Chapter VI, Part 1
1.
In theoretical terms, the style of a speaker or author, or of a text or
discourse, is the array of actual choices made from the vast repertory of
potential choices. In practical terms, a ‘style’ gets attributed to a
discourse [1622] or participant [1623].
[1622]
a more colourful, gossipy style of writing took over from
the self-consciously poetic late
Victorian style. (Sport and the British)
[1623] Phrases such as ‘there is no alternative’ […] sum up the spirit of
what she feels and argues. The warrior image is aided by her forceful style of speaking (Thatcherism)
Yet, as so often in our societies, the relation between theory and
practice by no means constitutes a transparent dialectic (cf. I.2ff). Most of
the many occurrences of ‘style’ as a Noun (e.g. 10,381 in the BNC alone) do
not stipulate the relevant qualities or features, e.g., what renders a style ‘colourful’ as opposed to ‘late Victorian’. For most speakers
and writers, theories
of ‘style’ have remained implicit, even though projects to render them
explicit have a venerable history.
2.
In the study of text and discourse, our theory might define a style — along
with a genre, register, or text type — as an intermediary system, more
specific than the language and more general than the discourse (cf. II.153).
Routinely interacting, these systems mediate between the entire potential
available to text producers and the individual text to be produced. Such systems
appear paradoxical: precise yet flexible, constrained yet adaptable. Copious
stylistic criteria guide a search and selection process that rapidly and
efficiently terminates in uttering or inscribing combinations of particular
choices in Colligations and Collocations. Such a mode of operation could profit
from massively parallel distributed processing whereby ongoing searches can
interchange partial results.1
3.
Evidently, discourse sustains a multiple dialectic between common and uncommon,
between general and specific, between habit and innovation — between what is
typically said and what is actually said. If so, a language remains in the
process of being both confirmed and constituted by discourse (I.36), which is
neither totally fixed in advance nor totally free at the moment (cf. I.26;
II.21, 157). This design is great to exploit in practice, but daunting to
account for in theory.
4.
To a modern view, ancient studies of style, notably in the extant writings of
Aristotle, suggest an intriguing of the three disciplines mentioned back in
II.7. For poetics, he favoured combining ‘strange’ and ‘proper’
choices [1624].2
[1624] The perfection of style is to be clear without being mean. […] That
diction […] is lofty and raised above the commonplace which employs […]
strange (or rare) words, metaphorical, lengthened, [or] ornamental, […] while
the use of proper words will make it perspicuous. (Poetics, 9.4)
For
rhetoric to deliver a ‘speech’, he lauded ‘being clear’ over
‘poetic’ [1625], yet kept ‘metaphor’ as one ‘pre-eminent’ means for
being ‘clear’ as well as ‘pleasant’ and ‘unfamiliar’, whilst
enlisting ‘beautiful words’ [1626].
[1625] the virtue of style is to be clear, [whereas] poetic style [is] inappropriate to a speech; we should make little use of exotic, compound, and artificial (Rhetoric, 3.2)3
[1626] Metaphor pre-eminently involves clarity,
pleasantness, and unfamiliarity; [and] draws from words that are beautiful in
sound or in effect or in image (same)
For
grammar, he rated ‘extended style’ below ‘contracted style’, as
if merging my concepts of appropriate and effective with efficient (cf. II.130).
[1627]
extended style [is] unpleasant because of its unboundedness; [in] contracted
style, […] a clause having an end in itself and an easily surveyed magnitude
[is] both pleasant and easily learned, [and] can be delivered without drawing
breath, as a whole (3.9).
And,
as noted back in IV.4 and signalled again in [1627], he integrated prosody
too.
5.
An unexpected and jarring Platonic note intruded when Aristotle expressed
reservations that, in respect to ‘the study of style’,
[1628]
it makes a difference for explanation to speak in one way or another, but not
that much; all these things are rather mere display directed at the listener.
