot structure of The Magus

Part I

(chs. 19)

Self-ignorance

Nicholas is portrayed as a selfish snobbish womanizer

Part II

(chs. 1067)

journey

Nicholas quests for the truth behind Conchiss


manipulation, especially the true identity of Lily

Part III (chs. 6878)

Self-knowledge Nicholas comes to self-realization

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The early chapters of Part I present Nicholas as a young, cynical


intellectual, who has unreasonable assumptions about sex, love and
freedom. Despite a dozen sexual conquests by the time of his graduation from Oxford, Nicholas remains loveless and unattached, and
avoids intimate emotional involvement with others. At about the
same time he decides to take a teaching position at a school on a
remote Greek island, Phraxos, he meets Alison Kelly, an Australian
girl who is about to begin training as an airline hostess. Despite
seeing through Nicholass dishonesty, Alison falls in love with him.
Though they are both experienced and somewhat cynical concerning sexual relations, each feels some regret as they go their separate
ways at the end of Part I.
During his first few months on Phraxos, Nicholas is lonely and
experiences difficulty in living a monastic life. So he visits a brothel
in Athens, where he believes that he contracts syphilis. Feeling
hopelessly unhappy about the disease and also realizing for the first
time that he cannot be as a good poet as he expects himself to be, he
contemplates death and stages an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
In Part II, the first mysterious event occurs when Nicholas makes an
initial intrusion into Bourani, the villa owned by a rich recluse named
Maurice Conchis, and inexplicably finds that he is expected. He then
visits Bourani on successive weekends at Conchiss invitation. Conchis
is a mysterious manipulator. He tells Nicholas four impressive stories
concerning his own life, and arranges many mystical incidents to
perplex Nicholas. He ensnares Nicholas in a web of magic during
his visits.
One of the most enticing elements of the mystery for him is Lily,
a young woman who is cast in various roles in what Conchis calls the
masque or godgame. In the beginning, she seems to be Conchiss
dead fiance, named Lily Montgomery. As the narrative unfolds, she
becomes a schizophrenic, an actress, Conchiss mistress and so on.
Then Nicholas is told that Lilys real name is Julie Holmes and she
has a twin sister, who is at first called Rose and is later known as June.
Bewitched by her beauty and her unpredictable behaviours, Nicholas
tries persistently to discover the real Lily beneath the masks she
wears in Conchiss masque. (Hereafter I refer to the character Lily
as Lily/Julie to indicate her double identity in the novel. Her twin
sister June will be referred to as Rose/June for the same reason.)

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

39

After Nicholas has become fascinated with Lily/Julie, Alison writes


to invite him to Athens for a weekend. When he finds Bourani
closed up for that weekend, he reluctantly goes to Athens to meet
Alison. He falsely tells her that he is still suffering from syphilis in
order to avoid having sex with her. After their enjoyable weekend
climbing Parnassus, Nicholas confesses his lie and tells her about
Bourani and Lily. Alison is hurt and makes this ultimatum to him:
either she will quit her job and live with him on the island, or she
will leave him forever. When Nicholas indirectly rejects the former
idea, Alison leaves in a fury. Later Nicholas receives shocking news
of her suicide.
Chapter 53 in the middle of Part II is the only chapter in the book
with a heading eleutheria, the Greek word for freedom. Conchiss
four narratives about his own life build up to a climax in this chapter,
where the central purpose of the whole masque is revealed. It is
about a crucial event which occurred in the Nazi occupation of
Greece. Conchis, as mayor of Phraxos then, was offered a choice by
a German colonel named Wimmel. Wimmel told him to club two
guerilla fighters to death with a rifle in exchange for his own life and
the lives of 80 hostages from the village; otherwise, they would all
be executed. It was an impossible choice, and in a moment of moral
vision, Conchis chose to die. When the execution was carried out,
Conchis was saved by his servant. Conchiss wartime choice indirectly
reveals how thoughtless Nicholas had been in choosing Lily/Julie
over Alison. He then begins to realize that he has exercised his
own freedom of choice only to satisfy personal desire, not in the best
interests of these two women. He grieves over Alisons death for the
first time, and feels guilty that he did not behave more considerately
to her when she was alive. However, his desire for Lily/Julie still
remains strong.
When he is about to make love to Lily/Julie for the first time in
a hotel room, and assumes that their love and everything Lily/Julie
has said are genuine, he is suddenly caught, gagged and rendered
unconscious by a group of anonymous male intruders. All the events
at Bourani culminate at this point. A mock-trial and a final scene
of disintoxication follow (Short and Seminos (2008) comparative
analysis of the extracts from this climactic scene will be reviewed in
section 5.1).

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In the trial scene, Nicholas is seated facing 12 figures in bizarre


costumes. As they unmask, they are introduced as psychiatrists,
including the former Lily/Julie, now said to be Dr. Vanessa Maxwell.
She reads out a clinical diagnosis of Nicholass psychological problems.
He is then given a whip and offered the chance to revenge his
humiliation on his seducer Lily/Julies bared back. Realizing that
this choice mirrors Conchiss wartime choice, Nicholas declines
(The two versions of the extracts of Nicholass first self-reflection
will be compared in section 5.3).
Nicholas suffers further humiliation in the final disintoxication
scene: he is forced to watch a pornographic film of a man and woman
having sex and then a real scene where Lily/Julie makes tender
love with Joe Harrison (a member of Conchiss cast) in front of him.
The purpose of this disintoxication process is to make him realize
the difference between sex and love, and to free him from his illusory
attachment to Lily/Julie. Unable to believe any of his experiences
in the mock-trial and the disintoxication, Nicholas clings to his
memory of Alison as totally honest and true. When he later finds
that Alison is still alive and that her supposed suicide is evidently
another piece in the puzzle of Conchiss godgame, Nicholas is
shocked and calls into question everything that has happened and
will happen to him. At the end of Part II, Nicholas is left jobless and
baffled in Athens.
In Part III, Nicholas returns to London and continues his search
for clues for the real identities of Conchis, the twin sisters and the
rest of Conchiss cast. He finally succeeds in locating a house in which
Lily Montgomery (now Mrs. Lily de Seitas) lives. At first, she toys
with Nicholas, but when he finds out that she has twin daughters of
her own, she admits that she is Conchiss friend and Alisons too.
After several talks with Lily de Seitas, Nicholas begins to appreciate
what has happened and waits for Alison to forgive and come back to
him. After a prolonged period of waiting, Alison reappears when
Nicholas least expects her, and they quarrel in a park. Both versions
of the novel end at this point, with the future relationship between
Nicholas and Alison uncertain.
The Magus has interwoven narrations, an over-arching first-person
narration by Nicholas Urfe throughout the novel, with four embedded

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

41

first-person narrations by Conchis in Part II. Both I-narrators are also


the principal characters of the stories they tell in retrospect.
As we know, a first-person narrator is the one who tells the story
and is generally a character in the story, a homodiegetic narrator in
narratological terms (Bal 1997; Fludernik 1993; Genette 1980). This
kind of point of view is usually limited, and readers are only apprised
of what this I-character/narrator sees, hears, and thinks. In a sense,
the narrative structure of The Magus corresponds to the pattern of
the detective story. As Rubenstein (1975: 333) puts it, Nicholass
struggle to unravel Conchiss mysterious godgame is to some degree
the detective trying to unravel the mystery by following the clues
Conchis scatters around for him to find (see also Loveday 1985).
Each line of Nicholass attempt to de-mystify the unusual incidents
leads to a false understanding or a dead end, because he cannot
know for sure whether Conchis and the other characters have told
him the truth. The strong narrative tension compels our attention
from beginning to end, and makes us eager to find out what happens
in the novels narrative cycles.

3.1.2 Nicholass journey from self-ignorance to self-knowledge


Critics (e.g. Berets 1973; Boccia 1980; Magalaner 1976; Olshen 1976;
Presley 1972; Rubenstein 1975) generally agree that the novel presents
a quest motif. This motif is explicitly indicated in the underscored
passage from T. S. Eliots Little Gidding (M1, chapter 10: 59) that
Nicholas discovers when he intrudes into Bourani for the second time:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
These lines contribute to an understanding of the significance of
the three-part geographical structure of the book: London-GreeceLondon, which reflects the pattern of Nicholass quest, return and
discovery. We may infer that the return to London in Part III presents
a new Nicholas who comes to know himself for the first time.

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This pattern also suggests that there are two Nicholases in the novel,
an early inexperienced Nicholas and an older experienced one, who
has learned some lessons and knows more about himself. In narratological terms, we may say that the I-character has undergone some
form of development and the I-narrator intends to reveal this growth.
The development of Nicholas is the central concern of the novel; his
character thus deserves close scrutiny throughout the novel.
Below I first present how readers may infer Nicholass characters
flaws from his narrative in Part I of the novel, which accounts for
the necessity of his journey to self-knowledge, and then discuss how
we may infer the change in his character after the journey. Note that
the extracts chosen to be discussed below remain unchanged in the
second edition of The Magus.

3.1.2.1 Inferring Nicholass character flaws from his narrative


In the earlier part of the novel Nicholas is presented as a young,
cynical and selfish pseudo-intellectual. A number of his character
flaws can be inferred from his narrative: for example, (1) his
superior, sarcastic and snobbish attitudes towards people and life in
general; (2) his sexist attitude towards women and (3) his selfishness
and dishonesty in terms of his relationship with women.
(i) Nicholass sense of superiority and class-consciousness
Here is Nicholass description of a woman who works in the British
Council trying to help him to find a job:
She was about thirty, a born spinster, with a lack of sexuality so total
that her smart clothes and too heavy make-up made her pathetic;
like an unsuccessful geisha. (M1, chapter 2: 8)
This value-laden description clearly reveals Nicholass prejudiced
ideological viewpoint. The single sentence includes many unfavourable
terms about the appearance of the woman, such as, a born spinster,
lack of sexuality, too heavy make-up, pathetic and unsuccessful
geisha. Given that the terms all carry negative connotations and that
Nicholas hardly knows her, this description shows his unreasonably

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

43

negative opinion about this woman, in whom he would normally not


be interested. However, because he is looking for a job and she can
help him in this, he invites her out to lunch.
She gave me a patient smile; her front teeth were much too big.
I asked, in my best Oxford voice, if I might take her out to lunch.
(M1, chapter 2: 8)
There is an obvious clash between Nicholass snobbish internal
attitude and his seemingly polite external behaviour. The adverbial
phrase, in my best Oxford voice, can be considered as Fowles implicating to his readers Nicholass sense of superiority and insincerity, via
flouting Grices (1975) maxims of quantity and relation.
Another example which reveals Nicholass snobbery is in his
description of an old Etonian friend called Billy Whyte:
[He] carried with him, perhaps in spite of himself, an unsloughable
air of high caste, of constant contact with the nicest best people, of
impeccable upper-class taste in facial expression, clothes, vocabulary.
(M1, chapter 4: 25)
In this sentence, there are three noun phrases containing value-laden
adjectives (i.e. high caste, the nicest best people, impeccable upperclass taste) carrying favourable and positive connotations. We may
infer from Nicholass ideological viewpoint that he admires the
upper-class taste. His praise for Billy Whytes social superiority constitutes a contrast to his snobbish attitudes towards the above-mentioned
woman in the British Council and the other socially inferior people
in the novel (his neighbour, Margaret, for example, cf. the discussion
in section 3.2.1).
(ii) Nicholass sexist attitude toward women
In the earlier part of the book, Nicholas is also presented generally as
a sexist who has strong sense of superiority and who manipulates
women into sexual relations through what he calls his technique.
He compares relationships to games: It was like being good at golf,
but despising the game (M1, chapter 3: 9). He shows that he is proud

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of having a good deal of sex with girls when he was at Oxford (the
sentences are numbered for ease of reference):
(1) Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car not
so common among undergraduates in those days and I had
some money. (2) I wasnt ugly; and even more important, I had my
loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with
women. (3) My technique was to make a show of unpredictability,
cynicism, and indifference. (4) Then, like a conjurer with his white
rabbit, I produced the solitary heart. (5) I didnt collect conquests;
but by the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity.
(M1, chapter 3: 9)
What Nicholas counts as essential prerequisites for a relationship
are superficial: a car, money, and attractive appearance. He treats
women as sexual objects that he can conquer. As he says, his loneliness, unpredictability, cynicism and indifference are only pretences,
namely, his weapons and technique of pursuing women sexually.
The conjunction but in sentence (5) above reveals (via conventional
implicature) that he thinks having sexual relationships with a dozen
girls is like making conquests.
The first of Nicholass relationships that readers are exposed to is
his affair with Alison. When they first meet, Nicholass snobbery
comes to the fore, as he describes her voice as being only very slightly
Australian, yet not English, veered between harshness, faint nasal
rancidity, and a strange salty directness (M1, chapter 3: 12). So far as
Nicholas is concerned, the harshness of Alisons accent is one of
many signs that she is socially inferior and thus deserves to be treated
badly. The day after their first meeting and first sexual encounter,
Alison asks him if he thinks she is a tramp. Nicholass reply contradicts with what he actually thinks in his mind: (Yes, you are a tramp,
and even worse, you exploit your tramp-hood [M1, chapter 4: 19]). This
free direct thought reveals his true feelings about Alison and his
insincerity. He sees her as a sexual toy, nothing more.
Take Nicholass conversation with his friend Billy Whyte in a bar, for
another example of his snobbish values. Just before that conversation,
readers are told that Nicholas was embarrassed by Alison, by her

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

45

accent, by the difference between her and other upper-class girls


sitting near them.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)

Nice girl, dear boy.


Oh . . . I shrugged. You know.
Most attractive.
Cheaper than central heating.
Im sure.
But I knew what he was thinking. (M1, chapter 4: 25)

When Billy Whyte expresses his appreciation of Alisons attractiveness,


he appears to be trying to be polite to Nicholas as he thinks that
Alison is Nicholass girlfriend. However, Nicholas shows hesitation in
agreeing with Whytes stated appreciation, as indicated in the preface
oh and his kinesic behaviour (shrug). Nicholass hesitation and his
reply you know clearly violate the Gricean maxims of quantity and
manner. Given that Nicholas feels embarrassed by Alisons accent
and social inferiority, he is implicating to Whyte that Alison is
nothing more than a convenient sexual partner. In reply to Whytes
re-assertion of Alisons sexual attractiveness in sentence (3), Nicholas
explicitly states that Alison is cheaper than central heating. His
metaphorical remark indicates that Alison can keep him warm in bed
and thus reduce his bill for central heating. When Whyte agrees with
the sexual implication of Nicholass remark in sentence (5), at which
point their conversation ends, we do not have enough contextual
information to know whether Whyte is trying to be polite again
or whether he really agrees with Nicholass contempt for Alison.
However, in (6), Nicholas tells us that But I knew what he was
thinking. It appears that Nicholas infers Whytes attitude and intentionally reveals to Whyte that he also has high class taste and that
Alison is merely a convenient sexual partner of his.
In the earlier chapters, Nicholas constantly expresses his awareness
of the tension he felt between Alisons social inferiority and her
physical attraction.
(1) I knew the affaire was like no other I had been through.
(2) Apart from anything else it was so much happier physically.

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(3) Out of bed I felt I was teaching her, anglicizing her accent,
polishing off her roughnesses, her provincialisms; in bed she did
the teaching. (M1, chapter 4: 24)
Class-prejudice, a sexist attitude and an obsession with sex are the
fundamental flaws in Nicholass character. On one hand, he thinks
that his affair with Alison is different from others, given that it is so
much happier physically. On the other hand, he assumes a dominant position in social terms as their relationship progresses. The
French spelling of the word affaire in sentence (1) is another
indication of Nicholass snobbery. By using the French spelling,
Nicholas is demonstrating that he is an educated and cultured
person. He tries to teach Alison, improve her inferior status, and
change her into a socially acceptable woman. Despite Alisons love
for him, Nicholass emotional state upon leaving her is a feeling
of escape and a desire to celebrate his release. Even when, later, he
feels lonely on Phraxos, he still thinks that it is merely the physical
ache that he feels for her: they were moments of sexual frustration,
not regretted love (M1, chapter 7: 43).
(iii) Nicholass selfishness and dishonesty
Given Nicholass character, one of the most enticing elements of the
mystery in Bourani for him is Lily/Julie, the woman who is cast in
various roles in Conchiss masques. When Nicholas first talks to her,
he notices that her accent is very largely my own (M1, chapter 27:
160), from which he infers that her social class is similar to his. The
function of Lily/Julies role in the novel is to show other flaws in
Nicholass character, that is, dishonesty and selfishness. These flaws
can be inferred from his indecisive attitudes about how to reveal the
news of Alisons death to Lily/Julie.
When Nicholas receives the news of Alisons death, he is very
shocked and feels guilty. But his desire for Lily/Julie remains strong.
As he says, [Julie] now becomes a total necessity [. . .] If she had
been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a
clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be
forgiven by her (M1, chapter 51: 366). However, the next day when
he calms down from the shock of Alisons death, he changes from the
intention of immediate confession to deferring this speech act.

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

47

He says that he needs to wait for an appropriate time and place to


confess to Lily/Julie.
(1) I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened
myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. (2) I was still determined
to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange
rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.
(M1, chapter 52: 368, emphasis mine)
Fowless use of the metaphor of the monetary exchange rate between
one currency and another in sentence (2) implicates to readers
Nicholass calculated dishonesty and selfishness. He compares human
contrasting emotions with economic trade-offs and expects that his
confession at the right time and place can gain him the greatest
benefit, winning him Lily/Julies sympathy and forgiveness.
After that, Nicholas has many opportunities to tell Lily/Julie the
truth, but he continues to delay the moment of confession by finding
excuses.
I was longing to tell her about Alison, longing for her sympathy
and understanding. But the lie I had told her a fortnight before
stood like a black guard, like Joe, between me and the absolving
sunlight. As soon as we had consummated the physical thing,
I would go to confession [. . .] Those moments on Parnassus need
never be told. (M1, chapter 56: 418)
This time, he decides that he has to wait until they have consummated the physical thing, as if sex will guarantee their future relationship. Even when he decides to tell Lily/Julie about Alison, he is
still dishonest. He decides to tell her only part of the truth; his joyful
moments with Alison on Parnassus need never be told. His violation
of the maxim of quantity can be seen as Fowles implicating Nicholass
selfishness and dishonesty to his readers.

3.1.2.2 Inferring changes in Nicholas the essence of the godgame


The first-person narrator, Nicholas, looks back on his life and his role
in the godgame, narrating and commenting on his experiences

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from a temporal distance. The time lapse between Nicholass visit


to Greece and his telling of his experiences is not stated, but it is
certainly some years later. The fact that he retells his story many
years later may suggest that Nicholas has progressed. His narrative
elsewhere confirms this point:
(1) Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza: a harsh black canarycage strung high up the side of the towering campanile, in which
prisoners were left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town
below. (2) And looking up at it I remembered that winter in Greece,
that gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude, and
self-delusions. (3) To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
(4) And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those
of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his
old ambitions until he dies. (M1, chapter 9: 52, emphasis mine)
The considerable indefinite time lapse is indicated by years later in
sentence (1). Notice also that Nicholass experiences during the year
on Phraxos are referred to as psychologically and deictically remote,
as shown in the distal deictic expressions in sentences (2) and (4):
that winter in Greece and that wretched term in particular. It is
not clear precisely how Nicholas feels about his experience in Greece
and which attitude he is implicating to readers by using the adjective
wretched (self-pitying and unhappy or annoyed and angry?). However, we can infer a change in Nicholas, given he states metaphorically
that he had confined himself in a cage and had false beliefs about
himself (e.g. self-delusions, jeers of all his old ambitions) while
reflecting upon his past.
The extract below is narrated early in the novel, after Nicholass
description of how he manipulates women into sexual relationships,
using his technique (see section 3.1.2.1):
(1) This sounds, and was, calculating, but it was caused less by a
true coldness than by my dandyish belief in the importance of the
life-style. (2) I mistook the feeling of relief that dropping a girl
always brought for a love of freedom. (M1, chapter 3: 9)

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49

The use of the present tense for sounds, a proximal temporal


deictic feature, indicates that it is the experienced I-narrator who is
confessing directly to the reader his past sexist attitude towards
women, rather than narrating his account of what happens (for which
the basic tense signature in this novel is the past tense). The insertion and was in sentence (1) points out Nicholas-the-narrators
judgment of his own behaviour in the past. From the verb mistook,
the reader may infer that Nicholas has changed, given that he admits
his own false assumption of freedom.
The change in Nicholas is also revealed in his self-recognition,
which is manifest in the following extract, when he realizes why he
dislikes Mitford, his predecessor on Phraxos:
I disliked Mitford because he was crass and mean, but even more
because he was a caricature, an extension, of certain qualities in
myself; he had on his skin, visible, the carcinoma I nursed inside
me. (M1, chapter 73: 575)
Nicholas admits that he has some of Mitfords unpleasant qualities, as
indicated in the metaphor of the invisible carcinoma which he
nursed inside himself. His self-recognition represents a step forward
in changing those undesirable attitudes. To understand better how
Fowles intends to present the change in Nicholas, we cannot omit
what Nicholas says at the end of the novel: the memory told me,
in the simplest and most revealing way, how much I had changed
(M1, chapter 76: 602). Nicholass journey in the novel enables him to
view himself with a sober perspective. He comes to some painful new
truths about choice, sex, love and freedom.

3.1.3 Conchis: the Magus, the manipulator


Among the critics views of Conchis as a philosopher, psychologist,
magician, educator, artist, seer and god-like figure, I would particularly
like to focus on his thematic roles as a moral teacher and a magician.
Conchis is explicitly referred to as the magus in the novel whereas
his role as a moral teacher is conveyed implicitly.

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My view of Conchis as a moral teacher is drawn from Boccia (1980).


He perceives Nicholass experiences at Bourani as an educational
process and Conchis as the teacher who attempts to educate him.
As Conchis explicitly tells Nicholas, you have much to learn about
yourself and you are far from your true self (M1, chapter 52: 371).
To perceive Conchis as a moral teacher, we should not ignore his
embedded narratives and their moral lessons. His compelling life
story is presented as an important narrative foil to that of Nicholas.
Conchiss past experiences expose the process through which he
himself has learned to know the meaning of freedom, which constitutes a parallel process of Nicholass learning.
Conchiss other thematic or allegorical role in the novel is as that
of a magician. Very often Fowles alludes to The Tempest in this novel
(cf. Wight and Grant 1987). The role of Prospero is alluded to in the
role of Conchis in the masque at Bourani. His seeming manipulation
of Nicholas and Lily/Julie is similar to Prosperos control over
Ferdinand and Miranda. Like Shakespeares Ferdinand, Nicholas
participates in the tests Conchis sets for him in order to aid him on
his journey. That Conchis assumes the role of magus indicates that
he embodies a special kind of power, a power that originates in selfknowledge and entails a responsibility to guide and lead others.
Unlike Shakespeares Prospero, who has a twofold agenda, to protect
his daughter Miranda and regain his dukedom, Conchiss role is
singular and philanthropic, to lead Nicholas to learn to recognize his
own character flaws and his own potential. This is the reason Conchis
tells Nicholas about the masque: You are beginning to understand
why. Not how (M1, chapter 27: 159). To understand why, not how
implies that Nicholas will know the purpose of the masque in the
end but will never fully understand the mechanisms by which the
magician manipulates him into self-understanding.

3.1.4 Lily/Julie: the personification of dishonesty and illusion


On a first reading of the novel, it appears that Nicholass quest is to
establish the true identity of Lily/Julie. She is cast in various roles in
Conchiss masques. In the beginning, she is presented as Conchiss
dead fiance, Lily Montgomery. As the narrative unfolds, she becomes

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51

an amnesiac, a schizophrenic, an actress of Conchiss meta-theatre,


and Conchiss mistress and so on. As Nicholas says at one point:
(1) In so many ways, it seemed all no more than a game. (2) Lily
gave strongly the impression that she was playing with me
amusing herself as much as acting a role at Conchiss command.
(3) But all games, even the most literal, between a man and a
woman are implicitly sexual; and I was clearly meant to feel that.
(4) If it was her job to seduce me, I should be seduced. (5) I couldnt
do anything about it. (6) I was a sensualist. I wanted to be seduced.
(M1, chapter 32: 196)
He senses that Lily/Julie is acting out a role in the masque and
playing with him at Conchiss command, as explicitly indicated in
sentences (1) and (2). The use of the non-factive lexical items, that
is, seemed and impression suggests Nicholass uncertainty about
the game and Lily/Julies role in it. It seems that the only thing
Nicholas infers from Conchiss game is its sexual implication, not
its meaningful purpose. The adverbs strongly in sentence (2) and
clearly in (3) indicate the strength of Nicholass cognitive assumption
about the sexual implication of the game.
If we perceive the godgame as part of Nicholass education, then we
may say that the symbolic function of Lily/Julies role in the novel is
to help Nicholas to achieve his self-discovery. Acting as an innocent
pawn in Conchiss godgame, she seduces Nicholas to the point that
he believes they are in love with and desire each other sexually. This
illusion permeates the novel, even when Conchis warns him against it:
Lily is susceptible and very dangerous both things without realizing
it herself. Like a very fine blade, she can easily be hurt but she can
also hurt. She can hurt you, as I know to my cost, because she can
deceive you again and again, if you are foolish enough to let her.
We have all had to learn to remain completely detached emotionally
from her. Because it is on our emotions that she will prey if we
give her the chance. (M1, chapter 35: 217)
At this point, Conchis has already explicitly pointed out another
theme of the novel, emotional deception, which is one of Nicholass

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character flaws. However, Nicholas is too sexually oriented, or too


misled by Lily/Julie, to keep Conchiss warning in mind. It is not
until the end that Nicholas realizes that Lily/Julie was simply the
personification of [Conchiss] irony (M1, chapter 43: 273).

3.1.5 Alison: the personification of honesty and reality


As the story unfolds, we learn that Alisons fake death is also part of
Conchiss manipulation and is crucial to Nicholass development.
The exact situation of her death and rebirth is not revealed, but
readers may infer that Alison has also undergone some sort of
godgame as Nicholas has. Even though her process is not depicted
in the novel, we may still perceive some differences in her character
at the end of the book.
In the beginning Alison is presented by Nicholas as a socially
unacceptable woman. In her conversation with Nicholas, she also
constantly reveals her lack of self-assuredness. When Alison reappears
at the end of the novel, however, she seems to be without her old
feelings of inadequacy. She also has changed in other ways, as
Nicholas says:
(1) She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back
several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. (2) As
if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on a
table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. (M1, chapter 78: 611)
Notice that the last line of the quotation from Eliots Little Gidding
and know the place for the first time is repeated in italics here. The
repetition of the same line in the novel foregrounds its role as an
interpretative guide. It indicates that after a prolonged period of
waiting, Nicholas learns to re-evaluate Alison. Note the metaphorical
presentation in sentence (2) Alison has changed from being
as accessible as a pot of salt on a table to being held in a phial,
sacrosanct. This indicates her transformation from being cheap and
easily approached to being sacred and inviolable.
Notice that Alisons transformation (e.g. almost a new woman) is
perceived from Nicholass viewpoint, which also reflects his own
change of attitude toward Alison and his ultimate comprehension of
the significance of Conchiss godgame. Alison, as we learn, is cast as

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53

Reality in the masque. Her greatest virtue, as Nicholas comes to


realize after losing her, has been her honesty and constant reality
(M1, chapter 63: 495). Nicholass final change of attitude towards
Alison indicates that he has achieved his self-realization in the end by
accepting Alison and appreciating all that she represents: honesty
and reality, which constitute a contrast to what Lily/Julie represents,
that is, dishonesty and illusion.

3.2 An overview of The Magus revision


The revision of The Magus does not involve major structural alterations.
The storyline, narrative structure and the chapter numbers remain
the same in both editions. In this section, I review the literary and
linguistic scholars comments on the revision, examine what types of
textual alterations Fowles has made in general and discuss what makes
Fowles and some critics (e.g. Binns 1977; Boccia 1980; Wade 1979)
believe that the second edition is more refined than the first edition,
and whether the meaning of The Magus, as Boccia (1980) suggests,
becomes more accessible to readers in general terms.
Table 3.2 presents a general categorization of the major types of
changes in the second edition of The Magus which have been observed
Table 3.2

Categorization of the changes in the revision of The Magus

Two levels

Five Categories

Chapter No.

punctuation, lexical change, syntactic


Across various
Changes
change, modality, reordering of words/
chapters
at the linguistic Language phrases/sentences, merging or separating
level
sentences, paraphrase, addition or deletion
of sentences/paragraphs, etc.
Theme

(a) Overt allusion/intertextuality


(b) Themes of Sex/Love/Deception
more explicit

From an implicated happy ending to an


Ending
Changes at the
indeterminate ending
discoursal/
narratological Characters The roles of Conchis and Lily/Julie
level

POV

M1 is told more consistently from the


viewpoint of the I-character; M2 mixes
together I-characters and I-narrators
viewpoints

33, 46, 56, 58


47, 49, 58

78
Across various
chapters
Across various
chapters

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or mentioned by the scholars. The observed changes/differences


are grouped into five mutually inclusive sets, that is, language, theme,
ending, characters, and point of view, which I relate to two levels of
stylistic change: the local small-scale linguistic level and the global,
narratological level.
We should bear in mind that the specification of the changes is by
no means fixed and unrelated. Changes at the discoursal/narratological level are intimately related to the smaller-scale changes at the
linguistic level. Further discussion of each type of changes will follow
in subsequent sections.

3.2.1 Language
In the initial stage of the research, I compared manually the linguistic
changes between the texts from the two editions. I found that, apart
from the larger chunks of textual addition or deletion in the revised
edition, there are also numerous microscopic linguistic changes,
ranging from subtle alterations of punctuation, single words and
slight rephrasings, to the compression of long passages into a few
lines and so on.
Binns (1977) states that, on the whole, the revised version of The
Magus is an improvement for the following reasons: (1) redundant or
inappropriate adjectives disappear; (2) unnecessary description is
deleted; (3) the irrelevant epigraph is removed; (4) the dialogue is
modernized; (5) there is a general shift in the direction of greater
consistency and (6) allusions are tidied up (see Binns 1977: 834).
What we see in this statement is a critics intuitive and impressionistic
evaluation concerning the revision. For example, it is not clear what
Binns means by redundant or inappropriate adjectives, unnecessary
description and irrelevant epigraph. In what ways is the dialogue
modernized? Are Binns statements subjective evaluations? Is his
judgement a carry over from the general assumption that revision
makes better texts? Does the revision create any different effects on
readers? Binns does not provide satisfying answers to these questions.
It seems that all his claims need to be examined with more contextual
information and in more detail.

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55

Although Binns fails to provide substantial evidence to support his


judgements, I would agree with two of the claims he made, (5) and
(6), regarding the textual consistency and allusions. Here I will first
give an example to illustrate why I also think that the revision of The
Magus has been shifted in the direction of greater consistency. I will
discuss allusions later in section 3.2.2.1. These two statements will
also be examined and confirmed with recourse to corpus evidence
later in Chapters Six and Seven.
The examples I use to illustrate the reason for my support of the
claim concerning textual consistency are the conversations early
in the novel between Nicholas and his new neighbour, Margaret.
Nicholas talks with Margaret on two occasions. The first occasion is
when Margaret moves in below Nicholass flat and invites him to a
party; the other is when she is trying to warn Nicholas to keep away
from Alison because Alison is engaged to her brother. The first extract
below is taken from their first meeting. The words marked in boldface highlight the linguistic features worthy of close attention.
(1) Gled to know you. Look, were heving ourselves a bottle pardy.
Like to come along?
(2) Oh. Well actually . . .
(3) Itll be noisy up here.
(4) It was the usual thing: an invitation to kill complaint. I hesitated, then shrugged.
(5) All right. Thanks.
(6) Well thets good. Eight? She began to go downstairs, but
she called back. You hev a girl-friend youd like to bring?
(M1, chapter 3: 10; M2, chapter 3: 22, emphasis added)
This extract is identical in both editions. The spelling deviation
highlighted in boldface indicates two things: (a) the evocation of
Margarets style of speech in dialogue through the graphological
device of non-standard spelling and (b) Nicholas-the-characters
viewpoint, namely, his awareness of Margarets Australian accent,
which indicates that he is socially prejudiced against her accent, and
so against her.

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As Leech and Short (1981: 132) suggest, although a written text


has no phonological level of style as such, we cannot ignore the
phonological potentials of the written word, given that the implicit
sound pattern can always be made explicit in reading aloud. The use
of the non-standard spelling, for example, gled, heving, pardy
and thets, suggests the characters accent.
Apart from the phonological effect that shows in Margarets style of
speech in dialogue, the non-standard spelling also helps readers to
infer Nicholass character. Margarets direct speech is clearly related
to Margarets viewpoint about the things she is trying to relate to
Nicholas. However, in a conversational context, the speaker and
hearer have to take each others viewpoint into account. Hence
Nicholass view of Margarets accent is revealed as well. The fact that
Nicholas presents Margarets vocabulary with non-standard spellings
helps us to infer that Nicholas-the-character is especially sensitive
to accent variation, and that he is probably very class-conscious.
Indeed, he appears to think that Margaret does not have a socially
acceptable accent. As we learn from other part of his narrative report,
Margaret is an Australian with all her short as flattened into ugly
short es (M1, chapter 3: 10; M2, chapter 3: 22, emphasis mine). The
value-laden adjective ugly reinforces the inference about Nicholass
middle-class snobbery (cf. section 3.1.2.1).
In the two editions, the dialogues between Nicholas and Margaret
remain largely unchanged. However, in the conversation of their
second meeting, there are two changes in Margarets utterances in
the M2 version, which are presented below for a comparison:
Ive a nice English girl anxious to meet you, Nicholas. (M1,
ch 3: 12) vs.
Ive a nice English girl enxious to meet you, Nicholas. (M2,
ch 3: 24)
This is difficult to explain. (M1, ch 3: 13) vs.
This is a liddle difficult to explain. (M2, ch 3: 24)
The deviation of spelling shown in M2 is extra evidence of the
viewpoint and attitude markers discussed above. In their first conversation Margarets accent is highlighted in both editions. It seems

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57

that Fowles in writing his first edition had already used the linguistic
device to lead readers to draw certain inference about Nicholass
character, but he failed to do it consistently in the second occasion of
their conversation. In this regard, the revised edition may be thought
of as being improved to greater consistency as compared to M1.

3.2.2 Theme
In the M2 version, many chunks of dialogue between Nicholas,
Conchis, Lily/Julie and Rose/June have been completely rewritten,
notably in chapters 33, 34, 35, 43, 45, 46, 47, 55, 56, 58 and 59. These
chapters depict mainly the interactions among the four characters.
This observation raises some interesting questions. What are the
propositional contents of their conversations? Why does Fowles
rewrite the dialogues among the characters so extensively?
In terms of the changes that Fowles has made, the critics consider
that the themes of the book have become more explicit to readers
(Binns 1977; Boccia 1980; Wight and Grant 1987). For example,
Binns suggests that the drastic revision of the dialogue involves a
clarification of the godgame, of the elaborate debates about human
illusions and free will (1977: 81). Boccia echoes Binns; he says that
the most important aspects of the novel appear to be expanded by
having characters explain, in rather clearer language than previously,
exactly what they mean when speaking of such things as the godgame, hazard, and elect; all reasonably obscure in the initial version
of The Magus (1980: 236). Wight and Grant share the same view:
We believe The Magus: A Revised Version is not at all limited to
86 pages of stylistic emendation; rather, in conjunction with stylistic
change, it profits notably from clarification and improved focus
of theme (1987: 85).
The critics comments with regard to the clearer language and
explicit thematic concern of the novel will be examined further in
Chapter Seven, where I demonstrate more specifically how Fowles
employs metaphors, playing in his revision with the boundary
between what is said (text/dialogue) and what is meant (subtexts),
to reinforce the theme and the plot structure of the novel as
a whole.

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3.2.2.1 Overt allusion/intertextuality


Some critics (e.g. Binns 1977; Boccia 1980; Hill 1980; Wight and
Grant 1987) point out that the allusions in the second edition of The
Magus are tidied up to make the theme more focused. For example,
in both editions, the link between Conchis and the Magus of the
Tarot is made when Nicholas sees the Magus card in a shop window:
Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them
was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same
emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words LE SORCIER
the sorcerer (M1, chapter 70: 537; M2, chapter 70: 579). This is the
only allusion to Conchis as the magus in the first edition. Notice that
the reference is not stated overtly but implicated by the narrator via
Grices maxim of relation.
In the revised edition, however, Fowles adds one more allusion
to the Tarot which makes an overt connection between Conchis
and the magus. In chapter 58, Rose/June explicitly tells Nicholas
that the names Conchis has selected for the twin sisters come from
the Tarot:
(1) What was the delusion planned for tonight?
(2) That I was your last true friend. She added quickly, Which
wasnt all a lie. The friend part, anyway.
(3) I wasnt going to buy it.
(4) You werent really expected to. She gave me another quick
smile. If you can imagine playing chess, but not to win . . .
merely to see what moves the other person makes.
(5) All that Lily and Rose nonsense.
(6) The names are a kind of joke. Theres a card in the Tarot
pack called the magus. The magician . . . conjuror. Two of his
traditional symbols are the lily and the rose. (M2, chapter 58:
477, emphasis added)
The responses that Nicholas makes in this conversation that is,
What was the delusion planned for tonight? in turn (1), I wasnt
going to buy it in turn (3), and nonsense in turn (5) all indicate
his awareness, in the later stages of his journey, of Conchiss manipulation and the incredible nature of the events he experienced.

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59

Rose/June points out in turn (4) that everything that happened in


Bourani was a metaphorical game, like playing chess, and its only
difference from a real game was its purpose: not to win but to see
how he reacted. The allusion to Conchis as the magus and Lily and
Rose as his mythic symbols in turn (6) clearly invites Nicholas (and
readers) to deduce that Nicholas himself is the Fool of the Tarot.
According to McDaniel, the Fool is the principal figure in the Tarot,
for he is the persona who must travel the circuit of cards through a
calibrated progression out of ignorance and frivolity into enlightenment
(1980: 24950, emphasis added). Hence, Rose/Junes explicit remark
draws a deliberate parallel between Nicholass quest in The Magus
and the Fools journey through the graded levels of the Tarot. The
Fool (Nicholas) must solve a separate riddle each time so that he can
progress to the succeeding card and its own peculiar lesson.
Wight and Grant (1987) suggest that the clearer thematic exposition
can also be clearly seen in Fowless extended use of Shakespearean
allusions (see also Hill 1980: 124). In some scenes within Conchiss
domain, Nicholas, a habitual liar and user of women, conceptualizes
himself as playing Shakespearean roles, that is, Mercutio (M1,
chapter 8: 51; M2, chapter 8: 62), and Ferdinand (M1, chapter 13:
73; M2, chapter 13: 83), which implicates to the reader his heroic
and overweening picture of himself.
The Tempest is the main literary allusion of the novel, in original and
revised versions alike. Wight and Grant point out how Fowles intensifies Nicholass foolish sexual fantasy through a series of added Tempest
allusions in M2 (e.g. chapter 33: 2034; chapter 46: 341; chapter 56:
458). Fowles makes the association of Conchis-Prospero, Lily/JulieMiranda, and Nicholas-Ferdinand more explicit in the revised
version than in the original (cf. also Boccia 1980; Hill 1980). One of
the obvious additional allusions to The Tempest occurs when Nicholas
is locked in Conchiss underground trial room. His confidence
is destroyed when Conchis suddenly proclaims the game is over.
Nicholas interprets the situation to be a twisted Tempest, one with
Prospero turned insane, maniacally determined never to release his
Miranda (M2, chapter 56: 458). Fowles uses the explicit intertextual
reference to implicate to readers Nicholass romantic pretentiousness,
via comparing his role with that of Ferdinand and revealing his false

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expectation of winning his Miranda (Lily/Julie) in the end. As Wight


and Grant state, these Shakespearean allusions, often ironically, point
to Nicholass misperceptions and selfishness (for the analysis of the
dramatic irony created by additional allusions, see Wight and Grant
1987: 878). Nicholass unrealistic vision and false expectations
sharpen his character flaws and make clearer the need for his
journey to self-realization.

3.2.2.2 The themes of sex, love and deception are made more explicit
Given that Nicholas has misconceptions about sex and love, the role
of sex becomes a key to the conceptual framework of the novel. One
of the changes that Fowles has made in the revision is to make some
of the sex overt. As Fowles himself says in an interview, the original
wasnt quite erotic enough. I always regretted there wasnt more
of that (see Singh 1980: 186); and in the preface to the revised
edition he declares, The erotic element is stronger in two scenes.
I regard that as merely the correction of a past failure of nerve (M2,
Foreword: 7). He claims that the reason for not explicitly describing
such sex scenes in the original version had to do with the climate
of the times in which the novel was written, and that the time of
the revision, the 1970s, gave him greater freedom to introduce
these scenes.
Three new erotic incidents are added to the revised version: two
moments of frustrated sexual possibility for Nicholas with Lily/Julie
one in the chapel (chapter 47) and one at the beach (chapter 49)
and the climax of the sexual scene (chapter 58). The major change
in the sex scene is in chapter 58. In the M1 version Nicholas is teased
into arousal, and when he is about to have sex with Lily/Julie, she
leaps out of bed, turns on the lights, and admits several men into the
room to capture Nicholas. In the M2 revision Nicholas succeeds in
having sexual intercourse with Lily/Julie before the men burst in (for
the textual comparison of the scene, see section 5.1).
Two questions have to be asked in reviewing the change of the
sexual encounters between Nicholas and Lily/Julie. Why does
Fowles regret not having the erotic scenes in the original? And do
the additional sex scenes and Nicholass final success in having sexual
intercourse with Lily/Julie in M2 create any specific meaning or

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61

impact on Nicholas-the-character (and us, the reader)? According to


Binns, [t]he effect is dramatic, shocking even, and for once Nicholas
is forced into the role of sexual victim, rather than predator, in a
painful game of emotional deception (1977: 80). Salami also points
out that by increasing the seductive elements of the revised text the
reader is able to see the novels vital paradox: the gratification of
Nicholass fantasies by fulfilling his sexual desires and his humiliation
by Julie (1992: 98). In other words, the lesson Nicholas learns is
more powerful and unforgettable. He is forced to admit that all his
life he has been willing to hurt and deceive women, just as Lily/Julie
now deceives him.
The reason why Fowles makes such a change is explained clearly in
his addition of Lily de Seitas philosophical remarks in reply to
Nicholass doubts about why her daughter sleeps with him. She tells
him: Perhaps thats our way of telling the truth (M2, chapter 75: 626);
and to teach you that physical pleasure and moral responsibility are
two very different things (M2, chapter 75: 627). The addition of overt
sex scenes and Lily de Seitas remarks certainly makes the theme of
love, sex and emotional deception more explicit. As Wade (1979:
719) suggests, one of the reasons Nicholas is subjected to sexual
perversity is that he must learn to distinguish sex from love and
value them accordingly. Nicholas ultimately realizes the truth, as
he says: Conchiss truths, especially the truth he had embodied in
Lily, matured in me (M1, chapter 78: 607; M2, chapter 78: 646).

