Routledge Revivals: Style and Stylistics (1969)

Graham Hough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351261586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

First published in 1969, Professor Hough's work examines stylistics – the bridge between linguistics and literary criticism. The book gives a short survey of stylistics from a literary point of view, and tries to answer the question of how much stylistics contributes to the understanding of literature. It brings together continental European work on stylistics and Anglo-American critical writing which has a similar purpose though usually under a different name. In calling the attention of the student of literature to trains of thought with which he is not generally familiar, and with detailed analysis on different literary styles and methods, Professor Hough provides important critical insights.

1

The concept of style and the origins of style-study

Older Concepts of Style

It is a paradox that the term ‘style’ has tended to disappear from the main stream of modern criticism, while a quasi-independent study of ‘stylistics’ has simultaneously made its appearance. If we look into the causes of this we shall go far towards defining the rationale of the modern study of literary style.

The concept of style is an old one; it goes back to the very beginnings of literary thought in Europe. It appears in connection with rhetoric rather than poetic, and there seems to be no special reason for this, except that style is regarded as part of the technique of persuasion and therefore discussed largely under the head of oratory. Ancient rhetoric distinguished between ceremonial, political and forensic oratory, and each has its own appropriate occasion and appropriate repertory of devices. If you wish to produce this particular effect these are the means to bring it about; the proper vocabulary, type of syntax and figures of speech can be prescribed for the purpose in hand (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. III; Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Bk. VIII). The tone of this ancient rhetoric is largely prescriptive—the giving of instructions for appropriate and effective composition. Even a writer like Longinus, who is much concerned with the moral and spiritual sources of ‘the sublime’, still goes on to detail the rhetorical figures by which it can be achieved. Ancient rhetoric in its later phases tended to enlarge its discussion to historians and other prose writers. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance this immense body of rhetorical precept was largely incorporated into poetic, where it had a deep influence not only on critical ideas, but, as recent studies have shown, on the composition of poetry itself. The tradition carries on a lingering existence even into the eighteenth century.

But for us all this is a vanished history. Prescriptive criticism has not been a central literary activity for the last 300 years. In a post-Romantic age it survives only in odd corners—schools of journalism, classes in ‘creative writing’. Modern literary study does not presume to dictate to poets; it does not offer instructions towards the forming of a style, it examines styles that are already formed. It is parallel in this respect to linguistic study, which no longer lays down rules for correct grammar, but studies the rules that are actually adhered to by particular cultural groups. The aim is not to give laws for human utterance, but to understand the utterances that actually occur. We can conceive a time when linguistics and criticism might resume their legislative role; but except in countries where literature is decisively subordinated to political necessity this is remote from any currently active way of thinking, and we shall not consider it further.

However, there are other legacies from the old rhetorical concept of style that cannot be dismissed so easily. It was fundamental in traditional rhetoric and criticism to make a separation between matter and manner, what is said and the way of saying it. Such things are often spoken of in metaphor, perhaps necessarily so; and here the commonest metaphor is to speak of language as the dress of thought. Thought is imagined as existing in some pre-verbal form, and it is then clothed in language. We can illustrate this from a passage in Dryden’s Preface to Annus Mirabilis:

So then the first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing or adorning that thought so found and varied in apt, significant and sounding words.

On this theory it is easy to see what style is. Language is the dress of thought, and style (often, following Quintilian, referred to as ‘elocution’) is the particular cut and fashion of the dress.

This way of thinking has a number of consequences. The cut or fashion can be looked at from different points of view. Dryden sees it as mainly dictated by the subject; the thought must be moulded in a manner ‘proper to the subject’; the words must be ‘apt’ to the subject. This is in conformity with the general neo-classic theory of literary kinds. Each genre has its own appropriate style; the style of a tragedy is not to be the same as that of a pastoral because they have different subject-matters; and this is nothing to do with the private tastes of the author, but part of the nature of things. At a rather later date, with the advent of expressive theories of literature, style is seen as largely dictated by the nature of the author himself. It is the expression of his personality. Le style c’est l’homme même, as we always say in this context, perverting Buffon to our own purpose. By an extension of this approach we can go on to talk about the style of a period or a literary school. But from then on it begins to be doubtful whether we can stay within the limits of the old metaphor—language as the dress of thought. Is the style of the Romantic poets different from that of the school of Pope because they were saying the same things in different ways, or because they were saying different things? Probably the latter; and the more we reflect on it the more doubtful it becomes how far we can talk about different ways of saying; is not each different way of saying in fact the saying of a different thing?