(3.1)
[1629] Justice requires
contention from the facts themselves, so that all other aspects apart from
demonstration are ancillary. Yet these have a great effect, […] because of the
baseness of the audience. (3.1)
These
reservations might cloud the prospects for a dialectic between theory and
practice. Aristotle based the theory upon abstract values (lofty, clear,
pleasant, beautiful, etc.) which in concrete practice would be applied by
authors and experienced by ‘audiences’. Yet a disparate theory from ancient
philosophy, preoccupied with epistemology and ethics, and thus assigning
abstract values to truth and truthfulness, instilled some ambivalence about the
authenticity of stylistic values versus ‘mere display’ and about the
judgements of real audiences. Plato’s own reservations against the ‘imitative
poet’ come to mind:
[1630]
We shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he
awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. […]
He is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth. (Republic,
41)4
6.
Even so, some dialectic was a professional requirement for an authority on style
back then. The theoretician earned a livelihood imparting practical training in
‘style’ aimed at political or juridical benefits by winning the acclaim of
‘audiences’. And these might indeed not share the theories of authors (or
orators) about what is ‘clear’ or ‘pleasant’ and might in practice value
‘display’ and ‘effect’ over ‘justice’ and ‘fact’. The
theoretician was uneasily entrained in inculcating stylistic and rhetorical
skills whilst surmising that they could be unethically exploited.5
7.
The Aristotelian tradition was ably continued and elaborated in the treatise of
Demetrius whose accredited English title is On Style.6 He
recognised four styles and took more care than Aristotle to illustrate them
abundantly with celebrated orators and poets.7 The ‘elevated’
or 'eloquent style' derives ‘impressiveness’ and
‘stateliness’ from ‘repetition’, ‘long syllables’,
‘compound words’, and lengthy complex, and parallel sentences;8
and also from ‘metaphor’, ‘allegorical language’, and ‘onomatopoeic
words’. The ‘elegant style’ relies on ‘geniality’, ‘grace’,
‘smoothness’, and a ‘pleasant cadence’. The ‘plain style’
seeks ‘clearness’ and ‘lucidity’ from ‘current words’, ‘familiar
diction’, ‘vivid representation’, and ‘homely subject-matter’,
‘shunning ambiguities’ and long sentences, and adhering to ‘the natural
order of the words’. And the ‘forcible style’ prefers ‘brevity
and energy’, and ‘in many passages harshness’ and ‘vehemence’, plus
‘a discreet use of elaborate language’. Like Aristotle, Demetrius betrayed
some inconsistency and ambivalence, namely about both the plain [1631-32] and
the elaborate [1633-34].
[1631]
Everything ordinary is trivial, and so fails to win admiration. (§ 60)
[1632]
Diction [that is] grandiose, elaborate, and distinctly out of the ordinary […]
pos-sesses the needed gravity, whereas usual and current words, though clear,
are unimpressive and liable to be held cheap. (§ 77)
[1633] Overloading with figures […] betokens lack of taste and inequality of style (§ 67)
[1634] Exuberant and
inflated language must not be sought after in a style meant to carry conviction.
(§ 221)
Similarly,
he asserted that ‘metaphors impart a special charm and grandeur to style’,
but warned against their being ‘numerous’, ‘far-fetched’, or
‘daring’, or ‘conducing to triviality’ and ‘pettiness’ (§ 78, 83f).
8.
Like certain other branches of knowledge and study, such as philosophy and
geometry, ancient studies of style have hardly fallen into obsolescence. Indeed,
they overshadow modern studies which are more restricted and self-consciously
‘methodical’ and ‘scientific’, and which fail to resolve the
ambivalences that perplexed the ancients. Moreover, none has exerted a remotely
comparable or enduring impact upon discursive practices in the cultivation of
style as have Aristotle and Demetrius, and, through them, their unsurpassable
models Homer and Demosthenes.
9.
Modern studies under the heading of ‘stylistics’ began to congeal in the
early 20th century, when studies of language resonated more with a
mentalist psychology than epistemological or ethical philosophy. That ambience
featured the ‘affective’, ‘subjective’, and ‘expressive’ aspects of
style,9 thus highlighting the audience over the author or orator.
This work would hardly find favour in the ‘modern linguistics’, arising
shortly after, which sought its identity first by fencing itself off from
neighbouring disciplines and later by falling into line with the formalism,
physicalism, and behaviourism of ‘unified science’, which colonised
psychology and philosophy too (cf. I.`81). So stylistics did not regain full
momentum until the 1960s and 1970s, when these ideologies were receding, and
when text linguistics and discourse analysis were also gathering momentum (cf.
II.120, 135).10
10.
