Impenetrable Eyes, Stealth and Surveillance: A Corpus Stylistic Study of Salient Adjectives in William Faulkner’s The Hamlet

Stylistics combines both a granular and global approach to works of literature. Through analysis of linguistic and semantic patterns in a text, stylistics explores how authors construct a fictional text world and populate it with vividly realized characters. In this article, I adopt a corpus-stylistic approach to William Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Through identification of high-frequency words and close reading of their concordances, I explore what the data reveals about Faulkner’s thematic concerns in the novel and how his linguistic strategies convey them to the reader.


POS (Part of speech)
Example Frequency The frequency list in Table 1 showed that the category of "general adjective" was the fourth most frequent POS type in the novel. An author's use of adjectives in a work of fiction plays a key role in developing individual characters' mind-styles, and in generating that more elusive gestalt, "atmosphere". The next step of the analysis was to look at the keyword list generated by UCLAW and isolate the adjectives in the list. Given that these are words that were found to be overused to a statistically-significant degree relative to the BNC Written Imaginative sampler, these adjectives can be considered distinctive to Faulkner's writing strategies in The Hamlet. The adjectives in Table 2 represent a sampling of those that were statistically-overused in the novel. O1 is observed frequency in The Hamlet, O2 is observed frequency in the BNC Written Imaginative sampler, %1 and %2 values show relative frequencies in the texts, and LL shows the log-likelihood value. All of these adjectives had a statistical significance above the log-likelihood critical value of 15.13 (p < 0.0001, indicating 99.99% confidence of significance).  In 16 of these concordance lines, "pleasant" is used to describe the manner and demeanor of V.K.

Ratliff.
A key lexical strategy of Faulkner's for signaling irony is the juxtaposition of a typically positive adjective with other adjectives (usually several) that carry negative connotations. Line 1 combines "pleasant" with "bland" (suggesting lack of genuine meaning/feeling) and "hard" (toughness, firmness underlying surface geniality). Line 2 repeats the juxtaposition of "still hard" with "pleasant".
Ratliff is the traveling salesman, itinerant retailer of country news and stand-in for the narrator. He is the character closest to being the eyes and ears of the Varners. He seems to be the one man whom town-head Will Varner listens to with respect, and as he is the least directly interested in the machinations of Ab and Flem Snopes, Jack Houston, Jody Varner and the rest of the sordid Snopes clan, the frequent use of "pleasant" to describe his detachment, eagle-eyed observation and intelligence-gathering carries a distinctly pungent humor. It's pleasant for a man to take his time spying on others while he sponges meals, chews the fat with the locals and earns his living selling merchandise to those he spies on. It is pleasant for the reader as well to see the leisurely yet masterful way he holds his cards close by confining his utterances to non-commital understatement. In Line 3 in Figure 1, Jody Varner anxiously tries to determine what hard facts concerning Ab Snopes' alleged barn-burning activities Ratliff is in possession of, but Ratliff won't commit to any over-broad interpretations: "Hell fire!" Varner cried. "Do you mean he set fire to another one? Even after they caught him, he set fire to another one?" "Well", the man in the buckboard said, "I dont know as I would go on record as saying he set ere a one of them afire. I would put it that they both taken fire while he was more or less associated with them.
You might say that fire seems to follow him around, like dogs follows some folks". He spoke in a pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern at once to be even more shrewd than humorous.

Figure 2. Ratliff "pleasantly" Dodges Jody Varner's Question
Indeed, Faulkner unreels catalogues of adjectives when sketching the contrasting shades of implication and deprecation with which Ratliff deflects other characters'' attempts to pin him down. His manner is "pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable", "pleasant and quizzical", "pleasant and inscrutable"; his voice is "pleasant and drawling and anecdotal", and "pleasant, lazy, equable".
Faulkner constructs situational irony around this word "pleasant" not only with Ratliff. The three generation of dissolute McCarron males have in common that their unreliable natures are unfailingly pleasant even as they are making bad speculations or getting shot gambling. The father was a "handsome, ready-tongued, assured and pleasant man", while the son, having been beaten bloody thwarting an ambush, faces Will Varner with "the pleasant hard revelation of teeth which would have been called smiling at least, though it was not particularly deferent".

