MOD A: EXPERIENCE THROUGH LANGUAGE (18/20)
IN WHAT WAYS DO COMPOSERS DISCUSS THE WAYS THEY USE DISTINCTIVELY VISUAL ELEMENTS TO CONVEY THEIR IDEAS IN THEIR TEXT?
The employment of language through distinctively visual amalgamates the changing emotions of the persona to their environment, in order to depict the experience of urban alienation and human disconnection to the land. These visuals are vivid and clear; so it helps the responder visualise the text and create a greater degree of understanding. Henry Lawson’s Short Stories “The Drover’s Wife” and “In a Dry Season” and “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” by T.S.Eliot, both capture the environmental adversity and the relationship between the individual and their milieu.
A monotonous life filled with hardship and loneliness, forces the persona to detach from their physical world. “In A Dry Season” Henry Lawson examines the Australian landscape to create and present its idiosyncrasies to help shape meaning for the audience through distinctive visuals. In an effort to maintain realism and avoid presenting the bush as a ‘rural paradise’, Lawson relies on varies visual techniques to accentuate its monotony. In the opening paragraph, Lawson invites the audience with an imperative “draw a wire fence and a few raged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train” through descriptive language, Lawson creates a mundane and visual picture of the environment whereby the persona feels dislocated from. The emptiness of the dreary landscape is further explored through the employment of minimalistic description. He manages to reduce the bush landscape into key characteristics – a “train”, a “few ragged gums”, a “Railway Hotel” – and in doing so implicates that the bush varies from the simple picture. Furthermore, despite the disparaging and condemnatory attitude of the persona, Lawson effectively paints a stereo typical setting. We gain the impression that Lawson is describing a typical railway town scenario, again stressing the ‘sameness’ of the bush. He paints the landscape broadly – repeating that “it is safe to…” encouraging us to assume that most of these towns have a “Railway Hotel”, the “Railway Stores” and “ungroomed hacks” and a “sun downer” waiting outside the pub. Lawson’s exploration of the Australian landscape illuminates for readers, an aspect through which the same environment causes the persona to feel alienated.
In ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S Eliot, Eliot creates a distinctively visual setting whereby the bleak description of Prufrock’s loneliness in an urban environment demonstrates his emotional distance from the world. Much like the allusion to Dante in the Inferno, Prufrock is confined within a lost and metaphorical hell representing his urbanized environment. We can recognise his detachment from the abrogating imagery and dramatic monologue. “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes…” - the pollution that encapsulates the city indirectly represents Prufrock’s distorted thoughts. His environment is likewise emulated through the enjambment “Of restless nights…sawdust restaurants like oyster shells and streets that follow like a tedious argument…” depicting the labyrinthine spatiality of his urbanised world. This complexity of the labyrinth like city represents his intricate state of mind, whereby his indecisions have made him paralysed and numb “like a patient etherized upon a table”. Nevertheless, his figurative paralysis correlates to the sordid imagery of “restless nights” and “sawdust restaurants” further accentuating his lost loneliness as he is unable to come to terms with his own insecurities. Eliot uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock’s self-pitying state and exemplifies this to emphasis his detachment from his setting.
Lawson, in The Drover’s Wife, paints an elusive representation of the human connection to the relentless brutality of the Australian bush. This connection is severed from