Without a secured academic home of its own, stylistics has understandably been a
diffuse enterprise. Perhaps we could roughly map it out with a catalogue of
prospective ‘theories’ about the nature of style.
10.1.1.
‘Each language as a whole has its own
style.’ This theory would suggest that differences among languages have
a stylistic value that should emerge when they are compared or contrasted. Yet
practical comparisons of the ‘style’ of other languages with English, as in
[1635-36], are not common in my data.
[1635]
The German
version conforms
to German style [so
closely] that it
is generally taken by German speakers
to be a very well written ‘original’. (Coursebook on Translation)11
[1636]
Had he clothed his thoughts in the half French
style of Horace Walpole, or in the half Latin
style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half German jargon of the present
day, his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner. (Life of
Addison)
During
my student days at the Sorbonne, one teacher decried my ‘German style’ of
using French with ‘heavy syntax’, though the real cause was more likely my
having read literary monuments in ‘classical French’ so resolutely that I
took to speaking it in everyday affairs with the Parisians, who seemed peeved or
bewildered.
10.1.2.
Comparative studies of language might have prospered but for the
compartmentalisations or rivalries among language and literature departments, or
the notion in ‘general linguistics’ that ‘each idiom is a closed system’
and so ‘in practice forms a unit of study’ (Saussure).12 Still,
‘comparative stylistics’ has produced fundamental works in continental
Europe,13 whereas ‘contrastive linguistics’ ironically emerged
under the aegis of formalism even though formal contrasts are the least
interesting, and afforded little support to ‘contrastive stylistics’.14
10.1.3.
In practice, at all events, stylistic influences across languages are evident
among non-native language learners, e.g., Brazilian Portuguese impacting the
English of these São Paulo university students, shown with plausible
equivalents:15
[1637]
Art delays to be ready. [= art takes time to be achieved]
[1637a]
Arte demora pra ser pronto.
[1638]
Sometimes the marriage was just to the woman become a housewife.
[1638a]
Às vezes o casimento era só para a mulher virar dona de casa.
[1639] What about start this modification of thoughts inside your home?
[1639a] Que tal começar essa
modificação de pensamentos dentro de sua casa?
Somewhat
depressingly, style has hardly figured in the teaching of English as a foreign
language, where the preoccupation with ‘rules’ and ‘correctness’ is
prone to foreclose aspects of choice and creativity.
10.2.
‘Each speaker or writer has a unique style.’ If the previous
theory implied a small number of general styles, this theory implies a huge
number of specific styles. Such a theory might underwrite social and discursive
inclusion and actualisation, but risks unduly diluting the concept of style by
equating it with raw uniqueness.16 Admittedly, in fine detail every speaker
or writer makes a unique set of choices. Yet among those choices, only
certain ones have significant discursive functions that lend them the status of stylistic
indicators, which render a style not just different, but distinctive, as in
[1640-41].
[1640] If you write primarily to see, then the style
becomes an expression of your personality. […] One’s style
must be an outcome of one’s vision of reality. (Hot Press)
[1641]
Whatever its place in the literary league tables, After Silence is
undoubtedly entertaining: Carroll’s style
has a high gloss, twinkling with near epigrams (lecture)BNC
And
in practice, most recognition of ‘style’
has been given to literary works selected more for use in the
acculturation projects of the schools (II.182, 188) than for any explicit
consensus about the indicators of their styles. Otherwise, few of us get much
recognition of our ‘styles’, least of all non-native learners of English.
10.3.
‘Each text or discourse has a unique style.’ Here, we raise the
number of specific styles still higher, acknowledging that every text or
discourse is unique in fine detail; even the same one read aloud twice by the
same speaker evinces minor differences in articulation or prosody. But if
a language is itself a theory steadily in the dialectical process of
being constituted by its practices (I.36; II.21, 157, 178; VI.3), then
uniqueness is a routine by-product of text and discourse. Again, a style should
be not merely different but distinctive, as invoked in [1642-43].
[1642] The style of the poem is in many ways
seventeenth-century, though there are plenty of resemblances to later hymns (Wordsworth)
[1643]
The style of the novel [A la recherche du temps perdu] [is] like
the structure. […] His long sinuous phrases are designed to enclose the
different levels and quirks of reality, just as liquid, spilt on a rough
pavement, eventually seeps into every crack and cranny. (Ideas in Action)BNC
Yet
here too, what qualities render the style distinctive (e.g.