Concordance Lines Close Reading: "Motionless"
Turning to another statistically-significant overused adjective, an examination of the adjective "motionless", allows us to explore an interesting cross-section of events and characters in the novel.
The overuse of "motionless" in the novel reflects a device used by Faulkner throughout his work, of foregrounding the slow crawl of life in his rural Mississippi setting and then exploring the enormous tension and violence beneath this apparent stasis and stagnation as characters full of passions and resentments and rage struggle against limited options and social constraints. Figure 3 shows selected concordance lines of the 38 occurrences of "motionless" in the novel: 1. and one broad black-haired hand motionless and heavy as a ham of meat on the 2. the two broad faces, the one motionless, the other pumping up and down w 3. ire body behind him, which even motionless in a chair seemed to postulate an  The motionlessness in many of these occurrences paradoxically hides a tension of waiting, watching, calculation, suspicion or secret surveillance. There is implied movement or action to come, but it develops in its own time and keeps its own counsel. In line 1, Jody Varner is gnawed by fear that Ab Snopes will set fire to the property the Varners rented to him, and his "broad black-haired hand motionless and heavy as a ham of meat on the paper" is a metonym for his plodding inartful scheming to bind Snopes contractually and avert disaster. In line 2, Jody, having arrived at the rental property to try and maneuver against Ab Snopes', is spied upon by Snopes' twin daughters, one of whom continues with pumping water while the other stares motionlessly at Varner, her tense motionlessness heightening the atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. In line 3 Jody seethes at having to cart to and from school his arrogantly sedentary sister, she of the "too much mammalian female meat" that arouses every strapping young man in a 10-mile radius. His boiling resentment is heightened to comic proportions by this very motionlessness, itself a metonym for her apathy and bored disassociation for everything around her: "he began to feel the entire body behind him, which even motionless in a chair seemed to postulate an invincible abhorrence of straight lines". Faulkner's curious use of "postulate" here is repeated in line 3, "the motionless horse alone postulating life and that not because it moved but because it resembled something known to be alive". Faulkner uses the irony of a motionless horse that merely "postulates" life being nonetheless the liveliest thing in sight to underscore how lifeless the town appears to Labove, the lecherous schoolmaster with a frustrated passion for the indifferent Eula. In lines 6-8, the comedy of frustrated passion takes a decidedly perverse turn when the rutting halfwit Ike Snopes stalks a cow with amorous intent: He would lie amid the waking instant of earth's teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn's rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female The motionlessness of this scene is a stillness taut with a heightened sensory awareness attuned to and stimulated by every aspect of the "teeming life", every vegetable and animal organism in its vicinity.
The absurdity, of course, is that this is a "flowing, immemorial bovine female" arousing Ike's passion.
Then the sun itself: within the half-mile it overtakes him. The silent copper roar fires the drenched grass and flings long before him his shadow prone for the vain eluded treading; the earth mirrors his antic and constant frustration which soars up the last hill and, motionless in the void, hovers until he himself crests over,…then the trotting legs, until at last it stands upright upon the mazy whimple of the windy leaves for one intact inconstant instant before he runs into and through it. She stands as he left her, tethered, chewing. Within the mild enormous moist and pupilless globes he sees himself in twin miniature mirrored.
The motionlessness of this moment is that of carnal pursuit, suddenly arrested, poised between "antic frustration" and anticipated consummation. But again, this consummation is with a cow, and Faulkner uses this motionless instant to pause the narration at the instant before Ike "crests over" an incline and the target of his unnatural lust comes into view. In line 9, the unholy assignation has now moved beyond pursuit to active coitus, and the motionlessness of the backs and heads underscores the salacious voyeurism of the local yokels ogling Ike and cow in flagrante delicto: against the wall and no more motionless than the row of backs, the row of heads which filled the gap. He knew not only what he was going to see but that, like Bookwright, he did not want to see it, yet, unlike Bookwright, he was going to look. He did look, leaning his face in between two other heads; and it was as though it were himself inside the stall with the cow, himself looking out of the blasted tongueless face at the row of faces watching him who had been given the wordless passions but not the specious words.
The lack of movement in the motionless rapt watchers is linked through repetition of morpheme "-less" with the absence of language in Ike's "wordless passion" and "tongueless face", words being dismissed 102 Published by SCHOLINK INC.