3.2.3 The ending of the novel


With regard to the ending, two points deserve our special attention.
First, we should notice that the narrators tone of voice changes
in the first paragraph of the last chapter, where Nicholas is waiting
for Alisons reappearance. The extract below is the same in both
editions.
(1) The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for
the anti-heros future; leave him, says our age, leave him where
mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to
lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him
no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary

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rooms where the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this
truth, this crystal of humanity, this reality lost through imagination,
to return; and to say she returns is a lie.
(2) But the maze has no centre. (3) An ending is no more than
a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears. (4) Benedick
kissed Beatrice at last; but ten years later? (5) And Elsinore, that
following spring?
(6) So ten more days. (7) But what happened in the following
years is silence; is another mystery. (M1, chapter 78: 606; M2,
chapter 78: 645)
This paragraph is significantly different from the rest of the novel in
that it is narrated in the third person and the present tense as opposed
to first-person past. This breaking away from the previous pattern of
the narration foregrounds the paragraph and forces readers to take
special notice of it.
This paragraph signals an authorial intrusion at the end of the
novel. The whole paragraph, notice, is written in the present tense
(e.g. is, says, are waiting) with proximal spatial deixis (e.g. this girl, this
truth, this reality). These linguistic features might also belong to
Nicholas-the-narrator, who could be predicting the possibilities in his
own future. However, this explanation is unlikely for two reasons.
First, the character Nicholas is referred to in sentence (1) as the
anti-hero and him. Secondly, in the sentence we too are waiting
[. . .], the inclusive pronoun we and the adverb too reveals to us
as readers that, we are suspended in the moment of waiting as well,
eager to know what will happen to Nicholas in the future.
One of the most startling changes in the M2 edition comes in the
very last paragraph of the novel. Here is how the story ends in the
M1 version. Nicholas suspects that he is still being watched. He
explains to Alison his plan of action; that is, he will slap her and walk
away, and then they will meet at Victoria Station. The passage below
appears after Nicholas slaps Alison. He looks at her for the last time
and walks away.
(1) I gave her bowed head one last stare, then I was walking.
(2) Firmer than Orpheus, as firm as Alison herself, that other day

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63

of parting, not once looking back. (3) The autumn grass, the
autumn sky. (4) People. (5) A blackbird, poor fool, singing out of
season from the willows by the lake. (6) A flight of grey pigeons
over the houses. (7) Fragments of freedom, an anagram made
flesh. (8) And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
(M1, chapter 78: 617, emphasis added)
The last paragraph in M1 version is written in the same past tense,
first-person narration as the rest of the novel, as indicated by the
verbs in sentence (1). Sentences (3) to (8) are a series of elliptical
sentences, which indicate a world frozen and suspended at the
moment of departure. We are not told whether Alison does meet
Nicholas at Victoria. However, to infer the ending, we cannot ignore
the important allusion to Orpheus (Binns 1977; see also Boccia 1980;
Nadeau 1980).
Orpheus was the greatest musician of Greek myth, whose songs
could charm wild beasts and coax even inanimate objects into
movement. When Orpheus wife, Eurydice, was killed by the bite of
a serpent, he went down to the underworld to bring her back. His
songs were so beautiful that Hades finally agreed to allow Eurydice to
return to the world of the living. However, Orpheus had to meet one
condition: he could not look back as he was conducting her to the
surface. Just before they reached the upper world, Orpheus looked
back, and Eurydice slipped back into the netherworld once again.1
From the allusion to Orpheus in sentence (2), we can infer that
there might well be a happy ending between Nicholas and Alison. The
fact that Alison walks up to Nicholas and accepts the slap, and the fact
that Nicholas is firmer than Orpheus in his determination not once
looking back, implicates that he might have his Eurydice back.
In the M2 version, however, Nicholas makes a new, final appeal
to Alison for forgiveness. At this moment, the narrative moves
abruptly into the present tense again, echoing the opening passage
of this chapter:
(1) The bowed head, the buried face.
(2) She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a
hand, never leave this frozen present tense. (3) All waits, suspended.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

(4) Suspend the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people.
(5) A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows
by the lake. (6) A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments
of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. (7) And somewhere
the stinging smell of burning leaves. (M2, chapter 78: 6556,
emphasis added)
In the revised edition of The Magus the last paragraph is more
ambiguous. There seems to be no way to decide whether Alison and
Nicholas will have a future together. The change in the ending echoes
more consistently the opening paragraph of the same chapter,
written in the same third-person present narrative form. The revised
ending keeps the suspension of what we are told to expect in the
authorial intrusion in the opening paragraph. This authorial intrusion is made more obvious in M2, which points to Fowless overt
communicative intention, namely, to remind his readers of the
illusive nature of fictional reality and the artifices of the story (I will
return to this topic in section 8.1 for further discussion).

3.2.4 Characters
Some critics suggest that one of the obvious changes in the revision is
in characters (see Binns 1977; Boccia 1980; Salami 1992; Wade 1979).
They generally agree that the revision creates a sharper characterization of Conchis and Lily/Julie.
As discussed in section 3.2.2.1, Fowles has added several references
in the revision that help clarify Conchiss role as a magician and
a moral teacher in the godgame. Binns (1977: 80) points out that
Conchiss role as a psychiatrist, as a doctor, a scientist, is also repeatedly suggested and thus emphasized in the revision. Conchis himself
announces that he is a psychiatrist attempting his own brand of
situation therapy (M2, chapter 35: 231). He treats the godgame as a
psychological experiment in testing a human beings emotional
deception and Nicholas is the subject of this test, the guinea-pig. This
is mentioned more explicitly in the revised edition of The Magus.
For example, in the first edition, the concept of guinea pig appears
in chapter 74 and this reference remains unchanged in the revision.

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

65

Fowles further develops this concept in chapters 29, 34, 46 and 58


in M2, which are the chapters that he has revised drastically (cf.
Figure 4.5). The following example is taken from chapter 58. The
notion of Nicholas as Conchiss guinea-pig and the purpose of this
experiment, are reinforced by additional remarks from Rose/June,
especially in sentences (5) and (9) below:
(1) Ill give you one clue. (2) Maurices lifelong special field has
been the nature of the delusional symptoms of insanity. (3) She
put her hands in her pockets. (4) Psychiatry is getting more and
more interested in the other side of the coin why sane people
are sane, why they wont accept delusions and fantasies as real.
(5) Obviously its very difficult to explore that if you tell your sane
guinea pig, your very sane guinea-pig in this case, that everything
hes going to be told is an attempt to delude him. (6) I said
nothing, and she went on. (7) You must be thinking were running
a very delicate tightrope in medical ethics. (8) We are . . . aware
of that. (9) But our justification is that one day the sane temporary victims like you may have helped some very sick people.
(10) Perhaps far more than you can imagine. (M2, chapter 58:
477, emphasis mine)
The notion of Nicholas as the guinea-pig of Conchiss psychological
experiment, either through his own conception or other characters
remarks, occurs six times more in the M2 version. Via the Gricean
maxim of quantity, Fowles is not only implicating to readers a
justified purpose of Conchiss manipulation, as stated in sentence
(9), but also reinforcing the experimental element of the novel (for
further discussion, see section 7.7.2).
Some critics also suggest that the most noticeable change in
characters occurs in the character of Lily/Julie (see Binns 1977;
Salami 1992; Wade 1979). Wade thinks that the textual revision has
made Lily/Julies role considerably more believable and more
enchanting to Nicholas (1979: 717). Similarly, Salami suggests
that [i]n the revised text Julies reality seems credible to Nicholas
(1992: 98), especially when she herself frankly admits to Nicholas
that (a) she is an actor who has been given the role of Conchiss dead

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

fiance and (b) her real name is Julie Holmes. By contrast, in the first
edition, it is Conchis who tells Nicholas these two things. This type
of revision actually changes the facts in the fictional world, and so
it is difficult to examine the effect of this change from a stylistic
perspective. Nonetheless, if Lily/Julie in the revised edition is indeed
made more credible to Nicholas, it is arguable that his disbelief in
Conchiss illusions/manipulations will be increased, the shock of his
final humiliation by Lily/Julie is greater, and accordingly the lesson
he learns becomes more powerful and unforgettable.

3.2.5 Point of view


Apart from Nadeau (1980), not many scholars discuss the change in
narrative point of view between both editions of The Magus. In this
regard, Nadeau makes an interesting observation:
The most pervasive change is that the character Nicholas is made
more circumspect and less nave as he progresses through the
godgame. The result is that some of the magical, fabulous quality
of the first version is sacrificed, but the obvious benefit is that the
more bizarre events in the narrative become much more credible.
(Nadeau 1980: 267)
Interestingly, Nadeaus intuitive comment seems to be exemplified
by Short and Seminos (2008) comparative stylistic analysis of two
equivalent extracts from an important moment in The Magus. The
extract they choose is the scene when Nicholas is overpowered and
tied up immediately after he makes love to Lily/Julie in a hotel. They
argue that the first edition is told much more consistently from the
viewpoint of Nicholas-as-character, which helps readers to experience
his shock, anger and helplessness at first hand, whereas the second
version mixes together the different perspectives of the characters
experienced event-time and the narrators coding-time memories,
and as a consequence, they say much of the sense of immediacy,
drama and reader involvement in the first edition is lost. I will
come back to Short and Seminos analysis in section 5.1 for a further
discussion of this change.

The Magus (M1) and its Revision (M2)

67

This chapter gave a general overview of the critics and linguists


comments concerning the changes in The Magus revision. Those
comments are mostly based on the critics intuitive impression or on
small-scale textual analyses. The scope of the comparison between
the two editions that has been done so far is not large enough for
us to draw any conclusion about the overall changes in linguistic
or stylistic terms. As I will demonstrate later in Chapters Six and
Seven, with recourse to some corpus techniques, we are able to
extend the scope of investigation, explore the linguistic changes at
global level and examine further the stylistic difference between the
two editions.

Chapter Four

Quantitative comparison measuring the


degree of text similarity

Given that my research is a comparative analysis of The Magus original


and its revision, the first question to answer is: What exactly are the
linguistic differences between them? At first sight, it may seem that
revision is easy to study because researchers can observe the record
of textual alterations on the page. However, as an object of study,
revision has proven to be difficult and often frustrating to analyse, as
the seemingly clear surface record hides great underlying complexity
(cf. Faigley and Witte 1981; Hildick 1965; Sommers 1980). In the
previous chapter, I reviewed some literary and linguistic scholars
comments on the revision of The Magus in general terms. In this
chapter, I conduct a corpus-based quantitative comparison, in order
to find out the similarities and differences between the two editions
in quantitative terms.
Two corpus tools are introduced for my initial quantitative text
comparison: (a) the TESAS/Crouch1 tool for measuring the extent
of text reuse in the domain of journalism, which was developed at
the University of Sheffield and tested at Lancaster University and
(b) WCopyfind, a software package developed in 2002 by Professor
Louis Bloomfield of the Physics Department at the University of
Virginia, which is mainly used to detect the possibility, and quantify
the degree, of one text being copied from another.
John Fowless The Magus was first published in 1966. It was revised
and republished in 1977. The revision is similar in some ways to
the plagiarizing reuse of the existing written source to create a new
version, given that the revised edition of The Magus contains the same
number of chapters and there is no major structural or narrative

Quantitative Comparison

69

overhaul of the original edition. Hence, I consider the first edition of


The Magus as the source text and the second edition as the derived/
rewritten target text and use these two corpus tools to assess the
degree of text similarity between the two versions of the book. I will
present the statistical results of each chapter-pair comparison and
then examine the general pattern of the changes between the two
editions of The Magus. The strengths and weaknesses of the corpus
tools in measuring text content and the implication of the statistical
results in stylistic terms will be discussed in sections 4.4 and 4.5
respectively.

4.1 The Magus corpus


In order to combine the corpus techniques with my stylistic comparison,
I needed to have the two editions in machine-readable form and
so I scanned both versions electronically, performed optical character
recognition on the scanned texts, and then post-edited the texts
to produce accurate versions. The content of The Magus corpus
containing the full texts of the two editions is shown in Table 4.1.
The total number of word tokens is 222,439 in the first edition of
The Magus and 241,745 in the revised edition, which indicates an
increase of 8.68% word tokens in the revision. However, Part I and
Part III show small decreases, the increase taking place in Part II.
I first identify the changes with TESAS/Crouch, to examine,
chapter by chapter, the overall pattern of text similarity between
the original and the revised version. Section 4.2 introduces the
matching approach of this corpus tool in more detail, especially
Table 4.1

The content of The Magus corpus


No. of word tokens

The Magus Corpus


1

M Edition (1966) M2 Edition (1977)


Part I (chs. 19)

% of word tokens increased


or decreased in M2

18,370

18,237

0.72%

Part II (chs. 1067)

172,221

191,665

11.29%

Part III (chs. 6878)

31,848

31,843

0.02%

Total

222,439

241,745

8.68%

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

the two major functions that are particularly helpful to my initial


comparative research work: (a) it searches for text alignment at the
sentence level and (b) it assesses the degree of overall text similarity.
In section 4.3, I will use another corpus tool, WCopyfind, for text
comparison, to confirm the statistical results obtained from the
TESAS/Crouch tool.

4.2 Corpus tool 1: TESAS/Crouch


4.2.1 The concept of text reuse
To explain the development of the TESAS/Crouch tool, we shall start
from the idea of text reuse in the domain of journalism. Although in
an academic environment the reuse of other peoples texts without
acknowledgement is considered to be plagiarism, text copying and
reuse in journalism is standard business practice. In the newspaper
industry, most newspapers rely heavily upon press agencies, such as
the UK Press Association (PA), as their primary source of written
news material. Upon payment of a subscription fee, the newspaper is
free to reuse the PA material verbatim, or modify it in whatever way,
without any need to acknowledge the source (Clough et al. 2002b;
Gaizauskas et al. 2001; McEnery and Piao 2003).
In the past few years, some corpora have been built for the
study and analysis of journalistic text reuse, notably, (a) the METER
(MEasuring TExt Reuse) project which was carried out at the
University of Sheffield to identify British newspaper articles reuse
of the texts released by PA and (b) a similar project which was carried
out at Lancaster University to explore text reuse in mid-seventeenth
century English newspapers.2 The main goal of these two research
projects was to explore approaches and algorithms for the automatic
detection, comparison and measurement of journalistic text reuse
(i.e. text similarity). They wanted to find out not only whether a
source text has been reused or not, but also to what extent and
subject to what transformations had been done (Clough et al.
2002a: 152). This is because PA was interested in changing their fee
structure so that it would reflect the amount of use of PA materials
by particular newspapers.

Quantitative Comparison

71

In these two projects, a number of algorithms were tested. The


prototype tool developed from the METER project is called TESAS;
the one developed at Lancaster University is called Crouch. In
Crouch, the corpus tool I use for this study, the researchers modified
the existing TESAS functions and added new functions (Clough
2001; Clough et al. 2002a; 2002b; Gaizauskas et al. 2001; Piao 2001).
Since there is not much literature on Crouch, as it is based heavily
on TESAS with only slight modifications, I will introduce in more
detail the matching approaches of the TESAS algorithm tested in
the METER project, and particularly focus on the major functions
which are relevant to my research and which remain unchanged
in Crouch.
The METER Corpus consists of a set of news stories written by PA,
and a set of stories about the same news events, as published in nine
British daily newspapers. Some newspaper stories are rewritten from
the PA source; some are independently written by the newspapers
own journalists (for detail of the METER Corpus, see Clough et al.
2002a; 2002b). The corpus is manually classified and annotated at
two levels, the document level and the lexical level, by expert journalists
with many years of practical experience of the newspaper industry.
(1) General classification at the document level: WD, PD, ND
In order to capture general information about the reliance of a
newspaper story upon PA source text, each newspaper text as a whole
was first classified into one of the following three categories (see
Gaizauskas et al. 2001: 219):
Wholly-derived (WD): all content of the target text is derived only
from the PA;
Partially-derived (PD): some content of the target text is derived
from the PA, but other sources have also been used;
Non-derived (ND): no content of the target text is derived from
the PA.
The classification of each text as belonging to one of the above
categories was based upon the expert journalists professional judgements, not upon linguistic criteria such as presence of a certain

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

number or length of shared tokens. By content they mean the


provision of facts. In a wholly-derived newspaper text, all of the facts
in it can be mapped to its PA counterpart, with varying degrees of
directness, from verbatim copy to change of word order, substitution
of synonyms or paraphrase. In a partially-derived newspaper text,
some facts can be mapped onto its corresponding PA text, but it
also contains new facts that cannot be found in the PA. This category
represents an intermediate degree of dependency of newspaper
text on the PA. The last category covers those newspaper articles that
are written independently from PA; namely, none of the facts in the
newspaper text can be found in the PA.
(2) Detailed annotation at the lexical/phrasal level: verbatim/rewrite/new
After the document-level classification, about 400 wholly- or partiallyderived newspaper articles were further annotated in detail. The
detailed annotation attempts to capture reuse within the newspaper
text itself down to the sentence, phrase and word level. Similarly,
based on the judgement of the professional journalists, three
categories are used (Gaizauskas et al. 2001: 21920; see also Clough
et al. 2002a; 2002b):
VERBATIM: text that is reused from PA word-for-word in the same
context;
REWRITE: text that is reused from PA, but paraphrased to create a
different surface appearance (the context is still the same);
NEW: text not appearing in PA, or apparently verbatim or rewritten, but used in a different context.
In their annotation, the tagging of the REWRITE materials was
generally less straightforward than the tagging of VERBATIM and
NEW, as rewrite has many forms (cf. Faigley and Witte 1981).
According to Gaizauskas et al. (2001) and Clough (2003), a PA text
can be modified or rewritten in the following ways: (1) Reordering:
rearrangement of word/phrase/sentence order or position; (2) Substitution: change of original terms with synonyms or other context
dependent substitutable terms; (3) Deletion: deletion of original materials and (4) Insertion: addition of minor new materials (e.g. words like
by in passivisation). The newspaper materials falling into any one of

Quantitative Comparison

73

the above four transformations were tagged as REWRITE. With these


classifications in mind, we can now proceed to see in detail the
matching approaches of the TESAS algorithm tested in the METER
project. I will focus in particular on how it measures text similarity,
that is, the degree of overlap, between a text pair.

4.2.2 Approaches to the measurement of text similarity


For the sake of manageability, the researchers of the METER project
used the sentence as the unit to be mapped.3 Piao (2001) proposes
an algorithm for identifying text reuse based on sentence alignment.
It is assumed that the relationship between a pair of texts can be
determined by examining the relationship between the sub-units of
the texts, namely, sentences. If they can detect relationships between
sentences, they can then assess the overall relationship between whole
texts based on these sentence level relationships. The algorithm has
two main stages. In the first stage, it splits the derived text and source
text into sentences and searches for alignments at the sentence level.
Each sentence in the derived text is scanned and compared against
all of the sentences in source text to find the best match. The cognate matching approach to sentence alignment will be discussed in
section 4.2.2.1. In the second stage, the algorithm measures the
similarity between each aligned sentence pair. Four statistical scores
are extracted to suggest the likelihood of derivation. The computational measurement will be discussed in section 4.2.2.2.

4.2.2.1 Cognate matching approach: n-gram, stemming, synonym


In order to cope with various changes during text reuse, a cognatebased approach to sentence alignment is adopted for the METER task.
In the task, cognates are defined as a pair of terms that are identical,
share the same stems, or are substitutable in the given context (Clough
et al. 2002a: 155). In practice, three types of cognates are considered
(for details, see McEnery and Piao 2003; Piao 2001):
Verbatim N-grams matching (n 2). N-grams means consecutive word
sequences. Measuring the overlap of consecutive word sequences
between a sentence pair is an initial, and the most straightforward,
approach to assessing text similarity.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

An extended version of Porters (1980) English stemmer. Porters


algorithm reduces inflected variants of an English word into a morphological base form (e.g. to convert the word degree and
degrees into the base form degre). It is an efficient tool for identifying inflectional variants of a single English word.4 However, the
original Porter stemmer could not deal with irregular inflectional
forms such as thought and drank. Hence, it was extended in the
METER project to cope with such words.
Synonym list extracted from WordNet. A list of English synonyms
containing about 46,000 entries was extracted from WordNet.5
Each entry contains two or more basic synonyms.
Following the cognate approach, three kinds of shared terms between
the aligned sentence pair are identified: (1) n-grams; (2) identical
single words and (3) word pairs that are synonyms or which have the
same stem.

4.2.2.2 The TESAS algorithm


The algorithm then measures the similarity between each aligned
sentence pair. Based on the matches, the relationship between the
sentence pair is quantified in terms of three scores: PSD, PS, PSNG
(cf. Appendix A). Each of these scores reflects different aspect of the
relationship between the sentence pair. The PSD score indicates the
extent to which a derived sentence is dependent on its source
sentence(s). The PS score indicates the proportion of shared terms
in the pair of sentences, which reflects the similarity between the sentences. The PSNG score denotes the degree of significance of the
matched items, that is, the proportion of n-grams among the matched
terms (Clough et al. 2002a: 156; McEnery and Piao 2003: 639). The
value of the three scores all range between 0 and 1. To put it simply,
the maximum score, 1, implies a complete match between the two
sentences; the minimum score, 0, means that they are completely
unrelated.
In order to obtain a single overall metric for measuring the similarity
between the whole mapped sentence pair, the three scores are

Quantitative Comparison

75

combined together to create a weighted score, WS. A default threshold


of WS, 0.65, is used to determine whether or not a pair of sentences
is truly related. Those sentence pairs which produce a WS score
higher than the threshold are taken to be truly related (for detailed
computation, indication and evaluation of the scores, see Clough
et al. 2002a; McEnery and Piao 2003; Piao 2001).
The tool then displays the comparison of a given pair of texts in an
alignment-map, mapping sentences in the derived text to their source
sentences, including null alignment if no match can be found, as
shown in Figure 4.1.
The three statistical scores (PSD, PS, PSNG) and the alignment
weighted score (WS) are extracted and displayed in the first column
of the table. The user-friendly graphical interface helps us to identify
the local changes more easily, as the mapped sentences are displayed
side by side in a table, and different types of matched words are
highlighted with different colours on computer screen. As Figure 4.1
makes clear, the n-grams shared by each pair of aligned sentences are
highlighted in grey (green in the figure), and shared single words

Figure 4.1

TESAS/Crouch sentence-alignment mapping example

76

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

(including those which have undergone inflectional and letter-case


changes) are highlighted in black (red in the figure).
Then, based on the measurements of text similarity between pairs
of sentences discussed above, the TESAS/Crouch tool can assess the
degree of text similarity at a higher level, namely, the document level,
and produce a pie chart reporting the total number of words in the
derived text, the numbers of matched and unmatched words, and
the similarity score of the text pair. Figure 4.2 shows the comparison
result of chapter 59 of The Magus shown in the pie-chart.
Ranging between 0% and 100%, a greater percentage indicates a
greater similarity between a text pair, while a smaller percentage
indicates less similarity or greater difference between a text pair. The
extent of the text similarity of the two editions in chapter 59 of The
Magus as measured by TESAS/Crouch is 29.39%, which indicates a
high percentage of unmatched words, and so much greater revision,
in this chapter.
Given that The Magus is a novel of over 600 pages, it is impossible
for human analysts to keep in mind all the changes scattered over the

Figure 4.2 TESAS/Crouch similarity score sample report

Quantitative Comparison

77

two editions. The benefit of the TESAS/Crouch tool for this study
is that it helps to ascertain the degree of similarity between each
chapter-pair in the two editions. According to McEnery and Piao,
the evaluation of the TESAS/Crouch corpus tool shows that it is
capable of detecting and measuring text reuse with a reasonably
high rate of precision (2003: 645). Hence, the similarity scores of
each chapter-pair comparison are used as statistical indicators to
describe the pattern of Fowless revision of The Magus.

4.2.3 Statistical results


Table 4.2 shows the TESAS/Crouch statistics, indicating the various
degrees of revision across the 78 chapters between the two editions of
The Magus. The chapters with the score below the average of 87.53%
are highlighted in dark grey. These are the chapters which have been
altered to an extent above the average .
Fowles himself has commented on his revision of The Magus in an
interview: I havent changed the general line of the story, but Ive
rewritten a large, mostly the central, part and Rewritten it, yes. Not
all of it. First and last parts Ill hardly change (Singh 1980: 186).
As shown in Table 4.2, the average similarity score of the novel as a
whole is 87.53%, which is quite high and indicates great similarity
(in terms of matched words) between the two versions. The average
similarity score for Part I of the novel is 97.58% and for Part III
90.16%, which reflect Fowless statement that he hardly changed
these two parts, Part I in particular. Most of the changes occur in
Part II, which explores Nicholass journey to self-revelation under
Conchiss manipulation in the godgame. The average similarity
score for Part II, 74.85%, is considerably lower than the other
two parts.
The general pattern of Fowless revision is clearly shown in the
graphical presentation in Figure 4.3. The tripartite divisions of
the book are indicated by the dark lines in chapter 9 and chapter 67
(the final chapters of Part I and Part II). The chapters with low
similarity scores (e.g. chs. 335, 43, 457, 559) are the chapters
where Nicholas has active interactions or conversations with the
other characters (i.e. Conchis, Lily/Julie, Rose/June). They are

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

78
Table 4.2

TESAS/Crouch Statistics: the 78 chapter-pair similarity scores


78 Chapter-pairs Similarity Scores

Ch. 1

97.89%

Ch. 28

92.88%

Ch. 56

12.93%

Ch. 2

99.23%

Ch. 29

65.80%

Ch. 57

46.73%

Ch. 3

93.86%

Ch. 30

91.43%

Ch. 58

8.82%

Ch. 4

98.99%

Ch. 31

72.08%

Ch. 59

29.39%

Ch. 5

98.29%

Ch. 32

69.40%

Ch. 60

88.76%

Ch. 6

97.78%

Ch. 33

26.61%

Ch. 61

97.62%

Ch. 7

99.09%

Ch. 34

10.91%

Ch. 62

97.32%

Ch. 8

98.40%

Ch. 35

44.76%

Ch. 63

99.09%

Ch. 9

94.72%

Ch. 36

84.70%

Ch. 64

96.55%

Part I Subtotal

97.58%

Ch. 37

85.26%

Ch. 65

96.72%

Ch. 10

94.33%

Ch. 38

91.44%

Ch. 66

90.65%

Ch. 11

98.25%

Ch. 39

99.07%

Ch. 67

67.74%

Ch. 12

96.84%

Ch. 40

99.86%

Part II Subtotal

74.85%

Ch. 13

93.92%

Ch. 41

98.47%

Ch. 68

98.25%

Ch. 14

99.58%

Ch. 42

98.05%

Ch. 69

97.87%

Ch. 15

97.34%

Ch. 43

11.20%

Ch. 70

86.79%

Ch. 16

99.75%

Ch. 44

92.39%

Ch. 71

94.65%

Ch. 17

98.72%

Ch. 45

41.46%

Ch. 72

93.51%

Ch. 18

99.37%

Ch. 46

26.61%

Ch. 73

96.88%

Ch. 19

90.29%

Ch. 47

3.37%

Ch. 74

95.84%

Ch. 20

99.79%

Ch. 48

51.04%

Ch. 75

64.82%

Ch. 21

82.57%

Ch. 49

46.35%

Ch. 76

97.43%

Ch. 22

99.50%

Ch. 50

78.93%

Ch. 77

98.44%

Ch. 23

93.79%

Ch. 51

82.23%

Ch. 78

67.26%

Ch. 24

94.46%

Ch. 52

36.31%

Part III Subtotal

90.16%

Ch. 25

96.05%

Ch. 53

99.34%

Ch. 26

99.33%

Ch. 54

69.24%

Total

87.53%

Ch. 27

95.68%

Ch. 55

10.46%

Quantitative Comparison

79

TESAS/Crouch:
The Magus 78 Chapter-Pair Similarity Scores

Similarity Score (%)

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%

9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77

Chapter-Pair No.

Figure 4.3

TESAS/Crouch comparison

also the chapters where, as Binns (1977) and Boccia (1980) point
out, Fowles has made drastic revision on the dialogue among the
characters to make the theme more explicit to his readers (cf. the
discussion in section 3.2.2).
Next I will explore another corpus tool for text comparison, to see
if the statistical result retrieved from TESAS/Crouch can be upheld.

4.3 Corpus tool 2: WCopyfind


Similar to TESAS/Crouch, the focus of plagiarism detection is also
on how to detect similarity between texts, and what to measure to
show this similarity. Given that plagiarism is a form of unacceptable
text reuse, it has received considerable attention, and relatively
sophisticated computer programs have been written for automatic
plagiarism detection (for a review, see Clough 2002). WCopyfind is
one such program.
WCopyfind was developed in 2002 by Professor Louis Bloomfield
at the University of Virginia. This program compares a collection of
papers by
look[ing] through them for matching words in phrases of a specified minimum length. When it finds two files that share enough
words in those phrases, WCopyfind generates html report files.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

These reports contain the document text with the matching phrases
underlined. (Bloomfield 2002)
To put it simply, WCopyfind also adopts an n-grams overlap approach,
namely, finding the overlap of matching consecutive words of
length n (where n is derived empirically). The software allows
the user to specify what the minimum and maximum sizes are for
phrases to be checked. Bloomfield recommends leaving this parameter at the default of 6 words; that is, it measures the overlap of
6-grams (n 6).
This system also allows for the adjustment of other comparison rule
parameters.6 Given limitations of space, I do not intend to discuss the
settings of the scanning parameters in detail (for more information,
see Bloomfield 2002). In my study, I used the default parameter
settings recommended by Bloomfield, to find absolute matching.
Figure 4.4 illustrates a comparison report of chapter 59 of The
Magus. To examine the texts in detail, we can click on the individual
files or click on the side-by-side option to display the pair of files in
adjacent panels of a new browser window. When we view the two files

Figure 4.4 A sample html report of WCopyfind text comparison

Quantitative Comparison

81

side-by-side, perfect matches are highlighted by underlined texts.


All the matching phrases are links. If we click on a matching phrase,
we will be taken to the equivalent phrase in the other document in
the pair.
In terms of statistical results, WCopyfind generates two numbers of
matches: Total Match and Basic Match. According to Bloomfield
(2002), if the parameter of Most Imperfections to Allow is set to
zero (i.e. no imperfections are allowed in the matching), Total Match
and Basic Match will be the same, and Basic Match will be essentially
the value that would have been obtained. Both match entries have
3 subparts (cf. Figure 4.4):
(1) the number of matching words (e.g. 153);
(2) what percentage of File 1 is accounted for by these matching
words (e.g. 25%);
(3) what percentage of File 2 is accounted for by these matching
words (e.g. 22%).
To put it simply, the percentage figures tell us how much of the files
in the comparison are common to each other.
Following the same procedures as with the TESAS/Crouch corpus
tool, I run the 78 chapter-pairs through the WCopyfind software.
Notice, the TESAS/Crouch statistics is based on M1 as the source text
and M2 as the derived text. In order to make the WCopyfind statistics
comparable with the TESAS/Crouch statistics, I adopt the first percentage of the Basic Match (i.e. the percentage of the matching words
in the M2 version). The matching percentages of the 78 chapter-pairs
are shown in Table 4.3 (the chapters with the scores below the average 86% are highlighted in dark grey).
I then compared the two sets of statistics, the similarity scores
generated from TESAS/Crouch (Table 4.2) and the matching
percentages generated from WCopyfind (Table 4.3), to ascertain
the difference in the overall pattern of revision across the 78 chapters
between the two editions of The Magus. The general pattern of
the changes retrieved from the two corpus tools is almost identical,
as shown in Figure 4.5. The result of text comparison via

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

82
Table 4.3

WCopyfind Statistics: the 78 chapter-pair matching percentages


78 Chapter-pairs WCopyfind Report

Ch. 1

97%

Ch. 28

91%

Ch. 56

8%

Ch. 2

99%

Ch. 29

62%

Ch. 57

43%

Ch. 3

93%

Ch. 30

89%

Ch. 58

5%

Ch. 4

98%

Ch. 31

70%

Ch. 59

25%

Ch. 5

98%

Ch. 32

68%

Ch. 60

85%

Ch. 6

95%

Ch. 33

22%

Ch. 61

97%

Ch. 7

98%

Ch. 34

7%

Ch. 62

96%

Ch. 8

97%

Ch. 35

41%

Ch. 63

99%

Ch. 9

99%

Ch. 36

84%

Ch. 64

95%

Part I Subtotal

97.00%

Ch. 37

84%

Ch. 65

96%

Ch. 10

92%

Ch. 38

91%

Ch. 66

90%

Ch. 11

96%

Ch. 39

98%

Ch. 67

65%

Ch. 12

95%

Ch. 40

99%

Part II Subtotal

74.00%

Ch. 13

92%

Ch. 41

99%

Ch. 68

97%

Ch. 14

99%

Ch. 42

97%

Ch. 69

97%

Ch. 15

96%

Ch. 43

8%

Ch. 70

86%

Ch. 16

99%

Ch. 44

91%

Ch. 71

68%

Ch. 17

98%

Ch. 45

37%

Ch. 72

90%

Ch. 18

99%

Ch. 46

19%

Ch. 73

96%

Ch. 19

90%

Ch. 47

0%

Ch. 74

95%

Ch. 20

99%

Ch. 48

51%

Ch. 75

62%

Ch. 21

82%

Ch. 49

44%

Ch. 76

97%

Ch. 22

98%

Ch. 50

77%

Ch. 77

97%

Ch. 23

93%

Ch. 51

82%

Ch. 78

63%

Ch. 24

93%

Ch. 52

31%

Part III Subtotal

86.00%

Ch. 25

95%

Ch. 53

99%

Ch. 26

98%

Ch. 54

69%

Total

86.00%

Ch. 27

96%

Ch. 55

6%

Quantitative Comparison

83

TESAS/Crouch vs. WCopyfind


78 Chapter-Pair Comparison Result
Similarity Degree

100%
80%
60%
Crouch
40%

WCopyfind

20%
0%
1

9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77

Chapter-Pair No.

Figure 4.5

TESAS/Crouch vs. WCopyfind comparison

WCopyfind thus upholds the result retrieved from the TESAS/


Crouch tool.
As pointed out earlier, the areas with the lower degrees of similarity
in the bar chart are mainly the chapters where Nicholas has active
interactions or conversations with the other characters (especially
chs. 335, 43, 457, 559). The low similarity scores or matching percentages of these chapters result mainly from the fact that higher
percentage of words in the M2 version are detected as unmatched
with M1. We then have to ask: Are the words unmatched because
they do not appear in the M1 version (i.e. are they all new content
being added to M2)? The question can only be answered by conducting a manual textual comparison. I examined some of these chapters
manually and found that the answer seems to be no. Some of the
M1 extracts which have been paraphrased or rewritten extensively
but with the content invariant in the M2 version are mapped as
unmatched. The computational mapping of the matched and
unmatched leads us to consider further the complexity and
difficulty of measuring the content of two expressions. Below
I explore in more detail what is implicated in the statistics of the
matched and the unmatched, and show in what aspects the pure
quantitative measurement is advantageous as well as limited with
regard to my stylistic comparison.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

4.4 Measuring the unmeasurable? advantages


and disadvantages
It is clear that the two corpus tools explored in sections 4.2 and 4.3
can be of great assistance in comparing the two editions of The Magus.
By and large, there are two major advantages. First, with the aid of the
corpus tools, I am able to detect and measure text similarity in terms
of matched words (i.e. n-grams overlaps and substitutable terms)
between the two versions of the novel. We can thus know roughly
how much of the M1 edition remains unchanged. The statistical
chapter-by-chapter comparison also helps to show the general
pattern of the revision in quantitative terms (cf. Figure 4.5), which
provides an indication of sampling chapters for further stylistic
analysis (see section 6.2).
Secondly, as The Magus is a novel of over 600 pages, there is great
difficulty in identifying manually the various kinds of linguistic changes
over the two versions. With TESAS/Crouch, its sentence alignment
mapping approach and the user-friendly interface help us to identify
the subtle changes in the texts to be compared (cf. Figure 4.1). With
WCopyfind, all the matching phrases (n-gram overlaps) are highlighted and inter-linked (cf. Figure 4.4). If we click on a matching
phrase, we are taken to the equivalent phrase in the other document
of the pair. It thus becomes easy for me to identify stretches of the
texts that remain unchanged in both versions, and accordingly to
trace the parts that have been revised.
However, there are still some limitations in applying the corpus
tools in relation to my stylistic comparison. Given that, (a) WCopyfind
is merely supporting software I used to confirm the TESAS/Crouch
result and (b) it shares more or less the same problems with TESAS/
Crouch, I will focus the discussion below on the limitations of the
TESAS/Crouch tool only. The major limitations in the corpus technique are related to the content issue, that is, the difficulty of
measuring text content in statistical terms.
(1) Limitations in applying surface linguistic criteria to measuring text content
It is difficult for the software to define precisely the similarity or comparability of content between two expressions. In terms of deciding

Quantitative Comparison

85

whether two different expressions mean the same thing or not, many
scholars have suggested different criteria. Enkvist (1988) proposes
using syntactic roles and quantifier scope as criteria to define the
content of different linguistic expressions. As he states, those wordorder permutations that do not change the basic syntactic roles of
constituents, and which do not change quantifier scope, are cognitively equivalent (1988: 1478). For example, John kicked Mary
and Mary kicked John are non-equivalent because syntactic roles have
been switched. Everybody in this room speaks three languages and Three
languages are spoken by everybody in this room are non-equivalent because
they differ in quantifier scope. Enkvists two examples can be used to
illustrate the limitations of the corpus tool in textual comparison.
If we compare the sentence pair in the first example, TESAS/
Crouch reports: the number of matched single words is 3.0 (i.e. John,
Mary, kicked), and 0.0 words are unmatched; the similarity score is
100%. The two sentences contain exactly the same words, with the
syntactic roles of John and Mary switched. The switch of syntactic roles
makes the sentences non-equivalent in content, yet they are mapped
as 100% matched.
Similarly, if we compare Enkvists second example, their similarity
score is 98.303%, which resulted from the matched n-grams (in this
room) and the matched substitutable terms (Everybody-everybody, speaksspoken, Three-three). However, although they are mapped as highly
similar, the content of the two sentences are actually non-equivalent
in that they differ in quantifier scope, as Enkvist suggests.
In both cases, the high similarity score between the obviously nonequivalent sentence pairs reveals the limitation of measuring text
similarity (in terms of meaning conveyed) by simply applying surface
linguistic criteria, that is, by counting the matched and unmatched
words.
(2) The issue of identifying synonyms and stemmers as matched
As the TESAS/Crouch statistics shows, 87.53% of words are shared,
that is, matched between the two editions of The Magus. Those
matched words include verbatim n-grams, synonyms and stemmers
(see the discussion on the Cognate approach in section 4.2.2.1). We
have to bear in mind that the main purpose of developing TESAS/

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

Crouch was to detect and measure whether a source text had been
reused or not in the domain of journalism. What had been reused
was more important in the study than how a text had been reused.
Hence stylistic variation between the source text from the UK news
agency and the reused texts in other newspapers is not the major
concern of journalistic business practice. This is the reason why
synonyms and the inflectional variants of a single word are identified
as matched.
However, the main purpose of my study is to explore whether there
is any change in text style between M1 and M2 versions, and if so,
how their text styles are different. If I take the similarity scores at
face value, I might miss some important stylistic variation in the
minimal and scattered changes in synonyms and stemmed words
which have been counted by the software as matched words between
M1 and M2.
Take, the PA news agency source text with the subsequent rewritten
text published in The Sun, for example (the example is taken from
Clough et al. 2002b: 1678).
Example 1
Original (PA) A drink-driver who ran into the Queen Mothers
official Daimler was fined 700 and banned from driving for two
years.
Rewrite (The Sun) A DRUNK driver who ploughed into the Queen
Mothers limo was fined 700 and banned for two years yesterday.
This simple example illustrates the types of rewrite that occur in a
single short sentence. TESAS/Crouch reports as below:

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87

The size of the derived text from The Sun is 20 words; 4 words are
unmatched. The similarity score of the sentence pair is 81%, including the shared n-grams 15 words and 1 matched substitutable term
(DRUNK/drink). Despite the high degree of text reuse, however, the
style of rewrite from The Sun is markedly different from the PA report.
The style variation between the two news texts is conveyed both in the
matched and unmatched words.
Let us first look at the unmatched words. The addition of yesterday
is typical of all newspaper stories in that the reused news text is
usually published the day after the PA copy is produced. It is a nonstylistic deictic change due to a time-frame change. Nonetheless, the
use of ploughed and limo in The Sun is relatively informal or colloquial
compared with ran and official Daimler in the PA text. The lexical
changes result in different stylistic effects.
With regard to the matched words, apart from the verbatim
n-grams, the word DRUNK is counted as a matched substitutable
stemmer of drink. If my comparison focuses only on the unmatched
words, the stylistic effect (i.e. using capital letters to capture readers
attention) is likely to be unnoticed simply because they are counted
as matched. Example 1 illustrates the reason why we can not take
the TESAS/Crouch similarity score at face value in stylistic terms,
since style variation can be found both in the matched and
unmatched linguistic items.
(3) Limitations in measuring content of texts involving extensive revision
In Example 1, the expressions official Daimler and limo refer to the
same object in the text world context, yet they are counted as
unmatched linguistic items. The example shows that it is difficult
for the software to define precisely similarity or comparability of
content between two lexical items. The difficulty is even greater in
texts involving extensive revision.
With regard to the definition of content, Doleel suggests that:
Text content can be defined as the aggregate of meaning associated
with a text paraphrase which is referentially equivalent to the original
text; in other words, the original text expression and its content
paraphrase denote the same content (1971: 103, emphasis mine).

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

Here is an adapted example taken from Boase-Beier (2004: 267),


which exemplifies what Doleel suggests:
Example 2
(a) Tim is a good teacher.
(b) Tim always prepares well for classes and gets on really well with the
students and he gets the best feedback reports in the Department.
Although the linguistic forms of the two sentences are so different,
we can still say quite confidently that they convey the same content.
Three factors help us to make such a judgment. First, and most
importantly, sentence (b) is referentially equivalent to sentence (a),
in that they have the same referent, Tim. Secondly, although his role
as a teacher is not explicitly mentioned in sentence (b), it can be easily inferred from the terms schematically associated with teacher, that
is, classes, students, feedback reports, Department. Thirdly, the evaluative
judgments on Tims role as a teacher are positive in both expressions:
from good in sentence (a) to well, really well, the best in sentence (b).
However, TESAS/Crouch reports that none of the words in (b) is
detected as matched with (a). The similarity score for the sentence
pair is 0.00%, even though (a) is a summary of (b).
The following sentence pair from The Magus is the sample texts
involving extensive revision.
Example 3
(a) A different kind of tension had arisen, mainly because there
were things in him that I could not relate (and which he knew and
intended I could not) . . . . (M1, chapter 30, 184)
(b) He clearly meant me not to be able to relate the conflicting
sides of his personality. (M2, chapter 30, 192)
There is a set of referential invariants between the two texts (e.g.
He refers to Conchis; I refers to Nicholas.). There is certain semantic
association between the M1 and M2 expressions. For example, things
in him that I could not relate can be associated with the conflicting

Quantitative Comparison

89

sides of his personality; He knew and intended I could not can be


associated with He clearly meant me not to be able to, and so on.
However, the TESAS/Crouch report of this example is similar to that
of Example 2. None of the words in (b) is matched with (a). The similarity score between the sentence pair is 0.00%.
With the broader definition of content, we perceive the above
examples of text revision (Examples 2 and 3) as two different expressions saying roughly the same thing, even though their linguistic
structures are so different. These examples illustrate the limitation of
applying surface linguistic criteria to the computational measurement of text similarity, especially that of the texts involving extensive
revision.

4.5 Summary and implications


Figure 4.6 shows what is implicated in the matched and unmatched
statistics of The Magus comparison in stylistic terms.
The similarity score between M1 and M2 as a whole indicates that
87.53% of words are shared or matched between the two versions,
and roughly 12.47% of words are unmatched. The matched words
include verbatim n-grams, synonyms and stemmers. The unmatched
words include: (a) texts with roughly equivalent content but which
have been detected as unmatched in that their surface linguistic
structures are so different (as illustrated in Example 3) and (b) texts
that appear in the M2 edition only, that is, new scenes, new dialogues
or new narrative description, and so on. As I have exemplified in
section 4.4, stylistic variation can actually be found in texts with
different degrees of revision, from the matched to the unmatched,

Texts remain
unchanged in both
versions.

