Love, war and lexicogrammar: transitivity and characterisation in ...

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Love, war and lexicogrammar: transitivity and characterisation in
The Moor’ s Last Sigh
E. Hilton Hubbard
University of South Africa

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh is a most energetic piling up of different stories,
but in the diversity so created there is also thematic unity, brought about most forcefully
through the character of Aurora, the narrator’s mother – ‘most sharp-tongued woman of
her generation’ – and through the counterpoint of her relationship with her husband, the
shadowy Abraham. This paper examines transitivity patterns in certain passages of the
novel, showing how these lexicogrammatical features underpin the perception that it is
Aurora in particular, but other women too, who dominate the narrative – and the men in
their lives. More generally, the paper points up the value of transitivity analysis in
explicating reader responses to characters in fiction.

The narrator of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moraes (‘Moor’ ) Zogoiby, sees
his story as ‘A last sigh for a lost world, a tear for its passing. Also, however, a last
hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns ... and a set of rowdy tunes for the
wake. A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury’ (p.4). The sound and fury of love,
regret, betrayal and conflict are, indeed, at the heart of the narrative, which, being told by
one who has been destined to age at double speed (‘No need for supernatural
explanations; some cock-up in the DNA will do’ (p.145)), proceeds at a headlong pace.
Belying its title, then, the novel is more breathless pant than sigh, and its rumbustious
energy corroborates the view that Rushdie’s magic realism transforms ‘everyday, mundane
actions into something more lively than life’ (Casey 1995).

The liveliest by far of all the characters in this zestful work is the narrator’s mother,
314reportedly also Rushdie’s own favourite creation: ‘The story revolves in the first place
around one person, around the painter Aurora. For me as a writer, she is the most
pleasing character I have ever invented and described’ (Doerry & Hage 1996:155 [my
translation]). It is Aurora’s energy that lies at the epicentre of most of the conflict in the
novel, be this the tension between the comic and the tragic, the satirical juxtaposition of

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religions, the internecine ‘battle of the in-laws’ , or the confusion of love and power: ‘Did
we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our
passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?’ (p.91). So in The
Moor’s Last Sigh we have a female holding sway, and this is something of a precedent in
Rushdie’s oeuvre. It is true that his earlier novel, Shame, has been read as an indictment of
the oppression of women in Pakistan, and that its narrator is half inclined to believe that
the women’s stories subsume the men’s, but at least one feminist critique of the novel
nevertheless sees in it the depiction of ‘the unchanging subordinate position of Pakistani
women, of women as more acted upon than acting, of the futility of opposition, and of the
“otherness”of women’ (Grewal 1994:143).

I hope to show that such a charge could not possibly be levelled at The Moor’s Last Sigh,
and in the process to point up the value to be derived from close analysis of grammatical
features – specifically the transitivity system – in the novel for explicating reader
perceptions that here it is the men who are ‘more acted upon than acting’ while the
women dominate the proceedings. Sometimes, this view is expressed quite explicitly.
Thus, early in the narration, after Moraes has told of the death of his great-grandfather,
Francisco da Gama, who leaves just a ‘modest allowance’ to his wife, Epifania, and
control of the lucrative family trading company to their two sons, Aires and Camoens, we
read that ‘The women are now moving to the centre of my little stage. Epifania, Carmen,
Belle, and the newly arrived Aurora – they, not the men, were the true protagonists in the
struggle...’ (p. 33). Appalled that her ‘useless playboy’ sons have inherited virtually all
their father’s wealth, Epifania summons Carmen, her niece-cum-daughter-in-law, to her
boudoir ‘for a pow-wow’ and declares: ‘From now on, better us ladies should call-o the
tune’ (p.33). The immediate context of these statements is the family feud between
Epifania and Carmen on the one hand, and Camoens, his wife Belle and daughter Aurora
on the other, but they can also be seen more broadly as emblematic of the way gender
relations are depicted in the novel.

The major personal conflicts that shape this novel – between Epifania and her husband and
sons; between the narrator Moraes’s parents, Aurora and Abraham; between Abraham and
his mother, Flory Zogoiby; and between Moraes, his mother and his lover, Uma – play

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themselves out across gender lines. Occasionally, as in some passages that focus on the
relationship between Moraes and his mother, there is poignancy to the conflict (‘... the
closest Rushdie has got to genuine psychological insight, and almost the best things he has
written’ (Shone 1995:38)); for the most part, though, the gender battles generate the
richest comedy, where the women tend to have the upper hand and the men are at the
receiving end.