Figure 4. Adjective "Invisible" and "Impenetrable" Concordance Lines
The high frequency of these two adjectives connected with vision, one denoting "inability to see" and the other "inability to see into/through", reflects the thematic concern of the novel with secrecy, suspicion, surveillance, intelligence-gathering, stalking, and haunting. In line 1, characters are in close physical proximity and are aware of each other's presence, but unable to see each other. The effect of this is to emphasize Ratliff's careful selectivity of who he shares his intelligence with and how much he shares, and underscores the necessity for interested parties to fill in the gaps. Lines 2-4 occur during the highly impressionistic narration of Ike Snopes' pursuit of the cow. Lines 2 and 3 continue the "can hear In this fascinating interplay between light and dark, shade and spotlight alternate and overlap like the flicker of dramatic still-shots, darkened form appearing and disappearing, darkness framing light-accentuated form, and fevered mind conjuring and projecting myriad ghostly shades of imagined past lovers circling the visible object's form. In lines 6-9, as Snopes flees the search party and the consequences of his shooting of Houston, he skirts invisible corn, blunders into invisible tree-trunks and, ominously, sees "the black concentric spiraling of vultures as if they followed an invisible funnel, disappearing one by one below the trees". All through this sequence of occurrences, the invisibility of objects Mink moves among emphasizes the fear that controls his thoughts and clouds his judgement.

Conclusion
At the outset of this study a blended approach to exploring William Faulkner's thematic and character-development in The Hamlet was proposed, an approach combining quantitative data The target corpus consisted of the complete novel while the reference corpus was the BNC Written Imaginative sampler. The initial data consisted of frequency lists of parts of speech as well as keywords frequently appearing in the novel. Then the comparison between the two corpora was conducted and statistical analysis using the log-likelihood test was performed.
The results of quantitative analysis of the target corpus yielded the following quantitative information about the novel. The most frequent parts of speech were: singular common noun, article, general preposition, general adjective, past tense of lexical verb, coordinating conjunction, general adverb, 3rd person singular subjective personal pronoun, Infinitive, and plural common noun. Given the high frequency in the text and unique character-development role of general adjectives, closer attention to this category was warranted. A set of adjectives found to have statistically-significant overuse were culled and four, "pleasant", "motionless", "invisible" and "invisible" were selected for close-reading of concordance lines. "Pleasant" used in combination with typically negative connotations such as "hard", "bland", "shrewd" and "inscrutable" was found to be a tool for irony, underscoring the humorous dissonance between Ratliff's genial surface and underlying secrecy, surveillance and shrewdness. This theme of secrecy and surveillance was also found to be linked with overuse of "impenetrable" (to describe characters' eyes). Close-reading of concordances for "motionless" revealed the device Faulkner uses throughout the novel of stillness and stasis hiding underlying tension of waiting, watching, calculation, suspicion or secret surveillance on the part of Ratfliff and Flem Snopes.
Motionless is also used to define the character of Eula Varner as one of profound torpor and arrogant refusal to move her body for anyone, which is used to comic effect when contrasted with Jody Varner's impotent rage.
The limitations of this study include the narrow focus on keyword and part-of-speech analysis. Given the insights provided focusing on these four adjectives, future research could expand the list of adjectives to potentially yield additional insights about the Faulkner's writing style and character and thematic development strategies. Additional insights could also be gained by looking at statistically-significant overuse of semantic fields using Wmatrix's USAS automatic tagging of semantic fields.