exploited workers

[50:42] – Contemporary, The Restraint of Beasts

1 L it is completely exploitative

2 D =of course

(0.5) it never occurred to [them

4 M [to them that there was nothing better (.) oh why should we live in this grot

yes

5 L =yeah (.)or to question it (.) and to go this isn’t

suitable (0.5) we are not going to work for you because you are not (1.5) treating us properly

6 M I love I love the bit (1.0) where they get new belts to put their tools in (.) and he was a foreman he had one anyway

7 C =yes

8 M one of them says (1.0) does this come out of our wages as well ((laughs))

L = Lizzie; D = Debbie; M = Mark; C = Colin

The readers seem to agree that the working conditions depicted in the novel are ‘exploitative’ (Turn 1) and in this short passage of talk they try to understand why the characters are so complicit with this. Lizzie argues that the characters ‘just accepted’ these conditions because it ‘never occurred’ to them ‘to question it’ (Turns 3 and 5). At Turn 4 Mark shifts into the voice of the exploited workers, representing what they might have thought or said had they been more aware of their situation: ‘oh why should we live in this grot?’. This is marked as hypothetical speech or thought by the preceding turn construction unit (‘to them there was nothing better’), but this is subtle and has to be understood as hypothetical from the

surrounding discourse, and particularly in light of Lizzie’s prior turns. Lizzie continues this, also shifting into the voice of the workers and presenting another hypothetical piece of speech or thought: ‘this isn’t suitable... you are not treating us properly’ (Turn 5). Given the

interactional context, these two examples of reported discourse from Mark and Lizzie are evidently ‘impossible’ (Myers 1999b: 577- 579) in that these utterances or thoughts could not have been articulated by the characters due to their complicity in their poor working

conditions (Turn 3). These examples of reported discourse seem to perform a simulation function for the readers, allowing them to account for why the characters may have behaved as they did. As in Extracts 4.13 and 4.13a, this reported discourse is hypothetical and shows the readers imagining what life would be like from the characters’ perspective. The

hypothetical status of the reported discourse also means that it can be highly involving, and this is demonstrated in the fact that Lizzie and Mark co-produce the workers’ voices. As in Extract 4.11, the reported discourse here is marked as not what characters said or thought, and so no special, in-depth knowledge of the text is needed, which theoretically gives all readers in the group the opportunity to add their own versions of the characters’ voices. The reported discourse across Turns 4 and 5 also has an evidential function, supporting and supplying evidence for Lizzie and Mark’s evaluations of the characters. By presenting what these voices did not say or think the readers demonstrate the limits of the characters’

understanding of their working conditions. While the reported discourse in Turns 4 and 5 seem to display all three functions discussed in this chapter, the example at Turn 8 is more obviously just evidential, with the quotation from the novel supporting the point that the characters are being exploited.

The two passages of talk analysed in this subsection show members of reading groups using reported discourse in order to simulate the minds of fictional characters. This function often occurs when readers take on the voices of characters – the form of reported discourse considered earlier in section 4.2.3. The extracts discussed in the present section all involve the readers giving a sense of the characters’ mind or behaviour through the reported discourse, rather than actually quoting from the literary text. To do this, the readers make inferences about the characters, arriving at approximations of the fictional voices. An argument can be made for these acts of simulation indicating or leading to an empathetic relationship between reader and character, but based on the examples presented here readers are not necessarily empathising when they simulate. In Extract 4.6 Robert voices a rural community but presents these characters negatively, and likewise in Extract 4.14 Lizzie and Mark seem to have pity for the characters but not empathy.

4.4 Conclusion

Reported discourse is common across various discourse contexts (Bakhtin, 1981), but seems particularly important in reading group talk. Evaluation of texts, characters, and authors are frequently made in the groups, and reported discourse often goes hand-in-hand with these sequences of assessments. Three forms of reported discourse were identified, relating to the speaker and addressee of the reported speech or thought (section 4.2), and three predominant functions of reported discourse were discussed: evidential, involving, and simulation (section 4.3). For the most part the use of reported discourse performed rhetorical and interpersonal functions, serving to strengthen a reader’s assessment of the text under discussion and create group cohesion through involving others in the reported discourse. At the same time,

however, it has been suggested that the reported discourse could demonstrate the kinds of relationships that readers had with characters: in some cases reported discourse was used to index a distance between reader and character (as in Extract 4.6), while on other occasions it was used to show a close, potentially empathetic relationship between reader and character. Whether a particular instance of reported discourse indexed empathetic closeness or distance from a character, its use in certain situations seemed to suggest that readers are treating characters as possible people, as entities that have thoughts, beliefs and feelings beyond those written on the page and constructed synthetically by the author. This idea of readers treating characters as possible people is picked up and given extensive treatment in Chapter 5.

The use of reported discourse across the reading groups was a widespread discursive practice, forming an important part of each the groups’ shared repertoire. Drawing on reported speech and thought served as ‘a shared discourse’ for approaching texts, and in particular fictional characters. Readers’ direct addresses to characters and their simulations of fictional minds may reflect their ‘certain perspective on the world’ (Wenger 1998: 83) in which characters

are conceived of as possible people. In forming part of the shared repertoire, reported discourse performed an important collaborative function within the groups, becoming a way by which the reading groups in this study constituted themselves as groups (Myers 1999a: 397).

Chapter 5