These power imbalances in the gender conflicts find expression via the usual options open
to a narrator. There is explicit description of character, as when Aurora is described thus:
‘We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects upon others – her bending of other people’s
light, her gravitational pull that denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those
too weak to withstand her ...’ (p.136); or as ‘the most sharp-tongued woman of her
generation’ (p.5); while her mother Belle, too, is characterised as one who ‘had always
spoken her mind’ (p.10). Of Abraham, on the other hand, we read for example that for
Aurora’s sake he is prepared to give up his Jewishness and embrace the Catholic faith: ‘in
this matter too he would surrender to her will’ (p.100); and later, more generally, ‘...his
weakness demeaned us all – by which I meant, of course, all men’ (p.169).

Direct description of personality traits as a category of characterisation shades naturally
into description of characters’ actions and, given that speech is action, from there into the
more indirect representation of character through dialogue. Reading this novel one gets
the impression that, where there is overt conflict between men and women, that conflict is
practically always verbal and that it is mostly the women who are responsible for the
‘sound and fury’ of this ‘Moor’s tale’. Through their actions and speech, too, they seem
to dominate their environment – and most particularly their menfolk. Unlike the women of
Shame, who are seen – at least from a gender-political point of view – to be too passive,
the main female characters in The Moor’s Last Sigh appear to act, rather than be acted
upon. The interesting question here for stylistics is what kind of linguistic features in the
text underpin this perception and what kind of analytical framework might be used for
describing these features in a relatively objective and quantifiable manner.

A framework that has much to offer is systemic-functional grammar, and specifically the

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system of transitivity within this model. The relevance of this system for the purposes of
this study will be obvious from the following definition:

[Transitivity] is concerned with a coding of the goings on: who does what
in relation to whom/what, where, when, how and why. Thus the analysis
is in terms of some PROCESS, its PARTICIPANTS, and the
CIRCUMSTANCES pertinent to the Process-Participant configuration
(Hasan 1988:63).

The notion of transitivity has been used by a number of linguists to throw more light on
the use of language in literary texts. Halliday’s analysis of William Golding’s The
Inheritors (Halliday 1973) is the pioneering, and now classic, work in this field. His aim
was to show how an analysis based on transitivity could help to distinguish the world-view
that characterised the more primitive ‘people’ of the novel on the one hand and the
‘inheritors’, the members of the ‘tribe’, on the other. He finds in passages depicting the
‘people’ that a picture emerges where ‘people act, but they do not act on things; they
move, but they move only themselves, not other objects’, and where ‘a high proportion
(exactly half) of the subjects are not people; they are either parts of the body [...] or
inanimate objects [...], and of the human subjects half again [...] are found in clauses which
are not clauses of action’ (Halliday 1971:335).

Clearly, this kind of analysis is relevant to the issue of the relative passivity of different
fictional characters. Kies (1992) focuses specifically on this question of passivity in his
discussion of Orwell’s 1984, adducing 14 different syntactic devices that he sees as
undercutting the degree of ‘agency’ that the central character of the novel is permitted.
The approach here is loosely based on systemic grammar. A more specific focus on
transitivity is found in Kennedy’s (1982) discussion of the role it plays in the depiction of
the main players in Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Joyce’s short story, Two Gallants,
while Hubbard (1994) shows how a transitivity analysis lays bare gender stereotyping in
popular (Mills and Boon) romances and helps to explicate reader perceptions that in these
stories the men are very much action heroes but the women are to a large extent victims of
their circumstances – including their own emotions.


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Closer examination of the studies just mentioned highlights the prime relevance, within the
system of transitivity, of participant roles to our response to fictional characters:

... part of the basis of our perception of what a person is like derives from
knowing what sort of Participant roles are ascribed to that person (Hasan
1988:65).

In terms of this functional-grammar perspective, animate and inanimate objects (the
participants) take up various possible roles relative to the process depicted by the clause.
These roles differ in the degree to which the relevant participant is active rather than
passive, i.e. what Hasan calls their effectuality or dynamism:

If we define effectuality - or dynamism - as the quality of being able to
affect the world around us, and of bringing change into the surrounding
environment, the semantic value of the various [...] roles must be seen as
distinct (Hasan 1989:45).

