The communicative situation in literary discourse
Devonshire Street W.1
It is a poem written by John Betjeman. The key words are: ‘X- ray photographs…confirm the
message’ (someone went to the doctor)- ‘no hope…no hope’ (probably the X-ray doesn’t tell
something positive, the man is ill). We understand that who is speaking is a man, because in the last
stanza there is a reference to a woman ‘she puts’. The scene is described in 3rd person terms (‘his
arm- his wife- he- she’) and this presupposes a 1st person perspective. We a have a sort of apparent
detachment from the point of view of an uninvolved omniscient narrator, but his or her position is
never made explicit by the use of the 1st person pronoun: he or she remains an unidentifiable voice.
The only times the 1st person pronoun makes an appearance are in the direct speech of the man
(lines 11,12) and of his wife (lines 15,16). What the wife says and what he thinks relate to two
entirely different realities: the simple and everyday life of the present they can share and the agony
of the future that they cannot share (he is going to die).
-Lines 11,12: the man is speaking because is dying. He uses ‘I’ to talk about his life. He is not
talking aloud, he is talking to himself to express what he thinks (it is an interior monologue)
-Lines 15,16: the wife speaks for both of them because she speaks in ‘we’.
So there are 3 perspectives:
1. The man who is thinking about his death
2. The wife who tries to behave as if nothing is happen
3. A detached observer
-Is the description of the scene through the filter of the detachment or not?
We have many details that are noun-phrases, nouns denoting lifeless objects, things are given
human attributes, the use of a simple present tense and article. It is a really detail scene, so
description is having with details: things are described linguistically through noun phrases which
are overloaded with adjectives and modifying elements; for example ‘the heavy mahogany DOOR
with its wrought-iron screen’ it is the description of the door from which the doctor is just came out
(he shuts it) , ‘the 18th century SCENE with Edwardian faience adornments’ is the description of
Devonshire Street, ‘the opposite brick-built HOUSE, ‘its CHIMNEYS steady against a mackerel
sky’, the iron NOB of this palisade so cold to the touch’. In the book we have the head noun of the
noun-phrase in capital. We have determiners ‘the- this- its’, adjectives ‘heavy- mahogany’ and other
descriptive structures ‘with its wrought-iron screen’. So they are complex structures in themselves,
but they are just linguistic features; but these descriptive elements refer to a discourse significant so
they reflect perspective. The linguistic elaboration here implies a heightened perception of detail.