87.53% Matched

Matched consecutive word sequences (n-grams)

12.47% Unmatched

Texts with equivalent content but involving extensive revision

Figure 4.6

Matched substitutable terms (synonyms & stemmers)

Texts conveying new content (new scenes, dialogues, etc)

Implications of the text similarity statistics

Stylistic variations to
be found in the texts
with different degrees
of revision.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

from a one-word change to a change at the sentence level, or possibly


even at discourse level.
What I intend to explore in this study is whether the changes Fowles
has made across the chapters result in any text style difference
between the two editions. The statistic is not particularly revealing in
this regard. Moreover, the new content which is included in the
12.47% of unmatched words raises an issue I have to consider further
in my comparative stylistic study. Is invariant content or the same
content really a necessary condition of my stylistic comparison of the
two editions? If content should be held constant for every stylistic
comparison, how do we account for these additional words (i.e. new
scenes, new dialogues)? How can we compare the new content if it
does not exist in the original version? Because there is no alternative
text to be compared with, does it mean that the additional new content is not important? Certainly not. The discussion in section 3.2.2,
for example, has shown that the drastic revision (addition) of the
dialogues among the characters helps to clarify the implicit purpose
of Conchiss godgame.
According to Short (1994), stylistic comparison does not have to be
conducted in a restricted way. It is possible for someone to talk about
different authors styles, in spite of the fact that the content expressed
are unlikely to be equivalent. As Short states, [f]or styles to be established irrespective of content, regularity of choice with respect to particular
style features becomes paramount (1994: 4376, emphasis added). To
put it simply, stylistic comparison in my study can be made at different
levels. At the micro-level, we can compare the stylistic effect of two
linguistic choices which express roughly the same content. At the
macro-level, we can explore if there are any recurrent linguistic features that Fowles has frequently used in the revised texts, particularly
in the additional passages in M2, and which result in different text
styles between the two versions of The Magus.
The micro-level qualitative stylistic comparison of some equivalent
extracts will be conducted in Chapter Five. The macro-level quantitative
linguistic comparison will be done with the aid of corpus techniques,
Wmatrix and WordSmith Tools, in Chapter Six and Chapter Seven
respectively.

Chapter Five

Qualitative stylistic comparison


generating hypotheses

In Chapter Four, I used the corpus tools I have chosen to assess the
degree of text similarity and present the general pattern of revision
across the 78 chapters of The Magus. In this chapter I conduct a
qualitative textual comparison of some extract pairs, not only to show
that stylistic variations are scattered here and there in the chapters
with different degrees of revision (i.e. similarity scores), but also to
explore whether the revision Fowles has made results in any consistent text style differences between the two editions as a whole.
The extracts to be analysed and compared in this chapter are taken
respectively from chs. 29, 59 and 61 of The Magus. I choose these
textual examples for two reasons. First, the three chapters have
different similarity scores which indicate different degrees of revision: 65.758% (chapter 29), 29.394% (chapter 59), and 97.622%
(chapter 61). A qualitative examination of the linguistic differences
and stylistic variations of the extracts from these three chapter-pairs
helps to show that the statistics of text similarity are not always
revealing enough in stylistic terms. Secondly, the three extracts are
important and representative in terms of the plot of the novel. The
extract in chapter 29 describes an important tableau that Conchis
intentionally stages for Nicholas to watch as part of his manipulation
of Nicholas. The extract from chapter 59 depicts the climax of
Nicholass journey, and the most shocking scenario he experiences.
The extract from chapter 61 depicts the first crucial moment of his
self-realization with regard to what he has been through in the godgame and the purpose of Conchiss manoeuverings.
This chapter is divided into five sections. In section 5.1, I revisit
Short and Seminos (2008) analysis of the passages from chapter 59,
the scene when Nicholas is overpowered and drugged. In section 5.2,

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

I explain how a one-word change (A man satyr with an arrow in his


heart) in the climactic scene in chapter 59 helps us more easily to
recall our memory of the important tableau in chapter 29 and show
the thematic correlation of the linguistic changes Fowles has made
in these two chapters. The extracts discussed in section 5.3 take us
to the crucial moment of Nicholass revelation. The main purpose
of this chapter is to demonstrate the advantages of the qualitative
stylistic comparison of short extracts in locating and explaining the
local differences between the two versions. Hypotheses concerning
the revisionary tendency will be presented in section 5.4. Nonetheless,
in section 5.5, I also discuss the limitations in applying detailed
linguistic examination of textual extracts to the assessment or confirmation of the overall text style difference between two versions
of a very long novel like The Magus.

5.1 Review of previous stylistic research on The Magus


In Evaluation and Stylistic Analysis, Short and Semino (2008) explore
how stylistic analysis can be beneficial in comparing and evaluating
two equivalent small-scale extracts from the two editions of The Magus.
The functions of the passages they choose to analyse are roughly equivalent, and by looking at textual detail in relation to these functions,
they state clearly which piece of writing they prefer and why. The value
of their analysis resides not only in demonstrating the use of stylistics
in critical interpretation, but also in the relationship between stylistic
analysis and literary evaluation. Evaluating the two different versions
of The Magus is beyond the scope of my book, and so the review in
this section will be focused only on Short and Seminos detailed and
systematic account of the linguistic differences between the pair of
extracts, and how well their analytical result corresponds to the stylistic
comparison of other extract pairs to be discussed in this chapter.
The scene Short and Semino choose to analyse is the one where
Nicholas and Lily/Julie have just been in bed together in a hotel room
and Nicholas assumes that he has managed to win her love. Men suddenly rush into the hotel room and assault him, and then Conchis
comes in and drugs him with a tranquillizer. In both editions, just
before the attack, Lily/Julie suddenly tells him that she is not Julie
after all. At this moment Nicholas is in a state of disorientation.

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93

The passages they quote for detailed comparative analysis are


placed side by side in the following table. The numbers at the
beginning of each sentence indicate which version it is taken from,
a indicating that the sentence is from the M1 version, and b, that it
is from the M2 version. Different marking styles are used for ease
of identifying the changes (see Appendices C.1 and C.2 for the two
versions of the whole episode). The words without any marking
are identical sequences of consecutive words (i.e. verbatim n-grams)
shared with the M2 extract. The words in small capitals indicate
the parts that have been rewritten, that is, they are different expressions of roughly the same content, including lexical substitution,
syntactical transformation and paraphrase. In the M1 version (left
column), the words with a line drawn through indicate the parts
which have been deleted, and so do not appear in the second
edition. In the M2 version (right column), the words in boldface
indicate the added texts that do not appear in the original.

(M1, chapter 59: 444)

(M2, chapter 59: 4889)

(1b) Three men, all in dark trousers and black


(1a) The door was flung wide open, the
polo-neck jumpers they came so quickly that,
light came on, there were two black
paralyzed in everything but instinct, I had
figures, two tall men in black trousers
no time to do anything but grab the bedspread
and shirts. (2a) One was the Negro and
over my loins. (2b) The one in the lead was Joe,
the other was Anton. (3a) Joe came
the Negro. (3b) He flung himself at me just as
first, so fast at me that I had no time to
I was about to shout. (4b) His hand clapped
do anything but convulsively grip the
bedspread over my loins.
brutally over my mouth and I felt the
strength and weight of him throw me back.
(5b) One of the others must have turned on the
bedside lamp again. (6b) I saw another face I knew:
the last time I had seen it had been on the ridge,
when the owner had been in German uniform,
playing Anton. (7b) The third face belonged to the
blond-headed sailor I had seen twice at Bourani that
previous Sunday.
(4a) I tried to see Julie, her face, because
(8b) I tried as I struggled under Joe to see Julie I
I still could not accept what I knew:
still couldnt accept that this was not some
that she had turned the key and opened
nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a
the door. (5a) Anton flung her something
Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one
she caught and quickly put on a deepby Kafka. (9b) But all I glimpsed was her back as she
red towel bathrobe. (6a) Joe flung
left the room. (10b) Someone met her there, an arm
himself at me just as I was about to
went round her shoulders as if she had just escaped
shout. (7a) His hand clapped violently
from an air disaster and drew her out of sight.
across my mouth and I felt the weight
of him; a whiff of shaving-lotion, or
hair-oil. (8a) I was in no fit state to
struggle. (9a) What fighting I did
was mainly to try to keep the

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

bedspread over me. (10a) Anton gripped


(11b) I began to fight violently, but they
my legs. (11a) They must have had loops
had obviously anticipated that, had loops of
of rope ready prepared, because in
rope ready. (12b) In less than half a minute I
fifteen seconds I was tied up. (12a) Then
was tied up and lying on my face. (13b) I dont
I was gagged. (13a) I got one stifled
know if I was still shouting obscenities at them; I was
beginning of what I felt out at Julie.
certainly thinking them. (14b) Then I was gagged.
(14a) You
(15b) Somebody threw the bedspread over me.
(15a) But then I was silenced. (16a) The two
(16b) I managed to twist my head to see the door.
men forced my arms back, so I was lying flat,
straining my neck up to see Julie. (17a) She
turned, tying the ends of the belt.

In the extract pair, there are two major differences in the actions: (a)
there is an addition of a third character (intruder) in the M2 version
(cf. sentence 7b) and (b) in M1 Lily/Julie covers herself with a bathrobe and stays in the room for a while, while in M2 she leaves the
room immediately. Short and Semino focus their analysis not on the
differences in actions but on the linguistic differences in the ways the
same events and actions are told.
Nicholas is the first-person narrator of the novel, who tells the
story some time after it happened. In both versions of the scene,
readers have access to the viewpoint of Nicholas-as-character,
experiencing his shock, disorientation, helplessness and anger.
Short and Seminos analysis shows that the M1 version is told more
consistently from the viewpoint of Nicholas-the-character, whereas
the M2 version mixes together the different perspectives of the
characters (experienced) event-time and the narrators codingtime memories. The linguistic features related to the uncertainty
or psychological sequencing of Nicholas-as-character and the post
hoc knowledge of Nicholas-as-narrator in both versions are listed in
Table 5.1 for a comparison.
As shown in Table 5.1, some linguistic features used to suggest the
psychological sequencing of Nicholas-as-character are retained in
the M2 version, but are used less often. For example, the use of the
passives with agent deletion is in accord with the assumption that,
due to Nicholass state of disorientation, he does not know exactly
who opens the door and who ties him up, gags him and silences him.
Four passives with agent deletion are used in the M1 version of the
episode, whereas only two are used in the M2 version.
Similarly, appositional structures are used to suggest changing
perceptions on the part of Nicholas-the-character: from a blurred,

Qualitative Stylistic Comparison


Table 5.1

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A summary of Short and Seminos analysis

Linguistic features and viewpoint anchors in the extracts

M1

M2

Passives construction with agent deletion used to highlight the


I-characters state of disorientation (e.g. The door was flung
wide open)

(1a)(11a) (12b)
(12a)(15a) (14b)

Appositional structure used to suggest the I-characters cognitive


state changed from blurred perception to precise identification
(e.g. two black figures, two tall man in black trousers and shirt)

(1a)(4a)
(5a)

(1b)(2b)

Scare quotes in reference used to highlight the I-characters


epistemic uncertainty (e.g. 'Anton')

(2a)

nil

Indefinite expressions used to suggest the limitations of the


I-characters perception (e.g. some, something, someone)

(5a)

(8b)(10b)
(15b)

Physical details relating to the I-characters event-time


sensations (e.g. a whiff of shaving lotion, or hair oil)

(7a)

nil

Modal expressions used to highlight the I-characters inference (2a)


and epistemic uncertainty (e.g. must, obviously)

nil

Modal expressions used to highlight the I-narrators epistemic


uncertainty (e.g. I dont know, certainly)

nil

(13b)

Additional contextual information related to the I-narrators


post hoc knowledge

nil

(6b)(7b)

Literary devices (e.g. similes, metaphors)

nil

(8b)(10b)

indistinct perception due to his state of disorientation to more precise identification as he partly comes to terms with what is happening
to him. In sentence (1a), the two people who burst into the room are
introduced as two black figures, two tall men in black trousers and
shirts. The noun figures is a vague reference to the individuals, who
at first are not identified even in terms of their sex, but only in terms
of colour. This is then followed by a noun phrase where the invaders
are identified more clearly in terms of their size (tall), their sex
(men), and their clothes (black trousers and shirts). It is only in
the following sentence that the two invaders are identified by name/
nickname. Again, the use of these techniques is diluted in the M2 version. Nicholass perception of the invaders is much more precise than
in M1. In sentence (1b), we know immediately the sex of the three
people (three men), and we are given a very precise description of
their clothes (dark trousers and polo-neck jumpers). The provision
of such exact detail weakens the sense of fast, blurred impressions
conveyed by the first version (for detail analysis of the other linguistic
features listed in Table 5.1, see Short and Semino 2008).

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Short and Seminos analysis has shown that the linguistic features
used to suggest the viewpoint of Nicholas-as-character at the moment
of disorientation are used less consistently in the extract of the second edition. By contrast, the perspective of Nicholas-as-narrator in
M2 is much more prominent. As a consequence, much of the sense of
immediacy and drama in M2 is lost.
While comparing the two extracts, it is also important to note what
has been added to the M2 version by Fowles for emphasis:
(1) Some additional old contextual information, which helps to
remind readers of some minor characters or events that have
been mentioned in the earlier part of the novel;
(2) Some new figurative expressions, which have been added to suggest how Nicholas feels or perceives this shocking experience.
First, for example, instead of using scare quotes around the name of
the character Anton to highlight Nicholass uncertainty about his
real identity, we are given the exact circumstances in which Nicholas
had last seen the character while he was playing Anton (cf. sentence
6b). With respect to the addition of the third figure in the scene (the
blond-headed sailor), we are also given detailed information about
when and where Nicholas had earlier seen him (cf. sentence 7b).
Secondly, two new similes are added to the M2 extract. One is in
sentence (8b), representing Nicholass experience in terms of his
knowledge of different literary novels: like some freak misbinding in
a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.
The other is the quasi-simile in sentence (10b): Someone met her
there, an arm went round her shoulders as if she had just escaped
from an air disaster. As Short and Semino point out, both types of
addition lessen the sense of being there with Nicholas-the-character
during his disconcerting experience, and instead emphasize rather
more the presence of Nicholas-the-narrator, reflecting on his past
experience and providing contextual information for the reader.
Short and Seminos interpretation is reasonable and true to some
extent. However, in first-person narration, it is often fairly difficult to
draw a clear distinction in viewpoint between the I-character and the
I-narrator. For example, it is arguable that sentence (8b), including

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97

the simile, is presented from Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint, as


indicated by the linguistic items: the intentional verb tried, the
informal use of contraction couldnt, the proximal deictic this
relating to the immediate attack, the repeated use of the indefinite
expression some to indicate his uncertainty, and the negative evaluative
adjective freak. All these linguistic features seem to tie us to Nicholasthe-characters viewpoint. If so, we then have to ask why the sense of
being there with Nicholas-the-character is reduced in the M2 version
(cf. 4a and 8b in particular). Why do we feel less involved in Nicholass
disconcerting experience while processing the M2 version?
Let us compare sentences (4a) and (8b) again in more detail. In
the M1 version, Nicholas says in (4a) I still could not accept what
I knew: that she had turned the key and opened the door. Here we
are given straightforward description of what Lily/Julie does which
perplexes Nicholas. We have to infer how astonished he is as the
event happens. By contrast, in the M2 version, the radical change
from the sexual pleasure with Lily/Julie to a sudden violent attack is
conceived by Nicholas as a turn to some nightmare, analogous to
some freak misbinding in a book, from a Lawrence novel (generally
associated with sex and passion) to a Kafka one (generally associated
with complex, bizarre, disorienting situations). His astonishment is
expressed more obviously, if not explicitly, through the analogy he
draws and through the evaluative judgments (i.e. like some nightmare, freak misbinding in a book).
What is interesting in sentence (8b) is that we would not expect
Nicholas-the-character to be making complex comparisons in a state
of disorientation, as all his attention will be taken up with coping with
the fast-moving circumstances. Hence, it is arguable that, even though
we are tied to Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint in linguistic terms,
his described reaction is apparently not as instant and spontaneous as
we would expect to see in a character. In accord with the normal
assumption, it is reasonable to attribute the complex analogy to the
narrators voice, as Short and Semino suggest.
However, I would argue that the crucial factor seems to be not simply
whether the event is relayed from the I-characters or I-narrators
viewpoint. It is also to do with the fact that Fowles has made a shift in
descriptive focus (Leech and Short 1981: 181): from the focus on

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the story/event itself to the internal worlds of Nicholas-the-character


(e.g. his emotions, perceptions, feelings, cognitions, etc.) when he is
experiencing those bizarre events. In this regard, it is perhaps also
useful to draw on Chatmans (1978) distinction between perceptual
point of view and conceptual point of view. Perceptual point of view
refers specifically to an optical viewpoint, that is, exactly that which a
character physically sees. A characters conceptual point of view, on the
other hand, is not what he or she physically sees, but is rather a manifestation of his or her ideology, beliefs, attitudes or way of thinking.
In other words, how Nicholas feels about what he experiences is told
more explicitly, though sometimes metaphorically, in the M2 version.
The shift in narrative focus from what happens in the textual actual
world to the internal possible worlds of the I-character, if that is
the case, inevitably results in: (a) more linguistic indicators of the
I-characters (conceptual) viewpoint and (b) a tendency from
physical/dynamic to relatively more abstract/stative description in the
M2 version. This point is exemplified in the above example. The
description of Nicholass internal conception or feeling in sentence
(8b) is more explicit but more abstract than in (4a). The shift to
abstract/stative description is possibly the reason why the sense of
dynamic immediacy to the events is lost in the M2 version.
The byproduct of the narrative shift to internal possible worlds of
the Nicholas-the-character is that Nicholas is becoming more rational
and contemplative in the M2 version. This seems to echo Nadeaus
(1980: 267) intuitive observation: The most pervasive change is that
the character Nicholas is made more circumspect and less nave as he
progresses through the godgame (see section 3.2.5).
Based on Short and Seminos analytical result with slight modifications, provisional hypotheses concerning the tendency of revision
and text style difference between the two versions can be formed:
(1) A tendency to explicitness in M2. There are different levels of
specification of details between the two versions. The M2 version
provides more (either given or new) contextual information
than the M1 version.
(2) A shift to the internal world of Nicholas-the-character in M2.
There is a shift in descriptive focus in the revision. The M1 version

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99

focuses on describing the actual events that happen to Nicholas


whereas the M2 version focuses more on his internal world
(e.g. his emotions, perceptions, feelings, un/certainties, doubts,
etc.) as he is experiencing the events.
(3) More frequent use of figurative expressions in M2. Nicholass
internal emotions or perceptions are conveyed mostly via
figurative expressions (e.g. similes or metaphors).
I would argue that the provision of minute contextual information,
the emphasis on Nicholass internal world, and the more frequent use
of figurative language that we have seen in the changes from M1 to M2
are representative of the major changes Fowles has made across various chapters of The Magus, not just in this particular extract. The addition of contextual information (e.g. sentences 6b and 7b) emphasizes
the presence of Nicholas-the-narrator, reflecting on his past experience and providing details for the reader. The emphasis on Nicholass
internal world via figurative language, however, creates contradictory
effects. On one hand, it leads us to perceive the events from Nicholasthe-characters point of view; on the other hand, the use of figurative
language reduces the sense of immediacy and the element of spontaneity, as the readers cognitive processing is more likely to be oriented
to the literary device itself, rather than the immediate events Nicholasthe-character is involved with (see section 8.3). I will analyse two other
textual examples in sections 5.2 and 5.3 to support my argument.

5.2 Textual comparison 1: A man satyr with


an arrow in his heart
The passages I compare in this section describe a scene from chapter 29
of The Magus. It is referred to as the Apollo scene by Nicholas in the
novel itself. It is a tableau that Conchis intentionally stages for Nicholas.
In the middle of his story-telling, Conchis suddenly excuses himself
and leaves Lily and Nicholas alone to talk. Their conversation is
then interrupted when a horn sounds. Four mythical figures appear
successively in the yard: an Apollo figure blowing the horn, a nymph
who runs past, a satyr who is pursuing the nymph and a goddess
(a huntress) who later shoots the satyr with an arrow.

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In the two versions of the scene, there is one major difference in the
action. In M1, Lily/Julie leaves Nicholas alone to watch the scene and
we later learn from Nicholas that she is playing the role of the goddess
who shoots the satyr. In M2, Lily/Julie is watching the scene with
Nicholas, and some conversation between them is added. The goddess
is played by another unknown woman. In consequence of the change
in plot, the association of the goddess (who shoots the satyr-man) with
Lily/Julie (who humiliates Nicholas later on) is made less direct and
less obvious in the M2 version than in M1. Nonetheless, in both versions,
at this point Nicholas is not aware that the tableau is intended to be
perceived as an allegorical lesson for him to learn from.
The focus of my analysis is not on the difference in the actions but
on the linguistic differences in the ways the same events are perceived
by Nicholas, and especially on how the new referents are introduced.
I do not have enough space here to quote both versions of the scene
extensively, but instead will quote smaller extracts from the passages
for more detailed analysis (for the two versions of the full text, see
Appendices C.3 and C.4). The extract I quote below describes how
Nicholas perceives that a nymph-girl is being chased by a satyr-man.
Here is the M1 version with the changes highlighted in the same style
as in section 5.1. For ease of reference, sentence numbering here
does not take account of the unquoted preceding text in the appendices describing the appearance of the first mythical figure Apollo.
The words in small capitals indicate the parts that have been
revised in M2 but with the content unchanged. The words with a line
drawn through indicate deletion, that is, they do not appear in M2.
(1a) A running girl appeared; and I thought at first by the apparent whiteness of her skin the torch did not shift to her that she
was also naked. (2a) I thought too, with increasing shock, that it
was Lily. (3a) If she had gone very quickly round the back of the
house . . . but then I could distinguish a white chiton, and dark hair.
(4a) A wig? (5a) The girl had a slim body, the right height. (6a) She
ran towards the sea between Apollo and myself on the terrace. (7a) Then a third figure appeared behind her. (8a) Another
man, running from out of the dark tunnel through the
trees. (9a) The girl was being chased. (M1, chapter 29: 1723)

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The M1 extract seems to highlight Nicholas-the-characters psychological sequencing, uncertainty and his on-line thought processing
while he is watching the tableau, as shown in the ways he presents the
nymph figure and the satyr-man. Sentences (1a)(6a) introduce the
sudden appearance of the nymph figure. There are a number of linguistic features anchoring the characters viewpoint at that moment:
z
z

the change from indefinite to definite reference in relation to


the nymph figure;
the use of the if construction and the ellipsis in (3a) which indicate Nicholass uncertainty and unfinished thought regarding
whether the running girl is Lily or not;
the conjunction but then in (3a) which suggests Nicholass changing
perception with regard to the girls physical features (from perceiving
she was also naked to discerning a white chiton she wears);
the noun phrase A wig? in (4a) where the question mark shows
his uncertainty about what he sees.

Sentences (7a)(9a) introduce the appearance of the third mythical


figure, the satyr, chasing after the nymph-girl. This introduction of
the satyr shows a similar pattern to the introduction of the nymph-girl.
He is also at first vaguely identified as a third figure (7a), then as
another man (8a) (i.e. in addition to the Apollo figure), and then
he is identified more precisely as the satyr-man shortly after this
short extract (see Appendix C.3).
What we have in the M1 version is a simple and straightforward
description of the events. It seems that Nicholas is unaware of what
happens. If we compare this extract with the revised version, we will
find that we are shifting back and forth between the perspectives of
Nicholas-the-character and Nicholas-the narrator in the M2 version.
Below is the equivalent extract from M2 with the changes highlighted
in the same style as in section 5.1. The words in small capitals
indicate the revised texts with the content preserved as in M1. The
words in boldface indicate addition, that is, they appear in M2 only.
(1b) A faint light shape came running out of the dark
tunnel where the track to the house emerged from the

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trees. (2b) The torch-beam moved to her it was a girl, and


she too was naked, except for antique sandals that were laced up
her calves; or perhaps not quite naked either the pubic hair had
been shaved or she wore some kind of cache-sexe. (3b) Her hair was
bound back in a classical style, and as with the Apollo her body and
face seemed unnaturally white. (4b) She was running too quickly
for me to see her features. (5b) She threw a look back as she came
towards us, she was being chased.
(6b) She ran towards the sea, between the Apollo and the
two of us standing on the terrace. (7b) Then a third figure
appeared behind her. (8b) Another man, running out of the
trees and down the track. (9b) He was got up as a satyr, in some
kind of puffed-out hairy tights, goat-haunches; and he had the traditional head, a beard, two stubby horns. (10b) His naked torso
was dark, almost black. (11b) As he ran closer, gaining on the girl,
I had my next shock. (12b) A huge phallus rose from his loins.
(13b) It was nearly eighteen inches long, far too massive to be
meant realistically, but it was effectively obscene. (14b) I suddenly
remembered the painting in the bowl of the kylix in the room below
us; and also remembered I was a long way from home. (15b) I felt
unsure, out of my depth, a lot more innocent and unsophisticated
at heart than I liked to pretend. (M2, chapter 29: 1812)
In the M2 extract, linguistic indicators of Nicholas-the-characters
viewpoint are made more prominent, which lead us into his internal
speculation and perceptions. In the meantime, the extract in the M2
version also presents minute contextual details, which seem to be
provided from Nicholas-the-narrators post hoc knowledge.

5.2.1 Prominent linguistic indicators of Nicholas-as-characters


viewpoint in M2
In terms of psychological sequencing, we seem to have even more
linguistic features anchoring Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint in
the M2 extract. For example, in the original, the nymph figure is first
introduced as a running girl and then Nicholas gradually realizes
that the girl is running because [she] was being chased. In the

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103

revised version, however, the way Nicholas presents the nymph-girl


becomes more sophisticated and less straightforward. In sentence
(1b), the nymph is first identified as a faint light shape, a vague
reference to what Nicholas perceives. This is then followed by an
indefinite noun phrase, identifying the faint light shape as a girl
(2b). We are then provided with a detailed but uncertain description
of what he sees in the girl, as he is trying to figure out whether she is
naked or not (e.g. or perhaps not quite naked). The reformulation
in (2b) either the pubic hair had been shaved or she wore some
kind of cache-sexe suggests alternative possibilities which went through
Nicholass mind at the event time, and the use of some kind of
indicates limitation in his sight perception. In (3b), the perception
verb seemed and the evaluative adverb unnaturally also indicate
the characters viewpoint. Moreover, if we compare (5b) to (9a), we
can see the fact that the girl was being chased is given less directly
in the revised version. Nicholas first sees the girl [throwing] a look
back as she came toward us, and then he realizes that she was
being chased.
The M2 version also gives more explicit description of Nicholass
internal emotions. In the M1 extract, only three verbs of cognition
are used to indicate Nicholass internal thoughts: I thought in (1a),
I thought too in (2a), and I could distinguish in (3a). The objects
which follow the three verbs are all related to the physical details of
the nymph-girl. Nothing is related to his feelings. However, in M2,
we are given more explicit information with regard to his internal
emotions (e.g. shock, surprise, doubt). In (11b) I had my next
shock, we are told explicitly that he is astonished by seeing the satyrs
huge phallus (cf. 13b). His astonishment is also indicated in the two
evaluative adjectives far too massive and obscene. His recall of the
fact that I was a long way from home in (14b) is used metaphorically
to indicate his unwillingness to believe what he sees. Effectively,
we are led into Nicholass cognitive state. This becomes even clearer
with I felt unsure, out of my depth, a lot more innocent and
unsophisticated at heart than I liked to pretend in (15b), where
the juxtaposition of unsure, out of my depth, innocent and
unsophisticated highlights the degree of his uncertainty and helplessness in struggling to understand what is going on.

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Another minor linguistic change which also relates to the viewpoint


difference is in the reference to the Apollo figure. In the M1 version,
the Apollo figure is referred to as Apollo (cf. 6a), whereas in M2, he
is referred to as the Apollo twice (cf. 3b and 6b). The use of the definite article with the proper noun indicates that Nicholas is referring
to a particular person who is playing the role of Apollo. It seems that
Nicholas in the M2 version is more on guard when he is watching the
tableau and more aware of the theatricality of the performance.

5.2.2 The provision of minute contextual information in M2


Another obvious textual alteration is in the provision of minute
contextual details in the M2 version, which is similar to what we saw
with the pair of extracts discussed in section 5.1.
(i) New information in (2b)(5b) regarding the physical details of the
nymph-girl.
In the M1 version, the details related to the nymph figure are limited
to the four general expressions: a white chiton, dark hair, a slim
body and the right height. In the M2 version, however, we are given
more specific physical details, such as her antique sandals that
were laced up her calves, her hair being in a classical style, her
unnaturally white body and face.
(ii) New information in (9b)(13b) regarding the physical details of the
satyr-man.
In the M1 version, there is no physical description of the satyr figure.
In M2, however, we are provided with a very detailed physical description in sentences (9b)(13b), from his outfit (puffed-out hairy tights,
goat-haunches), his head (a beard, two stubby horns), to his naked
torso and his immense phallus.
(iii) Old contextual information in (14b) the painting in the bowl of the
kylix.
When Nicholas pays a second visit to Conchis, he sees some of
Conchiss art collections. One of the items he notices is the kylix.
He describes: The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave

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me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene
indeed (M1, chapter 17: 945; M2, chapter 17: 103). This episode
appears in chapter 17 of the novel (about 80 pages earlier) and
remains unchanged in both versions. The astonishing image of satyrs
on the kylix is recalled by Nicholas here in sentence (14b) of the
revised extract in chapter 29.
As I have pointed out, these extra contextual details seem to be
presented mostly from Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint. Nonetheless, as argued in section 5.1, in stories where a character is involved
in intense or unexpected situation, we simply assume that the character would not notice or remember so many details. Hence, in accord
with the normal assumption, it is reasonable to attribute the provision of contextual details to Nicholas-the-narrator.
Another striking difference worth mentioning is in how Nicholas
refers to the satyr figure. He is generally referred to as the man in
the M1 version; whereas in M2, the figure is more specifically referred
to as the satyr. See Figure 5.1 for a detailed account of this important lexical change.
The extra recalled information about the kylix painted with the
obscene image of satyrs in (14b) echoes the consistent one-word
change from man to satyr in the revised extract above. These two
changes foreground the important symbolic meaning of the satyr figure in the novel. Given that Nicholas is presented as a womanizer in
Part I of the novel (see section 3.1.2.1), via the Gricean maxim of
relation, Fowles seems to implicate to his readers the correlation
between Nicholas and the satyr in the scene.
The correlation is made more explicit and is confirmed in another
important change Fowles has made in the last line of the scene quoted
from chapter 59 discussed in section section 5.1. Soon after Nicholas
has sex with Lily/Julie and is overpowered by Conchiss henchmen,
he struggles to understand what is happening to him. Then this oneline paragraph is presented as the metaphorical conception of his
own situation at this moment (see the last lines of the texts in Appendices C.1 and C.2):
A man with an arrow in his heart. (M1, chapter 59: 444)
A satyr with an arrow in his heart. (M2, chapter 59: 490)

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Figure 5.1 An overview of the significant changes in the extracts from


chapter 29

The lexical change from man to satyr at this point in chapter 59


clearly relates back to the changes Fowles has made in the scene
in chapter 29 discussed above. The association of Nicholas with the
satyr is made clear at this moment via the foregrounded one-line

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107

paragraph. The one-word lexical change has two implications. First,


it implies a change in viewpoint. The use of man in M1 indicates that
Nicholas is unaware of the symbolic meaning of the satyr figure. He
perceives the figure simply as a man who is chasing after a girl. By
contrast, the repeated use of satyr in M2 emphasizes rather more the
presence of Nicholas-the-narrator, reflecting on this past event after
he has learned the lesson. Secondly, compared with the use of
man in the original, the word satyr in the M2 version more easily
reactivates readers memories of the tableau presented in chapter 29
and its allegorical or educational purposes. Fowless revision in this
scene stands as an example to support the critics comment on the
clarification and improved focus of the theme in the second edition
of The Magus (see the discussion in section 3.2.2).
To sum up, the analytical result of the extracts from chapter 29
seems to support two of the hypotheses formed in section 5.1. First,
the M2 version shows a tendency toward explicitness, as we are given
more detailed contextual information than in M1, mostly provided
from the I-narrators post hoc knowledge. Secondly, the M1 version
focuses on the events Nicholas experiences whereas the M2 version
focuses more on his emotions, perceptions, feelings, un/certainties,
or doubts when he is experiencing those bizarre events.

5.3 Textual comparison 2: Nicholass first self-reflection


The next extract is the mock trial scene in chapter 61 where Nicholas
experiences his first crucial moment of revelation after going through
a series of Conchiss manipulations. In the trial scene, Nicholas is
seated facing 12 figures in bizarre costumes. As they unmask, they
are introduced as psychiatrists, including Lily/Julie. She reads out a
clinical diagnosis of Nicholass character flaws and his psychological
problems. He is then given a whip (referred to as the cat in the
extract) and offered the chance of whipping Lily/Julies bare back as
a revenge for his humiliation. At this moment, Nicholas suddenly
realizes that this choice mirrors Conchiss wartime choice described
earlier in chapter 53 of the novel. In the Nazi occupation, a brutal
German colonel named Wimmel commanded Conchis to club two
guerilla fighters to death with a rifle in exchange for the lives of
80 hostages. It was an impossible choice. In a moment of moral vision,

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Conchis realized that he was the only person there who had free
will to choose what to do, and he chose not to do it. The sudden
revelation with regard to the meaning of freedom and choice makes
Nicholas [lower] the cat and decline the chance of revenge.
Here is the M1 version. The text revision marking style is the same
as in sections 5.1 and 5.2, apart from the additional marking of
double underline, which indicates the rearrangement of phrase/
sentence order or position in the discourse.
(1a) Then suddenly.
(2a) I understood what I had misunderstood.
(3a) I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern. (4a) I was in a sunlit square and in my hands I held a German
sub-machine-gun.
(5a) And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost.
(6a) Whatever they thought of me; even though it would seem,
as they had foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated; their dupe. (7a) That eighty other parts of me must die.
(8a) All Conchiss manoeuvrings had been to bring me to this;
all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the
psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the
guerilla, unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are
strange times for the calling in of old debts, and even stranger
prices to pay.
(9a) I lowered the cat. (M1, chapter 61: 4734)
Sentence (1a) is foregrounded in that it consists of two one-word
adverbial phrases standing together as a graphological sentence and
also as a paragraph. Pragmatically, the complete two adverbials can
be seen (via the maxim of relation) as circumstantial elements
modifying the predication in sentence (2a). This linguistic device
foregrounds the crucial moment of Nicholass realization. From
sentences (3a) to (8a) we are provided with the cognitive content of
what he has understood. He suddenly realizes that his freedom
of choice mirrors Conchiss wartime choice. The analogy between
Nicholass choice at this moment and Conchiss wartime choice ten
years earlier is shown in Table 5.2:

Qualitative Stylistic Comparison


Table 5.2

109

Analogy of freedom and choice


Conchis

Nicholas

Choices

(a) To club the guerilla fighters


to death
(b) Not to do it

(a) To strike Lily/Julie


(b) Not to do it

Tool

A German submachine gun

A cat (whip)

Consequences (a) 80 hostages will be saved


if choice (a) is carried out
(b) 80 hostages will be executed
if choice (b) is carried out

(a) Revenge for his humiliation


if choice (a) is carried out
(b) eighty other parts of me must die
if choice (b) is carried out

Nicholas realizes that [his] freedom too was in not striking, whatever
the cost. The adverb too emphasizes that he was making the same
choice as Conchis did ten years ago, even though it would seem to
Conchis et al., (1) that he is forgiving them; (2) that he has been
taken on their belief structure and (3) (most importantly, and as
foregrounded by the elliptical structure of the sentence) that he is
their dupe. Sentence (7a) That eighty other parts of me must die is
syntactically a dependent clause that constitutes the fourth object
of the perception verbs seem and had foreseen in (6a). It is a
modalized assertion with strong commitment. It stands alone as a
graphological sentence, which also foregrounds the crucial moment
of Nicholas-the-characters self-realization. It is the sudden revelation
that makes Nicholas put the whip down and decline the chance of
revenge. This decision is shown in sentence (9a) I lowered the cat,
which is placed after a series of Nicholass internal thoughts in (8a).
Similar to sentences (1a), (2a) and (7a), the importance of such
decision in (9a) is also foregrounded by its standing alone as a
one-line paragraph.
Here is the equivalent extract from M2 with the linguistic differences
from M1 highlighted, including the reordering of the two important
pieces of information (sentences 7a and 9a) which is marked with
double underline:
(1b) Then suddenly.
(2b) I understood.
(3b) I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern. (4b) I was in a sunlit square ten years before and in my hands

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

I held a German submachine-gun. (5b) And it was not Conchis who


was now playing the role of Wimmel. (6b) Wimmel was inside me,
in my stiffened, backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what I
had done to Alison.
(7b) The better you understand freedom, the less you possess it.
(8b) And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost.
(9b) Whatever eighty other parts of me must die, whatever the
watching eyes might think of me; even though it would seem,
as they must have foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was
indoctrinated; their dupe. (10b) I lowered the cat, and I could feel
tears gathering tears of rage, tears of frustration.
(11b) All Conchiss maneuverings had been to bring me to this;
all the charades, the psychical, the theatrical, the sexual, the psychological; and I was standing as he had stood before the guerilla,
unable to beat his brains out; discovering that there are strange
times for the calling in of old debts, and even stranger prices to pay.
(M2, chapter 61, 5178, authors italics)
The revision pattern of the extract pair is similar to the previous
extract pairs discussed in sections 5.1 and 5.2. There also seems to be
a shift in descriptive focus to Nicholass internal world at the event
time, and a tendency to (con)textual explicitness in the revised
extract.

5.3.1 A shift in descriptive focus to Nicholass internal world at


the event time in M2
In the M1 extract, sentence (7a) That eighty other parts of me must
die is a modalized assertion with strong commitment, and it stands
alone as a graphological sentence, which foregrounds the climactic
importance of Nicholass self-realization. In the M2 version, however,
the clause eighty other parts of me must die in (9b) is preceded by the
pronoun whatever and moved to the beginning of the sentence, and
is thus clearly parallel with the second clause whatever the watching
eyes might think of me. These two alterations, that is, the additional
pronoun whatever and the removal of its original foregrounded
textual position in the M1 version, reduce the prominence and

Qualitative Stylistic Comparison

111

importance of the crucial information which signifies Nicholass realization. In the revision, Nicholas seems to be unwilling to reconcile
himself to being the dupe of Conchis and his henchmen, but at the
same time he knows that he has no other choice.
This point is reinforced by another textual addition that Fowles has
made in sentence (10b), I could feel tears gathering tears of rage,
tears of frustration, coordinated with the clause I lowered the cat
by the conjunction and. As the clause I lowered the cat is neither
placed as the last sentence, nor foregrounded as a one-line paragraph
in the M2 extract, the prominence of the decision itself is reduced.
The perception verb feel and the parallel noun phrases tears of
rage, tears of frustration reveal more clearly Nicholass perplexed
and emotional internal state at the moment of realization.
There are some other linguistic indicators anchoring Nicholas-ascharacters viewpoint at the event time. For example, in the M1 version,
the pronoun they in (6a) anaphorically refers to Conchis and his
companions. In the M2 version, the pronoun is replaced by a more
specific noun phrase the watching eyes in (9b), which is used synecdochically to refer to the people who are judging and watching Nicholas
in the mock trial scene. This change seems to highlight Nicholass
sense of being watched and being scrutinized at the time of the event.
Moreover, in sentence (6a), the clauses they thought of me and as
they had foreseen are subordinated assertions. They look like the
statements from the narrator about what was the case in the textual
world. In sentence (9b), however, the certainty attached to the narrative assertions is reduced by the modal auxiliaries might and must:
whatever the watching eyes might think of me and as they must have
foreseen. The modal might indicates the lack of certainty; the modal
must, however, indicates relatively strong certainty about something
that Nicholas has not witnessed but is inferring. The addition of might
and must suggests that in the revised version we now have the viewpoint of Nicholas-as-character rather than Nicholas-as-narrator.

5.3.2 A tendency to (con)textual explicitness in M2


Another major difference between the two versions of the extract is
in the specification of details. Notice that sentences (5b)(7b) are

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

extra old contextual information added to the M2 extract. Sentence


(7b) is put in italics to present Nicholass recall of what Conchis has
said about freedom and choice. The provision of detailed contextual
information shows a tendency to explicitness in the revised text.
As mentioned above, the key point in understanding this extract
better is to recall Conchiss wartime experience and see how it is
related to Nicholass realization. Conchiss wartime choice indirectly
reveals how thoughtless Nicholas had been in choosing Lily/Julie
and abandoning Alison, a choice consequently leading to her suicide.
By telling the wartime story, Conchis is trying to teach Nicholas to
understand the essential meaning of freedom and choice, as he
explicitly tells Nicholas after he relayed the wartime story (boldface
indicates that this passage appears in the M2 version only):
For as long as you cherish your present view of freedom, it is you
who holds the executioners gun.
I thought again of Alison; suppressed the thought. (M2, chapter
54: 439)
Conchiss remark it is you who holds the executioners gun suddenly
reminds Nicholas of Alisons suicide. This remark is related to
Nicholass self-reflection expressed in (6b) Wimmel was inside me,
in my stiffened, backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what
I had done to Alison. Following the story we have been told earlier,
we see that Wimmel, who gives the order to carry out the execution
of the 80 hostages, metaphorically represents evil. The four parallel
prepositional phrases in (6b) indicate Nicholass explicit and detailed
recognition of the resemblance of his own wrongdoings to Wimmels,
especially in what he has done to Alison. At this point in the novel,
Nicholas begins to realize that he has exercised his own freedom of
choice merely to satisfy his personal desire, not in the best interests of
either Alison or Lily/Julie.
In the revised extract, the addition of the background information
in (5b)(7b) which readers have already learned from the earlier
part of the novel makes the analogy between Conchiss wartime
choice and Nicholass choice in the current situation more explicit.

Qualitative Stylistic Comparison

113

What Nicholas actually realizes at that moment is also made more


explicit, though metaphorically, in the textual addition.

5.4 Hypotheses concerning the revisionary


tendency in The Magus
The common features of the changes observed from these extracts
discussed in sections 5.15.3 and the hypotheses concerning the overall text style differences between the two versions are illustrated in
Figure 5.2:

M1

revision tendency

implicit
story events or actions
literal

I-character's
viewpoint consistent
perceptual point of view

showing
fiction emotions

Figure 5.2
versions

TEXT

VIEWPOINT

EFFECTS

M2

explicit
I-character's internal world
figurative

I-character's & I-narrator's


viewpoints mixed
conceptual point of view

telling
artifact emotions

Hypotheses concerning the text style differences between the two

The first tendency shown in Figure 5.2 is the change concerning


(con)textual explicitness. Fowles has added more contextual information and made the second edition become more explicit in narrative
terms, disregard the extra information being provided from I-narrators
or I-characters perspectives. This point has been observed by
many critics (see section 3.2.2) and has been exemplified in all of
the extract pairs discussed in this chapter. However, the other two
tendencies remain to be my hypotheses which need to be examined
quantitatively and qualitatively in the following chapters.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

5.4.1 Hypothesis 1: events/actions I-characters


internal world
I argued in section 5.1 that Fowles seems to make a shift in narrative
focus away from the story events towards the internal possible worlds
of Nicholas-the-character when he is experiencing and evaluating
those bizarre events (e.g. his emotions, feelings, cognitions, wishes,
desires, (un)certainty, doubt, etc.). That is, how Nicholas feels about
what he experiences is told more explicitly, though sometimes metaphorically, in the M2 version. The shift in narrative focus from what
happens in the textual actual world to how Nicholas perceives, feels
and speculates about the events inevitably results in more linguistic
indicators of the Nicholas-as-characters viewpoint (especially his
conceptual viewpoint, in Chatmans (1978) terms). This narrative shift
also makes the texts become relatively more abstract/stative in the
M2 version, which is one possible reason why some of the sense of
dynamic immediacy is lost in the M2 version. As I have also pointed
out above, the byproduct of the narrative shift to the internal possible
worlds of the Nicholas-the-character is that Nicholas in M2 seems to
become more rational, observant and contemplative. The revised
text is full of the voicing of his thoughts, perceptions and deliberations. This hypothesis will be examined and tested quantitatively in
Chapter Six.