Hasan further refines and extends the linguistic stylistic potential of the transitivity system
by positing a cline of dynamism along which the various participant roles can be ranged,
from most active to most passive (Hasan 1989:46), and this construct informs her stylistic
analysis of certain poems (Hasan 1988; 1989).

The participant roles and the cline of dynamism are key features of my analysis of extracts
from The Moor’s Last Sigh, and in order to clarify both concepts, examples of each role,
drawn from the text, will now be considered - in order of dynamism, from most to least
dynamic (coded accordingly, from 1 to 12).

A1 Actor (+ Animate Goal)

The participant role of Actor has been defined as ‘the “logical subject” of older
terminology, and means the one that does the deed’ (Halliday 1985:103). In terms of the
transitivity system, the process in which some participant performs as an Actor is termed a
material process (Halliday 1985:103). The most dynamic ‘deed’ is seen as one that
directly affects animate participants (as Goals):

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[1] She spirited Abraham away... (p.98)


A2 Actor (+ Goal)
This category differs from A1 in that the Goal is usually an inanimate entity, though it
includes cases where the Actor acts on his or her own body as Goal:

[2] Aurora...stretched her long body for maximum provocation... (p.100)


S3 Sayer (+ Recipient or Verbiage)

Sayer is seen as a relatively dynamic role, involved in verbal process clauses (Halliday
1985:129), and defined as ‘anything that puts out a signal, like the notice or my watch’
(Halliday 1985:129), and it does of course include human speakers, as in:

[3] Aurora commanded Abraham that night... (p.115)

In [3] Abraham is the Recipient (see R12 below), but an alternative or additional role in
verbal process clauses is that of Verbiage, as in:

[4] Aurora ... to demand an explanation.

A4 Actor
This is the standard role found in intransitive clauses, as in:

[5] The young heiress leaned closer towards him... (p.69)

In Hasan’s (1988;1989) cline of dynamism this role is categorised as less dynamic than the
three roles that follow below but, following Thompson (1996:79-80), a distinction can be
made between the Actor role in intentional processes, such as in [5], and this role in

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involuntary processes, categorised here on the level Hasan suggests (see A8 below).

P5 Phenomenon (+ Senser)

Phenomenon and Senser are the main participants in mental process clauses, where the
Senser is ‘the conscious being that is feeling, thinking or seeing", while the Phenomenon is
‘that which is sensed - felt, thought or seen’ (Halliday 1985:111). The role of
Phenomenon is seen as the more dynamic one as it might be said to trigger the relevant
mental process:

[6] ...and Abraham without flinching accepted his fate... (p.99)

S6 Sayer

The role of Sayer is seen as less dynamic when there is no overt Recipient, as in:

[7] ‘My God,’ she burst out... (p.69)

Although we are here working with a cline or continuum, it could be said that for most
cases, if one had to divide the full set of roles into two groups, one essentially active and
one essentially passive, it would be most appropriate to see the above six roles as
‘active’and the eight that follow as ‘passive’.
S7 Senser

In [6] above, the Senser role is represented by Abraham.

A8 Actor (involuntary)

This is the role of Actor in involuntary processes, as in:

[8] ...he would wake up... (p.57)


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B9 Behaver

Behavioural processes are ‘processes of physiological and psychological behaviour, like
breathing, dreaming, smiling, coughing’ (Halliday 1985:128). Halliday admits to a certain
fuzziness between this category of process and material processes, and hence between the
roles of Actor and Behaver (a fuzziness which of course affects all grammars with a strong
semantic orientation, but space prevents this issue from being considered further here).
Behavioural processes could be seen as less under voluntary control than material
processes, and some fairly clear examples include:

[9] ...her ageing husband..., mouth twitching in an embarrassed smile... (p.99)

C10 Carrier

This is ‘the entity to which some attribute is ascribed’ - a participant in a relational
process (Halliday 1985:113):

[10]
Abraham was tougher than any frog. (p.170)

B11 Beneficiary

The Beneficiary is ‘the one to whom or for whom the process is said to take place’
(Halliday 1985:132):