‘seventeenth-century’ or ‘sinuous’) often remains unspecified in
practice (cf. VI.1).
10.4.1.
‘Style is an issue of value or attitude.’ In my
data samples from British and American Writers, Ameliorative Collocations like
[1644-45] are far more common than for Pejorative ones like
[1646-47].
[1644] Sechele
conducted the
prayer in
his own
simple and beautiful style (Dr Livingstone)
[1645] a more correct and elaborate style
distinguished the discourse, or at least the compositions, of the church and
palace (Decline)
[1646] Books are filled with trivial content and banal
style, to make them ‘easier to read’. (New Scientist)
[1647]
A flush suffused her face for such an awkward style of
presentation (Wildfell)
Attested Adjectives collocating with a good ‘style’
of language included ‘fine, high, glorious, eloquent,
grandiloquent, imperious, sublime’; the Nouns collocating with ‘of style’
included ‘clearness, elegance, eloquence, purity, dignity, propriety, energy,
tact, graces’. The only Adjectives I found collocating
with a bad ‘style’ of language were ‘haughty,
mechanical, conventional, vapid, pedantic’ (these last four all in the same sentence); and no Nouns at all.
10.4.2.
These proportions suggest a generally Ameliorative view of ‘style’, witness
expressions like ‘stylish’ [1648], ‘with style’ [1649], or a ‘style of
your own’ [1650].
[1648] Thomas Herbert was at his best reading aloud his own work and
delivering stylish penetrating eisteddfodic adjudications in his
memorably sonorous voice. (National Bibliography)BNC
[1649] the novel speeds along — firing insults and
insights with style. (Best)
[1650]
Eduard Bagritsky’s first poems were in imitation of the Acmeists, a literary
group of the early 1900s that advocated a concrete, individualistic realism,
stressing visual vividness, emotional intensity, and verbal freshness. Before
long, however, he began writing in a style of
his own (Odessa Web)www
Some
data suggest that style can be valued for helping to express ‘thought’ and
‘feeling’ [1651], especially ‘complicated’ ones in ‘simple words’
[1652]. But, like Aristotle’s distrust of ‘mere display’ [1628] (VI.5),
some data suggest that a ‘brilliant style’ can also camouflage a lack of
‘knowledge’ or ‘caution’ [1653].
[1651]
To use words so true and simple that they oppose
no obstacle to the flow of thought and feeling from mind to mind
[…] is the essence of style (John
Galsworthy)
[1652]
in the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought
into simple words, musical and measured, he read as he
might have read a novel (Human Bondage)
[1653]
The work, from its powerful and brilliant style, though
displaying little accurate knowledge and a great
want of scientific caution, immediately had a very wide circulation. (On
the Origin of Species)
10.5.
‘Style is conveyed by linguistic units and patterns.’ This theory seems
uncontroversial if not indeed self-evident. Yet only some units and patterns
will qualify as stylistic indicators (VI.10.2), i.e.,
the relevant ones for determining the style, such as the Figures of
Speech in [1654-65].
[1654] A train
horned its way northward. […] The landscape trembled by. (Butcherbird)
[1655]
All men were afraid in a world menaced by the invincible spiders of their own
anxieties (Harmattan)
Describing
the Figures is a challenge I shall take up further on (VI.39-67).
10.6.1.
‘Stylistics is a field inside linguistics.’
This theory should logically follow from the previous one if linguistics is the
study of linguistic units and patterns. But the discipline has tended to
formulate its methods too narrowly to underwrite a general study of style.
10.6.2.
Comments on style in the discourse of the more formal linguists have thus been
mainly sporadic and tentative. If ‘style is a technical matter of the building
and placing of words’, ‘the major characteristics of style’ are
‘inescapably’ ‘given by the language itself’; ‘these necessary
fundamentals’ might ‘point the way to those stylistic developments that most
suit the natural bent of the language’, such as its ‘phonetic groundwork’
and its ‘morphological peculiarities’ (Sapir).17 In this theory,
the potential style (of the language) strongly pre-conditions the actual style
(of the text), which led the same linguist to disqualify stylistic influences
between languages in the ‘semi-Latin’ of John Milton and the ‘Teutonic
mannerism’ of Thomas Carlyle. Later, formal linguistics severed style from the
core of language by declaring ‘the rules of stylistic reordering’ to be
‘peripheral’ matters of ‘performance’, not ‘bearing on the theory of
grammatical structure’ (Chomsky).18
10.6.3.