5.4.2 Hypothesis 2: literal presentation figurative


(re)presentation
Following hypothesis 1, if M1 focuses the narrative on the story
events, it seems to give more literal presentation of what happens
to Nicholas. Upon close examination of narrative technique, we
see more figurative expressions (representations) of Nicholas-thecharacters cognitive and emotional experiences in the M2 version.
It seems that Fowles has used more sophisticated figures of speech
(e.g. metaphors or similes) to represent how Nicholas thinks or
feels as the events take place. This point can be briefly illustrated
by Fowless revision of the last lines of the Apollo scene discussed
in section 5.2. At the end of the tableau, Nicholas sees the two

Qualitative Stylistic Comparison

115

mythical figures (Apollo and the goddess) retreat from the yard (see
Appendices C.3 and C.4).
(M1, chapter 29: 1725)
The beam went out. I saw them
retreat into the dark penumbra
of the trees. Silence. Night.
As if nothing had happened.

(M2, chapter 29: 1803)


But then the remaining light went out. I could still
just distinguish the two pale shadows, turning away
now with the rather mundane haste of actors eager
to get off stage while the lights are down.

In the M1 version, it is difficult to say whose viewpoint is presented.


However, if we compare the linguistic features of the two expressions,
it is arguable that the M2 version shows more linguistic indicators
anchoring the I-characters viewpoint. For example, the tone is less
assertive, if comparing I saw them with I could still just distinguish
two pale shadows. The proximal deixis now and the present tense
are all relate to the time of the event. There is also an evaluative
judgement conveyed in the expression rather mundane haste. Here
how Nicholas perceives the two mythical figures retreat is presented
via the simile: turning away now with the rather mundane haste
of actors eager to get off stage. The analogy between the mythical
figures and actors helps to highlight Nicholass awareness of the
theatricality of the tableau. This is one of the (many) observed
examples where we see Fowles tends to use figurative expressions to
represent Nicholas-the-characters cognitive and emotional experiences
in the revised version of The Magus. This hypothesis will be tested in
Chapter Seven, by comparing the relative frequency of the figurative
expressions in the two editions.

5.5 Summary and implications


To sum up, Short and Seminos analytical result regarding the
prominent feature of mixing two voices in the M2 narration seems
to accord with the comparative analyses of the other extracts.
However, I would argue that the mixed viewpoint phenomenon is
not because the narration of the events from the I-characters viewpoint is reduced. On the contrary, as I have suggested, the M2 version
shows more prominent linguistic features anchoring the I-characters

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

(conceptual) viewpoint as the narrative is focusing on Nicholass


internal possible worlds. I would say that the mixture of viewpoints
actually results from the additional contextual information and the
literary devices Fowles has added in the revision, which are arguably
provided from the I-narrators post hoc knowledge. As M1 does not
provide so much contextual detail and has less complex figurative
expressions, we naturally feel that we are having Nicholas-the-characters
viewpoint more consistently. By comparison, because of the textual
addition, the shift back and forth between the viewpoints of I-narrator
and of I-character becomes more prominent in M2.
The resulting effect seems to relate to the showing/telling difference.
In the first edition, what Nicholas feels about the bizarre events has
to be inferred by the reader from time to time; while in the revised
edition, we are given more obvious descriptions of his internal states
and mental activities related. The M1 version seems to engage the
reader more with the fictional world and the actual events Nicholas
is experiencing; the sense of immediacy is stronger. As for the
M2 version, because of the prominent feature of mixing I-characters
and I-narrators viewpoints in the narrative, the sense of immediacy
is much reduced in the revised edition.
So far, my comparative analyses have focused only on small-scale
extracts from the novel. Based on the linguistic changes in these
extracts, I have generated some hypotheses concerning the overall
linguistic changes and text style differences between the two editions.
However, detailed stylistic comparison is feasible only when the texts
are short. Given that The Magus is about 600 pages long, both editions
are the same, it is almost impossible to identify all of the linguistic
changes Fowles has made, compare them in stylistical detail and confirm the overall text style difference. What I will do in the subsequent
chapters is to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis in my
stylistic comparison, in order to test my hypotheses concerning the
overall text style difference between the two versions.

Chapter Six

Comparing lexical semantic patterns


testing hypothesis 1

In Chapter Four, I used the TESAS/Crouch and WCopyfind software


packages to detect and measure text similarity (in terms of matched
words) between the two versions of the novel. In this chapter, another
corpus tool, Wmatrix, is exploited for the purposes of large-scale
text comparison. The main purpose of this chapter is to identify
the linguistic differences between the two editions as a whole, and
more specifically, between the chapters which have undergone
drastic revision. I present some statistics that indicate significant
linguistic differences at the semantic level, discuss the implications
of the statistical results, and analyse the cumulative effects of those
linguistic changes. The corpus evidence seems to be in accord with
my first hypothesis concerning the text style differences formed in
Chapter Five (cf. section 5.4.1), that is, there seems to be a shift
in narrative focus from the story/event itself in M1 to the internal
possible worlds of Nicholas-the-character in M2 (e.g. his emotions,
feelings, cognitions, certainty, uncertainty, doubt, etc.).
Wmatrix only provides macroscopic textual comparisons. If we
conduct a chapter-by-chapter text comparison, the statistics show no
significant difference between each chapter-pair. As a consequence, we
can only conduct a large-scale comparison, for example, a comparison
of several sample chapters together, a comparison of the three parts of
the novel, or a comparison of the novel as a whole. Nonetheless, as
Rayson (2003) suggests, Wmatrix allows the macroscopic analysis (the
study of the characteristics of whole texts) to inform the microscopic
level (focusing on the use of a particular linguistic feature) as to which
linguistic features should be investigated further.

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6.1 Corpus tool 3: Wmatrix


Wmatrix was initially developed by Paul Rayson in a research project
(REVERE1), and then extended and applied to corpus linguistics
during his PhD work at Lancaster University. It is still being updated
regularly. In this section I will briefly introduce the major functions
of the corpus comparison tool (for details, see Rayson 2003, 2008).
While introducing the tool, I will use my own corpus data, namely,
the two versions of The Magus, for illustration.
Wmatrix is the web interface to the CLAWS2 and USAS3 corpus
annotation tools. CLAWS is a grammatical part-of-speech (POS) tagger.
POS is the commonest form of corpus annotation so far. USAS is a
semantic tagging system. Semantic annotation is also referred to as
word sense tagging (McEnery et al. 2006: 38). It assigns codes indicating semantic features or the semantic fields of the words in a text.
Wmatrix allows the user to upload their own corpus data and run
these two annotation tools via a web browser (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.
uk/wmatrix/). Once the users upload their text, the Wmatrix tag
wizard will automatically go through the POS and semantic tagging
stages, and then produce a set of frequency lists for words, POS tags
and semantic tags from the uploaded text. All of the data will be stored
in a work-area in the web server. Each work-area contains the original
raw text, the POS and semantically tagged versions of that text, and a
set of frequency lists for the words, POS tags and semantic tags.
The major functions of Wmatrix are: (a) we can click on a frequency
list to see the most frequent items in our corpus and (b) most importantly, we can compare the frequency lists. This comparison can be
carried out at the word level to see keyword differences, at the POS level
to see key word class differences, or at the semantic level to see key
concept differences. From the work-area, we can perform a comparison
of the frequency list for our corpus against another larger normative
corpus (for example, the LOB general fiction corpus, which is roughly
contemporaneous with Fowless The Magus). Alternatively, according
to Rayson (2003), we can perform a comparison of the frequency list
against another corpus of our own as long as that corpus data has
also been loaded into Wmatrix. In my case, by using Wmatrix, I can
compare the two editions of The Magus without using a normative
reference corpus. To put it another way, I can use the M1 edition as the

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

Figure 6.1

119

A sample view of a Wmatrix comparison result at POS level

reference corpus for the M2 edition, to see how different the two
editions are in linguistic terms. Figure 6.1 shows the comparison result
of the POS frequency lists between the two editions, for example.
Notice that the log-likelihood (LL) statistic is employed by Wmatrix
in any level of frequency comparison. In all cases the comparison
shows the most significant key items at the top of the list since they
are sorted by the descending LL values. The LL statistics show how
significant the relative frequency differences are between the two
corpora. The + and codes indicate respectively the over-use and
under-use of each linguistic item in one corpus as compared to the
other corpus. To be statistically significant we could look at items with
a LL value over 6.63, as this is the standard cut-off for 99% confidence of significance (see Rayson 2003: 95100).

6.2 Sampling texts for further comparison


I first conduct a comparison of the three parts of the book. Part I
and Part III do not show any significant linguistic differences at any
level of the comparison (word, POS, semantics) between the two
editions, and most of the changes (i.e. the significantly over-used or

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

under-used linguistic items with LL value over 6.63) occur in Part II


of the novel (see Appendix D). Wmatrixs comparison result generally
reflects the pattern of revision shown in Figure 4.5. That is, the pattern of the revision retrieved from the corpus tools (TESAS/Crouch,
WCopyfind and Wmatrix) all show that the major changes occur in
Part II of the novel. Considering, (a) it is the main part of Nicholass
journey to self-realization, the most dramatic and essential part of the
novel and (b) Fowles himself has said that he has not changed much
in the other two parts (see Singh 1980: 186), I will focus my comparative analysis on the changes in Part II.
Part II of The Magus contains 58 chapters, among which, 33 chapters
have similarity scores above the average, and even above 90% (cf.
Appendix B). These chapters are highly similar in terms of shared
words (especially n-grams, the matched consecutive word sequences).
Some of the chapters, Conchiss four embedded narrations of his
past life for example, remain almost identical with the original.
Hence I decide to select from Part II the chapters which had undergone drastic revision for further comparison. The selection of sampled
chapters is partly guided by my own intuition and the claims made
by the literary critics (cf. Table 3.2), and partly guided by the
quantitative comparison results obtained from the corpus tools.
Two external conditions are set up for sampling:
(1) chapters with TESAS/Crouch similarity scores below the average
87.53% (i.e. 25 out of total 58 chapters in Part II);
(2) chapters involving the interactions between Nicholas and the
other characters (i.e. 22 out of the selected 25 chapters). These
chapters basically describe what happens to Nicholas and how
Conchis engineers Nicholas into the quest. They are composed
of, (a) direct speech presentation among the characters (i.e.
Nicholass conversation with Conchis and the twin sisters) and
(b) Nicholass narration (including the presentation of his
thoughts and some minor, indirect presentation of speech).
The 22 chapters that have been sampled for further comparison
thus include chapters 3137, 43, 4552, 5459. Table 6.1 shows the
content of the sampled chapters.

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns


Table 6.1

The content of the sampled chapters


No. of wordtokens in M1

Ch. 31

121

3,715

No. of wordtokens in M2
3,261

No. of wordtokens
increased or
decreased

% of wordtokens
increased or
decreased

Similarity
Score (%)

454

12.22%

72.08%
69.40%

Ch. 32

679

856

177

26.07%

Ch. 33

1,958

2,509

551

28.14%

26.61%

Ch. 34

2,091

3,371

1,280

61.21%

10.91%

Ch. 35

3,219

5,012

1,793

55.70%

44.76%

Ch. 36

2,373

2,686

313

13.19%

84.70%

Ch. 37

1,797

1,892

95

5.29%

85.26%

Ch. 43

2,859

5,720

2,861

100.07%

11.20%

Ch. 45

4,841

4,773

68

1.40%

41.46%

Ch. 46

6,943

8,632

1,689

24.33%

26.61%

Ch. 47

2,650

4,214

1,564

59.02%

3.37%

Ch. 48

639

1,091

452

70.74%

51.04%

Ch. 49

6,168

8,959

2,791

45.25%

46.35%

Ch. 50

4,114

4,482

368

8.95%

78.93%

Ch. 51

2,816

2,733

83

2.95%

82.23%

Ch. 52

4,183

4,857

674

16.11%

36.31%

Ch. 54

1,911

2,485

574

30.04%

69.24%

Ch. 55

3,003

3,183

180

5.99%

10.46%

Ch. 56

3,124

3,452

328

10.50%

12.93%

Ch. 57

1,602

2,451

849

53.00%

46.73%

Ch. 58
Ch. 59

5,794

8,949

3,155

54.45%

8.82%
29.39%

Sample
Total

66,479

85,568

19,089

28.71%

43.13%

The Magus
Total

222,439

241,745

19,306

8.68%

87.53%

Notice that chapter 58 and chapter 59 are counted together as


one chapter, because Fowles changed the boundary between the
two chapters in his revision, with the sex scene between Nicholas
and Lily/Julie in M1 chapter 59 being moved to chapter 58 in the
M2 version. Notice also that only 3 chapters show a (small) decrease
in the number of word tokens in the revision (chapters 31, 45, 51); the
other 19 chapters all show an increase in the number of word tokens

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

(i.e. textual additions) in the M2 version. As shown in Table 6.1, the


total number of word tokens is 66,479 in the M1 sampled chapters,
and 85,568 in the M2 sampled chapters. So there is an increase of
19,089 words (about 28.71%) in the M2 sample. If we compare this
number with the total increase in the novel as a whole (19,306 words),
we find that the sample corpus captures almost 99% of the changes in
The Magus corpus. Biber, in his article about Representativeness in Corpus
Design, defines representativeness as the extent to which a sample
includes the full range of variability in a population (1993: 243). The
sample corpus that I have compiled for further comparison should
be considered as representative enough to explain the majority of
linguistic differences between the two editions of the novel.
I am aware that some small and scattered changes in the chapters
that have been left out of the sampling might also create important
differences in effect. An example would be the symbolic meaning of
the one-word change from man to satyr discussed in section 5.2.
Nonetheless, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the repeated
patterns, if any, in Fowless revision and examine their cumulative
effect.

6.3 Comparing the lexical semantic


patterns between M1 and M2
One main argument that runs throughout corpus linguistics is that
text analysis must always be comparative: we can interpret patterns
in an individual text only if we know what is to be expected in the
language as a whole (Stubbs 2002: 123). Since this study aims to
explore what kind of changes Fowles has made in the M2 revision and
how different it is from the original, the M1 version therefore will be
considered as the norm, with which M2 is compared. The densities
of specific linguistic features in the M1 edition will be compared with
the corresponding densities in the M2 edition. Features which are
significantly more frequent, or rarer, in the M2 texts (i.e. over-used
or under-used in Wmatrixs terms), will be considered as potential
indicators of style markers different from M1.
Among the three levels of linguistic differences retrieved from
Wmatrix, my analysis focuses on the significant differences at the
semantic level, to see the key concept difference between the two

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

123

editions of The Magus. This decision is based on the possible-worlds


theoretical assumption. As Ryan defines, the semantic domain is the
totality of the meanings projected by the text (1991: 127); namely, it
captures what is unique about the text.
Stubbs (2002) demonstrates how computer-assisted methods can
be used to study lexical semantic patterns in texts. The approach he
takes is called corpus semantics. It is an approach to studying how words
are used in text and discourse, using observational data from corpora
as the main evidence for meaning. The basic assumption in the corpus
semantics approach is that a text is a semantic unit of language in use,
which is in accord with Ryans (1991) definition mentioned above. As
Stubbs states, for a text to be comprehensible, it must be lexically
cohesive: it must contain chains of repeated and related words,
distributed across the text, in patterns of old and new information
(2002: 124). Any choice of words creates a mini-world or universe of
discourse, and makes it likely that other words will be co-selected in the
same context. Recurring co-selection of words that are semantically
related forms a particular semantic prosody (Louw 1993; Sinclair 1991)
or discourse prosody (Stubbs 2002) in text4.
Adopting the corpus semantics approach, and focusing on the linguistic differences that Wmatrix identifies at a semantic level between
the two editions of The Magus, we can not only explore what kinds of
semantic concepts (i.e. words that are semantically related) are used
less frequently or more frequently in the M2 sample, but also examine
how the linguistic changes result in a different discourse prosody
in the revision of The Magus. Again, it is worth noting that, what
I mean by different discourse prosody is actually a matter of degree.
Whatever semantic features I examine in the M2 sample exist in M1,
but the degree of prominence is different.
Since semantic features are distributed or shared across co-occurring
words in discourse, the main tool of corpus semantics is concordance,
which allows words and their characteristic collocates to be studied in
detail. In a concordance, we can talk of a node-word co-occurring
with collocates in a span of words to the left and right of the node.
A node is the word being investigated. A collocate is a word (or
words) which co-occur with a node in a corpus. What counts as
the node and the collocates depends on the focus of study (Stubbs
2002: 29). In my analysis below, the nodes in the concordance will

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usually be the under-used or over-used lexical items under each key


semantic concept identified by Wmatrix.
As I have argued in Chapter Five, Fowles seems to make a shift in
narrative focus away from the story events in M1 to the internal possible
worlds of Nicholas-the-character in M2. The increasing prominence
of Nicholass alternative possible worlds in M2 inevitably results in (or
actually results from) more obvious presentation of Nicholas-ascharacters internal psychological viewpoint, for example, his emotions,
wishes, desires, feelings, (un)certainty, doubt (cf. McIntyres 2006
notion of possible viewpoint discussed in section 2.2.3). This will
then be the focus of my identification of the linguistic features in the
concordance examples. The issue to be tackled is: what kind of linguistic features can be marked as indicative of a characters internal
possible viewpoint?
Within stylistics, the investigation of point of view involves a
number of linguistic features which indicate the source responsible
for the text or segment (either a narrator or a character, or a blend
of both). The study of point of view can be related to the study of
how people express their personal opinions and attitudes through
language, for example, through relatively neutral expressions or
psychologically and ideologically coloured expressions. Over the last
few decades, linguists have also become increasingly interested in
the ways that people convey their personal feelings and attitudes
in addition to propositional content. Such investigations have been
carried out under several different labels, including intensity (Labov
1984), evidentiality (Chafe 1986; Chafe and Nichols 1986), affect
(Ochs 1989), hedging (Brown and Levinson 1987), stance (Biber and
Finegan 1988, 1989; Conrad and Biber 2003), emotive communication
(Caffi and Janney 1994) and evaluation (Hunston and Thompson
2003). These studies show a wide range of terms in use, some of
which are in effect synonymous, while others cover slightly different
overlapping areas.
Among the studies of linguistic features related to peoples personal
attitudes or opinions, perhaps Biber and Finegan (1989) propose
the most precise linguistic identification so far (cf. section 2.3.1).
They give a list of 12 stance markers, defined as the lexical and
grammatical expression of attitudes, feelings, judgements, or

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

125

commitment concerning the propositional content of a message


(1989: 93). These stance markers comprise two pragmatic functions,
affect and evidentiality. Affect involves the expression of a broad range
of personal attitudes, including emotions, feelings, moods, and general dispositions (Biber and Finegan 1989: 94), which is semantically
divided into positive and negative categories. Evidentiality is a broad
term to cover any linguistic expression of a speakers attitude towards
knowledge (Chafe 1986: 271), which is semantically divided into certainty and doubt. Some knowledge is judged on a scale of reliability,
signaled by adverbs such as maybe, probably, certainly or by modals
might, may. These evidential markers indicate the probability of
something being a fact or not being a fact. A further distinction is
made between adjectives, verbs, adverbs and modals as grammatical
markers of these stance features. Below are Biber and Finegans
taxonomy and some lexical items for example.
(1) AFFECT (Positive; Negative)
Adjectives (e.g. I feel amazed; depressed)
Verbs (e.g. I ache for; it annoys me)
Adverbs (e.g. happily, astonishingly)
EVIDENTIALITY
Certainty
(2) Adjectives (e.g. I am convinced, undoubted)
(3) Verbs (e.g. prove; know)
(4) Adverbs (e.g. actually, certainly)
(5) Emphatics (e.g. a lot, for sure, just, really, more, most, so + adj/adv.)
(6) Predictive modals (e.g. will, would, shall, plus contractions)
Doubt
(7) Adjectives (e.g. doubtful, possible, unsure)
(8) Verbs (e.g. disbelieve, sense, feel, think)
(9) Adverbs (e.g. apparently, perhaps, possibly, seemingly)
(10) Hedges (vague language, e.g. sort of, some, maybe, something like)
(11) Possibility modals (e.g. can, may, might, could, plus contractions)
(12) Necessity modals (e.g. ought, should, must, plus contractions)
(Biber and Finegan 1989: 98)

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In The Magus, Nicholas is constantly in a quest for the truth (knowledge)


behind Conchiss manipulation, and is constantly baffled by Conchis
and his henchmen. The study of speakers attitudes of certainty or
doubtfulness with respect to expressed information, and the study
of emotive or affective features in their language, can be related to
my investigation of the differences in the ways Nicholas presents his
bizarre experiences between the two editions. Hence, my identification
of the linguistic features anchoring Nicholass internal psychological
viewpoint (i.e. affective and evidential) will be largely based on Biber
and Finegans (1989) list of stance markers. Their grammatical
markers of the stance features include only adjectives, verbs, adverbs
and modals. In my identification, I will also include nouns (e.g. I had
begun to feel something like despair or shock, I felt fear as well, a sharp
paranoia), as it is also the case that they can refer to Nicholass internal
viewpoint. While identifying the linguistic markers of a characters
viewpoint, I also refer to Shorts (1996) checklist (cf. section 2.3.2).
For example, proximal deixis (e.g. this, now), value-laden language,
and graphological device (e.g. ellipsis, scare quote) could also be
indicative of a characters (internal) viewpoint.

6.4 Statistical results and data analysis


In my data analysis below, I first explain why certain types of semantic
items are under-used in the M2 sample corpus as compared to M1,
and discuss whether their under-use is equally significant in stylistic
terms. I then focus the analysis particularly on the key over-used
semantic items, given that, (a) 19 out of the 22 sampled chapters are
highly dissimilar due to textual additions (see Table 6.1) and (b) we
may assume that Fowles has consistently opted for certain linguistic
items for certain purpose. Therefore, I intend to examine the repeated
patterns, if any, in the increased word-tokens in the M2 sample.

6.4.1 Significantly under-used semantic concepts:


lack of movements?
Wmatrix comparison shows that four semantic categories have been
significantly under-used in the M2 sampled chapters, as shown in
Table 6.2.

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns


Table 6.2

127

Key semantic concepts under-used in the M2 sampled chapters


M1 Sample
freq.
(%)

M2 Sample
freq.
(%)

M1

1240

(1.93)

1315

(1.59)

24.30 Moving, coming and going

B5

305

(0.48)

293

(0.35)

12.93 Clothes and personal belongings

33

(0.05)

15

(0.02)

12.27 Telecommunications

178

(0.28)

168

(0.20)

Sem Tag

Q1.3
H5

LL

Semantic category

8.41 Furniture and household fittings

Note: M1 in the first row refers to the first edition of The Magus, and M1 in line two of the first column
refers to a particular USAS semantic tag.

Referring to the USAS tagset, these four semantic categories are


defined as follows, along with the lexical items in each semantic category listed in descending frequency in the M2 sample corpus:
z

M1

B5

Q1.3

H5

terms depicting movement


went, came, go, come, walked, stood up, nodded, gone, left, turned
to . . .
terms relating to clothes and other personal belongings
shirt, clothes, dress, skirt, wearing, bag, trousers, shoes, pocket,
coat . . .
terms relating to telecommunications
rang, telegram, ring, telephone, telephoned, wirelessed across,
radioed . . .
terms relating to furniture and fittings used within the
home/buildings
bed, table, seat, rug, shutters, desk, bath, wardrobe, chair,
bedspread . . .

The statistics show that the lexical items related to the semantic field
of B5, Q1.3 and H5 are significantly under-used because of textual
deletion from M1 to M2, as the raw frequencies of the terms relating
to these three semantic categories are reduced in the M2 edition (see
Table 6.2). Upon examining the concordance examples, I would
argue that the deletion of these types of words from the M2 edition
mainly results in some minor change in the plot or small-scale details
of the textual actual world in the M2 version.

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Take the deletion of the terms relating to telecommunications


(semantic tag Q1.3), for example. The word rang appears 11 times
in M1, and 5 times in the M2 sample. The KWIC concordance below
displays the six textual examples in M1 that have been deleted in
the M2 version.

Concordance 6.1

Deleted examples of the semantic field Telecommunications

In Concordance 6.1, the six entries describe a bell that rings persistently in the middle of Nicholas and Lily/Julies meetings. The ringing
bell is a deliberate signal from Conchis, in an attempt to interrupt
them under the pretext of calling Nicholas for lunch. Similar
expressions are repeated several times in M1. In stylistic terms, if
the repetitions occur within a relatively short stretch, we may infer
the tension in the situation. The deletion of these repeated textual
examples will thus reduce such a stylistic effect. However, given that
the six entries appear on different occasions in chapters 31, 34, 47,
52, it seems more likely that Fowles has deleted these similar entries
(scenarios) to remove repetition.
Similarly, if we examine the deleted examples of the semantic fields
B5 and H5, we find that B5 (clothes and personal belongings) mostly
relates to descriptions of the physical appearance of the characters,
and H5 (furniture and household fittings) mostly relates to descriptions
of the external environment. For example:
She was wearing another beautiful dress, in a charcoal-amberindigo art nouveau fabric, with an almost ground-length paleyellow stole. B5
He raised his eyebrows a fraction as if I surprised him, but went up
the steps; put his glasses on the old cane couch, and turned back to
the tea-table. I stood by my chair, and gave him his own interrogative
shake of the head. H5

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

129

As shown in the above examples, the deletion of these sorts of texts


from the M2 edition results in minor changes in the furnishing of the
textual actual world. These examples illustrate that, although the
under-use of the semantic categories of B5, Q1.3 and H5 is statistically
significant, these types of changes do not seem to be equally significant in stylistic terms.
What strikes me as interesting in Table 6.2 is in the most significantly under-used concept which is tagged as M1 (terms semantically depicting movement). Before explaining the semantic differences,
it is important to note how we interpret the statistics. As we know,
simple frequency counts are a useful approach to quantifying linguistic data. However, if the sample sizes on which a count is based
are different, then simple arithmetical frequency counts cannot be
compared directly with one another, as the frequency counts simply
count occurrences: they do not indicate the prevalence of a linguistic
item in terms of a proportion of the total number of words within the
text. Hence, it is necessary to normalize the data using some indicator
of proportion (McEnery and Wilson 1996: 68). As we can see in
Table 6.2, although the raw frequency of the words depicting
movement has increased in the M2 sample, their usage has actually
decreased in proportion due to the increase in the M2 sample size.
The proportional decrease of lexical terms depicting movement
seems to be indicative in stylistic terms, as it implies that the emphasis
of Fowless revision (e.g. textual addition) is not on physical movement or actions in the story world. Let us look at some examples
of the lexical items under the movement semantic tag:

Concordance 6.2

Under-used examples of the semantic field Movement

As shown in Concordance 6.2, the expressions like I went down to the


beach, She moved a few steps and so on, seem to constitute characters

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130

actions or movements in the fictional world. In the total number of


increased word-tokens in the M2 sample (i.e. 19089, see Table 6.1),
the small increase of the items in this semantic category (i.e. 1315
1240 = 75 entries, see Table 6.2) only accounts for 0.39% of the total
increase. The significant under-use of the movement semantic category
in the M2 sample seems to indicate that Fowles does not focus his
revision on the descriptions of story events (assuming terms
depicting movement constitute what happens in the textual actual
world). This finding seems to reflect the first part of my hypothesis 1
formed in section 5.4.1: Fowles seems to make a shift in narrative
focus away from the story events towards the internal possible worlds
of Nicholas-the-character in his revision.
Now let us examine what kinds of semantic concepts have been
significantly over-used, and so to the main focus of Fowless revision.

6.4.2 Significantly over-used semantic concepts:


active internal activities?
Wmatrix comparison shows that twelve semantic concepts have been
significantly over-used in the M2 sampled chapters as compared to
M1. Upon examining the concordance examples of each semantic
category, I found that six out of the twelve key over-used semantic
concepts are related to mental activities or internal cognitive states,
as listed in Table 6.3.

Table 6.3

Key semantic concepts over-used in the M2 sampled chapters

SemTag

M1 Sample
freq.
(%)

M2 Sample
freq.
(%)

N5++

115

(0.18)

230

(0.28)

15.40

Quantities

A5.2+

70

(0.11)

151

(0.18)

13.36

Evaluation: -Truth/false

A5.1++

15

(0.02)

51

(0.06)

12.66

Evaluation: -Good/bad

Z7

100

(0.16)

195

(0.24)

11.75

If

A7

45

(0.07)

93

(0.11)

7.07

Unlikely

384

(0.60)

588

(0.71)

6.94

Knowledge

X2.2+

LL

Semantic category

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

131

Referring to the USAS tagset, the six semantic categories are defined
as below (+ or after the tag is used to indicate a positive or
negative position on the relevant semantic scale), along with the
over-used words in each semantic category listed in descending
frequency in the M2 sample:
z

N5++

A5.2+

A5.1++

Z7

A7

X2.2+

terms depicting quantities


more, also, as well, too, further, extra, additional, outnumbered,
in addition . . .
evaluative terms depicting truth (Evaluation:-True/false)
truth, true, proof, fact, evidence, in fact, truly, prove, proved,
honest . . .
evaluative terms depicting quality (Evaluation:-Good/
bad)
better, greater, superior, consummately
conditional terms
if, even if, as long as
unlikely
hesitated, doubt, impossible, doubts, uncertain, doubtfully, in
limbo, wavered . . .
terms relating to (level) of knowledge/perception/
retrospection
know, knew, remembered, known, remember, knowing, aware . . .

The fact that half of the key over-used semantic concepts are related
to psychological actions and states is significant itself. It indicates an
important tendency in Fowless revision of The Magus. If we examine
the concordance examples in detail, we can also see some recurring
collocational patterns in the six semantic categories. That is, the
linguistic features denoting Nicholass psychological viewpoint (cf.
section 6.3) are made more prominent in the texts, which engage
the readers attention to Nicholass online thought process and his
internal world. The six key semantic categories and the recurring
semantic patterns will be discussed in more detail in sections 6.4.2.1
6.4.2.3, under three subheadings: (1) comparison and evaluation;
(2) hypothesis and inference and (3) (un)certainty.

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6.4.2.1 Comparison and evaluation: N5++ (more) and A5.1++ (better)


In the semantic field N5++ (terms depicting quantities), more is the
most frequently over-used word, followed with also and as well. In the
semantic field A5.1++ (evaluative terms depicting quality, good or
bad), better and greater are most frequently over-used. Concordance
6.3 shows some examples of their occurrences in the M2 sample, with
other co-occurring affective and evidential stance markers which
indicate Nicholass personal attitudes and opinions towards the
expressed information highlighted in boldface.

Concordance 6.3 M2 Examples of the semantic fields Quantities and Evaluation:Good/bad

If we scan the lines, the impression we will have is that Nicholas is


always drawing a comparison or making a judgement about what he
sees/hears and how he feels (e.g. it seemed much more like a piece of
gratuitous cruelty; this was more than another nasty twist; The closer

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

133

I got, the more nefarious I felt, and the more nefarious I became). He is
also constantly evaluating his situation and how he could deal with
Conchis et al. (e.g. I had better believe him now; the faster I set things
in motion, the better).
If we examine further how the most frequently over-used words more
and better are used in the M2 sample corpus, we get the following results:
z

Frequent 3-word clusters of more:


more and more; more interested in; once more I; a lot more; a little more; a
much more; far more than; no more than.
Frequent 2-word clusters of better:
better than, the better, be better, much better, something better, was better.

As Hunston and Thompson (2003: 21) point out, drawing a comparison


always indicates a persons evaluative attitudes towards the entities or
propositions that the person is talking about. The comparative usage
of more and better itself conveys Nicholass strong subjective evaluative
attitude. His psychological viewpoint is made even more prominent
by the other co-selected lexical items conveying intense affective and
evidential stance features. Here is the pattern of co-occurrences in
the concordance examples of more and better:
Affective (evaluative) expressions and words denoting perceptions/
cognitions: felt, not going to stand, impressed, this futile doubletalk, his
perverse way, feel, nefarious, nasty twist, profoundly perverted, awe, angry,
an anger of impatience, an anger of fear, on tenterhooks, hopelessly, fear, a
sharp paranoia, flagrantly odd
Evidential expressions indicating certainty/doubt: convinced, seemed,
perhaps, convincing, as if, certain, doubts, suspicions, belief, apparently, obviously, incapable of understanding, increasingly strong possibility, not sure
Hedges: something, somewhere
Emphatics: far more, no more, much more, at all, so + adj., even
Modal verbs indicating possibility/prediction: could, might, would
Other linguistic indicators:
proximal deictic expressions: this, now
graphological device: ellipsis (. . .) indicating on-line thought process
scare quotes in reference (explanations) indicating Nicholass doubt

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The significant over-use of more and better as comparators in Nicholass


narration in the M2 sample seems to indicate that in M2 he evaluates
more frequently the things happening in Conchiss domain. Most
of the co-occurring lexical items reveal negative and unpleasant
feelings and attitudes, which indicate Nicholas-the-characters
subjective viewpoint.

6.4.2.2 Hypothesis and inference: Z7 (if) and X2.2+ (KNOW)


Section 6.4.2.1 shows that Nicholas makes evaluative judgements or
comparisons concerning the expressed information more frequently
in the M2 sample. In this section, through examining the over-use of
the semantic fields Z7 (conditional terms) and X2.2+ (terms relating
to knowledge in particular), we will see that Nicholas also tends to
make conditional or hypothetical remarks or make factual claims
based on inferences from what he sees/hears. Some of the factual
claims he makes turn out to be untrue later in the novel.
In the semantic field Z7, if, including as if and even if, are most
frequently over-used. In the semantic field X2.2+, know and its other
inflectional word-forms (hereafter referred to as KNOW in capital)
are the most frequently over-used lexical items. Concordance 6.4
shows some examples of their occurrences in the M2 sample. Again,
the co-occurring affective and evidential stance markers which indicate Nicholass psychological viewpoint are highlighted in boldface.

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

Concordance 6.4

135

M2 Examples of the semantic fields If and Knowledge

As we can see from the concordance examples, most of the factual


claims that Nicholas makes about the world he inhabits are based on
his inferences from what he sees/hears, and his statements are
coloured with different degrees of uncertainty. Take, the following
sentences, for example:
if she really was Conchiss mistress, I couldnt imagine why he should
allow it, and so obviously leave us alone together, unless he was much
more profoundly perverted than I could bring myself seriously to suspect;
There was something strange in his look, as if he would like to tell
me something, but couldnt;
I knew she must be totally innocent of this new trap;
I knew he could be bluffing.
The modalities (couldnt, must, could) indicate different degrees of (un)
certainty about the factual claims he makes. The evasive statement
(something, as if) as well as the emphatic and evaluative expressions
(really, so obviously, much more profoundly perverted) reveal the intensity of
his emotions with regard to the strong sense of uncertainty.
At one point in the novel, Conchis tells Nicholas explicitly about
the meta-theatre he is implementing: The disadvantage of our new

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drama is that in your role you do not know what you can believe
and what you cannot (M1, chapter 54: 401; M2, chapter 54: 435).
Conchiss remark summarizes Nicholass stumbling journey to
self-knowledge. Each line of his attempt to demystify the unusual
incidents leads to a false understanding or a dead end, because he
cannot know for sure whether Conchis et al. have told him the truth
or not. Hence, throughout the novel, Nicholas is constantly struggling with what he knows and what he does not. It is this aspect
of changing factivity which foregrounds the detective story plot style
and helps to emphasize Nicholass changing psychological state as he
reacts to changes in his assumptions about the world he is struggling
to understand.
The detective story pattern is the same in both editions. However,
in the M2 version, Nicholass emotive inferential reasoning process is
made more prominent by the over-use of the semantic fields Z7
(conditional terms) and X2.2+ (terms relating to knowledge), and by
the repeated co-occurrences of the linguistic features denoting his
internal feelings and personal attitudes in Concordance 6.4 and
other unlisted examples:
Affective expressions and words denoting perceptions/cognitions:
truly unpleasant, felt less battered, thinking desperately, profoundly relieved,
felt guilty, entranced, unusual, very frightened, fear, terror, despair, shock
Evidential expressions indicating certainty/doubt: seemed, supposed,
surely, probably, as if, in fact, something strange, felt certain, guess, doubt,
genuinely, incredulous, suspected, would not wash, doubting, bluffing
Hedges: some, something, in some way, someone, in a way, some sort of, in
a odd way, somehow, in some intuitive way
Emphatics: really, only, so + adv., too far, at all, almost, too, very, far more
Modal verbs indicating possibility/prediction: couldnt, could, must
be, might, would, must
Other linguistic indicators:
proximal deictic expressions: this, now
graphological device: ellipsis (. . .) indicating on-line thought process
The frequent occurrence of affective and evidential stance markers,
emphatics, hedges and modalities reflects the emotional intensity

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

137

and strong sense of (un)certainty on the part of Nicholas-thecharacter in M2.

6.4.2.3 (Un)certainty: A7- (hesitated, doubt) and A5.2+ (truth)


In section 6.4.2.2, I have illustrated that the over-use of if and KNOW
makes Nicholass hypothetical and inferential speculations more
prominent in the M2 texts. In this section, I will show that the over-use
of the other two semantic categories, A7 and A5.2+, in the M2 sample underlines the trend I have just observed.
Semantic field A7 includes terms that semantically depict
unlikely; in this field, hesitated and doubt are the most frequently
over-used terms. Semantic field A5.2+ includes evaluative terms
depicting truth, for example, truth, true, proof, fact, evidence, truly,
honest, and so on. Concordance 6.5 shows the examples of the overused lexical items from these two semantic categories in M2.

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Concordance 6.5
True/false

M2 Examples of the semantic fields Unlikely and Evaluation:-

Again, in the concordance examples, we can see the repeated pattern


of co-occurrences of the lexical items denoting Nicholass (un)certainty while reckoning what he can believe and what he cannot, as
well as lexical items revealing his strong emotions:
Affective expressions and words denoting perceptions/cognitions:
detected, feel, see, know, knew, thought, jealousy, torn, shock, incomprehension,
sensed, puzzled, drowned in a sea of mistrust, ludicrously, dreadful . . .
Evidential expressions indicating certainty/doubt: actually, doubt, suspicions, hesitated, uncertainty, truly, disbelieve, supposed, could not trust,
perhaps, as if, seemed, apparently, evidently, obvious, could not be true,
Hedges: some, something, somehow, a sort of, in a way,
Emphatics: almost, just, so + adv.
Modal verbs indicating possibility/prediction: would, could, couldnt,
must
Other linguistic indicators:
proximal deictic expressions: here, now, this
graphological devices: scare quotes in references (experiment,
bait, theatre) indicating Nicholass epistemic uncertainty.
Throughout his quest, Nicholas is constantly immersed in a feeling
or state of uncertainty, especially as to whether Lily/Julie is sincere
and trustworthy, and whether Conchiss statements about Lily/Julie
are true or not. Consider the following examples:
I couldnt doubt the physical proof Julie had given me that she was
to be emotionally trusted;
I could feel our doubts and suspicions mounting once more;

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

139

I felt a new prick of jealousy, and a deeper one of uncertainty I truly


began to feel now that I was discarded, a mere encumbrance . . . and
a fool;
I could not absolutely disbelieve Conchis; all he said could just be
true.
Even though Nicholas states that he could not doubt that Lily/Julie
is emotionally trustworthy, the negation itself subtly reveals his doubt
in relation to the possibility that she might not be reliable because
the possibility is presupposed in the negative construction (cf. Hardy
2003; Hidalgo-Downing 2000). As shown in the above sentences (and
other textual examples in Concordance 6.5), although the lexical
items depicting truth (e.g. proof, truly, true) are significantly over-used,
they are not used to convey Nicholass certainty about that truth.
Instead, Nicholass sense of uncertainty and doubtfulness is more
prominently conveyed through the non-factive hedges (e.g. somehow,
perhaps) or modal verbs (e.g. might, could).
Table 6.4 presents further quantification of the key over-used
semantic tags, that is, their occurrences in characters speech and
in Nicholass narration. The quantitative result shows more specifically that large proportion of these over-used semantic items,
especially A7- (terms depicting uncertainty), occurs in Nicholass
narration.

Table 6.4
chapters

Distribution of the over-used semantic concepts in the M2 sampled

SemTag (sample words)

Frequency in
M2 Samples

In speech

In narration

(more)

230

86 (37%)

144 (63%)

A5.1++ (better)

51

24 (47%)

27 (53%)

N5++

Z7

(if)

195

116 (59%)

79 (41%)

X2.2+

(KNOW)

405

224 (55%)

181 (45%)

A7

(hesitated, doubt)

93

7 (8%)

86 (92%)

A5.2+

(truth)

151

79 (52%)

72 (48%)

}
}
}

Comparison and
evaluation
hypothesis and
inference
(un)certainty

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Through the repeated patterns shown in the concordance examples,


we see how these over-used semantic concepts create a highly emotive,
speculative, uncertain and rather unpleasant discourse prosody in Nicholass narration in M2, as compared to M1. This change accordingly
makes Nicholass internal psychological states during his quest for
self-knowledge more obvious to the reader of the M2 version. The
byproduct of the changing lexical semantic patterns is that Nicholas in
M2 seems to become more rational, observant and contemplative, as
the revised text is full of his thoughts, conjectures and deliberations.

6.5 Summary and implications


To sum up, Wmatrix has helped me locate significant linguistic
differences between the two editions of The Magus at the word level,
at the POS level and at the semantic level. Following Stubbss (2002)
corpus semantics approach, I focused the comparative analysis on the
linguistic differences at the semantic level to see the key concept difference between the two editions. So far I have explored why linguistic
items denoting movement are significantly under-used in the M2
sample and suggested the possible implications of this change (in
section 6.4.1). I have also examined the significantly over-used
semantic categories in the M2 sample (in section 6.4.2). As I pointed
out earlier, the fact that six out of the twelve key over-used semantic
concepts in the revision are related to psychological actions and states
is indicative itself. The further examination of the concordance
examples from the six semantic categories also shows a recurring
co-occurrence of linguistic features denoting Nicholass psychological viewpoint. The discussion in both sections demonstrates an
important tendency in Fowless revision of The Magus: the narrative
in the M2 version does not focus on the story actions/events but on
the (re)presentation of Nicholass internal possible worlds.
Overall, the corpus evidence demonstrates the changing lexical
semantic patterns in Fowless revision. I will now illustrate the generalized patterns I have uncovered through Wmatrix, by exploring how
they are reflected in a particular excerpt from M2 and its equivalent
in M1. The extracts to be compared are taken from chapter 37. At this
point, Conchis has told Nicholas that he and Lily/Julie will be away

Comparing Lexical Semantic Patterns

141

for the next weekend and suggests that he accepts Alisons invitation
to join her in Athens for a holiday. Nicholas is annoyed by the fact
that Conchis has halted the masque so abruptly. Below I place the
extracts from the two editions side by side for ease of comparison.
The words with a line drawn through indicate the parts that have
been deleted, and so do not appear in the M2 version; the words in
boldface in the M2 extract indicate the added texts that do not appear
in the original. The words underlined indicate the linguistic markers
of Nicholass mental activities or psychological states in each
edition.
(M1, chapter 37: 230)

(M2, chapter 37: 244)

(1a) I sat for half an hour in the


darkness under the colonnade;

(1b) I sat brooding for half an hour in the twilight


under the colonnade. (2b) I felt both exploited
and excluded, and as much angry with myself as
with them. (3b) I was mad to have got involved
in the whole business, and even madder both to
want it to go on and be frightened of its going
on. (4b) I had changed my mind once again in
those intervening days. (5b) More and more I
no longer knew about the schizophrenia; from
faintly possible it began to grow probable.
(6b) I could not imagine why else he should
have halted the masque so abruptly. (7b) If it
had been only an amusement . . .
(8b) I supposed there was a large component of
and thought, among other things, of
envy too I thought of Conchiss foolishness,
Conchiss foolishness in leaving the
or arrogance, in leaving the Modigliani and the
Modigliani and Bonnards like that, in Bonnards like that, in a deserted house . . .
such a deserted house. (2a) My mind and from those Bonnards, my mind grasshoptraveled up to the Bonnards, and
pered to Alison.
grasshoppered from them to Alison.