[11] ...Aurora da Gama... waited for Abraham... (p.89)

R12 Recipient

This is the role of the receiving entity in verbal process clauses, exemplified in [3] above,
repeated here as [12], by Abraham:

[12] Aurora commanded Abraham that night... (p.115)

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G13 Goal

As seen in [1] above, reproduced here as [13], the Goal is the role of ‘the one to which
the process is extended’ (Halliday 1985:103):

[13] She spirited Abraham away... (p.98)

C14 Circumstance
The Circumstance role carries in a sense the background information of the clause,
describing aspects such as time, manner and place. This role is usually realised within a
prepositional phrase, as in:

[14] ...it was upon him that Aurora descended... (pp.69-70)

In order to examine the degree of dynamism shown by the two most prominent male and
female characters in the novel with respect to one another, all clauses in passages where
they were both present and interacting were analysed in terms of their transitivity roles and
the cline of dynamism. Extracts 1-3 below exemplify these analyses. The processes of all
clauses in which either Aurora or Abraham participate are represented in upper case;
Aurora’s participant roles are analysed in bold and Abraham’s in italics.

Extract 1 (pp. 68-70)

Below these grand personages, at an everyday sort of desk with its own
little lamp, SAT the godown’s duty manager [A4], and it was upon him
[C14] that Aurora [A4] DESCENDED, [A2] upon RECOVERING her
composure, [S3] to DEMAND an explanation of the pepper shipment’s
delay. [...]

The sight at close quarters of the most beautiful of the da Gamas and the
sole inheritrix of the family crores [P5] STRUCK the duty manager [S7]
like a spear in the heart, [P5] RENDERING him [S7] temporarily dumb.
The young heiress [A4] LEANED closer towards him [C14], [A1]
GRABBED his chin [G13] between her thumb and forefinger, [A1]
TRANSFIXED him [G13] with her fiercest glare, and [S7] FELL head

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over heels in love. [...]

‘My God,’ she [S6] BURST OUT when at last the white capitals insisted
on being seen, ‘it isn’ t disgraceful enough that you [C10] HAVEN’ T
GOT a bean in your pocket or a tongue in your head, you [C10] HAD TO
BE a Jew as well.’ And then, aside: ‘FACE FACTS, Aurora [S7]. [S7]
THINKOFY. You’ ve [S7] FALLEN FOR a bloody godown Moses
[P5].’

Pedantic white capitals corrected her [R12] (the object of her affections,
thunderstruck, moon-struck, dry of mouth, thumping of heart, incipiently
fiery of loin, [C10] WAS UNABLE to do so, [G13] HAVING BEEN
DEPRIVED anew of the power of speech by the burgeoning of feelings
not usually encouraged in members of staff): Duty Manager Zogoiby’s
name was not Moses but Abraham.

Extract 1 depicts the first meeting of the narrator’s parents and is in terms of transitivity
relations and relative dynamism fairly representative of the total data sample of 334
participant roles analysed (173 for Aurora and 161 for Abraham). In this extract, of the
26 relevant participant roles, Aurora features in 14 and Abraham in 12, and the imbalance
in the dynamism of the two characters is clear. Thus, in spite of the fact that the account
of this meeting has them both falling in love, assumably a reciprocal phenomenon, only
Aurora participates as Actor and Sayer in the three most dynamic roles (A1, A2 and S3),
and in both clauses where she is an A1 category Actor, the animate Goal (G13) of her
actions is Abraham or part of his body (‘his chin’). Of the eight essentially passive roles
(S7-C14) Aurora participates in only two here – once as Senser (S7) and once as
Recipient (R12), while on the other hand 10 of Abraham’s 12 roles are essentially passive,
with Carrier (C10) and Goal (G13) being most common.

Extract 2 (pp.88 and 89)
In the perfumed half-light of C-50 Godown No. 1, Aurora da Gama [A1]
GRABBED Abraham Zogoiby [G13] by the chin [C14] and [A4]
LOOKED deep into his eyes [C14]...no men, I can’t do this stuff. This is
my mother and father I’m talking about...

Way up there near the roof of Godown No.1, Aurora da Gama at the age
of fifteen [A4] LAY BACK on pepper sacks, [B9] BREATHED IN the
hot, spice laden air, and [A4] WAITED for Abraham [B11]. He [A4]

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