By contrast (as usual), functional linguists expansively saw ‘style’
‘fusing’ the ‘elements of habit, custom, tradition,’ and
‘innovation’ within ‘verbal creation’ (Firth).19
Indeed, ‘there are no regions of language in which style does not
reside’; the ‘central problem in the study of style’ is ‘determining
whether any particular instance of linguistic prominence’ ‘is significant’
and ‘motivated’ (Halliday).20 A ‘prominent’ ‘feature’ is
‘foregrounded only if it relates to the meaning of the text as whole’; it
may function either as ‘a departure from a norm’ or as ‘an attainment or
establishment of a norm’.20 The ‘deterministic concept’ of
‘deviation’, which focussed ‘great deal of attention’ on
‘ungrammatical forms’ ‘prohibited by rules’ (VI10.11.1), is ‘of very
limited interest in stylistics’.20
10.6.4.
Thus, the prospects for integrating stylistics seem brightest for functional
linguistics, defining style as a key factor in the dialectical relation between
the actual, represented by authentic data, and the potential, represented by
Lexicogrammar, Prosody, and Visuality. Aristotelian criteria like ‘familiar’
and ‘strange’ could be clarified by reference to representative corpora, if
possible intuitively sorted for their style, such as ‘epic poetry’ (cf.
VI.10.8.1ff).
10.7.1.
‘Stylistics is a field inside literary studies.’
This contrasting theory holds the advantage over linguistics of claiming a
longer and more prolific tradition in studying the ‘style’ of literary works
and authors, who naturally work to achieve an individual style. If the purview
of linguistics has been distinctly narrow, that of literary
studies has been distinctly broad, deploying numerous and diffuse terms
for designating a particular ‘style’:
[1656] In the
field of
literary writing, […]
the term
[style] has
been applied
to the
linguistic habits
of a
particular writer,
[or] to
the way language is used in a particular genre, period, school of writing,
or some combination of these: ‘epistolary style’, ‘early
eighteenth-century style’, ‘euphuistic style’,
‘the style of Victorian novels’. (Style in Fiction)21
[1657]
it was written in Eliot’s early style: pleasing, pungent
and persuasive. (T.S.
Eliot)
The
really tough challenge awaits in relating these terms to particular linguistic
features, e.g., to those rendering a style ‘pungent’ (cf. VI.1).
10.7.2.
The uncertain status of ‘style’ indicated by diffuse terms reflects the
generally hybrid organisation of literary studies as a wide-ranging project for
acculturation (II.197; VI.10.2). Close attention to language and text must share
the agenda with the mediation of culture, history, and biography, three domains
whose impact on literary works might foster innumerable forms. If literature is
a discourse domain wherein the principle of ‘alternativity’ creates
alternative worlds to enhance our understanding of our own world (cf. II.175,
182, 191), poetry skillfully applies the same principle to language, whereby the
author is all the more motivated to master a distinctive style. In exchange, the
relation remains problematic between the style of the literary text and the
reality of the author, the more so for authors who recreate themselves as a
literary character with a distinctive ‘life style’ too.
10.7.3.
As literature evolves through a vast plurality of styles, the potential for
fresh innovation is steadily narrowed, at least insofar as imitation is not
highly regarded. The historical irony of English literature lies in the early
emergence of its unsurpassed (and unsurpassable) masters of style, casting their
daunting shadows upon every later stylist who might try write ‘in the style
of’ Shakespeare or Milton.
10.8.1.
Style’ distinguishes a literary genre’. This theory seems reasonable for
some cases, notably the ‘epic style’, as memorably developed by Milton:
[1658]
Of Man’s First Disobedience […]
Sing,
Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of
Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That
Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In
the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose
out of Chaos: […] I thence
Invoke
thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That
with no middle flight intends to soar
Above
th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things
unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme. (Paradise Lost)
In
twin series of stylistic indicators, strategic cultural icons oscillate between
pagan (‘Muse’, ‘Aonian Mount,’ i.e., Mount
Helicon, mythical home of the Muses)
and Christian (‘Oreb’ and
‘Sinai’, mountains where Moses was inspired by God’s miracles), to
augur a synthesis of ‘Classical’ and ‘Biblical’ cultural and religious
traditions. Further indicators reside in the
grammatical complexity with its multiple dependencies among the Clauses, which
lends the flow a prosodic solemnity for a discourse proposing no less a mission
than to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.