In the M1 version, there are not many affective expressions which


show Nicholass annoyance. His emotional disturbance can be
inferred by the fact that he sits in the darkness for half an hour
[thinking] of Conchiss foolishness of leaving the house and his
properties deserted like that.
Notice, in the M2 extract, sentences (2b)(8b) are added and the
extra text-length is mainly to do with Nicholass internal world. As we
can see, the revised text is marked with (underlined) affective expressions and words denoting his internal cognitions: e.g. brooding; felt both

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exploited and excluded; angry with myself; I was mad; even madder; frightened; changed my mind; supposed; a large component of envy; grasshoppered.
Ellipsis (. . .) is used twice, which also indicates Nicholass on-line
thought process. There are also non-factive evidential expressions (no
longer knew; could not imagine) and emphatic expressions (as much . . .
as; so abruptly). These changes altogether expose Nicholass uncertainty/doubt and his emotions more explicitly to the reader. The M2
extract well illustrates the generalized patterns in Fowless revision
that I have uncovered in this chapter.
Given that the M2 version makes Nicholas-the-characters subjective
psychological viewpoint and his online speculative inferential process more prominent, it foregrounds his struggle to comprehend the
factuality of his experience. As a consequence, readers are exposed
more overtly to his alternative possible worlds (cf. McIntyre 2006;
Ryan 1991). We perceive the textual actual world, in Ryans terms,
indirectly through its reflection in Nicholass subjective world.
We are thus challenged to make sense of what happens in the actual
domain of the fictional world. The more prominent epistemic
uncertainty and reflections in M2 lend the story more postmodern
literary qualities. We may assume that, consequently, the M2 readers
are pushed towards an additional level of text processing, to reflect
on the reality which Conchis/Fowles creates in the fictional world,
as compared to the more straightforward and story-driven narrative
like M1. I will come back to this point in Chapter Eight.

Chapter Seven

Comparing figurative patterns and density


testing hypothesis 2

In Chapter Five, through a qualitative comparison of some pairs of


extracts, I argued that in the revision Fowles tends to use more sophisticated figurative language (e.g. similes and metaphors) to represent
what happens in the fictional world in general, and how Nicholas thinks
or feels as he goes through the bizarre experiences in particular. The
tendency toward using more figurative expressions in the M2 revision
is what I would like to examine in more detail in this chapter.
Section 7.1 first briefly introduces WordSmith Tools, the fourth
corpus technique applied in this research. Section 7.2 reviews two
forms of figurative language, simile and metaphor, given that they
are the major figures of speech that Fowles uses in his revision.
In section 7.3, I compare a pair of equivalent extracts from the two
editions, and examine the extra similes and metaphors used in the
M2 extract. In order to see whether the qualitative analytical result
can be confirmed quantitatively, I thus conduct a corpus comparison.
To this end, a brief review of the corpus research into figurative
language is given in section 7.4, including the discussion of some
methodological issues in relation to such comparison. The figurative
density and patterns of the similes and metaphors used in Part II of
the two editions of The Magus are then compared in sections 7.5 and
7.6. I start by comparing the relative frequency of the similes and
discuss the figurative patterns shown in the additional similes in the
M2 revision. The observation of the simile concordance examples
helps me:
(1) to note the overall configuration of three conceptual mappings
Fowles uses in The Magus and reinforces in the second edition,

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namely, life is a purposeful journey (i.e. a learning process1),


life is a play, and life is a game;
(2) to identify a set of vocabulary items related to these source
domains, and retrieve from Part II of both editions yet more
metaphorical expressions which are not introduced through the
form of simile but nonetheless instantiate these three mappings.
All of the retrieved figurative examples, both similes and metaphors,
are listed in Appendix E. The figurative data will then be compared
and analysed stylistically in section 7.7. I first focus on the metaphorical expressions that appear in M1 and remain unchanged in M2, to
see the ORIGINAL metaphorical patterns Fowles preserves in both
editions of The Magus. I then deal with the metaphorical expressions
that appear in the M2 version only, to see what kinds of changes Fowles
has made in his revision. A summary and discussion of the findings
follows in section 7.8.

7.1 Corpus tool 4: WordSmith


The WordSmith Tools is lexical analysis software.2 It is an integrated
suite of programs for looking at how words behave in texts. WordList
provides a list of all the words or word-clusters in a text, sorted in
alphabetical or frequency order. With KeyWords we can find the key
words in a text as compared to other texts. Concord allows us to see
any searched word or phrase in context.
Among the three programs, Concord is the one that I use to retrieve
metaphorical examples from the two versions of The Magus. After
specifying a search word (e.g. simile connective or source domain
vocabulary), Concord will seek in all of the chosen text files and then
present a concordance display which gives us access to information
about collocates of the search word. Sometimes it is hard to see overall trends in the concordance lines. By sorting them we may find it
easier to observe characteristic patterns. For example, in my study,
after searching through the M1 Part II and M2 Part II of The Magus
Corpus, sorting by R1 and R2 (the first and the second word to the
right of the search word) makes the pattern much clearer, that is,
identical entries in both editions or entries that appear only in one
edition, as shown in Figure 7.1.

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

Figure 7.1

145

A screenshot of the Concord program

Repeated concordance lines indicate the textual examples appear in


both M1 and M2. Consequently, it is easier to identify the actual textual difference (e.g. entry 185 in m1part2 and entry 188 in m2part2
shown in the figure).

7.2 Figurative language overview: simile and metaphor


Figurative language can occur in many forms. The most common
forms usually include allegory, metaphor, metonymy and oxymoron,
synecdoche, hyperbole, idiom, conceit, simile, irony, personification
and so on. My comparison concentrates on simile and metaphor for
the following reasons. First, a complete study of all the above figures
of speech displayed in The Magus is beyond the scope of the book,
and these two forms have received the greatest amount of attention
from scholars and are stylistically intertwined. Secondly, the textual
comparison I conducted elsewhere in the book, and the pair of
extracts to be examined in section 7.3 below, all demonstrate that
metaphor and (non-literal uses of) simile are major tropes which
Fowles uses to represent Nicholass experiences and emotions figuratively in M2. Thirdly, and most importantly, simile and metaphor in
all their various linguistic realizations involve the power of abstract
reasoning and the power of evaluating events or people, as Lakoff
and Turner (1989) suggest. The conceptual organizing power of
metaphorical language may help to explain the increased number
of similes/metaphors in The Magus revision. That is, the literary
devices help Fowles to highlight Nicholass internal struggle as he

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tries to understand Conchiss abstract motive, something which is


difficult, if not impossible, to portray using literal language.
Later in this chapter, I will demonstrate that simile and metaphor
are not only powerful tools for Nicholas in conceptualizing and
reasoning out his bizarre experiences during his journey to selfrealization (an overarching metaphor in The Magus). They are also
important devices for Fowles to revamp the motif of the novel in an
overt allegorical manner. Now, I shall briefly review the definition of
simile and metaphor, to prepare the ground for further analysis of
the figurative language in the two editions of The Magus.

7.2.1 Simile
Most scholars see similes as statements performing overt comparisons.
Miller (1993: 373) emphasizes that simile is a figure of speech in
which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase
introduced by like or as. The focus on the unlike aspect makes similes different from other similarity statements. Ortony (1993a: 348)
refers to ordinary similarity statements as being literal comparisons
and similes as being nonliteral comparisons (cf. Ortonys discussion
of the two sentences Encyclopedias are like dictionaries and Encyclopedias
are like gold-mines).
If we agree that simile involves non-literal comparison, simile and
metaphor are closely linked, although there is much controversy as
to the precise way they are related (see Glucksberg and Keysar 1993;
Ortony 1993a; Partington 2006; Thomas 1969). Thomas defines
simile as a restricted metaphor which says A is like B (1969: 48).
If a metaphorical statement serves the function of transferring and
ascribing the features of the source domain to the target domain, the
simile statement A is like B ascribes only certain, often unspecified,
features of B to A. That is, not all the features of the source domain
are to be assigned to the target domain, and the selection of features
is generally left to the reader (Thomas 1969: 42).
In terms of effects, Miller (1993) sees simile as relating very closely
to metaphor. It can link together two domains of knowledge or
experience in original and revealing ways, and what makes a simile
striking is an authors sensitivity to previously unnoticed resemblances.

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

147

In such cases, finding grounds for the comparison may be a nontrivial task for the reader, as Thomas (1969) also suggests. Therefore,
Miller (1993: 375) argues that similes are less interesting than
metaphors only in that the signals of the similitude (e.g. as, like) are
explicit; nonetheless, it is still important to recognize the potential
interpretative power and problems similes can pose.

7.2.2 Metaphor
In classical theory, metaphor was typically viewed as a characteristic of
language alone, a matter of words, rather than thought. Metaphorical
expressions were assumed to be devices found only in literary works,
not in everyday language. Over the past decades, however, it has been
shown that metaphor is prevalent in all language, and research on
metaphor has been dominated by the exploration of the relationship
between language and thought (e.g. Gibbs 1994; Ortony 1993b;
Sperber and Wilson 1995). In particular, the study of the conceptual
framework of metaphor has been at the core of the research programme now known as cognitive metaphor theory, a ground-breaking
development that was prompted by Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Turner (1989) and others.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) redefine metaphor as a cross-domain
mental mapping between two concepts which enables us to interpret
the one in terms of the other, normally to interpret abstract concepts
in terms of familiar, everyday cognitive experiences. The conceptual
mappings apply not just to novel poetic expressions, but to much
of ordinary everyday language. In brief, metaphor is both language
and thought.
Cognitive metaphor theory draws an important distinction between
metaphorical concepts and linguistic metaphorical expressions. As Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) argue, metaphor, as a phenomenon, involves
both conceptual mappings and individual linguistic realizations.
They use the term metaphor to refer to the conceptual mapping,
and the term metaphorical expression to refer to an individual
linguistic expression (a word, phrase or sentence) instantiating
these mappings (see Lakoff 1993: for a substantial overview of the
contemporary theory of metaphor).

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To mark the difference, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) first adopt a strategy for naming such conceptual mappings. They are conventionally
represented in small capitals and expressed in the form target
domain is/as source domain (e.g. life is a journey), which can
be realized in various linguistic expressions (e.g. you are far from
your true self, as indicated by Conchis for Nicholass journey to
self-realization). This convention will be followed throughout the
following sections of this chapter. I will show how Fowles uses
the three major metaphors (journey, play, game) to represent
Nicholass life experiences in The Magus original, and further elaborates in his revision the educational purpose of the journey, as well
as Nicholass psychological process of understanding the events
through more frequent and extended metaphorical expressions
drawn from these source domains.

7.2.3 The functions of simile/metaphor


This section summarizes two major functions of metaphorical language,
(i) abstract reasoning, and (ii) evaluation and emotive communication, as
they are highly related to the changes in The Magus revision.
(i) The power of abstract reasoning
It has been suggested theoretically that natural languages in their
initial stages only involved the literal use of words, which had a bearing
on concrete or perceptible things, qualities, occurrences and so on.
Afterwards, the need to speak about abstract ideas would have arisen,
which need would have been met especially by metaphors. Hence, it
is generally agreed that one of the major functions of metaphorical
language is to conceptualize abstractions. Metaphors are necessary
for casting abstract concepts in terms of the apprehensible (see
Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Mooij 1976; Thomas 1969).
For example, Thomas declares that metaphor has the primary goal
of characterizing abstract qualities by presenting them in terms of
concrete linguistic features (1969: 312). In Mooijs terms, metaphors
enable us to assimilate, in the light of the familiar, what was hitherto
unknown, undigested or unnamed (1976: 1617). Lakoff also states

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

149

that Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend


abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning (1993: 244).
(ii) The power of evaluation and emotive communication
Scholars have long argued about the sense in which metaphorical
expressions can be said to be true or false (e.g. Black 1993; Fraser
1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; MacCormac 1985; Partington 2006;
Searle 1993). Most claim that this is not a real issue. Fraser (1993),
for example, discusses this point in terms of a speakers communicative intention. To speak literally is to intend to convey the literal
meaning of the sentence uttered, to mean what one says. On the
other hand, to speak figuratively is to intend to convey not the literal
meaning of the sentence uttered, but some different meaning
which is related in some way to the literal meaning. Hence, as Fraser
claims, if we define metaphors as the intended non-literal use of
language on the part of speaker/writer, it should be clear that the
truth or falsity of a metaphorical expression is irrelevant to the
subject at issue.
Black (1993) makes a similar point. As he states, when a person
makes a metaphorical statement, it is reasonable to claim that he
meant just what he said, having chosen the words most apt to express
his thought, attitudes, and feelings (Black 1993: 22, emphasis mine).
Searle (1993: 97) notes that metaphors and similes are generally
hyperbolic, implicitly recognizing a function of emphatic evaluation
beyond simple descriptive comparison.
Since metaphor is generally evaluative in function, the view that
metaphor may also appeal to a positive or negative emotive value
cannot reasonably be doubted either (Mooij 1976: 134; Partington
2006: 297; cf. also Kvecses 2000). Mooij claims that emotive connotation is an important facet of the meaning of most metaphors:
thanks to metaphors, we are able to give utterance to ideas or
feelings which we otherwise could not have expressed at all (or far
less efficiently) (1976: 16). For the same reason, Ritchie proposes
a modified version of the conceptual metaphor approach, and
considers metaphors as mapping of associated cognitive responses
(2003: 1413). As he states, metaphors evoke a set of responses

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(emotions, social relationships, cultural and physical expectations,


and so on) that may be associated primarily with the vehicle, or may
be uniquely evoked by the combination of vehicle and topic.
With recourse to corpus evidence, some scholars have confirmed
that metaphorical expressions, whatever they communicate, are indeed
highly evaluative and emotive in function (e.g. Charteris-Black 2004;
Partington 2006; Semino 2002). Partingtons (2006) data demonstrate that non-literal statements are generally used to convey a point
of view, to express over and above a statement of similarity
opinions, claims or personal arguments. Based on the cognitive
theory of metaphor, Semino (2002) points out a more subtle
difference in metaphorical language in use. By comparing the
metaphorical representations of the euro in British and Italian
newspapers published around the time of the euros official launch,
her analysis demonstrates that the more conventional realizations
of conceptual metaphor express the most basic ways in which the
euro is conceptualized; creative metaphorical expressions tend to
be exploited rhetorically to support particular (positive or negative)
views of monetary union, or to express particular opinions in emotive
and persuasive terms.
In my comparative study, I consider these two functions are particularly relevant to explaining the changes in The Magus revision. In
Chapter Six, the corpus evidence has confirmed my first hypothesis
concerning the revision: the narrative focus of The Magus seems to
have shifted from story/events in M1 to Nicholass internal possible
worlds in M2. That is, Nicholass emotive, hypothetical and inferential
reasoning process is made more prominent in the M2 version (see
section 6.4.2). Assuming that metaphor/simile is a powerful tool for
abstract reasoning and emotive communication, it is reasonable
to claim that Fowless emphasis on Nicholass internal inferential
speculation, inevitably, increases the use of figurative language in
his revision, since it is an inexpressible and bizarre life experience
that Nicholas is struggling to comprehend. To put it simply, the
emphasis on presenting the characters internal struggle in Fowless
revision seems to be a contributory factor in another important
revisionary tendency, that is, the more frequent, and possibly more
creative, use of metaphors in the M2 edition.

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151

Next, before conducting a corpus comparison to test this hypothesis,


I will first illustrate this point by qualitatively comparing a pair of
extracts from both editions for a start.

7.3 Comparing figurative language in an


extract-pair from M1 and M2
The extracts to be compared are taken from chapter 50 of The Magus.
At this point, Conchis sends Nicholas a letter and announces that
the game is over and he will never see Lily/Julie again. Nicholas
refuses to believe this. He goes to Bourani, searches all over for the
twin sisters, and finds nothing. We are told in the narration that he
faces an empty theatre. He feels defeated and extremely frustrated.
In the middle of his search, he sees a jumping spider, which reminds
him of Conchiss witchcraft, his haunting, brooding omnipresence
(analogous to a spiders web in the novel). In the M1 version,
Nicholas expresses his anger and frustration by flicking the spider to
the ground:
Example 1 (M1, chapter 50: 352)
(1a) I flicked the spider on to the ground and looked up towards
the distant central ridge. (2a) I was sure there were no buildings
between it and where I was; that left only one alternative. (3a)
Where they waited was somewhere in the pine forest; and why not?
(4a) They might put up tents, a kind of ad hoc camp, as needed; so
that I was looking, that afternoon, for nothing.
In Example 1, three of Nicholass actions are described: he flicked
the spider, looked up and was looking, that afternoon, for
nothing. In his free indirect thought from (2a) to the first clause
of (4a), the only explicit expression that shows his cognitive state is
I was sure . . .. How Nicholas feels exactly about facing the empty
theatre needs to be inferred by the reader from his act of flicking
away the spider (a personification of Conchis) to the ground.
Example 1 is replaced by Example 2 in the M2 edition. These two
extracts are clearly meant to be equivalent as they occur at the same
point in the novel, with the preceding and subsequent narration

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unchanged; nonetheless, the content of what is referred to changes


fairly dramatically. In the M2 version, the description of Nicholas
flicking away the spider and the reference to the buildings and tents
are deleted. His internal world is exposed more obviously to the
reader through the recurring semantically-related lexical items in his
free indirect thought. In Example 2, the linguistic indicators of Nicholas-the-characters online inferential speculation, internal emotions
and cognitive states are marked in boldface. Another salient feature,
that is, the figurative language that Nicholas uses to conceptualize his
abstract feelings, is marked in italics. Expressions sharing both features carry both marking styles.
Example 2 (M2, chapter 50: 386)
(1b) What really defeated me was this proof that I was not indispensable. (2b) I had assumed the experiment needed my presence
above all; but perhaps it didnt, and I had been a mere side-plot,
discarded as soon as I had tried to gain too much prominence. (3b) What
riled me most was to find myself apparently in the same category as
Mitford, and for no clear reason at all. (4b) I felt fear as well, a
sharp paranoia. (5b) Although he might have found some lie to tell
the girls, some reason for my not being able to come that week-end,
there remained the possibility that they were all three deceiving
me. (6b) But how could I believe that now? (7b) All those kisses,
franknesses, caresses, that token coupling in the night water . . . no
girl could pretend to want and to enjoy such things unless she was
a prostitute. (8b) It was unthinkable. (9b) Perhaps the clue lay in
dispensability. (10b) I was being taught some obscure metaphysical
lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of
the egocentric view. (11b) But it seemed much more like a piece
of gratuitous cruelty, closer to tormenting dumb animals than any true
teaching. (12b) I was drowned in a sea of mistrust not only of outward
appearances but of deeper motives as well. (13b) For weeks I had had
a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self or the
linked structures of ideas and conscious feeling that constitute self; and
now it was like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer
gone . . . and not being quite sure how one put oneself together again.

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

153

As compared with the M1 extract in Example 1, the replaced passage


in M2 is much longer and more material is introduced. The M2 version
shows two prominent linguistic phenomena: (a) it is highly affective
(emotive and evaluative) and (b) it is more figurative and abstract in
its presentation (or representation) of Nicholass experience.
First, the M2 extract demonstrates again (cf. section 6.4.2) that in
his revision Fowles consistently opts for readily observable depictions
of Nicholass emotional intensity, as shown in the descriptive3 emotion words like defeated, riled, fear, paranoia and so on. How Nicholas
feels about his experience is revealed more obviously, if not explicitly,
via his overt emotive inferential speculation in the M2 version, as we
can see from the marked affective and evidential linguistic items
below (cf. Biber and Finegans 1989 list of stance markers discussed
in section 6.3) and other linguistic indicators:
Affective expressions and words denoting perceptions/cognitions:
what really defeated me; what riled me most; I felt fear, a sharp paranoia;
gratuitous cruelty; tormenting dumb animals; I was drowned in a sea of
mistrust; I had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous
self; it was like lying on the workshop bench . . .
Evidential expressions indicating certainty/doubt: perhaps, apparently, possibility, unthinkable, some obscure metaphorical lesson, seemed,
not being quite sure
Hedges: some
Emphatics: really, mere, most, at all, much more,
Modal verbs indicating possibility/prediction: might, could
Other linguistic indicators:
proximal deictic expressions related to the event time this, now;
graphological devices informal use of contraction (didnt);
scare quotes in reference to experiment indicating epistemic
uncertainty;
ellipsis (. . .) and Free Indirect Thought (But how could I believe that
now?) indicating on-line thought process.
Secondly, the M2 extract demonstrates that Nicholass emotional
experience is largely expressed in terms of metaphors or similes.

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Consider sentences (2b), (3b), and (10b)(13b) in particular. The


metaphorical expressions and their conceptual mappings in the
sentences are listed in Table 7.1.
Note: the extrapolation of the underlying conceptual metaphor in
each linguistic expression is based on the intuitive understanding
of the local and global context of The Magus. In the reference to
experiment in (2b), the quotation marks may also be seen as a
device to mark off a metaphor from the literal language around it
(Goatly 1997: 189); namely, to signal the presence of metaphorical
expressions.
Table 7.1

Metaphors in an extract from M2 chapter 50

Metaphorical expressions

Conceptual mappings

I had been a mere side-plot, tried to gain too much prominence (2b) life is a play
defeated (1b), experiment (2b), discarded (2b)

life is a game

being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson (10b)


true teaching (11b)

life is a learning
process

find myself apparently in the same category as Mitford (3b)


drowned in a sea of mistrust (12b)
like a piece of gratuitous cruelty, tormenting dumb animals (11b)

fear is a captive animal

had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self (13b) person out of control
like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer gone . . .
is a divided self4
and not being quite sure how one put oneself together again (13b)

Here I do not intend to analyse the metaphorical expressions and


associated conceptual mappings shown in this extract, as the main
purpose of this section is to illustrate the contrast in the use of
figurative language between the two versions. The M1 extract
(Example 1) contains only literal presentations of Nicholass actions.
No metaphors are used to express his anger or frustration. His
emotion has to be inferred by the reader from what he does with
the spider. In the replaced extract (Example 2), however, 6 out of
13 sentences contain metaphorical expressions which convey his
negative emotions and internal perceptions. Although Nicholass
emotions are overtly revealed, the M2 extract requires the reader
to perform a different kind of inferential work, that is, processing

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

155

the implications of the metaphors in use (for the discussion of the


overall difference in stylistic effects between the two editions, see
section 8.1).
The tendency of using more figurative expressions in the revised
version of The Magus to represent Nicholass cognitive and emotional
experiences is the second hypothesis that I would like to examine
both quantitatively and qualitatively in sections 7.5 and 7.6. As I will
demonstrate later, the conceptual mappings shown in Table 7.1
reflect the major metaphorical patterns that Fowles intends to
reinforce in The Magus revision. Now I will discuss some methodological issues with regard to the extraction and identification of the
figurative data from The Magus corpus.

7.4 Corpus research into figurative


language comparison
As pointed out in Chapter One, corpus methodology has been
established as a major empirical paradigm in linguistics over the
past 10 to 20 years, as corpora enable researchers to study linguistic
patterns on a large scale. Recently, a number of researchers have
also begun to lay methodological foundations for a strong emphasis
on authentic data and empirical verification of many fascinating
theoretical claims in the field of metaphor research (e.g. Boers
1999; Cameron and Deignan 2003; Charteris-Black 2004; Deignan
1999, 2005; Partington 2003; Semino 2002; Semino et al. 2004;
Stefanowitsch 2006a).
To conduct a corpus-based comparison of figurative language in M1
and M2, my first step was to try to develop an explicit methodology.
This confronted me with three major problems to do with metaphor
extraction and identification: (1) how to extract linguistic metaphors
from the corpus for comparison; more specifically, what particular
linguistic forms to search for metaphor extraction; (2) after data
extraction with the aid of corpus tools, how to distinguish between
the literal and the metaphorical expressions and (3) how to extrapolate and categorize the underlying conceptual metaphors from the
linguistic patterns. These problems are closely intertwined and need
to be disentangled step by step.

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7.4.1 The issue of metaphor extraction


The first problem to be tackled is the extraction of the relevant data
from the corpus. This is a simple task in investigations of similes
or fixed expressions, since they can be retrieved directly. However,
in the case of metaphor, retrieving the relevant data is much more
problematic because:
z

the direction of corpus linguistic research is generally from word


to meaning, as the principal way in which corpora are accessed
is via word forms (more precisely, orthographic strings); but
metaphors generally are not associated with particular word
forms (or particular linguistic items). They can appear in many
syntactic forms, within and beyond phrase, clause and even
sentence(s). There is a degree of apparent arbitrariness in the
linguistic realizations of metaphors. (Deignan 1999: 184)

Given the two constraints, metaphors cannot easily be retrieved


automatically. They can sometimes be uncovered by tracing linguistic
evidence through. It seems not possible to work the other way
round (e.g. to retrieve all linguistic realizations of journey metaphor
automatically), as the computer needs to know which particular
word forms to search for.
Nonetheless, some strategies have been proposed to deal with this
problem: for example, reading through the corpus extracting all
metaphors the researcher comes across (e.g. Semino 2002); searching for sentences containing lexical items from specific source
domain or target domain, or both (e.g. Boers 1999; Deignan 1999;
Hanks 2006; Stefanowitsch 2006b); or using a small corpus as a
starting point for searches in a large corpus (e.g. Cameron and
Deignan 2003).
Each strategy has its problems and limitations. The manual extraction
of metaphors drastically limits the potential size of the corpus because
it is very time-consuming. Searching for lexical items referring directly
to particular source or target domain concepts only identifies a subset of metaphorical expressions, namely those that contain either
source or target domain vocabulary, and it is probably impossible to
list all the source/target domain vocabulary exhaustively. Searching for
sentences containing lexical items from both the source domain and

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

157

the target domain is not perfect either, as this method can only be
used to identify expressions manifesting conceptual mappings that
are known in advance (see Deignan 2005: 924; Stefanowitsch 2006a:
26, for an overview of the problems and strategies of extracting
linguistic expressions manifesting conceptual mappings).
Among the automatic or semi-automatic strategies for extracting
metaphors, manual post-editing is still required in order to remove
false hits (e.g. the literal use of the lexical item in search). However,
as Stefanowitsch (2006a: 4) points out, the above-mentioned disadvantages are counterbalanced by the fact that corpus method allows
fast identification over large amounts of text. Post-editing takes less
time than that required by completely manual identification.

7.4.2 The issue of metaphor identification


Once potential metaphorical linguistic data are extracted with the
aid of corpus tools (e.g. concordancing), post-editing and metaphor
identification from the resulting data is the next step. The major
problems I have to tackle in this stage include: (a) reading through
individual concordance entries and making intuitive decisions
about whether a particular linguistic item is metaphorical or not
and (b) extrapolating and categorizing the underlying conceptual
metaphors from the linguistic patterns.
There is always a debate as to whether it is possible or even meaningful to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical. Probably
the most obvious question is whether and how metaphorical uses of
language can be unambiguously recognized. In spite of the attention
that metaphor has received over the centuries, and more recently
within the cognitive paradigm, we still lack explicit and precise procedures for metaphor identification and analysis, especially when
one looks at authentic data retrieved from corpora rather than decontextualised or made-up examples (for issues concerning metaphor
identification, see Cameron 1999a; Cameron 1999b; Heywood et al.
2002; Semino et al. 2004; Steen 1999a, 1999b).
In addressing this issue, most scholars emphasize that the boundary
between the literal and the metaphorical is fuzzy rather than clear-cut.
It is generally agreed that metaphoricity is a matter of degree, namely,
the distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical language

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

is not polar dichotomy but a cline (a continuum) (e.g. Black 1993;


Fraser 1993; Goatly 1997; Mooij 1976; Partington 2006). Black explicitly states that any search for an infallible criterion of metaphorhood
is doomed to failure, as there is plenty of scope for dubious cases
(1993: 34). A large number of examples may appear to be neither
entirely metaphorical nor wholly non-metaphorical but are either
indeterminate or seem to exist somewhere between the two poles.
To get around the problem of making intuitive decisions about
individual citations, Deignan suggests that: a preliminary definition
of metaphor must be developed before citations can be categorized
in any way, and it is necessary to establish an objective cut-off point
at which dead metaphors can be regarded as non-metaphorical, and
to attempt to implement this consistently (1999: 1934). In my study,
I consider the expressions that can be analysed in terms of a mapping
between two separate domains as metaphorical (see Heywood et al.
2002; Steen 1999a). For example, the sentence Alison had seemed
a pawn to be used, at least one counter-move I could make is considered as one instance of metaphorical expression because it can
be analysed as deriving from a mapping between a domain to do
with chess game (e.g. pawn, counter-move) and a domain to do
with Nicholass social interaction with Conchis. In this expression,
Nicholas conceptualizes Conchis and himself as chess players and
Alison as a piece on the chessboard used to oppose Conchiss
manipulation. For the purposes of quantification, I followed the
practice adopted by Boers (1999) and Semino (2002) and made some
adjustment. I counted a sentence (or in some occasions, several
sentences in close proximity) which contain metaphorically used
words relating to the same source domain as one instance of metaphor in use. Below I will introduce in more detail my methodology
of metaphor extraction and identification from The Magus corpus
for the comparative analysis of the figurative language between the
two editions.

7.4.3 Methodology
Since corpus methodology has been proposed, metaphor researchers have used both small corpora, of a size that can be searched by

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

159

hand, and corpora of many millions of words that can only be


searched by computer. Both types of corpora contain potentially rich
sources of data, but neither is without problems. The main problem
of using a small corpus is that findings may not be generalizable.
Words or metaphorical uses may simply not occur, or occur too
few times to make any generalization possible. Although searching
a large corpus can provide a reasonable quantity of evidence and
generate insights into language use, there are still some drawbacks.
For example, given that the researcher usually begins by searching
for linguistic forms, if a particular from is not identified and searched,
a potential metaphorical use realized by this particular form may be
missed (see Cameron and Deignan 2003: 1501). In order to tackle
the problems of each mode of research, Cameron and Deignan
(2003) propose to combine the analysis of a small corpus with the
examination of concordances from a large corpus. As they demonstrate, reading through the small corpus provides clues to significant
patterns, which can then be used as starting points for searches in the
large corpus for quantitative verification.
Adopting Cameron and Deignans (2003) idea of conducting
research from small to large corpora, I use simile as a starting point, to
find out the patterns of figurative language in The Magus, and then
use the discovered patterns to extract more metaphorical expressions
that are not realized through the form of simile.
In Chapter Six, I examined 22 sample chapters from The Magus
corpus which had undergone drastic revision, to explore repeated
linguistic patterns in Fowless revision and examine their cumulative
effect. In this chapter, given that the focus of research this time is on
figurative language, I extend the search from the sample corpus to
the whole Part II of the novel. This decision is made for the following
concerns:
(1) Although, in quantitative terms, the sampled chapters compiled
in Chapter Six captures almost 99% of the changes in The
Magus corpus (see Table 6.1), we have to take into account that
figurative expressions might occur throughout minimal and
scattered changes in the chapters that have been left out from
the sampling.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

(2) There is also an issue with regard to metaphor frequency.


The general assumption is: Metaphorical uses cannot be too
frequent. Frequency breeds literalness (Hanks 2006: 21; see
also Thomas 1969: 62). If I investigate only the 22 sampled
chapters in Part II, the number of metaphor occurrences may
just be a few, the chance of discovering metaphorical patterns
from limited examples might be slim, and the findings may not
be generalizable either.
(3) Since most of the linguistic changes Fowles has made occur in
Part II of the novel (see Figure 4.5), the investigation will still
focus on the 58 chapters in Part II. The total number of word
tokens in Part II of M1 is 172,221, and in Part II of M2 191,665,
both are within the manageable limit for the post-editing or
manual contextual checking of the retrieved figurative data.
The five-step procedure I undertake for the figurative comparative
research is briefly outlined in Figure 7.2. Detailed methods in each
step will be given at length in subsequent sections.

Compare figurative uses of similes between M1 Part II and M2 Part II


by concordancing the potential simile signals (e.g. as, like)

Examine the concordances of additional similes used in M2 Part II


to observe the extra metaphorical patterns

Identify the source domains vocabulary listed in the simile concordances


for retrieving most of the metaphorical expressions in M1 Part II and M2 Part II

Analyse the original metaphorical patterns


in Part II of The Magus

Analyse the changes in metaphorical language Fowles has made


in Part II of The Magus Revision

Figure 7.2 The process of figurative comparative research in The Magus

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

161

As I will demonstrate later, I start (in the first two steps in section 7.5)
with comparing the frequency of similes in both editions and examine
in particular the metaphorical patterns shown in the additional
similes in The Magus revision. The concordancing of the simile
connectives used in the M2 Part II helps me (in the third step in
section 7.6) to, (a) observe the overall configuration of three conceptual mappings Fowles intends to reinforce in his revision, that is, life
is a purposeful journey (a learning process), life is a play, and
life is a game and (b) identify a set of (journey, education, play,
game) source domains vocabulary and retrieve most, if not all, of the
metaphorical expressions instantiating these mappings in Part II of
both editions. After extracting the metaphors, I then conduct a comparative analysis of the retrieved figurative data (in the last two steps
in section 7.7). I first deal with the metaphorical expressions that
appear in both editions, to see the original metaphorical patterns
Fowles intended to display in The Magus. I then deal with the patterns
of the metaphorical expressions that appear in the M2 version only, to
see what kinds of changes Fowles has made in his revision.

7.5 Simile a starting point


By definition, simile contains an overt lexical sign. I use the Concord
program in WordSmith to conduct a computational search through
Part II of The Magus corpus, looking for potential functional connectives that may be used within a simile: like, as, resemble, similar to, the
same way, seem, impression of/that, unlike (cf. Miller 1993: 371; Partington 2006: 2801; Watson 1997: 215). Lemmas are used in the search
for counting the occurrence frequency (e.g. the lemma seem includes
the forms seem, seems, seemed, seeming, and seemingly).
From this search I arrive at a preliminary list of possible similes in
M1 Part II and M2 Part II. I first identify (and deselect) the entries that
exist in both versions, in order to locate the actual textual differences;
namely, to know what original entries in M1 are deleted and what
entries are added to the M2 revision (cf. Figure 7.1).
Second, considering that none of the lexical signals listed above
necessarily introduce similes, the remaining entries in the list are
contextually checked. I deselect all the entries of non-metaphorical

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

162

use. For example, the word like can be used as a verb, meaning enjoy
or want, and the word as can be used as conjunctions, meaning
because, while or when; they can also be used to perform all
kinds of explicit literal comparisons (cf. Ortony 1993a). Those invalid
entries are all removed from the concordanced list. While quantifying the figurative examples, comparative expressions, for example,
as brutal and unexpected as a slap across the face, are generally
counted as one occurrence of metaphorical use, even though as
appears twice in the statistics.

7.5.1 Results
Following the above methodology, I arrive at the quantitative result
presented in Table 7.2. Apart from as, like and seem, there is not much
statistical difference in the use of the other potential simile connectives listed above, and hence they are not shown in the table.
Table 7.2 shows the raw frequency of the simile signals as, like and
seem in Part II of M1 and M2, the frequency of the identical entries
(i.e. the parts which remain unchanged), and the textual differences
in quantitative terms (i.e. the number of original entries that no

Table 7.2

The distribution of simile usage in Part II of M1 and M2


Textual Differences

simile
signals

Total in Part II of
The Magus

M1

Identical
entries

1169

Textual revision in M2
(deletion & addition)
273

896

as
M2

1308

412

M1

488

104
384

like
M2

558

174

M1

235

55
180

seem*
M2

297

117

Lit.

250

Fig.

23

Lit.

323

Fig.

89

Lit.

70

Fig.

34

Lit.

91

Fig.

83

Lit.

46

Fig.

Lit.

86

Fig.

31

Figurative
density

x3.9

x2.4

x3.4

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

163

longer exist in M2 and the number of entries that are newly added
to M2). The table also shows the quantity of the literal and figurative
uses of each simile signal among those deleted and added entries in
each edition.
Take as, as an example. The occurrence of as is 1169 in M1 Part II
and 1308 in M2 Part II, among which, there are 896 identical entries.
After subtracting the identical entries from the total, the remaining
items indicate the actual textual revision Fowles has made. That is,
273 entries which were originally in M1 no longer appear in M2 and
412 entries are added in M2. Among the remaining entries of as in
M1, only 23 entries are used metaphorically, whereas in M2, 89 entries
are used metaphorically.
If we simply compare the frequency of occurrence without taking
into account what is deleted or added between the two editions,
we will see that the figurative use of as in M2 Part II is 3.9 times
more frequent than in M1 Part II; like 2.4 times, and seem 3.4 times
more. The M2 revision exhibits what Partington (2006) calls a higher
figurative density than the original. The more frequent figurative
use of as, like, seem is a simple reflection of this overall density.

7.5.2 Preliminary discussion


Given the limited contextual information each concordance entry can
provide, the discussion in this section will merely focus on identifying
the metaphorical patterns shown in the simile concordances. I will
highlight the metaphorically used words which occur within and near
the simile constructions and try to categorize them in a systematic
way. I first observe the concordance examples of as, like and seem used
in each edition, and then compare the differences in the metaphorical
patterns between the two editions.
In the M1 version, it is observed that one conceptual mapping
Fowles employed repeatedly through the form of simile is the play
metaphors (i.e. theatrical performances). Concordance 7.1 shows all
the 23 identified examples of as introducing non-literal comparison
statements in M1 Part II (cf. Table 7.2). The metaphorical expressions
are marked in italics. Words in boldface indicate the linguistic items
instantiating the play metaphor.

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

Concordance 7.1

Figurative use: as in M1 Part II

Among the 23 figurative uses of as in M1 Part II, 8 examples are,


broadly speaking, to do with the play metaphor. Consider entry (9),
for instance: Conchis tells Nicholas explicitly yet metaphorically that,
Here we are all actors. None of us are as we really are. In particular,
entries (10) and (12)(16) present Nicholass impression that Lily/
Julie is often playing a role while interacting with him, for example,
playing this serious exchange, the soubrette part she was playing.
In addition to the play metaphor, Concordance 7.1 also contains 4
metaphorical examples drawn from the source domain of various
kinds of games, for example, as rebellious puppets (17), set Lily as bait for
me (18), as Lily vamped me (19), Ive been too well spun in a game of blindmans-buff (20). Apart from the metaphors drawn from the source
domains of play and games, the other metaphorical examples, (1)(8)
and (21)(23), seem not to form a clear pattern.
The concordancing of the figurative examples of like and seem in M1
Part II shows less obvious and less focused metaphorical patterns
than the figurative examples of as. Given the space of the chapter, I
give only some examples involving like:

Concordance 7.2

Figurative use: like in M1 Part II

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

165

The metaphorical expressions are mostly drawn from various source


domains for different target domains, which have all been deleted in
M2 Part II. Concordance 7.2 contains only one each of the play and
game metaphors (i.e. entries 4 and 8).
By contrast, if we observe the concordance examples of as, like and
seem used in the M2 edition, we will see that metaphors drawn from
the source domains, play and games, occur repeatedly in the data.
There are also a number of metaphors to do with the educational
aspect of Nicholass journey. A number of metaphors, although drawn
from various source domains, convey strong emotive and evaluative
connotations. Some metaphors use intertextual reference as a metaphorical source domain. The metaphorical expressions in M2 fall
mainly into the following groups.
z

play metaphors: metaphorical expressions drawn from the source


domain of play or theatrical performance (e.g. I could try to be
content as a spectator, to let these increasingly weird incidents flow
past me; He inclined his head, like some seasoned impresario too
accustomed to first-night compliments to take them very seriously;
I am telling you, as the director, if you like, that you have failed to
gain a part; Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now).
game metaphors: metaphorical expressions drawn from the source
domain to do with games5, namely, any activity that involves intense
interest and competitiveness, such as, chess, poker, mousetrap,
hunting, spying game (e.g. I knew I would have to watch her like
a hawk now; a deep excitement buoyed me on, a knowledge
like that of the poker player who needs only one more card to have an
unbeatable hand; Alison had seemed a pawn to be used at least
one counter-move I could make; the old mans paradoxical determination to lure us into his game, yet seeming preparedness to
abandon it).
journey metaphors: metaphorical expressions drawn from the
source domain to do with journey (e.g. were a few step further into
the maze; like a man searching for a lost key; it was like entering a
deliciously warm room after a long, cold journey).
education metaphors: metaphorical expressions drawn from the
source domain to do with education (e.g. as if he were congratulating an especially bright pupil; I had indeed, it seemed, passed

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

some test). Other metaphors that are thematically related to the


educational aspect of Nicholass journey or the psychological
experimental aspect of Conchiss manipulation are also included
in this group (e.g. our justification is that one day the sane temporary victims like you may have helped some very sick people; You sound
like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation
than the patient). In these examples, Conchis is conceptually
mapped into the role of a doctor and Nicholas the patient (see
section 3.2.4). The mapping is based on the assumption that
Nicholass selfishness or dishonesty is a kind of psychological illness that Conchis intends him to help him recognize himself.
Emotive/evaluative: This group includes most of the metaphors
with uncategorized source domains, yet which carry strong emotive and evaluative connotations. Consider the examples discussed
before: I still couldnt accept that this was not some nightmare, like
some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of
a page, one by Kafka; it seemed much more like a piece of gratuitous
cruelty, closer to tormenting dumb animals.
Intertextual: This group includes metaphors using particular
intertextual references as metaphorical source domains, for
example, allusion to the characters in The Tempest or Hamlet, or
to the Greek mythological figures.

Note: None of the groups is mutually exclusive. For example, the


metaphorical expression, we were both cast now as his students,
his disciples, conveys the metaphors of play (cast) and education
(students, disciples). Some game metaphors also convey strong
emotive connotations, for example, I felt like an over-confident chessplayer who suddenly sees that his supposedly impregnable queen is only one
move from extinction. Intertextual allusions to The Tempest and Hamlet
are also relevant to the play metaphor.
As mentioned earlier, due to the limited contextual information
that concordances can provide, this section focuses on identifying
patterns in the metaphorical language. In order to make the
patterns more readily observable, I highlight the metaphoricallyused words in each concordance entry, and adopt different
marking styles to indicate different groups of metaphors in use.