The process of reflecting on this subject goes on intermittently through the eighteenth century. Gray could write to his friend Mason in 1762, of a passage in one of his odes: ‘It is flat, it is prose.… If the sentiment must stand, twirl it a little into an apophthegm, stick a flower in it, gild it with a costly expression, let it strike the fancy, the ear or the heart, and I am satisfied.’

This is apt to make a post-Romantic generation shudder. If Mason’s sentiment was flat, we feel, no amount of gilt or costly expression is going to improve it. By the time we reach the criticism of our own day we find that this whole distinction between matter and manner has been decisively rejected. To reject it has indeed become one of the principal dogmas of current critical thought. The work of literary art is seen as an organic unity, in which matter and manner, thought and expression are indissolubly one; and what began perhaps as an aesthetic doctrine is equally prevalent in considering non-literary utterance. Bloomfield, in an article on ‘Linguistic Aspects of Science’, says: ‘It is a well-tried hypothesis of linguistics that formally different utterances always differ in meaning.’ Some recent developments in generative grammar make this look at least doubtful, and the status of synonymy is still open to discussion. But Bloomfield’s point of view is still general. On this hypothesis we cannot talk about different ways of expressing the same thought, but only of different thoughts. What then has become of style? It seems to have disappeared. The case has been put very clearly by Richard M. Ohmann (Style in Vrose Fiction, 2):

For if style does not have to do with ways of saying something, just as style in tennis has to do with ways of hitting a ball, is there anything at all which is worth naming ‘style’? … The critic can talk about what the writer says, but talk about the style he cannot, for his neat identity—one thought, one form—allows no margin for individual variation, which is what we ordinarily mean by style. Style, then, becomes a useless hypothetical construct.

And it is for this reason that the word ‘style’ makes very little appearance in the main stream of modern criticism.

The Modern Concept of Style

Whatever has happened to the word, however, the concept of style cannot in practice be simply evaporated; for the kind of considerations that used to shelter under its name are still critically active. In England and America there is a huge complex of critical and educational practice that, without using the name, relies largely on stylistic analysis. The experiments in ‘practical criticism’ conducted by I. A. Richards in the twenties; what is, or was, called the New Criticism in America; the widespread techniques of ‘explication’ or ‘close reading’ of poetry—these are all cases in point. The idea that the nature of a whole work can be deduced from the qualities exhibited in a short passage is still widely current; and this is a stylistic dogma. Indeed, all that body of modern criticism which prides itself on its close contact with the verbal texture of literature is a kind of style-study. But the modern critic does not talk about style any more than he talks about beauty. Because the word is out of fashion and the concept now ill-defined, it has been felt necessary to invent new terminologies, and to be excessively cautious about relapsing into old doctrines now regarded as heresies. If we could continue to talk about style—without bringing in undesired and outmoded connotations—it would be an obvious simplification. It would also have the advantage of enlisting at least a little aid from the linguistic disciplines to a kind of criticism that has often had no discipline at all.

In general the linguists seem to have been little embarrassed by the difficulties we have been considering. In spite of the dictum of Bloomfield quoted above, many students of linguistics who have concerned themselves with style are quite content to talk about different ways of saying the same thing. Charles Bally, one of the founding fathers of modern stylistics, defined it as the study of the ‘affective’ elements in language—these affective elements being conceived as optional additions to an already determinate meaning. More recently Hockett’s Course in Modern Linguistics asserts that ‘two utterances in the same language which convey approximately the same information, but which are different in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ in style: He came too soon and He arrived prematurely’. Stephen Ullmann quotes a sentence of Proust, then offers a rearranged version of it and says, ‘Both sentences mean the same thing.’ He goes on to analyse the difference between them as a matter of effectiveness—effectiveness in expressing a given meaning—thus following precisely the definition of style he has quoted earlier from Stendhal: ‘ajouter à une pensée donnée toutes les circonstances propres à produire tout l’effet que doit produire cette pensée’.