10.8.2.
Comparative stylistics would be quick to point out that Milton’s epic style,
ostensibly for ‘things unattempted yet’, was anticipated by the style of
Virgil’s Aeneid. There, the ‘muse’ was famously invoked to aid
‘singing’ of quite different heroics but with similar stylistic indicators
such as cultural icons of historical places and a grammatical complexity in
Latin that Milton admired and partially emulated. (All ‘epic’ translations
in this section are my own.)
[1659] Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus,
Laviniaque venit litora […]
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,
quidve dolens, regina deum tot
volvere casus
insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores impulerit.
[Arms and the man I sing, who first from the coast of
Troy
came to Italy, exiled by fate, and to the shores of
Lavinia. […]
Muse, recount me the causes: how offended majesty,
or what angered, the queen of the gods impelled to
undergo so many misfortunes
a
man distinguished for piety, to endure so many labours.
From
there we would acknowledge Homer (both of him), who tersely invoked the
‘muse’ or ‘goddess’ at the start of the Iliad [1661] and the Odyssey
[1662].
[1660] mênin
aeide thea Pêlêïadeô Achilêos
oulomenên, hê muri Achaios
alge ethêke
[Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus,
that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans]
[1661] andra
moi ennepe, mousa, poluptropon, hos mala polla
planchthê, epei Troiês hieron ptoliethron epersen
[…]
tôn hamothen ge, thea, thugater Dios, eipe kai hêmin.
[Tell me, muse, of that much-travelled hero who
exceedingly far
wandered after he had ravaged the famous city of Troy.
[…]
From
whatsoever source, goddess, daughter of Zeus, tell those things.
Projecting forward again to the 16th century, the
epic style of Luis Vaz de Camões betrays the same lineage, but with the pungent
irony of bidding the song of the ‘ancient muse’ about ‘great voyages’ to
cease and attend to ‘greater merit’.
[1662]
As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que
da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por
mares nunca de antes navegados
Passaram
ainda além da Taprobana […]
E
também as memórias gloriosas
Daqueles
Reis; […]
Cantando
espalharei por toda parte,
Se
a tanto me ajudar o engenho e arte. […]
Cessem
do sábio Grego e do Troiano
As
navegações grandes que fizeram; […]
Cesse
tudo o que a Musa antígua canta,
Que
outro valor mais alto se alevanta. (Os
Lusíadas)
[The
arms and the distinguished barons
That
from the western shore of Lusitania [ancient name for Portugal]
Through
seas never before navigated
Passed
even beyond Taprobana [ancient name for Sri Lanka] […]
And
also the glorious memories of those kings […]
Singing
I shall spread everywhere
If
so much will aid me genius and art. […]
Cease
of the wise Greek and the Trojan
The
great navigations they made;
Cease
all that the ancient muse sings,
For
other, higher merit has arisen.]
An
‘interlingual style’ like the ‘epic’ indicates how a comparative
stylistics might offset the usual compartmentalisation of ‘literature
programmes’ (VI.10.1.2).
10.9.1.
‘Stylistics should be objective, not subjective.’ This theory reflects the
general ambitions of ‘classical science’ (in the sense of I.81) reapplied to
language studies and linguistics, and periodically to literary studies. Applying
it to stylistics as well has encouraged a recourse to statistics;22
yet by substituting quantity for quality,
statistics is not well equipped to distinguish which of the counted items are
stylistic indicators. When Aristotle stressed the infrequent (‘rare’)
choices ‘raised above’ the frequent (‘commonplace’) (VI.2), he
was probably thinking of the proportions in general usage. A specific author or
text might associate frequency with consistency, and infrequency with
creativity, but the style is still not described.
10.9.2.
A tougher problem is that stylistic indicators are often not single items but
combinations and patterns whose frequency is uniformly low and thus look much
the same in statistical terms, such as Shakespeare’s ‘to be imprisoned in
the viewless winds’ (Measure for Measure) or ‘whose high upreared and abutting fronts the perilous narrow
ocean parts asunder’ (Henry
V). The apparent simplicity and
objectivity of numbers hinder them from capturing the complex and subjective
phenomenon of style — they’re the smoke, not the fire.