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

167

Concordance 7.3Concordance 7.5 show the examples of as, like and


seem used figuratively in M2 Part II. Again, all of the metaphorical
expressions are in italics. Linguistic items instantiating play and
game metaphors are marked in boldface; metaphors using intertextual reference as source domain are shaded in grey. For the purpose
of quantification, metaphors being used to bring out the themes of
journey, education and psychological experiment are categorized
in the same group under the heading Thematic. Metaphorical
expressions carrying specific thematic function are underlined.
Note: The identification of the metaphorically-used words is based
on the intuitive understanding of the local and global contextual
meaning of The Magus. Some of the words may be de-lexicalized
and seem not straightforwardly metaphorical; nonetheless, given the
context of the uses, it is arguable to interpret them this way.

Concordance 7.3

Additional figurative use: as in M2 Part II

168
z
z
z
z
z

Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

play metaphor: 1, 3, 7, 8, 17, 19, 27, 31, 35, 40 (in boldface)


game metaphor: 2, 4, 6, 8, 14, 16, 18, 22, 33, 37, 38, 39 (in
boldface)
Thematic: (teacher-student) 2, 4, 5, 8, 14, 15, 19, 24, 29 (linguistic
terms underlined)
Intertextual: 5, 10, 11, 12, 13 (the whole entry shaded in grey)
Emotive/evaluative: 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 30, 34, 36

Concordance 7.4
z
z
z
z
z

Additional figurative use: like in M2 Part II

play metaphor: 8, 10, 12, 24, 26 (in boldface)


game metaphor: 1, 2, 4, 11, 15, 16, 18, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32 (in
boldface)
Thematic: (journey) 18, 27, 33; (doctor-patient) 6, 21, 22 (linguistic
terms underlined)
Intertextual: 5, 19, 20, 34 (the whole entry shaded in grey)
Emotive/evaluative: 1, 2, 3, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29,
30, 33, 34, 35

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

Concordance 7.5
z
z
z
z

169

Additional figurative use: seem* in M2 Part II

play metaphor: 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20 (in boldface)


game metaphor: 7, 16, 17, 18, 20 (in boldface)
Thematic: (teacher-student) 8 (linguistic terms underlined)
Emotive/evaluative: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19

Table 7.3 gives a simple indication of the strength of the metaphorical patterns observed from the simile concordance examples.
Concordance 7.3Concordance 7.5 have shown two prominent
features of the figurative language in M2 Part II. First, there are quite
a large number of metaphors, although drawn from various source
domains, conveying strong emotive and evaluative connotations. This
result helps to confirm my second hypothesis formed in Chapter Five,

Table 7.3 Metaphorical patterns in simile concordance examples from


M2 Part II
Concordance
samples

as
(40 entries)

like
(35 entries)

seem*
(20 entries)

play

10

(25%)

(35%)

game

12

(30%)

13

(37%)

(25%)

(23%)

(17%)

(5%)

(13%)

(11%)

(0%)

18

(45%)

18

(51%)

13

(65%)

No. of
instances (%)

Thematic
Intertextual
Emotive/evaluative

(14%)

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Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice

namely, we see more figurative (re)presentations of Nicholas-thecharacters cognitive and emotional experiences in the M2 version.
Secondly, metaphors drawn from the two source domains, play
and games, occur repeatedly in the data (see Table 7.3), which
seem to be the major metaphorical groupings Fowles intends to
reinforce in his revision.
After observing the concordance examples of as, like and seem used
in each edition and discovering the patterns shown in the textual
additions, I start to wonder whether the patterns discovered exist in
the texts that remain unchanged in the two editions (i.e. the identical entries shown in Table 7.2). Hence, I go back to check this part
of the concordancing data. Interestingly, among the 896 identical
entries of as, only 19 instances of metaphorical expressions are found
involving the source domains to do with play and games; for like, 9
instances out of 384 identical entries; for seem*, 3 instances out of 180
identical entries. The low occurrence frequency of the play and
game metaphors among the shared entries not only makes the patterns discovered in this section more prominent, but also points to
the significant tendency of Fowless revision in figurative language.
Before we proceed to the next section, it is worth mentioning
another implication of this finding. Partingtons (2006) study suggests that speakers in uncertain circumstances tend to use language
more loosely than they might wish; and Sperber and Wilson (1995)
claim that one way of using language loosely is to speak figuratively.
With regard to The Magus revision, the frequent use of non-factive
expressions (e.g. as if, seem) along with a metaphor or simile comparison seems to indicate Nicholass (the characters) inability to be precise because he is grappling with a complex concept or incredible
situation. Concordance 7.3Concordance 7.5 contain quite a few
metaphorical examples which reveal Nicholass uncertainty about
the factuality of the game and Lily/Julies role in it.

7.6 Metaphor further extraction


The main purpose of this section is to retrieve from The Magus corpus
more metaphorical expressions: (a) that are not realized through the
form of similes and (b) that instantiate the play, game, journey,

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

171

education metaphors, as well as the metaphors using intertextual


references as source domain, so as to compare the differences
between the two editions more precisely. Considering that metaphors
have no fixed linguistic forms, I made use of the simile findings for
further metaphor extraction6. The procedure is as follows:
(1) Search through Part II of M1 and M2 for sentences containing
source domain vocabulary. The key lexical items in the search
mainly derive from the collocational information from the
simile concordance examples:
play metaphor: act, actor, actress, audience, cast, character, charade, comedy, company, theatre, troupe, costume, director, drama,
finale, improvising, mask, masque, play, part, role, rehearsal, stage,
upstage, offstage, script, scene, tragedy, spectator, plot, performance,
protagonist, novel, novelist, story.
game metaphor: game, chess, poker, pawn, chessboard, player, dice,
card, bluff, win, lose, defence, challenge, position, surrender, confrontation, hide-and-seek, maze, hunting, spy, net, mouse and cat, trick, trap,
showdown, hook, observe, deceive, watch, guinea-pig, puppet, experiment.
journey metaphors: journey, adventure, way, step, purpose, search,
explore, reach, voyage, passage.
education metaphors and other thematically related metaphors: teach, lesson, pass, exam, test, learn, student, pupil, disciple,
ignorance, knowledge, surgeon, doctor, patient, operation, experiment,
guinea-pig, secret, truth, disintoxicate.
Intertextual: Ulysses, Theseus, Oedipus, Tantalus, Tempest, Ferdinand,
Miranda, Prospero, Caliban, Hamlet, Ophelia.
The computational search involves searching for the lemmas
of each lexical item (e.g. play* includes play, plays, played, playing, player, etc.).
(2) Deselect non-metaphorical entries from the concordances
(e.g. examples referring to Conchis playing musical instrument, or referring to Nicholas teaching English).
(3) Recover the contextual information for the metaphorical expressions identified through the concordancing of the source
domain vocabulary, and make a full list of the metaphorical
examples, including similes that are identified insection 7.5.

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172

I am aware that this methodology is not capturing all of the metaphors to do with these source domains, given the vocabulary set I
have got may not be perfect. There might be other metaphors turning up with other vocabulary. Hence I went manually through a large
portion of the novel to check up on the automatic search. In this
step, I also found some more metaphorical expressions which are not
retrieved by the computational search. I include them in the list.
Although I can not claim that I have found all of the metaphors
related to these source domains, it seems to me that very few were
missed by the hand checking.
The final result of the combined automatic and non-automatic
search is listed in Appendix E, with the metaphorical instances that
appear in both editions marked in boldface. Table 7.4 below gives
a general quantification of each type of metaphors shown in the
figurative examples in each edition.
As Table 7.4 shows, a total of 272 metaphorical instances were
identified in M2 Part II, among which, only 75 occur in M1 Part II.
That is, the additional metaphorical expressions in the revision are
approximately 3.63 times more than in the original. The table also
indicates that the patterns discovered exist in M1, but they are made
more prominent in M2 as a consequence of the fact that more relevant metaphors occur. play metaphors increase 3.13 times more in
the revision than in the original; game metaphors 5.86 times more.
Metaphors that are thematically related to the educational aspect
of Nicholass journey or the psychological experimental aspect of
Table 7.4 The intensity of the metaphorical patterns
between Part II of M1 and M2

Categories

No. of
M1 Part II
instances
(Total 75)

M2 Part II
(Total 272)

Increase
(3.63 times)

play

40

125

3.13

game

14

82

5.86

Thematic

12

40

3.33

19

4.75

11

45

4.09

Intertextual
Uncategorized

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

173

Conchiss manipulation also occur 3.33 times more in M2 than in M1,


and metaphors using intertextual references as source domain 4.75
times more. It is worth pointing out that, among the 15 additional
intertextual metaphors, 10 instances refer to Shakespeares dramas,
The Tempest in particular, which also instantiate the play metaphor,
and 4 instances refer to well-known mythological figures, which also
instantiate the journey metaphor (e.g. Ulysses). Overall, we can say
that play, game, journey and education are the main focus of
Fowless revision in figurative language.

7.7 Figurative data analysis: journey, play and game?


Now I will proceed to a comparative analysis of the figurative language
in the two editions of The Magus. Note: The numbering of the extracts
discussed in this section corresponds to the numbers of the figurative
data listed in Appendix E.

7.7.1 Corresponding metaphorical patterns in M1 and M2


This section deals with the original metaphorical patterns Fowles
displays in The Magus. Hence, I focus on the 75 metaphorical
instances that appear in M1 and remain unchanged in M2 (cf. the
entries marked in boldface in Appendix E).

7.7.1.1

LIFE IS A PURPOSEFUL JOURNEY

The Magus concentrates on Nicholass life and experiences as a


process to self-realization, yielding an overarching master metaphor
life is a purposeful journey. According to Lakoff (1993: 2223), a
purposeful life is a long-term, purposeful journey. Goals in life are
destinations on the journey. Choosing a means to achieve a goal is
choosing a path to a destination. Difficulties in life are impediments
to motion, and so on. There are a few metaphorical expressions
instantiating these conceptual mappings of journey into Nicholass
life experiences in The Magus original.

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Here are two examples instantiating the journey metaphor, which


are taken from the beginning and the end of the novel, where Nicholas
comments on the experience before and after the journey.
(18) as I walked there came the strangest feeling, compounded
of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had
happened, of having entered a myth [. . .] a Ulysses on his way
to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still
searching for his destiny.
(269) Above all there was the extraordinariness of the experience;
its uniqueness conferred a uniqueness on me, and I had it like a
great secret, a journey to Mars, a prize no one else had.
In extract (18), Nicholas is drawing an analogy between his own
experience with that of three well-known mythological figures, Ulysses,
Theseus and Oedipus. In addition to the phrases on his way, on his
journey and searching for instantiating the journey metaphor, the use of
the three myth figures as metaphorical source domain implies that it
is a journey full of adventures and with certain unknown and mysterious purposes. As shown in extract (269), by the end of the novel,
Nicholas reflects on his life in a sober manner and reevaluates this
unique experience, which he conceptualizes as a journey to Mars.
From the fact that the lexical items, for example, extraordinariness,
conferred, uniqueness, prize, all carry positive connotations, we may infer
Nicholass change after his stumbling journey to self-understanding.

7.7.1.2

LIFE IS A PLAY

As shown in Table 7.4, metaphors drawn from the source domain of


play or theatrical performance occur most frequently in the original
(i.e. 40 out of total 75 instances). The following two examples
indicate the thematic association between the journey and play
metaphors.
(154) It must have been obvious I was no actor.
It wasnt at all. I thought you were brilliant. Acting as if
you couldnt act.

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175

(209) You have much to learn. You are as far from your true self as
that Egyptian mask our American friend wore is from his true face.
Extract (154) is part of a conversation between Nicholas and
Conchis. Nicholas reminds Conchis of the fact that he is not an actor,
which is literally true; however, Conchis replies metaphorically. By
flouting the Gricean maxim of quality and relation, Conchis (Fowles)
is implicating to Nicholas (readers) that he is playing a role in his
real life without realizing it himself (i.e. acting as if [he] couldnt act).
Extract (209) is Conchiss explicit remark on his intended purpose
of engineering Nicholas, who is far from his true self, into the quest.
The message Conchis (or Fowles) intends to communicate through
the metaphor is: playing a role and wearing a mask in a theatre are
like having ones true self and true face in disguise; both correspond
to ones superficial self in life, that is, being shallow and insincere,
with the true face hidden behind a role/mask.
Similar to the important correlation of the play metaphor with regard
to Nicholass journey, the conceptual mappings of life is fiction are
also exploited by Fowles in The Magus original, interacting with the
play metaphor, as shown in the following examples.
(162) The third person is apt, because I presented a sort of fictional
self to them, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive
raffishness and essential inner decency. (Note: them refers
to the twin sisters.)
(270) all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away;
always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening
and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour a god like novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the
sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever
he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the
super-ego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it
I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence;
but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.
The concept of a role in a play is similar to that of a character in a
novel, in the sense that both are fictional. Thus, in extracts (162) and

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(270), we can see the play and fiction metaphors are interacting
with each other. These two examples occur in Nicholass narration.
In extract (162), Nicholas refers to his self-introduction to the twin
sisters as a way of presenting a sort of fictional self, as if he is talking
about someone elses life. Extract (270) is from the narrators viewpoint. Nicholas is reflecting on his own past after Alisons death, and
regrets his selfishness, as indicated particularly in the metaphorical
sentence: This leechlike variation of the super-ego I had created myself,
fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting
freely. The expression acting as if a third person instantiates the metaphors of play and fiction, indicating that Nicholas is leading an
inauthentic life, in philosophical terms.
These particular mappings are most relevant to the theme of The
Magus. As I examined in section 3.1.2.1, from Nicholass narrative in
Part I of the novel, readers may infer his character flaws (e.g. his sense
of superiority, his selfishness and dishonesty), revealed especially in
his frivolous playboy attitude in interpersonal relations. In a sense,
the uninitiated Nicholas is living his life with the superficial rather
than the true self, which accounts for the necessity of his journey to
self-knowledge.

7.7.1.3

LIFE IS A GAME

Abstract competition is often conceptualized in terms of game


metaphors. In The Magus original, there are 14 out of total 75
metaphorical instances mapping Nicholas and Conchiss interaction
into competitive games, mainly to do with chess and hide-and-seek.
Below are some examples.
(1) [Conchiss] eyes were those of a chess-player who has made a
good move.
(93) I had the distinct feeling that he was a chess master caught
between two moves; immensely rapid calculation of combinations.
(94) I hadnt played chess for years; but I remembered that the better you
got, the more it became a game of false sacrifices. He was assaying
not my powers of belief, but my powers of unbelief.

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177

(86) Hide-and-seek? Of course. The hider must have a seeker. That is


the game. A seeker who is not too cruel. Not too observant.
(92) [. . .] of course I knew that her schizophrenia was simply a
new hiding-place in the masque.
Among the game metaphors, the hide-and-seek metaphor has
particular thematic function. Conchis (or Lily/Julie) is the hider
and Nicholas is the seeker, seeking for the hidden truth behind
Conchiss manipulation. This metaphor remains unchanged in
both editions. In extract (92), a new hiding-placing in the masque, we
can see that the play metaphor is interconnected with the game
metaphor.
From the 75 metaphorical expressions that remain unchanged in
both editions, we can briefly outline the overall conceptual mappings
Fowles displays in The Magus original and preserves in his revision as
in Table 7.5:
Table 7.5

Identified metaphorical patterns in The Magus original

Target

Source

freq.

% in M1

Life

Journey

12

16%

Nicholass experiences and


Conchis et al.s manipulation

Play (theatre, novel)


Games

40
14

53%
18%

In next section, my analysis will show how these patterns are strengthened and extended in the revised version of The Magus.

7.7.2 M1 metaphorical patterns reinforced in M2


This section deals with the changes in the metaphorical language
shown in the revision. Note: All the examples discussed in this
section appear in M2 only, that is, they are additional figurative
expressions (see Appendix E).
As examined quantitatively in section 7.6, the metaphorical expressions drawn from the source domains of play, games, journey and
education, appear more frequently in the M2 version (see Table 7.4).
My further analysis of the figurative data shows two prominent

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178

features with regard to the additional metaphorical uses in the


revision:
z

First, Fowles further elaborates the play and game metaphors to


reinforce respectively the thematic/educational and emotive/
psychological aspects of Nicholass journey;
Secondly, through Conchiss masque and godgame manipulation,
Fowles presents an extended application of the Stanislavski7 method
in the fictional world of the M2 version, namely, improvising realities more real than reality in theatrical terms (cf. extract (151) in
Appendix E).

By playing with the boundary between the two source domains, play
and games (i.e. masque and godgame), and the boundary between
the literal (text/dialogue) and the metaphorical (subtexts, cf. also
the Gricean pragmatic account of implicature), Conchis compels
Nicholas (and Fowles compels the reader) to work out what is
happening to him and why, and to continue searching for the truth,
for the meaning lying underneath Conchiss manipulation. By
stressing the play and game elements so forcefully in the revision,
Fowles also presents a stronger self-reflexive consciousness of the
illusive nature of the fictional reality, and shows more obvious
intention to remind readers of the artificiality of novel/fiction in
The Magus. These points will be elaborated further in the following
three subsections.

7.7.2.1

PLAY

metaphors for thematic purpose

In the M2 version, the educational aspect of the journey is made


more explicit to the reader through the mapping of Conchis as a
teacher and Nicholas as a student, as shown in the added figurative
examples below. Words in boldface instantiate such conceptual
mappings:
(4) And Mitford? I do not waste time teaching the blind.
(10) [Conchiss story] was [. . .] patently more concealed lesson than
true confession.

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179

(195) I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about


the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the
egocentric view.
(233) It was as if [Conchis] had planted a bandillera in my shoulder, or
a succubus on my back: a knowledge I did not want.
Apart from that, the following examples more specifically illustrate
that the educational implication is mostly conveyed through the play
metaphors:
(127) He was in any case far too intelligent to expect us not to see
through the surface aspect of his masques; secretly he must
want us to . . . and as for whatever deeper purpose, inner
meaning they had, I was content to wait now.
(168) he informed us that all that had happened so far was merely
a rehearsal. Honestly, you should have seen his smile. It was
so smug. Just as if we were two students whod passed some
preliminary examination. by Lily/Julie
(211) I am telling you, as the director, if you like, that you have failed
to gain a part. [. . .] even if you had gained it, it would not
have brought you what you wish . . . the young woman you
find so seductive. by Conchis
(214) Her promises are worth nothing. All here is artifice. She
is acting, amusing herself with you. Playing Olivia to your
Malvolio. by Conchis
(220) The object of the meta-theatre is precisely that to allow the
participants to see through their first roles in it [. . .] Whether
we learn to see through the roles we give ourselves in ordinary
life. by Conchis
Extract (220) is an explicit yet metaphorical remark made by Conchis
in reply to Nicholass inquiry. These additional remarks point out more
clearly the metaphysical purpose of Conchiss manipulation; namely,
learn to see through the roles we give ourselves in ordinary life. The implication
is that Nicholas not only needs to realize the fact that he is acting as if
[he] couldnt act, but also to observe himself acting in the role as a
step towards being more self-reflective and changing his behaviours.

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180

7.7.2.2

GAME

metaphors for emotive connotations

Metaphor theorists have emphasized how metaphor is a tool whereby


we understand and describe abstract target domains in terms of
concrete, familiar source domains. As the following examples will
show, the choice of particular lexical items relating to the source
domain of different kinds of games provides the means to express
Nicholass emotional states vividly. In addition to some new examples
of the hide-and-seek metaphor, there are also metaphors to do with
hunting, mousetraps, experiment, and games of chess or poker in
the M2 version.
f Hunting: hunter and captive
Here is an example of a hunting metaphor.
(167) It was just conceivable that the sisters were in some way still
running with the hare and hunting with the hounds that is,
Julie might find me physically attractive and yet still be prepared to mislead me about her real background.
In this example, Nicholas conceptualizes himself as a hare (the target
to be hunted down) and Conchis et al. as hounds, with the twin
sisters seemingly playing on both sides. This conceptual mapping
and the indefinite expression in some way indicate Nicholass
uncertainty about the twin sisters real identity and role.
f Mousetrap: cat and mouse
Below are two examples of the mousetrap metaphor, in which
Conchis is often mapped as a cunning cat and Nicholas the mouse
to be trapped.
(99) on one level I listened to an impressively shrewd old doctor, on
another I was a mouse before a cat.
(178) [Conchis] had not allowed for the way his bait would prove
she was on the mouses side. I knew she must be totally innocent
of this new trap; and the mouse was turned fox, not to be tricked
so easily.

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181

In extract (178), Lily/Julie is conceptualized as the bait Conchis


sets for Nicholas. At this point, he decides to believe that Lily/Julie is
on his side, as indicated in this strong inference: she must be totally
innocent of this new trap. Due to the false belief, he confidently perceives himself turning into a fox, as cunning as the cat, and not to be
tricked so easily.
f Experiment: experimenter and guinea-pig
Extracts (22) and (204) below are metaphors to do with experiments,
illustrating how Nicholas perceives Conchis as a scientist or an experimenter, and himself as a kind of guinea-pig, the object of Conchiss
metaphorical game.
(22) [Conchiss] eyes were even more intense than usual [. . .],
almost leechlike; much more the eyes of a scientist checking t
he result of an experiment, the state of the guinea-pig, than of
a host seeking approval from a guest after a spectacular
entertainment.
(204) And in spite of this, Im very far from being ungrateful.
But stage one of the masque, experiment, whatever you call it, is
over. I smiled at him. Your tame white rats have tumbled . . . .
Fallen flat on their faces. But see no reason for repeating the process
until they know why.
His annoyance at being manipulated for some unknown reason is
subtly conveyed in the metaphorical projection of his having tumbled and fallen flat, and he insists on knowing the real purpose of
Conchiss manipulation.
The common feature among these conceptual mappings is that
Nicholas often projects himself in a passive and inferior position, for
example, the hare to be hunted down, the mouse to be trapped, the
guinea-pig or tame white rat to be experimented on. In linguistic
terms, these roles are all in the object/goal, rather than subject/actor
position in a clause. These projections indicate that he is uneasily
aware of being manipulated all the time by Conchis.

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f Chess and poker


All through the novel, Nicholas constantly has the sense of his
inability to change the situation which Conchis constructs, or to find
an answer to the puzzle. On some occasions, when he thinks he has
managed to outwit Conchiss manipulation, he reveals his positive
emotions. To effectively express his various emotional states under
different circumstances, he often has recourse to metaphors
associated with chess or poker games. Extracts (28) and (135) below
instantiate chess game metaphors; (163), (218), (236) and (240)
instantiate card game metaphors. The words in boldface, again,
indicate the linguistic items instantiating particular conceptual
mappings, the words underlined point out the expressions to do with
Nicholass cognitive states or feelings. The marking is to highlight the
observation that game metaphors are mostly used in presenting
Nicholass emotions.
(28) I was intensely aware that our relationship, or my position,
had changed again; as I had been shifted from guest to pupil,
now I uneasily felt myself being manoeuvred into a butt.
(135) I didnt show it, but I felt like an over-confident chess-player who
suddenly sees that his supposedly impregnable queen is only one
move from extinction.
(163) I felt both sexually and socially deprived, I did not expect
we should be able to meet during the week; but yet
a deep excitement buoyed me on, a knowledge like that of
the poker player who needs only one more card to have an unbeatable hand.
(218) one didnt make such elaborate preparations for a summers
entertainment, only to call it off when it was getting interesting. We must continue; all I had just experienced was a bout
of bluffing in the early part of a poker game. The real betting was
still to come.
(236) I knew he could be bluffing, but I had a strong idea that he
wasnt . . .
(240) I truly began to feel now that I was discarded,8 a mere
encumbrance . . . and a fool.

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183

The conceptual mapping of his interaction with Conchis as a game


of chess or poker depends crucially on the interpretation given to
contest, opponents, skill, calculation, and especially to winning.
In Nicholass mind, what he experiences is like a sustained contest
between two opponents, Conchis and himself (e.g. all I had just
experienced was a bout of bluffing in the early part of a poker game), in
which one player can only win at the expense of the other.
The above examples illustrate how Nicholass strong and mostly
negative emotions are conveyed through the game metaphors,
especially in the roles he assumes in the games. Consider extract
(28), for example. The two adverbs, intensely and uneasily, first
lead us to infer Nicholass highly charged emotional state at the
particular moment in the novel. The word butt with its negative
connotations also conveys his unpleasant feeling. It seems that Conchis is controlling the change in their relationship and Nicholas is
highly aware of the fact. Nicholass unpleasant emotion is effectively
conveyed not only through the conceptual mapping of his current
situation into a subordinate position in a chess game, which is linguistically realized through the chess terminology position, shift and
manoeuvre, but also through the passive construction with agent
deleted. If we undo the passive and turn it into an active version:
Conchis had shifted me from guest to pupil and manoeuvred me
into a butt, we can see that Conchis is the subject of the dynamic
intentional verbs, and therefore, he is the actor and initiator of the
action; whereas Nicholas is the object and therefore the person being
acted upon. The passive construction with agent deletion leads us to
infer that Conchis is the controller, the one who engineers the change
of Nicholass position and the change of their social relationship into
an educational one.
Notice that passivisation with agent deletion is used twice in
extract (28), once in (163) (I felt both sexually and socially deprived),
and once in (240) (I truly begin to feel now that I was discarded).
The passive construction can relate back to the hunting, mousetrap
and experiment mappings discussed above. All these indicate his
sense of powerlessness in taking any reaction to Conchiss manipulation. Similarly, instead of being always an equal player in a chess

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or card game, he sometimes feels more like a pawn on the chessboard


(cf. been shifted, being manoeuvred in (27)) or a card to be disposed of
on the card table (cf. discarded in (240)).

7.7.2.3

PLAY with double significance surface text and subtext of


The Magus

Overall, the particular play and game metaphors are connectable


to one another, and to the plot structure of the novel. Consider
the following additional examples involving game- and role-playing
concepts shown in Concordance 7.6, for an illustration of this
observation.

Concordance 7.6

Additional figurative use: play* in M2 Part II

Among the 15 examples, entries (1), (4) and (15) are Conchiss
remarks; entries (2), (5), (13) and (14) are the twin sisters remarks.
All of them occur in their conversations with Nicholas. The entries
shaded in grey, that is, (3) and (6)(12), are Nicholass remarks or
thoughts. If we examine the lines carefully, we will see that in his revision Fowles seems to be playing more obviously with the boundary
between the two source domains, play and games; and at the same
time he is playing purposefully with the boundary between the literal
(what is said by the characters in the text/dialogue) and the metaphorical implicature (what they really mean). Consider Conchiss
remarks first. Under the pretext of Lily/Julies illness (her schizophrenia), Conchis warns Nicholas that she is acting, amusing herself
with you (cf. entry 1) and assigns Nicholas a role (cf. entry 4) in this
pretend game to help him with the psychological treatment for Lily/
Julie, as he states his purpose clearly: I wish to bring the poor child

Comparing Figurative Patterns and Density

185

to a realization of her own true problem by forcing her to recognize the nature
of the artificial situation we are creating together here (cf. extract (115) in
Appendix E).
In the meantime, the twin sisters also tell Nicholas explicitly that
they are playing parts at Conchiss request: Ive made it very clear
to Maurice that Ill play parts for him (cf. entry 2); and he wanted to
mount a situation in which we two were to play parts (cf. entry 14).
These explicit remarks from Conchis and the twin sisters make the
role-playing and game-playing become literally true. Nonetheless,
there is an obvious contradiction between Conchiss remarks and
those of the twin sisters. The conflict and uncertainty about who is
telling the truth propels Nicholas to continue with his quest.
The play metaphor brings in Stanislavskis concept of subtexts,
which is employed by Conchis in his implicit teaching. As shown in
extract (115) mentioned above, the poor child literally refers to
Lily/Julie, but is meant to be Nicholas. Conchis wants to bring
Nicholas to a realization of his own problem through recognizing the
artificial situation created in his domain. His mysterious intention is
like the subtexts of a play, and Nicholas has to search for the meaning
lurking beneath the text/dialogue of the play (the masque) which
Conchis implements for him. The idea of a subtext brings out the
idea of searching for truth, which is also instantiated in the plot
structure of the novel, given that reading the novel is like reading a
detective story. In brief, by playing with the boundary between the
two source domains (play and games), and the boundary between
the literal (text/dialogue) and the metaphorical (subtexts), Fowles
compels his readers, just like Conchis compels Nicholas, to work out
what is implicated behind the story. The subtext is not spoken, but
rather, needs to be inferred metaphorically.

7.8 Summary and implications


In the investigation of the play metaphor regarding the topic of friendship, Kvecses (2000) makes an interesting proposal. He suggests that,
if we conceptualize people as containers, then a person has a deeper
part and a superficial part. The container metaphor assumes that
a person has two selves: a true self, corresponding to the innermost

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186
PLAY

fictional / illusive
nature of reality

Su

pe

(p rf
(w layi icia
ea ng
lS
rin
g m roles elf
as )
ks
)

JOURNEY TO SELF-REALISATION
GAME

Journey to the inner circle


to disclose Conchis's secrets

(NO MASK)

True Self
(No Game)

Figure 7.3 Configuration of journey/play/game metaphors

part, and a shallower self, corresponding to the superficial part. This


conceptual mapping also reflects the important is central metaphor. The most important part of a person is the deepest part where
the true self resides (see Kvecses 2000: 90). Kvecsess proposition
seems to echo the implicit moral lesson that Conchis intends to
convey to Nicholas. We may visualize Nicholass metaphysical journey
as in Figure 7.3.
As I have demonstrated, the major difference between the two editions is that the original conceptual metaphors (journey, education,
play, game) are further elaborated and extended in Fowless revision.
Metaphorical expressions drawn from these source domains appear
repeatedly in the M2 version, play and game metaphors in particular
(see Table 7.4). All of the metaphors seem to be interacting together
to reinforce the theme and the structure of the novel, as reflected
explicitly in Nicholass speculation (which appears in M2 only): It
must all have been a test, some sort of ordeal to be passed before I entered
the inner circle. By gradually approaching the inner circle, Nicholas
discloses the innermost essence of Conchiss masque/godgame:
namely, there should be no mask, no game in the real life, only your
true self (cf. Nicholass pretentious playboy attitude towards women
and his comparison of relationships to games in section 3.1.2.1).

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187

He finally reaches revelation through the paradoxical role Lily/Julie


plays in the game.
In the novel, we see how Conchis and his cast employ all sorts of
strategies to lead or mislead Nicholas into the bizarre experiences,
and how the final acts (i.e. the mock-trial and disintoxication
scenes) help to unmask Nicholass pretensions and lead him to
realize his own shallowness and self-deception. In the meantime, by
exploiting the fundamental pretending essence of play and games,
Fowles reminds his readers more forcefully in M2 than in M1 of the
illusive nature of the fictional reality.

Chapter Eight

Stylistic differences between


The Magus and its revision

This study set out to employ a corpus stylistic approach to exploring


the text style differences between the two versions of The Magus
and to reflect on Fowless communicative intention implicated in
his comment on the revised version as rather more than a stylistic
revision. With the aid of the corpus tools, I found that the major
changes Fowles has made locate in Part II of the novel, which explores
Conchiss manipulation and Nicholass journey to self-knowledge.
Literary critics generally believe that the central thematic concern
of The Magus has been made more explicit in the revised version by
having characters explain, in rather clearer language than previously,
exactly what they mean when speaking of such things as the godgame
(Boccia 1980: 236). The critics comments with regard to the clearer
language and more explicit thematic concern of the novel were
confirmed in my study. I demonstrated more specifically that Fowles,
by using metaphors, plays in his revision with the boundary between
what is said (text/dialogue) and what is meant (subtexts or implicature),
to reinforce the theme and the plot structure of the novel as a whole.
Further quantitative and qualitative analyses in Chapter Six and
Chapter Seven confirmed my hypotheses concerning the textual
differences between M1 and M2. First, the narrative focus in The Magus
revision has been shifted to Nicholas-the-characters internal possible
worlds. That is, his internal psychological viewpoint and his online
speculative inferential process are made more prominent in M2 than
in M1. The byproduct of the narrative shift is that Nicholas in the M2
version seems to become more rational, observant and contemplative,
as the revised text is full of the enactment of his thoughts, conjectures

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189

and deliberations. Second, M1 tends to give literal presentations of


what happens to Nicholas in the fictional world. By contrast, Fowles
has used (conventional and sophisticated) metaphors more frequently
in the M2 revision, the play and game metaphors in particular, not
only to highlight Nicholass internal cognitive states and emotions,
but also to foreground Conchiss masque and godgame, or his
own language game.
The identified patterns of the linguistic changes reflect the fact
that Fowles, as a well-known postmodernist writer, appears to reinforce the metafictional theory and its strategies in his revision of The
Magus, which consequently result in different degrees of reader
involvement into the fictional world and generate different kinds of
readers emotions (fiction emotions and artifact emotions) between
the two editions of The Magus.

8.1 playing language games: metaphorical /


metafictional move in M2
The term metafiction was coined in the 1970s. Although it is not
a new idea, its practice has become particularly prominent in the
fiction of the last decades. It is a literary tendency that novelists
have become much more aware of the theoretical issues involved
in fictional construction. As Waugh defined, metafiction is a term
given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically
draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions
about the relationship between fiction and reality (1984: 2,
emphasis mine).
Self-reflexivity and overt fictionality are two dominant features of
metafiction. Such novels tend to be constructed on the principle of
a fundamental opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion
(as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion (Waugh
1984: 6). In brief, the strategy is simultaneously to create a fiction and
to make an overt statement about the creation of that fiction. Given
that such metafictional experimentation is particularly prominent
in Fowless other fictions1, it does appear to be the concern in his
revision of The Magus as well.

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8.1.1 Self-reflexivity and the self-conscious personal narrator


The prominent self-reflexive tendency in M2 is rendered by means of
a more self-conscious personal narrator, Nicholas (as demonstrated
in section 6.4.2). This is realized linguistically by Fowless shift in
narrative focus to Nicholass constant reflections on the reality
which Conchis creates in the textual actual world. Here are four
examples which exist in M2 only. (Note: The numbering of the
examples corresponds to the numbers of the figurative data listed
in Appendix E.)
(5) Their living reality became a matter of technique, of realism
gained through rehearsal. [Their living reality refers to
Conchiss story]
(9) [Conchiss story] was much more that of a novelist before a
character than of even the oldest, most changed man before
his own real past self.
(15) I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the
right hands and contexts.
(126) Every truth in his world was a sort of lie; and every lie a sort of
truth.
In these examples, among others, Nicholas conceptualizes Conchis
as a novelist and himself as a reader, trying to comprehend Conchiss
duplicities, to read his palimpsest2 (i.e. different versions of story),
and at the same time, falling for the technique and literary devices
Conchis employs. Parallel to Nicholass inferential process in trying
to understand and interpret Conchiss communicative intention is
the attempt by the readers of the novel to understand Fowless communicative intention in writing it.

8.1.2 Overt fictionality at two levels


The laying bare of the illusive nature of fictional reality is achieved
at two levels. At the character-character level, the overt fictionality
is displayed through Conchis et al.s outright declaration of the
fictional essence of the godgame/masque which Conchis plays

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191

with Nicholas in the fictional world, and which is more ostensive in


M2. As I have discussed in section 7.7.2.3, by laying bare the artificial
situation Conchis creates (through the play and game metaphors,
and through the contradictory versions of story Conchis and Lily/
Julie provide), Conchis engineers Nicholas into a quest to understand the intended meaning of his manipulation, which results in
Nicholass constant reformulations of what happens and what is
intended (i.e. a conflict between Nicholass knowledge worlds and
Conchiss intention worlds, in Ryans terms).
As Ryan suggests, metaphorical expressions can be considered as
conceptually remote type of possible world. Metaphors are literally
false in the actual world (AW); nonetheless they are uttered without
deceptive intent (1991: 82). She goes on to explain that,
The meaning that originates in the metaphor world is reflected
back toward AW. This world is not created for its own sake, but as a
point of view allowing us to rediscover AW from a new perspective. Like
counterfactuals, metaphors take a detour to an APW in order to express
truths about AW. (Ryan 1991: 823, emphasis added)
Fowles (through Conchis) employs the play and game metaphors
more frequently in M2 and plays with the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical, to educate Nicholas in an implicit way.
Nicholas finally realizes what Conchis means by saying The masque
is only a metaphor (M2, chapter 56: 458), and discovers the truth
through the paradoxical role Lily/Julie plays in the game: I started
to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask now
seemed truer, more true because more obviously false, than the others. In The
Magus revision, readers see how Fowles, in Ryans terms, more
forcefully takes a detour to an APW in order to express truths
about AW. Through the metaphors, readers are encouraged to
explore the meaning of the story further.
The laying bare of the illusive nature of fictional reality is also reinforced at the author-reader level. There is a more obvious authorial
intrusion in the M2 revised ending. In the M1 ending, Nicholas is
implicated as an Orpheus figure bringing back his Eurydice from the
dead (Alisons suicide). In the M2 version, however, the I-narrator

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leaves but his story is not finished. Instead, a third-person narrator


(the author?) takes over the narrative, reminding the reader that
there is no way to know what will really happen in Nicholass future
(cf. section 3.2.3).

8.2 A Possible-World and linguistic account


of stylistic effect
In possible-worlds terms, within a fictional universe, different states of
affairs may carry different degrees of authentication, depending on
the source of the relevant narrative statements (Doleel 1998: 145).
From a linguistic perspective, the source relates to narrative point
of view. How readers perceive the world projected in narrative texts
largely depends on whose viewpoint (from the macro, discoursal
level to the micro, linguistic level) the events are presented from in
the texts.
In first-person narrations, like (most of) The Magus, it is not always
easy to determine what belongs to the actual domain and what to the
private worlds of the characters, as a personal narrator is effectively
a mind interposed between the facts and the reader, and the discourse reflects the contents of that character/narrators mind (Ryan
1991: 113). Given that the M2 version makes Nicholas-the-characters
subjective psychological viewpoint more prominent (which foregrounds his struggle to comprehend the factuality of his experience,
cf. section 6.4.2), readers are exposed more overtly to his alternative
possible worlds (cf. McIntyre 2006). As a consequence, we perceive
the textual actual world indirectly through its reflection in Nicholass
subjective world, and we are thus challenged to make sense of what
happens in the actual domain of the fictional world. The more prominent epistemic uncertainty and reflections in M2 lend the story postmodern literary qualities, and we may assume that, consequently,
readers are pushed towards an additional level of text processing, to
reflect on what happens and how it is presented, rather than just
imagining the events.
On the other hand, metafictional novels make their own ontological
status as fictions or artifacts manifestly apparent to the reader. Such

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193

a practice has also long been described as an intentional breaking


of the realistic illusion. Consider Detweilers (1976) remark about
the essence of postmodern fictions, for example:
In all of this fiction as game with the reader, the reader is challenged to dispense with the willing suspension of disbelief in order to
play another game. The hermeneutical point of departure is the
destruction of the old fictional illusion, of the traditional agreement between author and reader, to make way for the game in
which the author says, I will not allow you to inhabit an integral fictive
world while you read my novel; instead, you must constantly and selfconsciously connect the artifice of my narrative with the problematical real
world that you live in. . . . [T]he intention is not to absorb the audience
in the illusion but to use the artificiality of the illusion [. . .] to make the
respondent (the viewer or reader) aware of the alienating power of art, its
ability to employ tradition in order to negate it. (Detweiler 1976: 56,
emphasis mine)
Readers immersion in a fictional world is viewed as a passive subjection to the fictional illusions and is disparaged by most postmodern
theorists (cf. Waugh 1984). Ryan (1991) explains, from a possibleworlds theoretical perspective, that metatext of a fiction can destroy
the fictionality of the entire text and force the reader into a very
incomplete involvement, namely, a more-or-less distanced appraisal
of an evidently artificial fictional truth:
When the reader is constantly reminded that the text displays a
verbal artifact and not a real world [. . .], the gesture of recentering
is blocked and the reader contemplates the semantic domain from
a foreign perspective. (1991: 95)
While readers, as participants in the fictional game, expect that a
novel will produce a fictional world, radical postmodern metafiction
thwarts that expectation by what Doleel calls self-disclosing narratives,
where the texts authentication force is nullified (cf. section 2.2.1.2).

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The blocking of authentication in narrative texts (in Doleels terms)


and the rejecting of fictional recentering (in Ryans terms) seem to
frustrate (or challenge) the readers sense-making attempts to arrive
at definite conclusions about the contents of the world projected in
the text. The possible-worlds perspective seems to provide an account
of why the readers sense of involvement in the fictional events is
much reduced in the M2 version as a consequence of the more prominent metafictional move.
From a possible-worlds perspective, readers of the M2 version
involve an alternating participation on two levels, fluctuating between
taking the story as a record of actual events and as a mere verbal
artifact which they can observe without participating in the fictional
world. From a linguistic perspective, however, as Short and Semino
(2008) suggest (cf. section 5.1), the reduced sense of immediacy
and involvement in M2 is because M1 is presented more consistently
from Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint, whereas M2 mixes together
the viewpoints of Nicholas-as-character and Nicholas-as-narrator.
As shown in the corpus evidence, the linguistic features indicating
Nicholas-the-characters psychological and conceptual viewpoints are
more prominent in M2. Hence, we may argue that this mixed viewpoint phenomenon actually results from the additional (and more
explicit) contextual information and the literary devices (e.g. metaphors, intertextuality) Fowles has added in the revision, which are
arguably provided from the I-narrators post hoc knowledge. As M1
does not provide so much contextual detail, has less sophisticated
figurative expressions and intertextual allusions, and involves a lesser
degree of intentional metafictional manipulation, we naturally feel
that we are exposed to Nicholas-the-characters viewpoint more consistently and so become more involved with the actual events he is
experiencing in the fictional world. By comparison, as a consequence
of the increased literary self-consciousness, the shift back and forth
between the viewpoints of the I-narrator and the I-character becomes
more prominent in M2. Fowles effectively reminds his readers of the
artifices of the story more forcefully, just as Conchis constantly
reminds Nicholas of the illusory nature of the masque/godgame in
the fictional world.

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195

8.3 Fiction emotions in M1 artifact emotions in M2


In this section, based on the uncovered textual differences between
M1 and M2, and drawing on some empirical research of readers
response to literary texts, I discuss different kinds of emotions that
readers may generate while processing the two different editions
of The Magus. It is worth remembering that the effect evoked by the
text features and its impact on the readers may largely depend on
readers personal interests and literary training.
Psychologists distinguish two basically different (yet interrelated)
types of readers emotional response to literary texts: fiction emotions
(F-emotions) and artifact-emotions (A-emotions) (cf. Andringa 1996;
Dijkstra et al. 1994; Kneepkens and Zwaan 1995). F-emotions are
strongly related to the emotions experienced by the characters of
the story (primarily connected with the processes of identification
and empathy), or with the readers involvement in what happens
in the fictional world. A-emotions, however, relate to the work as an
artistic construction, that is, the authors skilfulness in writing a text.
A-emotions can either be about the fictional world (e.g. suspense, surprise, and curiosity generated by story structures) or about the artifact
(e.g. aesthetic constructions and how literary devices are used). From
psychological perspective, A-emotions need more time to fully
develop, and may not be an on-line phenomenon (i.e. occur during
reading), but may rather be an off-line phenomenon. An A-emotion
can be a holistic emotion about the overall effect of the reading
experience on the reader (Kneepkens and Zwaan 1995: 136).
Dijkstra et al. (1994) make use of a statistical technique called multiple regression analysis to examine to what extent readers emotions
could be enhanced or suppressed by the story aspects such as imagery,
pragmatic intent, plausibility, literary devices. Their empirical findings suggest that the presence of particular story aspects, such as
pragmatic intent (e.g. authorial or narratorial comments, reflections,
or background information) and overt literary devices (e.g. metaphor, unusual syntax), suppresses or hinders the diegetic effect of the
story on the readers, because they are oriented towards the literary
text itself rather than the events (Dijkstra et al. 1994: 144). These

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empirical findings help to support my argument about the text style


differences between the two editions. The more prominent metanarrative features, additional contextual information, intertextual
allusions and metaphorical language in M2 reduce readers involvement in the fictional world, as compared to the readers of M1. It thus
seems reasonable to say that M1 generates more readers F-emotions
(i.e. feeling of involvement into the fictional world), whereas in the
M2 revision A-emotions are more foregrounded (cf. Fowless more
sophisticated exploitation of the play and game metaphors).
I have to emphasize once again that I do not intend to claim that
one version of The Magus is better than the other, but to lay bare
the patterns of Fowless revision in linguistic terms, as well as
his communicative intention. Textual differences indeed create different stylistic effects and different degrees of readers involvement
between the two versions. However, in terms of literary appreciation,
reader variables may also play a role. Readers who want to be absorbed
by the fictional world and/or look for characters to identify with
might prefer more straightforward and story-driven narrative like M1,
with less authorial or narratorial intrusion. Consequently, how to
perceive the text style differences between the two editions will partly
depend on the readers reading purpose, personal preference and
literary training.

