Clause complexing and characterisation: Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants’ revisited

Abstract

The application of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyse literary texts has been a prevalent approach in the field of stylistics. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the three metafunctions, that is the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions, on the level of the clause, ignoring the logical metafunction on the level of the clause complex. Therefore, the present study seeks to examine the composition of clause complexes and explicate how clause complexing is related to the reader’s interpretation of literary meaning, especially that of characterisation. To achieve this, a comparative method is adopted to explain in what sense the author’s actual choices of clause complexes differ from alternatives that could have been chosen and also in what sense the choices shape into a coherent pattern throughout the text. My case study is James Joyce’s short story ‘Two Gallants’, a text that has already been successfully investigated from the Hallidayan approach. My main findings suggest that the deceptively simple style of clause complexing in Joyce’s text is in fact loaded with semantic density and incongruity that serve the purpose of characterisation. The study aims to show that we would miss many subtle details in the text in terms of characterisation if we skip the construction of clause complexes. Accordingly, the reading of nuances between the clauses might offer us a new perspective not just to interpret Joyce’s short story and but also to better understand his writing style.