10.9.3.
Moreover, statistics discounts the crucial factor of audience response to style.23
In The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play of mixed authorship, my intuitive
response is that [1663] (pleading for the Duke to give the ‘slain kings’ a
proper burial, a ‘grace’ even granted to suicides) is by Shakespeare, whilst
[1664] (pleading for the audience not to ‘hiss’ the play, whose ‘story’
came from Chaucer) is definitely not.
[1663] Remember that your fame
Knolls in the ear o’ the world: […] your actions,
Soon as they move, as ospreys do the fish,
Subdue before they touch: think, dear Duke, think
What beds our slain Kings have. […]
Those that with cords’, knives’, drams’ precipitance
Weary of this world’s light, have to themselves
Been death’s most horrid agents, humane grace
Affords
them dust and shadow.
(I, 1, 133-34, 137-38, 141-44)
[1664] Chaucer (of all admir’d) the Story gives,
There
constant to Eternity it lives.
If
we let fall the Nobleness of this,
And
the first sound this child hear, be a hiss,
How
will it shake the bones of that good man,
And
make him cry from under ground, ‘O fan
From
me the witless chaff of such a writer…’ (Prologue, 13-19)
My
response to both samples is based on prosodic flow, and on lexicogrammatical
combinations which are statistically
insignificant in my complete corpus of Shakespeare plays, but which are creative
in the one sample (e.g. ‘knolls in the ear’) and trite in the other
(e.g. ‘hear a hiss’).
10.10.1. ‘Stylistics should be descriptive rather
than evaluative’. This theory is a less ambitious correlate of the preceding
call for objectivity, and reflects the aspiration of ‘general linguistics’
to establish a science by opposing its descriptive stance to the more
traditional evaluative stances (cf. II.38). Yet the close correlate of favouring
the description of the most general or even universal aspects of language is
hardly conducive to studies of style.
10.10.2. Within the ambience of formal linguistics, descriptive stylistics
has predictably been concerned with measuring the proportions of word-classes or
clause types, the length or syntactic complexity of clauses and sentences, and,
as already noted, the statistical frequencies of individual words. Such research
could (and did) confirm — small surprise — that Edward Gibbon’s style is
far more complex than Ernest Hemingway’s,24 but could not explain
why I find Gibbon’s prose stimulating and Hemingway’s tiresome (perhaps
because as a teenager I was reading the polished histories of Tacitus, Suetonius,
and James Henry Breasted). Nor could it explain how I single out ‘authentic’ Shakespeare
inside a play of mixed authorship [1663-64]. Such explanations presuppose being
able to show how descriptive categories like ‘frequent’ and
‘infrequent’, or ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ influence how audiences
actually evaluate styles. Evidently, I value the infrequent and complex aspects
of style more than do the devotees and epigones of Mr Hemingway, who might find
them insufficiently macho.
10.11.1. ‘Style is the interplay between norm and
deviation’.25 This theory was also inspired by formal linguistics,
though it may sound reminiscent of Aristotle’s counsel that ‘by deviating in
exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will gain distinction’ (Poetics,
9,4). The analogy from linguistics seems to have been the interplay between
‘grammatical’ versus ‘ungrammatical’ (cf. VI.10.6.4); yet the latter
term designates utterances which simply don’t occur, such as ‘sincerity may
virtue the boy’ (II.78), and which are accordingly uninformative about issues
of style.