Part III

Further issues in corpus stylistics

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Chapter Nine

Pros and cons of a corpus stylistic


approach to literary studies

9.1 Assessment of the corpus stylistic approach


This research started with a review of the literary and linguistic
scholars comments on the revision of The Magus and a categorization
of the overall differences between the two versions of the novel. I then
addressed the same question with regard to the textual revision in
quantitative terms, by measuring the degree of text similarity between
the two editions with the TESAS/Crouch and WCopyfind software.
The major advantages of the corpus technique for this comparative
study were: (a) to know roughly how much of the M1 edition remains
unchanged in M2, and to begin to see the general nature of the
changes and (b) to present the statistics of a chapter-by-chapter comparison and ascertain the overall revision pattern across the whole
novel in quantitative terms. This work in turn provided an indication
of which chapters were under drastic revision so as to be sampled for
further stylistic/linguistic investigation.
Measuring text similarity quantitatively is of great help to the
study of literary revision to some degree. However, given that our
main purpose is to explore the stylistic difference in Fowless textual
alterations, general quantitative measurement was not particularly
revealing in this regard. Thus I conducted a qualitative stylistic
analysis of some equivalent pairs of extracts from both editions, and
formed two hypotheses concerning his revisionary tendency and the
resulting stylistic effect. Nonetheless, considering also the limitation
in applying detailed linguistic analysis to the confirmation of the
overall text style difference between two versions of a very long novel

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like The Magus, I had recourse to other corpus techniques, to examine


the two hypotheses quantitatively (combined with qualitative analyses
of the corpus data). Wmatrix was used to conduct a macroscopic
linguistic comparison at the semantic level, to test my first hypothesis
concerning the difference in narrative point of view (re)presentation
and the resulting difference in the text world projection between M1
and M2. I then explored WordSmith tools to test my second hypothesis
concerning the revisionary changes in figurative language.
Overall, this comparative study has made three major contributions.
First, it contributes to stylistic appreciation of The Magus (both editions). Literary critics of either version of The Magus usually express
discomfort in assessing the work. Some critics find the M1 edition too
pretentious and self-indulgent (Wight and Grant 1987: 85), or call
it a partial failure (Rubenstein 1975: 339). Others acknowledge the
novel as a brilliant puzzle (Rackham 1972: 95). As for the M2 revision,
some critics think that the essential opacity of the original novel has
not been removed in the revised version, yet the latter is unquestionably superior to the original (Wade 1979: 716). Regarding the
disparity in literary critics responses to the novel, we can see that
their evaluative judgments all seem to be too general, personal and
subjective. The study has presented a systematic, and hopefully more
reliable, account of the linguistic features in The Magus revision as
well as how it differs from the original. After identifying the main
differences between the two editions and discussing their possible
effects, we see how, depending on readers preferences and literary
training, one edition may be evaluated differently from the other.
The reinforced metafictional theory and its strategies, the increase of
more sophisticated figurative language and intertextual allusions
consequently increase readers processing effort and somehow affect
the readers involvement in the M2 fictional world, as compared in M1.
Readers who do not value the metafictional move as highly but prefer the effect of immediacy or sense of involvement in the fictional
world may arrive at a different appreciation or evaluation.
Secondly, the study demonstrates that corpus resources and
technique can be well applied to stylistic study in general. This
research investigated text style difference between the two editions

Pros and Cons

201

of The Magus. Different kinds of corpus tools were used to serve


different purposes.
(1) TESAS/Crouch and WCopyfind for measuring the degree of
text similarity:
The two corpus tools helped detecting the degree of text
similarity (especially in quantifying the n-gram overlaps) so
as to ascertain the overall pattern of revision for the whole
novel. Without the corpus technique, this task would have
been impossible. These tools are useful in comparing different
versions of the same text. It is particularly useful in the study of
(literary) revision.
(2) Wmatrix for macroscopic linguistic comparison:
Wmatrix helped identifying textual features that are of literary
significance in the two editions, including features that critics
seem not to have noticed, explicitly, at least. The advantage of
Wmatrix is that it allows the macroscopic analysis (the study
of the characteristics of whole texts) to inform the microscopic
level (the use of particular linguistic features) to be investigated
further.
(3) WordSmith for metaphors extraction:
WordSmith Tools have long been recognized as useful for all
sorts of language study. The sorting function in the Concord
program has been proved particularly useful. Surely no automatic analysis of such concordance lines is possible, but a
concordance can present and sort data in a form which allows
human analysts to see patterns more easily, as in my case, to
uncover the metaphorical patterns in The Magus original and
the changes in the revision.
I have explored various corpus techniques and applied them in the
areas where they have not been applied before in a similar way.
I applied TESAS/Crouch, which was originally developed to the
study of text reuse in the domain of journalism, to the study of
literary revision. I explored Wmatrix, which has been applied to

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language study in general, and showed that it is also useful for


stylistic comparison. WordSmith Tools show a fruitful result of corpus
investigation into figurative language, which may assuage some of the
cognitive stylisticians fears regarding corpus techniques.
Van Peer used to point out that the major shortcoming of quantitative studies of literature is apparent in one particular area, that is, the
treatment of figurative language; as he states, no computer program
can automatically disambiguate figurative language as such (1989:
3023). I certainly agree that figurative language is so abstract and
complicated that it is one of the areas which proves hardest to treat
in any quantitative way. However, I would argue that the main point
here is not to have figurative meanings assigned automatically by
machine. We do not rely on the corpus technique to automatically
disambiguate figurative language for us. On the contrary, we rely on
the tool to sort and display the linguistic data in the way easier for
us to see the pattern of figurative language. Qualitative analysis of the
retrieved corpus data is still a necessary and the most essential part of
the investigation.
The third contribution of this study thus lies in the development
of an explicit corpus methodology in the comparison of figurative
language between the two editions, particularly in terms of metaphor
extraction and identification. I outlined how I extracted potential
similes and metaphors from my corpus data, how I set up the criteria
for metaphor identification and quantification, and how I extrapolated
and categorized the underlying conceptual metaphors from the linguistic patterns. This methodology turned out to be a useful approach
to figurative language study and could be used by others. I do hope
that my quantitative and qualitative study of figurative language in
Chapter Seven has offered a relatively higher degree of objectivity
and sufficiently reliable analysis. Surely there can never be a hundred
percent accuracy in the counts of metaphors, even with the aid of
concordance. However, the discrepancy in the figurative language
frequency and their actual (deleted or added) textual occurrences in
the two versions can be regarded as a pointer or evidence in support
of further qualitative stylistic analysis or inference. That is, Fowless
seemingly unobservable revisionary process and his communicative
intention can be inferred from the observable corpus data.

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203

By and large, using the corpus tools on the electronic versions


of The Magus helped me to process the language of both editions
with great accuracy and consistency, not only in terms of identifying
the overall pattern of revision in quantitative terms, but also in uncovering significant linguistic differences between the two editions.
An integrated combination of the corpus methodology, quantitative
work and stylistic analyses has helped me to confirm my hypotheses
concerning the revisionary tendency and to arrive at a systematic and,
I hope, insightful account of the text style differences between the
two editions of The Magus.

9.2 Suggestions for future research


Further research regarding either edition of The Magus or the
comparison of the two editions can be done:
(1) In terms of the novel itself (either edition), it would be interesting to compare the linguistic differences between Part I and Part
III of the novel, and to trace what kinds of linguistic features in
these two parts trigger our understanding of the change that
takes place in Nicholas after he has gone through the journey.
(2) As I mentioned in Chapter Six, Wmatrix can help us to identify
the significant linguistic changes at the word level, at the POS
level, and at the semantic level (see Appendix D). Given the
space of the book, I focused only on the significant difference
at the semantic level. It would be interesting to investigate the
linguistic differences at the other two levels, to see if we can
arrive at new or different findings.
(3) It would also be interesting to do reader response testing on
some pairs of extracts from the two editions, to see how readers react to, interpret or even evaluate the two different versions of the texts.
(4) We may also use TESAS/Crouch to track and investigate the
linguistic changes that occur in Part I and Part III of the two
editions, to explore the theoretical issue concerning style and
choice. According to the text similarity scores and my own
observations, the changes in Part I and Part III are mostly

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microscopic textual alterations, ranging from subtle changes
of punctuation, lexis, slight rephrasings and reordering of
words/phrases/sentences, and so on, which presumably are
more conscious linguistic revision. Hence, with the aid of the
sentence alignment mapping in TESAS/Crouch (cf. Figure 4.1),
we may track those conscious linguistic choices Fowles has
made and explore further why he prefers the expression in M2
than the other in M1. Is the M2 expression better in stylistic
terms? If so, how?

For researchers who are interested in the study of literary revision


may duplicate the research process outlined in this book. Other
issues such as text deixis, speech and thought presentation, narrative
point of view and text world projection and so on, all form fruitful
topics to be investigated. Research topics are potentially inexhaustible. We can always find various methods and approaches to address
various kinds of questions. To adopt a corpus stylistic approach to
literary studies in general, there are several prerequisite principles.
To begin with, it should be recognized that corpus linguistics is
based on two principles of empirical observational study, as suggested
by Stubbs (2007a), and these two principles also apply to corpus
stylistics. First, the observer must not influence what is observed.
What is selected for observation clearly depends on prior hypotheses,
as well as on what is convenient and technically possible. Second,
repeated events are significant. If a pattern occurs over and over
again in the language use, then it cannot be dismissed as mere performance. From stylistic perspective, it may indicate certain aesthetic
emphasis or give the text its distinctive stylistic flavour.
Besides, corpus stylistics involves quantitative or statistical study
of style, which should be approached with the utmost care. Researchers should have basic knowledge of the statistical tools (tests) they
are utilizing, and a profound knowledge of the linguistic data they
are observing; and should always bear in mind that statistics can be
as misleading as any of the traditional methods in the study of
style. As Ardat (1986: 103) suggests, statistics works in the service of
stylistics under three conditions: (1) when it is utilized as a means not

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205

an end; (2) when its findings have empirical validity such as aesthetic
effect and artistic emphasis and (3) when its observable data are
adequate both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The last principle of corpus stylistic study, and the greatest challenge,
lies in how to explicate and operationalize stylistic intuitions in van
Peers (1989: 305) words, that is, how to develop reliable methods
of quantification and to strike a balance between quantitative and
qualitative analyses. While operationalizing stylistic intuitions, we
should spell out the steps that lie between what is observed and the
interpretation placed on those observations; that is, to incorporate
the observed corpus data and our quantifications into a synthetic
discussion of the chosen literary works. Surely it is unlikely to completely eliminate subjective factors in analysis, but we should, as
Stubbs (2007a: 131) suggests, make explicit how our observations
are constrained by what is possible and/or convenient, and how
different aspects of reality are therefore emphasized by available data
and observational methods.
In an approach which unites empirical science and hermeneutic
art, achieving a comfortable balance takes time. Stylisticians should
remain self-reflective about the directions that corpus linguistics
might take, so as to open up productive new avenues to literary
studies, prose fiction in particular.

Appendix A: TESAS algorithm


computation of text similarity score

Following the cognate approach, three kinds of shared terms between


the aligned sentence pair are identified: (a) n-grams, (b) identical
single words and (c) word pairs that are synonyms or which have
the same stem. Based on the matches, the relationship between
the sentence pair is quantified in terms of three scores which are
calculated as follows:

(1)

psd

(2)

ps

(3)

psng =

lsw + lng
m2
2x(lsw + lng)
m1 + m2
lng
lsw + lng

The proportion of shared terms


in the derived sentence.
The proportion of shared terms
in the pair of sentences.
The proportion of n-grams (n 2) among the
matched terms.

The symbols used in the TESAS algorithm are defined as:


lsw the number of single words matched between the sentence pair
(i.e. identical words, words sharing the same stem, or words
found to be synonyms of each other via the synonym list);
lng the sum of the length of shared n-grams in terms of the number
of tokens (n 2);
m1 the lengths of source sentence(s);
m2 the lengths of derived sentence.
Each of these scores reflects different aspects of the relationship
between the sentence pair, S1 (the source sentence) and S2 (the
derived sentence). The value of the three scores all range between

Appendix A

207

0 and 1. The maximum score, 1, implies a complete match between


the sentence pair; the minimum score, 0, means that the sentence
pair are completely unrelated.
The psd score indicates the extent to which a derived sentence is
dependent on its source sentence(s). If psd=1, all of the words in
S2 have matches in S1; if psd=0, no word in S2 has a match in S1.
The ps score reflects the similarity between the sentence pair. If
ps=1, all of the words have matches on the opposite side; if ps=0,
no word matches between S1 and S2.
The psng score denotes the degree of significance of the matched
items. If psng=1, all matched items are n-grams (n 2); if psng=0,
none of the matched items are n-grams.
In order to obtain a single overall metric for measuring the similarity
between the whole mapped sentence pair, the three scores are
combined to create a weighted score (ws) as follows:

(4)

ws

d1psd + d2ps + d3psng

d1 + d2 + d3 =1
The ws indicates the overall similarity
between the sentence pair.

The three parameters d1, d2 and d3 are weights for each of the three
scores. They have been determined empirically and are currently
set to: d1 = 0.85, d2 = 0.05 and d2 = 0.1. A threshold of ws, 0.65 by
default, is used to determine whether or not a pair of sentences are
definitely related. Those sentence pairs which produce a ws score
higher than the threshold are taken to be highly related (for detailed
computation, indication and evaluation of the scores, see Clough
et al. 2002a; McEnery and Piao 2003; Piao 2001).

B.1

TESAS/Crouch Report (M2 vs. M1)


Matched
n-grams single words substitutable terms

245,136

178,817

787

233

Matched Unmatched Similarity


Unmatched
n-grams (%)
(%)
Score
words
65,355

72.93%

26.65%

87.531%

TESAS/Crouch Statistics of The Magus

TESAS/Crouch Report (M2 vs. M1)

Part I

2nd
Matched
Unmatched
Edition n-grams single words substitutable terms
words
Ch. 1

1,709

1,671

38

97.78%

2.22%

97.893%

Ch. 2

652

647

99.23%

0.77%

99.232%

Ch. 3

2,686

2,482

31

167

92.41%

6.22%

93.857%

Ch. 4

3,853

3,795

16

41

98.49%

1.06%

98.987%

Ch. 5

2,345

2,301

41

98.12%

1.75%

98.294%

Ch. 6

1,034

1,007

23

97.39%

2.22%

97.776%

Ch. 7

2,962

2,930

29

98.92%

0.98%

99.089%

Ch. 8

2,936

2,883

49

98.19%

1.67%

98.398%

493

467

26

94.73%

5.27%

94.724%

18,670 18,183

58

10

419

97.39%

2.24%

97.583%

Ch. 9
Sub-Total

B.2

Matched
Unmatched Similarity
n-grams (%)
(%)
Score

TESAS/Crouch Statistics The Magus Part I

Appendix B: TESAS/Crouch statistics

Total

2nd
Edition

TESAS/Crouch Report (M2 vs. M1)


Matched

Unmatched

n-grams single words substitutable terms

Ch. 10

2,048

1,924

Matched
n-grams (%)

Unmatched (%)

Similarity Score

words
117

93.95%

5.71%

94.334%

Ch. 11

1,775

1,733

32

97.63%

1.80%

98.254%

Ch. 12

982

947

31

96.44%

3.16%

96.843%

Ch. 13

3,599

3,352

21

220

93.14%

6.11%

93.915%

Ch. 14

962

958

99.58%

0.42%

99.584%

Ch. 15

3,426

3,302

31

92

96.38%

2.69%

97.344%

Ch. 16

786

783

99.62%

0.25%

99.746%

Ch. 17

3,043

2,988

14

41

98.19%

1.35%

98.718%

Ch. 18

3,838

3,805

24

99.14%

0.63%

99.374%

Ch. 19

2,801

2,520

273

89.97%

9.75%

90.290%

Ch. 20

1,893

1,885

99.58%

0.21%

99.789%

Ch. 21

1,073

886

187

82.57%

17.43%

82.571%

Ch. 22

1,801

1,786

12

99.17%

0.67%

99.500%

Ch. 23

3,302

3,081

14

205

93.31%

6.21%

93.792%

Ch. 24

2,618

2,465

146

94.16%

5.58%

94.462%

Ch. 25

1,470

1,408

58

95.78%

3.95%

96.054%

2,362

2,334

18

98.81%

0.76%

99.325%

2,866

2,725

10

125

95.08%

4.36%

95.675%

Ch. 28

1,489

1,376

106

92.41%

7.12%

92.882%
(Continued)

209

Ch. 26
Ch. 27

Appendix B

Part II

2nd
Edition

210

TESAS/Crouch Report (M2 vs. M1)


2nd Edition

Matched

Unmatched

n-grams single words substitutable terms


Ch. 29

5,687

3,708

Ch. 30

1,481

Ch. 31

3,295

Ch. 32

866

Ch. 33

2,582

Ch. 34

Matched
n-grams (%)

Unmatched (%)

Similarity Score

34.31%

65.798%

words

10

1951

65.20%

1,347

128

90.95%

8.64%

91.426%

2,350

13

926

71.32%

28.10%

72.079%

600

265

69.28%

30.60%

69.395%

666

10

1899

25.79%

73.55%

26.607%

3,520

371

3138

10.54%

89.15%

10.910%

Ch. 35

5,069

2,222

27

11

2809

43.84%

55.42%

44.761%

Ch. 36

2,700

2,279

413

84.41%

15.30%

84.703%

Ch. 37

1,909

1,625

282

85.12%

14.77%

85.262%

Ch. 38

2,758

2,506

12

237

90.86%

8.59%

91.443%

Ch. 39

1,395

1,381

13

99.00%

0.93%

99.068%

Ch. 40

1,432

1,425

99.51%

0.21%

99.860%

Ch. 41

2,026

1,992

31

98.32%

1.53%

98.470%

Ch. 42

5,287

5,162

16

108

97.64%

2.04%

98.052%

Ch. 43

5,858

631

16

5208

10.77%

88.90%

11.199%

Ch. 44

6,794

6,272

517

92.32%

7.61%

92.391%

Ch. 45

4,899

1,996

24

2873

40.74%

58.64%

41.457%

Ch. 46

8,888

2,275

53

14

6546

25.60%

73.65%

26.609%

Ch. 47

4,272

133

4133

3.11%

96.75%

3.371%

Appendix B

18

Ch. 48

562

543

50.86%

49.14%

51.042%

Ch. 49

9,084

4,170

26

4880

45.90%

53.72%

46.346%

Ch. 50

4,508

3,524

23

953

78.17%

21.14%

78.927%

Ch. 51

2,785

2,285

495

82.05%

17.77%

82.226%

Ch. 52

4,910

1,761

16

3130

35.87%

63.75%

36.314%

Ch. 53

9,201

9,132

62

99.25%

0.67%

99.337%

Ch. 54

2,503

1,720

773

68.72%

30.88%

69.237%

3,212

317

12

2878

9.87%

89.60%

10.461%

3,535

434

10

3085

12.28%

87.27%

12.929%

Ch. 57

2,474

1,139

11

1322

46.04%

53.44%

46.728%

Ch. 58

8,460

696

29

10

7725

8.23%

91.31%

8.818%

Ch. 59

728

202

518

27.75%

71.15%

29.394%

Ch. 60

2,509

2,212

12

282

88.16%

11.24%

88.761%

Ch. 61

9,629

9,372

15

232

97.33%

2.41%

97.622%

Ch. 62

3,805

3,687

10

105

96.90%

2.76%

97.320%

Ch. 63

3,060

3,030

28

99.02%

0.92%

99.085%

Ch. 64

2,431

2,337

85

96.13%

3.50%

96.545%

Ch. 65

2,679

2,585

90

96.49%

3.36%

96.716%

Ch. 66

2,961

2,671

12

277

90.21%

9.35%

90.645%

Ch. 67

1,655

1,109

194,086

132,144

534

67.01%

32.27%

67.735%

574

187

61,174

68.09%

31.52%

74.853%

211

TESAS/Crouch Statistics The Magus Part II

Appendix B

Ch. 55
Ch. 56

Sub-Total

B.3

1,105

212

TESAS/Crouch Report (M2 vs. M1)


n-grams

Unmatched

single words substitutable terms

words

Matched
n-grams (%)

Unmatched (%) Similarity Score

Ch. 68

1,603

1,572

28

98.07%

1.75%

98.253%

Ch. 69

1,457

1,423

31

97.67%

2.13%

97.872%

Ch. 70

2,612

2,254

346

86.29%

13.25%

86.791%

Ch. 71

4,003

3,763

19

215

94.00%

5.37%

94.654%

Ch. 72

4,237

3,939

16

278

92.97%

6.56%

93.510%

Ch. 73

4,097

3,933

32

130

96.00%

3.17%

96.876%

Ch. 74

1,753

1,664

15

73

94.92%

4.16%

95.836%

Ch. 75

3,226

2,062

17

1142

63.92%

35.40%

64.817%

Ch. 76

4,118

3,986

23

107

96.79%

2.60%

97.426%

Ch. 77

1,089

1,068

17

98.07%

1.56%

98.439%

Ch. 78

4,248

2,826

16

11

1395

66.53%

32.84%

67.256%

32,443

28,490

155

36

3,762

87.82%

11.60%

90.157%

Sub-Total

B.4

Matched

TESAS/Crouch Statistics The Magus Part III

Appendix B

Part III

2nd Edition

Appendix C: Texts for analysis

Text Comparison Marking Styles:


z
z

z
z

verbatim: the words that remain unchanged in both versions have


no specific marking.
deletion: the words with a line drawn through indicate the parts
which have been deleted from the first edition, and so do not
appear in the second edition.
addition: the words with bold face indicate the parts that have been
added to the second edition.
rewrite: the words in small capitals indicate different expressions
of the same cognitive content or the same referent(s). This includes
lexical substitution, syntactical transformation, and paraphrase.
reordering: the text with double underline indicates the rearrangement of phrase/sentence order or position in the discourse.

Appendix C.1: Nicholas is overpowered


(M1: chapter 59)
The door was flung wide open, the light came on, there were
two black figures, two tall men in black trousers and shirts.
One was the Negro and the other was Anton. Joe came first,
so fast at me that I had no time to do anything but convulsively
grip the bedspread over my loins. I tried to see Julie, her face,
because I still could not accept what I knew: that she had turned
the key and opened the door. Anton flung her something she caught
and quickly put on a deep-red towel bathrobe. Joe flung himself at
me just as I was about to shout. His hand clapped violently across
my mouth and I felt the weight of him; a whiff of shaving-lotion,
or hair-oil. I was in no fit state to struggle. What fighting I did was

214

Appendix C

mainly to try to keep the bedspread over me. Anton gripped my


legs. They must have had loops of rope ready prepared, because
in fifteen seconds I was tied up. Then I was gagged. I got one stifled beginning of what I felt out at Julie.
You
But then I was silenced. The two men forced my arms back, so I was
lying flat, straining my neck up to see Julie. She turned, tying the
ends of the belt. Another figure appeared in the door: Conchis. He
was dressed like the others, in black shirt and trousers. He looked
at Julie, and gave a little nod of approval; touched her shoulder.
She was combing her hair briefly, not looking at me. Like a woman
athlete who has just won a race. Conchis came and stood over me.
He looked down at me absolutely without expression. I threw all
the hate I had in me at him, tried to make obscene sounds that he
could understand. A flash of awareness: this was an echo of the
torture room in the war; a corner room at the end of a corridor; a
man lying on his back on the table; symbolically castrated.
Now Julie came to the other side of the bed. My eyes began to fill
with tears of frustrated rage and humiliation. I was just able to
realize that her look was not completely detached from me;
there was no contempt in it, no mockery; but a strange reversion
to her old self, the Lily self, the cool, aloof self that I had first
known. Not as if she was an athlete now, but a woman surgeon
who had just performed a difficult operation successfully. Peeling
off the rubber gloves; surveying the suture. They were all the same;
not gloating, not taunting, even a little anxious - relieved, efficient,
yet anxious.
A team, less interested in each other, than in their difficult common purpose.
Julies cool, controlled eyes looked down into my wet, angry ones,
and I couldnt stand it. I had to shut them. I felt the lightest touch on
my bare arm, and I knew it was her hand. A moment later, when I
looked again, she was halfway to the door. She went out.
Conchis came forward from doing something by the table.
He leant over me. Nicholas, we shall not frighten you any more.
But we want you to go to sleep. It will be convenient for us and less
painful for you. Please do not struggle.

Appendix C

215

The absurd memory of the pile of exam papers I had still to mark
flicked through my mind. Joe and Anton held my left arm like a
vice. I resisted for a moment, then gave in. A dab of wet. The needle pricked into my forearm. I felt the morphine, or whatever it was,
enter. The needle was withdrawn, another dab of something wet.
Conchis went back to his table. I lay for half a minute or so,
then looked to see what he was doing. He was sitting by the
table, his legs crossed. A black medical case lay on the table
in front of him. Everyone was silent.
I tried to realize what I had got into; a world without limits.
A man with an arrow in his heart. (M1, chapter 59: 444)

Appendix C.2: Nicholas is overpowered (M2: chapter 59)


Three men, all in dark trousers and black polo-neck jumpers
they came so quickly that, paralyzed in everything but instinct,
I had no time to do anything but grab the bedspread over my loins.
The one in the lead was Joe, the Negro. He flung himself at me
just as I was about to shout. His hand clapped brutally over my
mouth and I felt the strength and weight of him throw me
back. One of the others must have turned on the bedside lamp again.
I saw another face I knew: the last time I had seen it had been on the
ridge, when the owner had been in German uniform, playing Anton.
The third face belonged to the blond-headed sailor I had seen twice
at Bourani that previous Sunday. I tried as I struggled under Joe to
see Julie I still couldnt accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel
become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. But all I glimpsed was
her back as she left the room. Someone met her there, an arm went
round her shoulders as if she had just escaped from an air disaster
and drew her out of sight.
I began to fight violently, but they had obviously anticipated that, had loops of rope ready. In less than half a minute
I was tied up and lying on my face. I dont know if I was still shouting
obscenities at them; I was certainly thinking them. Then I was gagged.
Somebody threw the bedspread over me. I managed to twist my head
to see the door.

216

Appendix C

Another figure appeared in it: Conchis. He was dressed like the


others, in black. Flames, devils, hell. He came and stood over me,
looked down at my outraged eyes absolutely without expression.
I hurled all the hate I had in me at him, tried to make sounds that
he could understand. My mind flashed back to that incident in
the war: a room at the end of a corridor, a man lying on his back,
castrated. My eyes began to fill with tears of frustrated rage and
humiliation. I realized at last what Julies final look at me had
been like. It was that of a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation successfully; peeling off the rubber gloves, surveying
the suture. Trial, flames . . . they were all mad, they must be, and she
the most vicious, shameless, degenerate . . .
Anton held out a small open case to Conchis. He took out a
hypodermic syringe, checked it was correctly filled, then
leant over me a little and showed it.
We shall not frighten you any more, young man. But we want you
to go to sleep. It will be less painful for you. Please do not struggle.
The absurd memory of the pile of examination papers I had still
to mark went through my mind. Joe and the other man turned me
on my back again and gripped my left arm like a vice. I resisted for
a few moments, then give in. A dab of wet. The needle pricked
into my forearm. I felt the morphine, or whatever it was, enter. The
needle was withdrawn, another dab of something wet. Conchis
stood back, watched me a moment, then turned and replaced
the syringe in the black medical case it had come from.
I tried to realize what I had got into: a world of people who knew
no laws, no limits.
A satyr with an arrow in his heart. (M2, chapter 59: 4889)

Appendix C.3: The Apollo scene (M1: chapter 29)


Conchis never finished his sentence. With an electrifying suddenness
a horn clamoured out of the darkness to the east. I thought immediately of an English hunting-horn, but it was bronzier, harsher, more
archaic. Lilys previously wafting fan was frozen, her eyes on Conchis.
He was staring out to sea, as if the sound had turned him to stone.

Appendix C

217

As I watched, his eyes closed, almost as if he was silently praying. But


prayer was totally foreign to his face.
The horn broke the tense night again. Three notes, the middle the
highest. The player was in the trees, somewhere near the place where
I had seen Foulkes.
I said to Lily, What is it?
She held my eyes for a moment, and strangely I had an odd
feeling that she thought I knew. But then she raised her closed
fan to her lips and looked down. The lamplight, the waiting silence.
Conchis had not moved, or opened his eyes. I let a few seconds pass,
then whispered to her.
What the devils happening?
She lifted her eyes momentarily to mine.
Apollo has come.
Apollo!
My brother.
Your brother!
I smiled, and she smiled back; but my face was full of uncertainty
and hers of knowledge. Her mouth was incredibly like that of the
stone statue. Again the horn was sounded, but at a higher pitch.
She said, I am called. I must go.
We rose together. She held out her hand.
But where?
Where I came from. Her eyes impressed some hidden significance
into mine. Then she began to walk away. I looked quickly at Conchis,
still with his oblivious face, and strode after her, stopping her at
the door.
Look, for goodness sake . . .
Her eyes were down, avoiding mine. Please let me pass.
Are you coming back?
Again the horn sounded, more urgently, closer, near the edge of
the trees. She looked up at me. A quick oblique look at Conchiss
dark figure. Then for a moment she seemed to drop the pretence. At
any rate she dropped her voice.
Go and watch. Over there. Her mouth curved unexpectedly into
a smile that hovered between mischief and sympathy. And pretend
to believe. I could have sworn that one of her eyelids fluttered; the

218

Appendix C

ghost of a very contemporary wink. But she was gone so quickly that
I was left only the more confused.
I went to the parapet that faced east. The gravel, and then across
the clearing, the trees. I could see nothing unusual. Darkness
and stillness. I listened for the sound of her footsteps downstairs, but
there was silence there too. Then the sound came again. It echoed
faintly from some steep hillside inland, its primitive timbre seeming
to wake the landscape and the trees, to summon from some evolutionary sleep. Another long silence. Then suddenly there was a movement in the pines.
A dim figure stood out in the starlight some fifty or sixty
yards away. I had an impression of whiteness. Then from beyond
the cottage there was a beam of light; not very strong, as
a hand-held torch might give. With a shock I realized that the
figure was that of an absolutely naked man. He raised the horn he
was carrying and again came the call. He was near enough for me to
see, with the aid of the weak beam of light, dark pubic hair and the
pale scape of his penis. He was tall, well built, well cast to be
Apollo. On his head I made out a crown of leaves; the glint of
golden leaves, laurel-leaves. The light made his skin even paler,
so that he stood out like marble against the black trees. He was
facing the house, facing me, the horn in his right hand.
Suddenly there was a new sound, even stranger, of a woman or
a boy, I couldnt tell, calling from where the track out of Bourani
disappeared into the trees. It was a chanted sound, a triphthong
hauntingly prolonged, an echo of the horns echo. Eia. Eia. The
man dropped his arm and turned and went a pace or two to the
north. I saw him raise his yard-long horn, a narrow crescent
with a flared end. He called back; and the other call came back at
once, so that the echoes of the two calls intermingled. Eia. Eia.
Like the man I was watching the trees to the north, the dark tunnel
where the track disappeared.
A running girl appeared; and I thought at first by the apparent
whiteness of her skin the torch did not shift to her that she was
also naked. I thought too, with increasing shock, that it was Lily.
If she had gone very quickly round the back of the house . . . but then
I could distinguish a white chiton, and dark hair. A wig? The girl had

Appendix C

219

a slim body, the right height. She ran towards the sea between
Apollo and myself on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared
behind her. Another man, running from out of the dark tunnel
through the trees. The girl was being chased. I flashed a look
round. Conchis sat exactly as before, as if he disapproved sternly of
this interruption.
The nymph-girl ran through the beam of light that shone on Apollo
and had almost reached the seaward side of the clearing when several
things happened. Apollo blew his horn again, but this time it was a
single wild note, sustained then abruptly ended. He struck a new
pose, his hand pointing at the satyr-man, who stopped at the sound.
Simultaneously a much stronger beam shone out from directly
underneath me. Someone else was standing under the colonnade. The beam moved, caught up the still running figure of
the girl, her white back and her black dishevelled hair
and her seemingly near-exhausted legs, as she plunged into
the trees. She disappeared. The light went out for two moments.
And then, in a brilliant coup de thtre, it went on again, and
standing there, exactly in the place where the first girl had
disappeared, a place where the ground rose a little, was yet
another, the most striking figure of all. It was Lily, but
metamorphosed.
She had changed into a long saffron chiton. It had a thin
blood-red hem where it ended at the knees. On her feet were black
buskins with silver greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in
strange contrast to her bare shoulders and arms. The skin was unnaturally white, the eyes elongated by black make-up, and her hair was
also elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over
her shoulders she had a quiver. In her left hand she held a long
silver-painted bow. Something in her stance, as well as her
distorting make-up, was genuinely frightening.
She stood, cold and outraged and ominous for a long
second, and then she reached back with her free hand and with a
venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the quiver. But just as
she began to fit it to the bow-string, the beam tracked like lightning
back to the arrested man. He was standing, darker-skinned, in a
black chiton, spectacularly terrified, his arms flung back, and his

220

Appendix C

head averted. It was a pose without realism, yet effectively theatrical.


The beam swept back to the goddess. She had the bow at full stretch,
the horn blew again, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost its flight in
the abrupt darkness as the torch flicked off again. A moment later it
shone on the man. He was clutching the arrow or an arrow in his
heart. He fell slowly to his knees, swayed a second, then slumped
sideways among the stones and thyme. The torch lingered a
moment on him, then went out. Apollo stood impassively, surveying,
a pale marmoreal shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the
arena. The goddess began to walk, a striding huntress walk, towards
him, her silver bow slung like a rifle over one shoulder. As she
came near, into the diffuse beam of weak light, he held out his hand.
They stood like that, facing me, hand in hand, Apollo and his
sister, Artemis-Diana. The beam went out. I saw them retreat
into the dark penumbra of the trees. Silence. Night. As if
nothing had happened. (M1, chapter 29: 1725)

Appendix C.4: The Apollo scene (M2: chapter 29)


Conchis never finished his sentence. With an electrifying suddenness a
horn clamoured out of the darkness to the east. I thought immediately
of an English hunting-horn, but it was harsher, more archaic. Lilys
previously wafting fan was frozen, her eyes on Conchis. He was staring
out to sea, as if the sound had turned him to stone. As I watched, his
eyes closed, almost as if he was silently praying. But prayer was totally
foreign to his face.
The horn broke the tense night again. Three notes, the middle the
highest. They echoed faintly from some steep hillside inland, the
primitive timbre seeming to wake the landscape and the night, to
summon from an evolutionary sleep.
I said to Lily, What is it?
She held my eyes for a moment; with a strange hint of doubt, as
if she half suspected me of knowing perfectly well what it was.
Apollo.
Apollo!
Again the horn was blown, but at a higher pitch, and closer,
too close to the house now for me to see anything, because of the

Appendix C

221

parapet, even if it had not been night. Conchis still sat with his
oblivious face. Lily stood and held out a hand.
Come.
I let her lead me to where we had stood before, at the eastern end
of the terrace. She stared down into the trees, and I glanced at her
profile.
Someone seems to be mixing metaphors.
She couldnt quite press the smile out of her mouth. My hand was
gently squeezed.
Be good. Watch.
The gravel, the clearing, the trees: I could see nothing
unusual.
I just wish I had a programme. Thats all.
How very dull of you, Mr. Urfe.
Nicholas. Please.
But whatever answer she might have given to that was forestalled.
From somewhere between the house and Marias cottage
there came a beam of light. It was not very strong, from a
small electric torch. In it, some sixty yards away on the edge
of the pines, a figure stood like a marble statue. With a new
shock I realized that it was that of an absolutely naked man. He was
just near enough for me to make out the black pubic hair, the
pale scape of his penis; tall, well-built, well cast to be Apollo.
His eyes seemed exaggeratedly large, as if they had been made up.
On his head there was a glint of gold, a crown of leaves; laurel-leaves. He was facing us, immobile, with his yard-long
horn, a narrow crescent with a flared end, held slightly out
from his waist in his right hand. It struck me after a few seconds
that his skin was an unnatural white, almost phosphorescent in the
weak beam, as if his body as well as his face had been painted.
I looked back: Conchis still sat as before . . . then at Lily, who
watched the figure without expression, yet with a kind of intentness
as if she had seen this rehearsed, and was now curious to see the full
performance that silenced any desire in me to be facetious. The
charade itself shocked me less than the revelation that I was not the
only young male at Bourani. I knew that at once.
Who is he?

222

Appendix C

My brother.
I thought you were meant to be an only child.
The Apollo figure raised his horn sideways and blew a different
note, sustained, yet more urgent, as if calling lost bounds. Lily said
slowly, without taking her eyes from him, That is in the other world.
And then, before I could challenge her further, she pointed to our
left, beyond the cottage. A faint light shape came running out of
the dark tunnel where the track to the house emerged from
the trees. The torch-beam moved to her it was a girl, and
she too was naked, except for antique sandals that were laced up
her calves; or perhaps not quite naked either the pubic hair had
been shaved or she wore some kind of cache-sexe. Her hair was bound
back in a classical style, and as with the Apollo her body and face
seemed unnaturally white. She was running too quickly for me to see
her features. She threw a look back as she came towards us, she was
being chased.
She ran towards the sea, between the Apollo and the two of
us standing on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared behind
her. Another man, running out of the trees and down the track.
He was got up as a satyr, in some kind of puffed-out hairy tights, goathaunches; and he had the traditional head, a beard, two stubby horns.
His naked torso was dark, almost black. As he ran closer, gaining on
the girl, I had my next shock. A huge phallus rose from his loins.
It was nearly eighteen inches long, far too massive to be meant
realistically, but it was effectively obscene. I suddenly remembered
the painting in the bowl of the kylix in the room below us; and
also remembered I was a long way from home. I felt unsure, out of
my depth, a lot more innocent and unsophisticated at heart than
I liked to pretend. I slid a quick look at the girl beside me. I thought
I detected a faint smile, a kind of excitement at cruelty, even when
being mimed, that I did not like; it was very remote from the
Edwardian other world whose clothes she still wore.
I looked back at the nymph, at her white back and dishevelled hair, her seemingly near-exhausted legs. She plunged
into the trees going down towards the sea, and disappeared
and then, in a coup de thtre, a much stronger beam shone out
from directly beneath where we stood. Standing there, in the

Appendix C

223

place where the first girl had just disappeared, a place where
the ground rose a little before falling abruptly towards
the beach, was yet another, the most striking figure of all,
a woman in a long saffron chiton. It had a blood-red hem where
it ended at the knees. On her feet were black buskins with silver
greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in strange contrast
to the bare shoulders and arms. Again the skin was unnaturally
white, the eyes elongated by black make-up, and the hair was also
elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over her
shoulders she had a silver quiver and in her left hand, a silver
bow. Something in her stance, as well as the distorted face, was
genuinely frightening.
She stood there for several moments, cold and outraged and
ominously barring the way. Then she reached back with her free
hand and with a venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the
quiver. But before she could fit it to the bow-string, the beam tracked
back to the arrested satyr. He stood spectacularly terrified, his arms
flung back and his head averted, the mock phallus in the better light
I could see it was jet black still erect. It was a pose without realism,
yet dramatic. The beam swept back to the goddess. She had her bow
at full stretch, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost it in the darkness.
A moment later the beam returned to the satyr. He was clutching
the arrow or an arrow to his heart. He fell slowly to his knees,
swayed a second, then slumped sideways among the stones and thymebushes. The stronger torch lingered on him, as if to impress the
fact of his death; then it was extinguished. Beyond, in the weaker
original beam, Apollo stood impassively, surveying, a pale marmoreal
shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the arena. The goddess
began to walk, a striding huntress walk, her silver bow held in one
hand by her side, towards him. They stood facing us for a moment,
then each raised a free hand, the palm bent back, in a kind of final
tableau, a grave salutation. It was another effective gesture. It had a
fleeting, but genuine, dignity, the farewell of immortals. But then
the remaining light went out. I could still just distinguish
the two pale shadows, turning away now with the rather mundane haste of actors eager to get off stage while the lights
are down. (M2, chapter 29: 1803)

Appendix D: Wmatrix statistics

POS Tag
RR
CC
RR21
VVD

D.1

M1 All (%)

M2 All (%)

6502 (3.06)
5905 (2.78)
652 (0.31)
12599 (5.93)

7512 (3.25)
6035 (2.61)
825 (0.36)
13256 (5.73)

overuse/
underuse

LL

POS category

(+)
()
(+)
()

12.26
11.97
8.26
7.59

General adverb
Coordinating conjunction
General adverb (phrases)
Past tense of lexical verb

Significant differences at the POS level between M1 and M2

POS Tag M1 Part 1 (%) M2 Part 1 (%)

n/a

overuse/
underuse

LL

POS category

The LL for each key POS item at the top is under 6.63,
which indicates no significant POS difference in Part I of the novel.

POS Tag M1 Part 2 (%)

M2 Part 2 (%)

overuse/
underuse

LL

POS category

4546 (2.76)
4932 (3.00)
9792 (5.95)
34 (0.02)
509 (0.31)
21580 (13.11)

4698 (2.56)
5900 (3.21)
10454 (5.69)
69 (0.04)
664 (0.36)
23481 (12.79)

()
(+)
()
(+)
(+)
()

13.40
13.24
9.63
8.62
7.12
6.82

Coordinating conjunction
General adverb
Past tense of lexical verb
General adverb (phrases)
General adverb (phrases)
Singular common noun

CC
RR
VVD
RR22
RR21
NN1

POS Tag M1 Part 3 (%) M2 Part 3 (%)

n/a

D.2

overuse/
underuse

LL

POS category

The LL for each key POS item at the top is under 6.63,
which indicates no significant POS difference in Part III of the novel.

Significant differences at the POS level in the three parts of the novel

Appendix D
SemTag
M1
N5++

D.3

3689 (1.74)
406 (0.19)

M2 All(%)

overuse/
underuse

LL

3735 (1.62)
541 (0.23)

()
(+)

9.81
9.53

Semantic category
Moving, coming and going
Quantities

Significant differences at the semantic level between M1 and M2

SemTag

n/a

SemTag
Ml
N5++
Z7
S9
Q1.3
A5.2+

SemTag

n/a

D.4

M1 All (%)

225

M1 Part 1 (%) M2 Part 1 (%)

overuse/
underuse

LL

Semantic category

The LL for each key semantic item at the top is under 6.63,
which indicates no significant concept difference in Part I of the novel.

