A Stylistic Analysis of Violence against Children in Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap and Its Australian Television Adaptation

Laws on corporal punishment against children vary across countries; in Australia, where Christos Tsiolkas’ 2008 novel The Slap and its 2011 television adaptation are set, “reasonable chastisement” by a parent or carer remains legal. However, what happens if a child is similarly “disciplined” by another adult? This question lies at the heart of The Slap, in which a man strikes a four-year-old boy at a barbecue in suburban Melbourne.
Neither the novelistic nor the television version of The Slap precludes the audience’s condonement or condemnation of the eponymous incident – the adaptation’s blurb even provocatively asks, “Whose side are you on?”. In this paper, I propose to investigate the stylistic and narrative devices that, in the book and the eight-part television series, are used to (de)legitimize these conflicting positions towards violence. To do this, I will first analyse the slap scene in the novel using M.A.K. Halliday’s model of transitivity (2014), showing that not the assailant himself but his arm and palm, or indeed the slap itself, are depicted as the aggressors; however, I will also show that the interpretation of these linguistic facts is far from straightforward. I will then examine how the passage from the book has been “transcoded” (Hutcheon 2013) into visual and auditory material in the series. Finally, I will contend that the book’s and the series’ overall narrative construction and stylistic makeup provide an ambiguous slant on “the slap” that obscures the works’ ethical subtext, whose fundamental components a stylistic analysis can nonetheless help to retrieve. In doing so, I hope to exemplify how stylistics can foster a clear-sighted engagement with the real-world issue of violence against children explored in The Slap.