10.11.2. Again, the reticence of linguistics about
evaluation incurs problems. Obviously, various modes of deviance may have quite
disparate stylistic value (or none), nor can value simply increase along with
degrees of deviance. Compare:26
[1665]
It dropped so low — in my Regard —
I
heard it hit the Ground —
And
go to pieces on the Stones
At
bottom of my Mind —
Yet
blamed the fate that flung it —
less
Than
I denounced myself
For
entertaining Plated Wares
Upon
my Silver Shelf. (Emily Dickinson)
[1666]
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely the hay
Fields
high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And
playing, lovely and watery
And the fire green as grass. (Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)
[1667] my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my
father moved through depths of height (e.e. cummings)
[1665] is normal in Grammar and mildly deviant in the
Lexicon, making abstractions concrete in a self-reproach about an undeservedly
noble (‘silver’) esteem for something superficial (‘plated’) — what it
was, we are free to imagine. [1666] deviates mildly in Grammar:
perhaps ‘sun’ for ‘sunny day’, ‘it’ for ‘childhood
activities’; ‘green fire’ for the glow of ‘watery’ dew on the
‘grass’. [1667] deviates most strenuously, but rather gratuitously, like a
riddle to be unscrambled to reveal humdrum content, e.g.: ‘my father’s fate
was to be loved throughout a stable and generous lifetime; greeting each morning
after each night, my father lived to make depths seem like heights’. But what
makes me personally hold Dylan Thomas to be the foremost English poet of the 20th
century is not any list of deviations but the total effect of the Lexicogrammar,
the sonorous Prosody of his recorded recitations, and the measured Visuality of
the lines and stanzas.
10.11.3. By contrast, a passage like [1668] doesn’t seem deviant, but
would in respect to
the norms of poetry as invoked by other lines in the same text like [1669].
[1668]
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me.
(T.S.
Eliot, The Wasteland)
[1669]
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch
and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses
the brown land, unheard. (same)
Far
more deviant, in my view, is the text’s literal and peremptory expropriation
from other texts, some in foreign languages; a more apt title for The
Wasteland might have been The Jumble Sale or Hypocrite Auteur.
10.11.4.
Extreme deviance may produce a style too strenuous to bear, viz.:
[1670] Many mellow Cydonian suckets
Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine
From ruby-rimmed beryline buckets
Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline
Like the sweet golden goblet found growing
On the wild emerald cucumber-tree
Rich, brilliant, like chrysoprase glowing,
Was
my beautiful Rosalie Lee (Thomas Chivers)
This
deservedly obscure 19th-century US poet might be suspected of
audacious parody, if his (unpublished) volumes did not bear such languishing
titles as Phials of Amber Full of the Tears of Love.27
Rosalie Lee — fittingly rhymes with ‘fiddle-dee-dee’ — or
some parts of her, reminded the impassioned speaker of Lebanese pastries (‘Cydonian
suckets’ => Sidonian
sweetmeats, i.e., from Sidon, a city in ancient Phoenicia, now Lebanon) and
‘sweet apples’ by the bucketful — and what opulent ‘buckets’! Made of
emeralds (‘beryline’), ‘rimmed’ with ‘rubies’, ‘gemmed’ with
‘stars’, ‘shaped’ like ‘lilies’ (sloppy to pour, though),
‘glowing’ like ‘chrysoprase’… You see my point.
She was a regular pail-faced Tiffany’s.
10.12.
‘Style results from the interplay of unmarked and marked’. This theory is a
functionalist correlate of the theory of deviance, but with an incisive
difference. Marked choices need not be deviant nor infrequent; they are chosen
for strategic motives, whereas unmarked ones are chosen when no such motive
applies (VI.14). In [1671], both the Direct and Indirect Objects of the
Imperative ‘bring’ are Fronted in marked positions; and ‘shadows brown’
might be something more to ‘bring’, but is more coherent as another
melancholy destination for the sun’s ‘beams’.
[1671] His
flaring beams, me, Goddess, bring
To
arched walks of twilight groves,
And
shadows brown, that Sylvan loves
Of pine, or monumental oak (Il Penseroso)
Whereas ‘deviance’ suggests an event violating or
falling outside the system, ‘markedness’ suggests an event refreshing or
flexing the system.
10.13.1.
‘Style should be explicitly developed’. Here at last, theory is
resolutely allied with practice; but so far, the practices are running ahead of
a creditable theory. For example, some advice on ‘style’ tells you to avoid
repeating the same words, whereas other advice warns against what H.W. Fowler,
beefeater guardian of The King’s English, famously spurned as ‘elegant
variation’, which ‘includes all substitutions of one word
for another for the sake of variety’. Neither advice will do for all cases:
for me [1672] is better style with repetitions, and [1673] without them.
[1672]
It seems that the woman was a young woman, and a
jealous woman, and a revengeful
woman; revengeful
to the last degree. (Great Expectations)
[1672a]
It seems that the woman was a young maiden, and a
jealous lady, and a revengeful female;
retaliatory to the last degree.