M1 Part 2 (%) M2 Part 2 (%)


2902 (176)
319 (0.19)
269 (0.16)
423 (0.26)
75 (0.05)
127 (0.08)

overuse/
underuse

LL

Semantic category

()
(+)
(+)
(+)
()
(+)

11.59
9.01
8.08
7.29
7.07
6.68

Moving, coming and going


Quantities
If
Religion and the supernatural
Telecommunications
Evaluation: - True/false

2961 (1.61)
443 (0.24)
376 (0.20)
561 (0.31)
52 (0.03)
190 (0.10)

M1 Part 3 (%) M2 Part 3 (%)

overuse/
underuse

LL

Semantic category

The LL for each key semantic item at the top is under 6.63,
which indicates no significant concept difference in Part III of the novel.

Significant differences at the semantic level in the three parts of the novel

Appendix E: Figurative examples

Figurative Examples Marking Style:


z
z

italics: the words in italics indicate metaphorical expressions.


boldface: the words in boldface indicate the metaphorical expressions that occur in BOTH editions. Examples with slight variations
between M1 and M2 will be listed together for reference.

Ch

Part II of The Magus (2nd Edition)

13

1. His eyes were those of a chess-player who has made a good move.

17

2. It is what I mean by hazard. There comes a time in each life like a point of
fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will
become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this.
You are still becoming. Not being.
3. I nodded, cautious, not concerned with understanding; because underlying
everything he did I had come to detect an air of stage-management, of the planned
and rehearsed. He did not tell me of his coming to Bourani as a man tells
something that chances to occur to him; but far more as a dramatist tells an
anecdote where the play requires.

19

4. And Mitford? I do not waste time teaching the blind.


5. Their living reality became a matter of technique, of realism gained through rehearsal.
6. It was like being earnestly persuaded an object was new by a seller who simultaneously
and deliberately revealed it must be second-hand: an affront to all probability.
7. Meanwhile he had started weaving his web again; and once more I flew to meet it.

21

8. If in one way he seemed a more human person, more normally fallible, than
before, that was tainted by what seemed like a lack of virginity in the telling.
9. Calculating frankness is very different from the spontaneous variety; there was
some fatal extra dimension in his objectivity, which was much more that of a
novelist before a character than of even the oldest, most changed man before his own real
past self.
10. It was finally much more like biography than the autobiography it purported to be;
patently more concealed lesson than true confession.
11. It was not that I was so self-blind that I saw nothing to be learnt.

Appendix E

227

23

12. Is this how they teach you at Oxford now? One reads last chapters first?
13. In some obscure way, one I was to become very familiar with, it flattered me:
I was too intelligent not to be already grasping the rules of the game we played.
14. It was no good my knowing that old men have conned young ones like that ever
since time began.
15. I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and
contexts.

24

16. I shall never forget these last two days. Even though I dont know why Im elect.
Or elected. Perhaps your ignorance is why.
17. I had indeed, it seemed, passed some test.

25

18. as I walked there came the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour,
the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a
knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been
young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to
Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny.

27

19. After all, it was a masque, and I wanted, or after a very short while began to
want, to play my part. I found something a shade patronizing in her attitude, and
I interpreted it as an attempt to upstage me; perhaps to test me, to see if I was
worth playing against.

29

20. I could still just distinguish the two pale shadows, turning away now with the
rather mundane haste of actors eager to get off stage while the lights are down.
21. I could try to be content as a spectator, to let these increasingly weird incidents
flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I
thought that, I knew it was a bad analogy. People dont build cinemas for an
audience of one, unless they mean to use that one for a very special purpose.
22. His eyes were even more intense than usual, like black phosphorus, almost
leechlike; much more the eyes of a scientist checking the result of an experiment, the state of
the guinea-pig, than of a host seeking approval from a guest after a spectacular
entertainment.
23. I smiled and shook my head. This time I take the tooth. This time it may be real.
24. At least Im beginning to realize that all your dice are loaded. Then you cannot
possibly win.
25. Conchis was evidently like certain modem poets: he tried to kill ten meanings with
one symbol.
26. I looked back: Conchis still sat as before . . . then at Lily, who watched the
figure without expression, yet with a kind of intentness as if she had seen this
rehearsed, and was now curious to see the full performance that silenced any
desire in me to be facetious. The charade itself shocked me less than the
revelation that I was not the only young male at Bourani.

228

Appendix E

30

27. The masque, the masque: it fascinated and irritated me, like an obscure poem.
28. I was intensely aware that our relationship, or my position, had changed again; as
I had been shifted from guest to pupil, now I uneasily felt myself being manoeuvred into
a butt.
29. Things like the humanity in his playing of Bach, in certain aspects, however
embroidered, of his autobiography, were undermined, nullified by his perversity
and malice elsewhere.
30. He must know it, therefore must want me to flounder; flounder indeed, since the
curious books and objects he put in my way, Lily herself, and now the
myth-figures in the night with all their abnormal undertones had to be seen as a
hook, and I couldnt pretend that it had not sunk home.

31

31. I stared out to sea, a little on the same principle as Ulysses when he tied himself to the
mast.
32. You keep suggesting youre playing this pretend game to please the old man. If you
want me to join in, I think youd better explain why.
33. I pretended to read it, did the same tracing of the lines; and tried to read it
quite seriously in the manner of Sherlock Holmes.
34. The girl beside me was making a brave effort or perhaps casting had preceded
narrating.
35. But all the acting skill in the world couldnt carry off this present role.
36. I had the impression that for once I had shocked her out of acting.
37. Shall we walk out there? If thats what the script says.
38. But since it is clear that we are incapable of speaking the same language, we shall
just walk. I smiled and shrugged: a truce, if she must.

32

39. She gave strongly the impression that she was playing with me amusing herself
as much as acting a role at Conchiss command.
40. But all games, even the most literal, between a man and a woman are implicitly
sexual; and here on the beach she had almost ingenuously set out to captivate me.
41. It must have been on the old mans orders, yet behind the flirtatiousness, the
mischief, I had glimpsed a different sort of amusement and one not compatible
with that of a mere actress for hire.
42. Besides, her performance had been much closer to inspired amateurishness than
to the professional.
43. In theatrical terms, the effect, despite the elaboration of the mounting, was much
more of a family charade than of the wished-for total illusion of the true theatre; in her
every glance and humour hung the suggestion that of course my leg was being
pulled.
44. In short, if it was her role in the charade to seduce me, I should be seduced.
45. I was both a sensualist and an adventurer; a failed poet, still seeking resurrection in
events, if not in lines.

33

46. You make a rotten Caliban. Then perhaps you shall take the part. I was rather
hoping for Ferdinand.
47. We were evidently still playing games, but in a different, rather franker key.
48. Forbidden. By Prospero? Perhaps!
49. Thats how it began in Shakespeare. By being forbidden. She looked down.
Although of course his Miranda was a lot more innocent! And his Ferdinand.

Appendix E

229

50. She was wearing absurd black lace-up boots. The echo now was of some
antiquated village schoolroom, or perhaps of Mrs Pankhurst, a first timid
attempt at female emancipation.
51. It was no good; she wouldnt lay down the other mask.
52. Youre trying very successfully to captivate me. Why? . . . Then she picked
up the mask and held it like a yashmak again. I am Astarte, mother of mystery.
53. I wanted her to know that she was getting very near the bottom of the locker in her
improvisings.
54. Sorry, Im an atheist. She put down the mask. Then I shall have to teach you
faith.
55. I left a pause. I dont find one aspect of your antics here quite so amusing as
the others.
56. It was closed, reluctant, but it seemed to be acting no longer. Then you admit it
is a game? Part of it.
57. It is like hide-and-seek, Nicholas. One has to be sure the seeker wants to play. One
also has to stay in hiding. Or there is no game.
58. Play your charade. But for Christs sake stop flogging a dead horse. Right?
59. I remained swing down into her eyes, and I knew I had won. The fear had given
way to a surrender.
(cf. M1: I knew I had called her bluff then; regain the initiative.)
60. Only, you know, its ones sense of reality. Its like gravity. One can resist it only
so long.
61. I was shown a new vista: the possibility that she had been playing her part under
some form of duress.
62. What you said this morning . . . there is a kind of script. Im meant to take and
show you something.
63. I sensed, behind the outward daring, the duplicities of the past she had been
playing, a delicious ghost of innocence, perhaps even of virginity . . .
64. I had also a return of that headlong, fabulous and ancient sense of having entered
a legendary maze . . .
65. There was no one in the world I wanted to change places with, now that I had
found my Ariadne, and held her by the hand.
34

66. It was a little like goading a recalcitrant mule a very charming mule, but one that
seemed scared of every step it took forward.
67. And the point is, if I answer all the questions I fully understand you must be
burning to ask, it . . . it would be like telling you the story of a mystery film just before
you went to see it.
68. If you like were a few steps further into the maze. That doesnt mean were any
nearer the centre than you.
69. Nothing to do with telepathy. Thats just a blind. A metaphor.
70. Hide-and-seek . . . its really much more like blind mans buff. Being spun so much
that you lose all sense of direction. You begin to see double, triple meanings in everything
he says and does.
(cf. M1: I feel as if Ive been too well spun in a game of blind-mans-buff.)
71. Its all so fragile. Like a spiders web. Intellectually. Theatrically, if you like. There
are ways we could behave that might destroy it all at once. She gave me
another look. Seriously. Im not playing games now.
72. He surely cant expect me to go on swallowing the Lily thing.
73. So all this could be a part of the plot? Yes. In a way it is. She took a deep
breath. Very soon your credulity is going to be stretched even further.

230

Appendix E
74. but about her I was getting, if not many factual, at least some psychological and
emotional answers . . .
75. I imagined a girl who had perhaps been a little bit of a blue-stocking, despite her
looks; certainly more an intellectual than an animal creature, but with a repeated and
teasing hint of something dormant there, waiting to be awakened.
76. I knew she was still acting in a way, but I felt it was defensive now, a way of
hiding what she felt about me.
77. This first act has apparently required you to attract me. Anyway, thats been the
effect. You may be another fly in the web, but youve also been doubling as the kind
they tie on hooks. It was a very artificial fly.
78. I feel Im some sort of guinea-pig, God knows why. Its mad . . .
79. He must have sold you something better than just playing games.
80. he did sell us something better. And guinea-pig . . . thats not quite right.
Something better than that, too.
81. I feel like an over-carbonated soda-bottle. Bubbling with questions.
82. You must have seen youre in the hands of someone whos very skilled at rearranging
reality.

35

83. I felt pretty sure that his leading actress had not been lying to me, at least as
regards her admiration for him and her belief that he was not an evil man.
84. I was beginning to lose my sense of total sureness that he was inventing a new
stage of the masque.
(cf. M1: to lose my sense of total sureness that he was inventing a new
explanation of the masque.)
85. the cunning little bitch, the cunning old fox, theyre throwing me backward and
forwards like a ball.
86. Hide-and-seek? Of course. The hider must have a seeker. That is the game. A seeker
who is not too cruel. Not too observant.
87. Julie was in danger of becoming, like many-such striking cases, something of a
monster in a psychiatric freak show. That is what I am now trying to guard against.
88. I began to swing the other way after all, she had warned me, I was to have my
credulity put on the rack again.
89. Before you told me this, I. was going to congratulate you on hiring such a
skilled young actress. I see events have forestalled me. She has adopted a new role
towards you. Yes?
90. But she is a skilled young actress. Let me warn you that some of the cleverest
confidence tricksters in the history of crime have also been schizophrenics.
91. You must not force her into corners. If you do, she will tell you lie upon lie until
your head swims with them.
92. I had the familiar feeling that came in conversation at Bourani, of not knowing
quite what statements applied to in this case, whether to the assumption that
Lily really was a schizophrenic or to the assumption that of course I knew that
her schizophrenia was simply a new hiding-place in the masque.
93. I had the distinct feeling that he was a chess master caught between two moves;
immensely rapid calculation of combinations.
94. I hadnt played chess for years; but I remembered that the better you got, the more it
became a game of false sacrifices. He was assaying not my powers of belief, but my
powers of unbelief.
95. It didnt wash, it didnt wash. There were various things about Lily, looks,
emotional non sequiturs, those sudden tears, that in retrospect seemed to
confirm his story.

Appendix E

231

36

96. All the time I wanted to challenge him, but I was frightened of the growing
resentment I was beginning to store against him: that things might explode
into the kind of confrontation where I could only lose everything be firmly told
never to return.
97. Then I sensed that he was in any case prepared, more than ready to throw up
further clouds of obfuscating sepia if I really pressed him.
98. My only defence was, as best as I could, to answer enigma with enigma.
99. on one level I listened to an impressively shrewd old doctor, on another I was a
mouse before a cat.
100. I was also on tenterhooks for Julie to appear; and curious to know what
experience I was to have that evening.

37

101. I could not imagine why else he should have halted the masque so abruptly. If it
had been only an amusement . . .
102. Now I saw Conchis as a sort of novelist sans novel, creating with people, not words;
now I saw him as a complicated but still very perverse old man; now as a
Svengali; now as a genius among practical jokers.
103. I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed, and increasingly
furious that Conchis could spirit his world away; deprive me of it, like a callous
drug-ward doctor with some hooked addict.
104. I could not imagine why else he should have halted the masque so abruptly. If it
had been only an amusement . . .
105. But no one was; so I embarked for my lack of a better.

38

106. I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was out of a desire to play my own double
game with Conchis.
(cf. M1: I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was mainly out of despite.)
107. Twenty-four hours before . . . , Alison had seemed a pawn to be used at least
one counter-move I could make.
(cf. M1: to think of her as something that could be used if nothing better
turned up)
108. I saw it as a kind of test, as well: of both my depth of feeling about Julie and my
doubts.
109. Alison could stand for past and present reality in the outer world, and I would put
her secretly in the ring with my inner adventure.
110. Also I had hit, during the long night on the boat, on a way of keeping the
meeting safely antiseptic something that would make her feel sorry for me
and keep her at arms length.

43

111. I was like one of Ulysses sailors turned into a swine, and able now only to be my new
self . . . . What I really wanted to say was that I was enchanted and that I had,
absurd though it was, to be free to be enchanted.
112. It was as if he were congratulating an especially bright pupil; and was blind, as
nonsensically blind as one of Lewis Carrolls queens before Alice, to my obvious
bewilderment.
113. Metaphorically, if not literally, I bit my lips.
114. he waved his hand, as if my part in all this was too manifest now to need
specifying in detail.
115. I wish to bring the poor child to a realization of her own true problem by forcing her to
recognize the nature of the artificial situation we are creating together here.
116. I knew I would have to watch her like a hawk now.

232

Appendix E
117. There was also the increasingly strong possibility that they were acting in league
to gull me . . .
118. she was as desirable in modern dress as in costume . . .
119. There was a tiny air about her of having been caught out of costume . . .
120. So what are you officially playing now?
121. Why wont you answer my question about your new role?
122. She had just done the one thing she would never do, if the old man had been
telling me the truth unless she was so insanely cunning, or cunningly insane,
that she was beating him at his own game. I remembered Occams razor: always
believe the simplest of several explanations. But I played safe.
123. But miraculously, or so it seemed to me, her right eyelid fluttered: I was not to
believe a word of all this little scene . . . . I felt a purr inside me. That one shadow
of a wink had made all his deceptions hollow and tolerable; it also allowed me to
deceive in return.
124. I felt each stroke was symbolic. Something more than wood was being hewn into
manageable lengths. As I neatly stacked the branches, I felt I was also beginning to
neatly stack the mystery of Bourani and Conchis.
125. In some way he was using us as personifications of his irony, as his partners in
exploring ambivalence.
126. Every truth in his world was a sort of lie; and every lie a sort of truth.
127. He was in any case far too intelligent to expect us not to see through the
surface aspect of his masques; secretly he must want us to . . . and as for
whatever deeper purpose, inner meaning they had, I was content to wait now.

44

128. She was not being natural, and I realized that this was some kind of pre-arranged scene . . . she was saying what Conchis wanted.

45

129. I knew he was initiating another shift in our relationships, or the conventions
that ruled them.
(cf. M1: he was commencing another shift in our relationships, or the
pretences that ruled them.)
130. In some way we were both cast now as his students, his disciples.
131. Then I felt her foot: a fleeting touch like a snatched kiss.
132. He might have his profound side, but another was that of a cunning old
charlatan.
133. He inclined his head, like some seasoned impresario too accustomed to first-night
compliments to take them very seriously.
134. the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. Now I really was
Theseus; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and perhaps the Minotaur.
(cf. M1: Now I was Theseus in the maze; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne
waited; and the Minotaur.)
135. I didnt show it, but I felt like an over-confident chess-player who suddenly sees that
his supposedly impregnable queen is only one move from extinction.
136. The tea-throwing scene had seemed too far out of character if she was cunningmad; but cunning-madder still might have precipitated it just to plant the
wink at the end; then those collusive bare feet under the table, the message
with the matches . . .
137. We dont blame you. Julies misled far greater experts than you. Why are you
so sure Im misled?
138. Honestly, were not blaming you. I know how clever she is at suggesting that
the madness is in everyone around her. The damsel-in-distress line.

Appendix E

233

139. But its vile. Were not just pawns on a chessboard.


140. The Negro stood with folded arms, like a bored attendant in a museum or
perhaps indeed like some scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem.
141. It wasnt so much that I was frightened of having a show-down over the
schizophrenia nonsense; but that having broken his rules so signally, I would
be sent off the field for good.
142. But he was strong and quick as a leopard, two inches taller than I am.
143. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a
gallery, and real human beings into his puppets . . .
144. I knew it would be no good storming into the house and having it out with the
old man he would only feed me more lies.
145. He was like some animal in a den, he had to be coaxed out a little more before he could
be trapped and destroyed.
146. Besides, the ball was now firmly in the old mans court; however he reacted, I
would discover something about him. I must wait to see what change this
brought to tomorrows script. There returned that old excitement let it all
come, even the black Minotaur, so long as it came; so long as I might reach the
centre, and have the final prize I coveted.
(cf. M1: I thought, I am Theseus in the maze; let it all come, even the black minotaur,
so long as it comes; so long as I may reach the centre.)
46

147. There was a deserted silence about the house that puzzled me. I had expected
Conchis, more comedy; not an empty stage.
148. I walked to the statue, all round the domaine, like a man searching for a lost key . . .
149. Julie added, After Id put on another of my celebrated madwoman acts.
150. He kept talking about our helping him cross a frontier to a new world that
was half art and half science. A unique psychological and philosophical adventure.
What might be an extraordinary voyage into the human unconscious. Those were
all phrases he used.
151. If we knew, we would contaminate the purity of the experiment. His words again.
He did give us more analogies than weve ever had since. In one way it was to
be a sort of fantastic extension of the Stanislavski method. Improvising realities
more real than reality. You were to be like a man following a mysterious voice,
several voices, through a forest of alternative possibilities who wouldnt even know
themselves . . . Another parallel was a play, but without a writer or an audience.
Only actors.
152. He must be dying to know what youre really feeling and thinking. Since
youre at the centre of it all. The chief guinea-pig.
153. I think thats some kind of clue. The place of mystery in life. Not taking
anything for granted. A world where nothing is certain. Thats what hes trying to
create here. With himself cast as God.
154. It must have been obvious I was no actor. It wasnt at all. I thought you were
brilliant. Acting as if you couldnt act.
155. Weve long realized that the first line he gave us that we should mystify you
was a blind. According to the script we deceive you. But the deceiving deceives
us even more. This script? Script is a joke. He tells us roughly when to
appear and disappear in terms of exits and entries. The sort of atmosphere to
create. Sometimes lines.

234

Appendix E
156. All along he says that if things dont go quite as planned it doesnt matter. As
long as we keep to the main development . . . . Its also all about role-playing. How
people behave in situations they dont understand.
157. Thats why I put on that dreadful act. It was a nice act.
158. I think for him its like some mathematical proposition. Except that were all x, and
he can put us where he likes in his equation.
159. He does keep running you down terribly. To both of us. As if hes apologizing to
the hounds for having provided such an awful fox. Which is palpably absurd.
Especially when youve done all the hunting.
160. Yesterday afternoon, after my little scene. Another magician once sent a young man
hewing wood. I missed that. Prospero and Ferdinand.
161. We are being watched. That Joe character.

47

162. The third person is apt, because I presented a sort of fictional self to them, a
victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner
decency.
163. I felt both sexually and socially deprived, I did not expect we should be able to
meet during the week; but yet a deep excitement buoyed me on, a knowledge like
that of the poker-player who needs only one more card to have an unbeatable hand.
(cf. M1: at last having in my hand, after a long run of low cards, the joker and all
four aces. Or three, at any rate.)
164. I was tempted to watch it out of sight; but then, knowing I was probably being
watched as well from out there, decided that I did not want to play the wistful
marooned man.
165. A few moments later I set off back to my dull, daily penal colony on the far side of
the dream; as Adam left the Garden of Eden, perhaps . . .

48

166. I also kept remembering how near I had been, on more than one occasion, to
swallowing the story about schizophrenia.
167. It was just conceivable that the sisters were in some way still running with the
hare and hunting with the hounds that is, Julie might find me physically
attractive and yet still be prepared to mislead me about her real background.

49

168. . . . he informed us that all that had happened so far was merely a rehearsal.
Honestly, you should have seen his smile. It was so smug. Just as if we were two
students whod passed some preliminary examination.
169. Actually he said hed feared the worst as soon as he set eyes on you. What
worst? That the cheese on his trap might fall for the mouse.
170. Did you believe him? She hesitated. As much as one can ever believe him.
Ive even been given a carrot to dangle in front of your nose.
171. all of which gave her a genuinely nymph like quality . . . . This girl did quite
literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a
true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attempts
to tame.
172. I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that was also a
seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the fastidious, the voice that
quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an adorable mermaid though not
physiologically the latter.
173. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now. I also knew, with an inwardly
crowning elation, that it had destroyed whatever last traces had remained of
the suspicion Conchis had tried to sow between us.

Appendix E

235

174. we had not been spied on, I was at last sanctioned as the Ferdinand to his
salt-haired, clinging, warm-mouthed Miranda.
175. Julie entranced me. It was as if I had stumbled on a sleeping princess and found
her, once woken, not merely in love with me, but erotically starved, deliciously
eager to exorcize whatever sour and perverse lovemaking had gone on with her
ill-starred choice of the previous year.
176. If you have a private menagerie, your concern is to keep the animals in, not to
dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle
psychosexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan
nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicesters troupe, his very private company; but he
might well have incorporated the Heisenberg principle into his experiment, so
that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as
observed human particles.
177. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperfidy his
perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.
178. [Conchis] had not allowed for the way his bait would prove she was on the
mouses side. I knew she must be totally innocent of this new trap; and the mouse
was turned fox, not to be tricked so easily.
179. I got into them safely, stopped a moment, trying to work out what insane new
trick Conchis was playing.
180. What the bloody hells the game?
181. This scene was so well organized, so elaborate. I fell under the spell of Conchis the
magician again.
182. There was a tense silence. I was cast as a spectator in some way, not as the
protagonist.
183. The cast had re-embarked.
184. Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow
aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia.
50

185. It was as brutal and unexpected as a slap across the face; dateless, placeless,
without superscription.
186. I knew a stunned plunge of disappointment and a bitter anger. What right had he
to issue such an arbitrary ukase?
187. I chillingly realized that the Occupation episode could also have been a finale, a
notice of dismissal . . .
188. I recalled the parallels with The Tempest, and that old mans trial of the young
usurper in his domaine.
189. I remembered Julie . . . not only the naked body in the sea, but her intuitive
trust in our Prospero.
190. I decided by the time I went to bed that it must be taken as some last black joke
on his part, some testing trick analogous to the dice-game and the suicide pill.
191. He might carry on with some comedy of intense disapproval, but he would be
there; and his other puppet would also be there to help me finally call his bluff.
192. It swivelled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody
of Conchiss quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny
apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchiss haunting, brooding omnipresence.
193. I had assumed the experiment needed my presence above all; but perhaps it
didnt, and I had been a mere side-plot, discarded as soon as I had tried to gain too
much prominence.

236

Appendix E
194. All those kisses, franknesses, caresses, that token coupling in the night water .
. . no girl could pretend to want and to enjoy such things unless she was a
prostitute.
195. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in
existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view.
196. But it seemed much more like a piece of gratuitous cruelty, closer to tormenting
dumb animals than any true teaching. I was drowned in a sea of mistrust not only
of outward appearances but of deeper motives as well.
197. For weeks I had had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self
or the linked structures of ideas and conscious feeling that constitute self; and now it
was like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer gone . . . and not
being quite sure how one put oneself together again.
198. And anyway . . . I stood up and screwed out my promiscuity of mind with my
cigarette. [Alison] was spilt milk; or spilt semen. I wanted Julie ten times more.
(cf. M1: I stood up then and screwed my randiness out with my cigarette.
All that was spilt milk. Or spilt semen.)

51

199. I forgot, he has let slip that he wants to tell you the last chapter (his words) of
his life and also that you will be expecting it now.
200. Obviously the old devil was still up to his tricks.
201. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should
feel innocent, and I felt guilty.

52

202. I understand I have more fellow-victims than I thought. Victims? Whatever


you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice.
(cf. M1: A victim is someone who has something inflicted on him without
being given any real choice.)
203. Sorry. Ive been bitten once too often.
204. And in spite of this, Im very far from being ungrateful. But stage one of the
masque, experiment, whatever you call it, is over. I smiled at him. Your tame white
rats have tumbled . . . . Fallen flat on their faces. But see no reason for repeating the
process until they know why.
205. But it was only too clearly a very limited freedom and mystery he wanted in
us; however large a maze the scientist builds, its purpose is still to allow him to watch
every move.
206. During the war, when I had a great deal of time to think, and no friends to
amuse me, I conceived a new kind of drama. One in which the conventional
separation between actors and audience was abolished. In which the conventional scenic
geography, the notions of proscenium, stage, auditorium, were completely discarded. In
which continuity of performance, either in time or place, was ignored. And in which the
action, the narrative was fluid, with only a point of departure and a fixed point of
conclusion. Between those points the participants invent their own drama.
207. This did make slightly more sense than his previous explanations, but he
apparently remained ludicrously blind to the fact that he had destroyed even
the remotest hope of my ever believing anything he said again that is, he
trotted out this new story with his habitual conviction, as if I could not possibly
not swallow it.
208. We are all actors here, my friend. None of us is what we really are. We all lie some
of the time, and some of us all the time.

Appendix E

237

52

209. You have much to learn. You are as far from your true self as that Egyptian mask
our American friend wore is from his true face.
210. Because you have proved incapable of playing your part properly.
211. I am telling you, as the director, if you like, that you have failed to gain a part. But if
it is any consolation, I will also tell you that even if you had gained it, it would
not have brought you what you wish . . . the young woman you find so seductive.
That was always to be the fixed point of conclusion this summer.
212. It is you who would not have wanted to see her again. The comedy is over.
213. But I intend to see the actress home afterwards.
214. Her promises are worth nothing. All here is artifice. She is acting, amusing
herself with you. Playing Olivia to your Malvolio.
215. I also know youre far too humane a man to think you can command peoples
emotions so easily. It is simpler than you think. When you know the plot.
216. Were all happy to admit that were a little bit under your spell. Within limits
were only too delighted to go on with whatever you have planned next.
There is no place for limits in the meta-theatre.

53

217. for a few moments I felt that I had won. But then his eyes were on me again,
and I knew I hadnt.
218. one didnt make such elaborate preparations for a summers entertainment,
only to call it off when it was getting interesting. We must continue; all I had
just experienced was a bout of bluffing in the early part of a poker-game. The real
betting was still to come.
219. The theatre seemed truly empty; and like all empty theatres, as the old devil no
doubt intended, it became in the end both flat and a little frightening.
220. But you must have known we would see through the parts you gave us. He
looked out to sea. The object of the meta-theatre is precisely that to allow the
participants to see through their first roles in it. But that is only the catastasis.
Im afraid I dont know what that word means. It is what precedes the final
act, or catastrophe, in classical tragedy. He added, Or comedy. As the case may
be. The case depending on? Whether we learn to see through the roles we
give ourselves in ordinary life.
221. I left a pause. You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the
operation than the patient.
222. Then your . . . meta-theatre is really a medical one? . . . You may see it so.
I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical one.
223. All through the meal, his talking, there had been something sombre and
withdrawn about him, as if more than one comedy was over; so many pretences
were being dropped and yet the one that concerned me showed no sign at all of
being jettisoned.
224. I somehow knew now that he would not keep the girls away from me by force;
but a man with such formidable powers of lying . . . I nursed a tiny terror that he
knew I had met Alison in Athens, had somehow got proof for them that I too
was a liar, and of a much more banal kind.

238

Appendix E

54

225. He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his
impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm, to convert or detest.
226. You are someone who does not understand what freedom is. And above all
that the better you understand it, the less you possess of it.
227. I spoke sharply. You cant treat people like this. As if were all just villagers to be
shot so that you can prove some abstract theory of freedom.
228. He stood up and stared down at me. For as long as you cherish your present view
of freedom, it is you who holds the executioners gun.
229. I knew that the threat to walk out at once had secretly alarmed him; had
forced him to toss me another hasty carrot, a reason to stay.
230. It must all have been a test, some sort of ordeal to be passed before I entered
the inner circle . . .
231. I had, so to speak, been brought before the execution squad, but this time there was
to be a last-minute reprieve.
232. I had not expected such a finale.
233. It was as if he had planted a bandillera in my shoulder, or a succubus on my back: a
knowledge I did not want.
234. Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of [Alison] as
someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing,
doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a
biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now
dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a smudge like a fallen speck of soot on
a blank sheet of paper.

55

235. The last act was to be played presto. A quick curtain? No real play has a curtain.
It is acted, and then it continues to act.
236. I knew he could be bluffing, but I had a strong idea that he wasnt . . .
237. Now. Two of my cast wish to say goodbye to you.
238. Julie . . . even if she was what you claim . . . would at least have the courage to
tell me all this to my face. Such scenes belong to the old drama. Not the new.
239. Good. Here is Joe. This is what we call the desintoxication.
240. I truly began to feel now that I was discarded, a mere encumbrance . . . and a fool.

56

241. It fell smoothly down to ground level, where the incrusted and projecting
stones on the upper side fitted the surrounding ones like the pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle.
242. I knew it was a put-on. Its just that dear old poker-face of his.
243. Actually we wondered if it was some last trick. But hes been so sweet to us.
Ever since our little show-down.
244. Prospero turned insane, maniacally determined never to release his Miranda.
245. I stood at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to comprehend the sadistic
old mans duplicities: to read his palimpsest.
246. His theatre without an audience made no sense, it couldnt be the explanation.
The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he
was doing did spring in part from some theory of the theatre, but he had said
it himself: The masque is only a metaphor.
247. Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort
of Empson of the event.
248. That must be it, it was all planned from the beginning, I was never to have
her, always to be tormented, mocked like Tantalus.

Appendix E

239

57

249. I had a growing suspicion that Conchis operated on some principle like that of
the espionage cell; one never told the lower echelons more than they needed to know . . .
250. I knew I could no longer trust the girls the screw had been turned once too often
for that.
251. Put the two together, and I had to conclude that she was in some way playing
on both sides . . . deceiving me for the old mans sake, but also deceiving him
for mine.
252. I regretted not having told her about Alison when I had had the chance, since
that must, if her feeling for me had any decency at all, have brought the
absurd hide-and-seek to an abrupt close.
253. But at least my silence there killed one past fear. She could not have known
the truth and continued with the charade.

58
59

254. She was far too persistent; it was like trying to sell a pig in a poke twice over to the
same customer.
255. I tried as I struggled under Joe to see Julie I still couldnt accept that this was
not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at
the turn of a page, one by Kafka.
256. Someone met her there, an arm went round her shoulders as if she had just
escaped from an air disaster and drew her out of sight.
257. Another figure appeared in it: Conchis. He was dressed like the others, in
black. Flames, devils, hell.
258. My mind flashed back to that incident in the war: a room at the end of a
corridor, a man lying on his back, castrated.
(cf. M1: a man lying on his back on the table; symbolically castrated.)
259. I realized at last what Julies final look at me had been like. It was that of a
surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation successfully; peeling off the rubber
gloves, surveying the suture. Trial, flames . . .
260. A satyr with an arrow in his heart.
(cf. M1: A man with an arrow in his heart.)
261. Mirabelle. La Mattresse-Machine, a foul engine made fouler flesh.

60

262. I started to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask now
seemed truer, more true because more obviously false, than the others. I tried
to imagine what she really was obviously a consummate young actress, and
consummately immoral into the bargain.
263. I guessed that her sister, June, Rose, might well have been prepared to carry
out that final abominable act. Probably they would have liked me to be thus
doubly humiliated.
264. All their stories had been lies; or groundbait.
265. My mind plunged sickeningly, as if I had walked off the edge of the world.

61

266. Like actors suddenly off-stage, the row of figures in front of me began removing
their masks and cloaks.
267. And it was not Conchis who was now playing the role of Wimmel. Wimmel was
inside me, in my stiffened, backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what I had
done to Alison.
268. I felt myself almost physically dwindling; as one dwindles before certain works of
art, certain truths, seeing ones smallness, narrow-mindedness, in sufficiency in their
dimension and value.

240

Appendix E

63

269. Above all there was the extraordinariness of the experience; its uniqueness
conferred a uniqueness on me, and I had it like a great secret, a journey to Mars, a
prize no one else had.
270. all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had
acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for
good or bad behaviour a god like novelist, to whom I turned, like a character
with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to
whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the super-ego
I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of
acting freely. It was not my defence; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a
death too late.

65

271. That was the meaning of the fable. By searching so fanatically I was making a
detective story out of the summers events, and to view life as a detective story, as
something that could be deduced, hunted, and arrested, was no more realistic (let
alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre,
instead of what it really was, one of the least.

67

272. I remembered something June had said on that last night how they
improvised, how the rat was granted parity with experimenter in constructing the maze.

Notes

Chapter Two
1

Stockwell (2002: 47) defines deictic fields as a set of deictic expressions relating
to the same deictic centre.

Chapter Three
1

For the reference to Orpheus and Eurydice, see http://www.pantheon.org/


articles/o/orpheus.html (accessed 30 October 2010).

Chapter Four
1

The Crouch tool is named after John Crouch, an early English satirist, Royalist
and newsbook publisher in the English Commonwealth (see McEnery and Piao
2003: 637). Since Crouch is based on TESAS (TExt Source Alignment System)
with only slight modifications, I refer to the text comparison tool in the book as
TESAS/Crouch.
In the project carried out at Lancaster University, an 800,000 word corpus (the
Newsbook Corpus) was built from English newsbooks from the mid-seventeenth
century. The corpus was built specifically to investigate text reuse in newsbooks
of this period. See McEnery and Piao (2003: 6401).
Note that the sentence is not necessarily the unit for text rewriting, a sentence
may be derived from several sentences, several sentences may be derived from
a single sentence, or part of a sentence maybe derived from part(s) of another
sentence(s). Nonetheless, the sentence provides a convenient unit for text
manipulation (Clough et al. 2002a; Piao 2001).
For details of Porters stemmer, see http://www.tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/index.html or http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/
stemming/general/porter.htm (accessed 31 October 2010).
WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words
into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short definitions, and records the
various semantic relations between these synonym sets. WordNet was created
in 1985 and is being maintained at the Cognitive Science Laboratory of

242

Notes

Princeton University under the direction of Professor George A. Miller (See


http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ (accessed 31 October 2010)).
The other parameters are: Fewest Matches to Report (Range: 0 to infinite);
Shortest Text String to Consider (Range: 0 to 255); Most Imperfections to
Allow (Range: 0 to 9); Minimum % of Matching Words (Range: 0 to 100);
Ignore All Punctuation (Yes or No); Ignore Outer Punctuation (Yes or No);
Ignore Numbers (Yes or No); Ignore Letter Case (Yes or No); Skip Non-Words
(Yes or No); Skip Words Longer than Characters (Yes or No, with Range: 0 to
255); Use Word Map (Yes or No). See Bloomfield (2002).

Chapter Six
1

REVERE stands for REVerse Engineering of REquirements. For the detail of the
research project, see http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/
cseg/projects/revere/ (accessed1 November 2010).
CLAWS stands for Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System. It was the
first form of annotation developed at Lancaster University. It has been continuously developed since the early 1980s. For details, see http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/
claws/ (accessed 1 November 2010).
USAS stands for UCREL Semantic Analysis System. The USAS semantic tagset is
composed of 21 major categories which are sub-divided into 232 sub-categories.
Experiments with contemporary texts show that the system achieves a precision
rate of about 92% (see Archer et al. 2002; Piao et al. 2004; Rayson 2003). The
USAS category system with examples of prototypical words and multi-word
units in each semantic field can be found online: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/
usas/ (accessed 1 November 2010).
The difference between semantic prosody and discourse prosody is not always
clear-cut. There is some inconsistency between the exact meanings of the terms.
For the discussion of the terminological issue, see Baker et al. (2006: 1445),
Baker (2006: 868) and Stubbs (2007b: 1789). Stubbs suggests that semantic
prosody denotes aspects of meaning that are independent of speakers, whereas
discourse prosody focuses more on pragmatic function, that is, it is concerned
with speakers hidden attitudes. Hence, I adopt the term discourse prosody
in this book, to refer to the communicative purpose of Fowless consistently
opting for certain semantically-related lexical items in The Magus revision.

Chapter Seven
1

Given the novel concentrates on Nicholass life experiences, I use life as target
domain in a broad sense. The mapping of journey onto his life experiences
is mostly based on his learning process, that is, from self-ignorance to selfknowledge; see the discussion in section 3.1.2.
See Mike Scotts website: http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version5/
HTML/index.html (accessed 5 November 2010); see also Scott (2003).

Notes
3

4
5

243

Kvecses (2000: 2) makes a distinction between expressive and descriptive


emotion words or expressions. Some emotion words can express emotions.
Examples include shit! when angry, wow! when enthusiastic or impressed,
yuk! when disgusted, and many more. Other emotion words can describe the
emotions they signify or that they are about. Words like anger and angry, joy
and happy, sadness and depressed are assumed to be used in such a way.
For the metaphors of emotions, cf. Kvecses (2000).
For my categorization of games, cf. OED definition: (1) an activity engaged in
for amusement; (2) a form of competitive activity or sport played according to
rules; (3) sporting contests; (4) the equipment used to play a particular game,
for example, a board, dice, counters, a deck of cards; (5) a secret plan or trick;
(6) wild mammals or birds hunted for sport or food, and so on.
I do not search for metaphors conveying Nicholass emotions or evaluative
opinions, given that this type of metaphors do not have fixed source domain
vocabulary, and that they will presumably come along with the other metaphors
in search.
Stanislavski is a famous Russian director, who developed a systematic approach
to training actors to create the appearance of reality on stage. He introduced
the important concept of subtexts, the meaning lying underneath the text/
dialogue of a play. See http://homepage.smc.edu/sawoski_perviz/Stanislavski.
pdf(accessed 5 November 2010).
Although discard is a de-lexicalized verb and this example seems not straightforwardly metaphorical, given Nicholas and Conchiss interaction is often
conceptualized as playing card game, readers are likely to interpret it this way.
Cf. also the association between Nicholas and the Fool of the Tarot cards discussed in section 3.2.2.1.

Chapter Eight
1

John Fowles is known for a propensity to play language games with his readers.
A well-known example is The French Lieutenants Woman (1969). The novel
begins in realistic way so that the readers participate in the fictional world.
Then authorial intrusions into the fictional world create a violation of ontologically differentiated boundaries, commenting on the construction of the story
and making obvious the fact that Charles and Sarah are merely characters in a
novel (see Waugh 1984: 112). The novel also has three alternative endings.
OED definition: (a) Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to
be reusable after any writing on it has been erased; (b) In extended use: a thing
likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while
still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.

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Index

actuality 17
affect 19, 267, 1245, 136, 208
affective 27, 126, 1324, 138, 141, 153
alternative possible worlds
(APWs) 15, 1819, 21, 245, 30,
33, 124, 142, 192
artifact emotions (A-emotions) 34,
113, 189, 195
artistic totality of style 10
authentication 1718, 1924
authorial intrusion 19, 62, 64, 191
authorial style 6, 8
balance 9, 11, 205
binding 234
characterization 14, 16, 18, 37, 64
CLAWS 118
cognate approach 734, 85
communicative intention 2, 13, 34,
64, 149, 188, 190, 196, 202
contextual frame theory 17, 22, 24
co-operative principle 29
corpus-based approach 8, 11
corpus semantics 33, 123, 140
Crouch 1, 312, 6871, 7589, 117,
199, 201, 2034
Deictic shift theory 17, 223, 30
deixis 22, 25, 289, 62, 115, 126, 204
discourse presentation 8
evidentiality 26, 1245
factuality 142, 170, 192
fiction
emotions (F-emotions) 113, 195
theory 14

fictional recentering 17, 1934


fictionality 17, 18990, 193
game of make-believe 17
generalizability 10
godgame 12, 18, 27, 38, 401, 47,
512, 57, 64, 66, 77, 901, 98,
178, 186, 18890, 194
guinea-pig 645, 171, 181
illusion 12, 501, 53, 57, 66, 189, 193
implicature 29, 44, 178, 184, 188
inductive argument 7
intertextuality 53, 58, 194
intuition-based approach 11
language game 2, 18, 189, 243n.1
machine-readability 6
masque 12, 18, 389, 46, 501, 53,
141, 171, 1779, 181, 1856,
18991, 194
metafiction 34, 18990, 1924, 200
metaphor extraction 1556, 158,
171, 202
metatexts 19, 193
METER project 71, 734
modality 15, 1921, 53
n-gram 32, 735, 80, 845, 87, 89, 93,
120, 201
narrative
semantics 15, 19
theory 15, 18
narrativity 14
perceptual 98, 113
personification 50, 52, 151

254
plagiarism detection 79
point of view
cognitive model of 22, 30
conceptual 28, 98, 113
corpus approach to 25
linguistic indicators of 2930
modal grammar of 1920, 30
possible viewpoints 1314, 257,
30, 124
possible worlds theory 14, 1618, 22,
245, 30
postmodern language game 18, 142,
189, 1924
priming 234
probabilistic generalization 7
prominence 245, 30, 334, 11011,
1234
reader involvement 9, 16, 34, 66, 189
reality 1415, 1719, 523, 62, 645,
142, 175, 178, 1867, 18991
re-characterization 18
revisionary tendency 1, 312, 92, 113,
150, 199, 203
self-conscious personal narrator 190
self-disclosing narrative 19, 193
self-reflexivity 178, 18990
self-voiding narrative 1819
semantic prosody 8, 123
shift in narrative focus 14, 98, 114,
117, 124, 130, 190
simile signals 33, 1602
stance markers 267, 1246, 132
Stanislavski 178, 185
stemmer 74, 85, 87, 89

Index
style markers 6, 122
stylistic variation 86, 89, 91
subtext 57, 178, 1845, 188
surface text 184
TESAS 1, 312, 6871, 7389, 117,
136, 199, 201, 2034
text
alignment 70
comparison 68, 70, 7981, 117
reuse 68, 70, 73, 77, 79, 87, 201
similarity computational
measurement 32, 73, 89
similarity score 769, 81, 83, 859,
91, 1201, 203
style 86, 902, 98, 113, 11617, 188,
196, 199200, 203
textual
actual world (TAW) 1517, 98, 114,
127, 12930, 142, 190, 192
alteration 13, 31, 37, 53, 68, 104,
199, 204
difference 1, 30, 145, 1612, 188,
1956
revision 1, 13, 30, 65, 1623, 199
textuality 1011
USAS 118, 127, 131
WCopyfind 68, 7984
Wmatrix 1, 313, 90, 11720, 1224,
126, 130, 140, 2001, 203
WordNet 74
WordSmith Tools 1, 312, 90, 1434,
2002
world shifts 24

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