Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
THE KEY-NOTE
The text is an extract from Charles Dickens's Hard Times. From the title the reader may expect that the novel deals with a period in which living is very difficult and complicated. The extract is called "key-note". It is a metaphor taken from the semantic field of music and it represents the most "important" note and so thing or concept. It may mean something that everybody should know or a general idea/concept without details. The reader will later understand that the second hypothesis is the correct one.
The extract presents the visual, auditory and olfactory description of the town where Messers Bounderby and Grandgrind are walking: Coketown. The narrator describes buildings (such as factories and churches), smoke, the colours he can see (red and black), a black canal (and so artificial, otherwise he would write channel), the extreme functionality of this town, people and their life there. All the aspects are used to delineate a typical (even if stereotyped) Victorian Industrial town.
In the short text the reader can find four main semantic fields. The first one is made up of industrial terms, such as machinery, canal, chimneys etc. These are neutral terms: I mean, they have neither good nor bad connotation; they may indicate both progress, technology and their advantage and the problems they involve on the environment and on life.
A specific connotation (that can be surely considered bad) is given by the semantic area of colours, made up of only two elements: red and black, the only shades you can find in Coketown. They don't only represent the dark, dull and monotonous atmosphere of the town, but they also convey their secular symbolical meaning: red represents blood, black death.
Another semantic field is used to demonstrate the functionality of the town. We can notice it from the name of the city (the name Coketown synthesises the main economical activity of the town) and from words such as workful or from the expression triumph of fact. Also the description of buildings, all made of red bricks (also churches), and of the inscriptions (in severe black characters) convey the same idea.
Another important concept in the extract is repetition: every day is like the others, every place is like the others and every person is like the others. Time and space loose their significance, they are only means in order to earn, while people loose their identity and become equal workers.
Dickens makes large use of similes and metaphors. We have already noticed it speaking of the use of the musical term key-note. There are two other important comparisons in the text.
The first one associate the piston of the steam-engine to the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness (line 14). It is odd, because the first term refers to one of the most important and revolutionary English inventions and the second describes a big and so incontrollable (and maybe dangerous) animal, that is also melancholic and mad.
At line 7 the reader can find another important comparison: the colours of the town are associated to the face of a savage. It is interesting first of all because it underlines the English still imperialistic point of view, but especially because it emphasizes the contraposition between town and industry (symbols of civility) and a savage (symbol of incivility). So Dickens seems to wonder weather progress and technology really represents human civility.