The attitude of professional linguistics to this problem is perhaps in process of modification. Late developments of Chomsky’s generative grammar have led to the hypothesis (it is yet only a hypothesis) that the deep structure of sentences may be the universal semantic basis of all languages, that they assume different grammatical forms in different languages, and that a single semantic complex in an individual language may indeed assume different but synonymous grammatical forms. The differences between synonymous sentences may then be called stylistic; in fact, a return to the old view of language as the dress of thought. Both the state of the case and the limitations of my knowledge forbid further discussion of the question here.

So I shall not meddle any further with the philosophical or linguistic aspects of the ‘one thought, one form’ doctrine—not from lack of interest, but from lack of competence. I would claim too that the literary critic has the right to borrow Occam’s razor, and may legitimately shear off a good many entities that are not necessary to his purpose. Among them are all discussions about forms of propositions, their relation to the syntactical forms of sentences, and most of what is said about the meaning of meaning. Such considerations occur at a level of abstraction where literary criticism has difficulty in following, where it has no contribution to make and no competence to decide. In these matters the critic may be a probabilist, and use for his purposes any doctrine decently attested by a reputable authority. The value of his conclusions is to be judged by their success in interpreting literature, not by the nature of the non-literary tools he has used on the way.

I think the concept of style can be rescued in three ways, none of them obviously disreputable.

(1) The critic can rest on ordinary language and received opinion, ‘the common sense of readers uncorrupted by literary prejudice’. Such readers obstinately persevere in distinguishing between matter and manner, the thing said and the way of saying it. The end of literature is to come home to men’s business and bosoms, and it can be argued that it is best discussed in the terms in which men’s business is normally conducted, to which their bosoms normally return an echo. There is no need to prove that there ‘is’ such a thing as style; it is enough that it is a convenient and natural term to use, and that in practice everybody knows what is being talked about.

(2) The critic can deny the doctrine that formally different utterances always differ in meaning, as I. A. Richards goes near to doing in Interpretation in Teaching. This may need some ingenious casuistry, but it is possible to establish the position sufficiently for literary purposes.

(3) The critic may accept this doctrine, and agree that difference of form is always difference of meaning. But he can still deny that the concept of style has disappeared. It has not disappeared; it has become subsumed in meaning. Style is a part of meaning, but a part which can properly and reasonably be discussed on its own.

For myself I should prefer the third of these possibilities—that style is an aspect of meaning; but I should expect to find literary critics employing all three, if not indiscriminately at least on different occasions and for different purposes. I shall not attempt to decide between these three positions—any one of them gives the critic all the room he needs to work in. What is now necessary is to show in practical and literary terms what aspects of the literary work it is intended to discuss under the head of style.

Whatever view we may take of its nature, it is clear that in talking about style we are talking about choice—choice between the varied lexical and syntactic resources of a particular language. And this is a secondary choice, a choice of means. In discussing whatever it is we mean by style we assume that the primary choice, the choice of subject-matter in the large sense, has already been made. The decision to write about the Trojan War, or whale-fishing, or a country childhood is not a stylistic one. We can talk about the secondary choice, the stylistic one, in various ways. We can say that it is the choice of the best verbal means to express a pre-determined subject-matter; or if we decline to do this we can talk about choice between the various meanings or shades of meaning that cluster round a given subject. (In practice it will be found to make surprisingly little difference which way we set about it.) We can regard the choice as conditioned by the subject-matter and the occasion, or as conditioned, perhaps unconsciously, by the character and temperament of the author. But whatever point of view we adopt, it will be the verbal ordonnance that we discuss, not the outlines of the myth, the facts of the case, the ideological or biographical substructure.

Let us begin by taking a simple case—virtually a non-literary one—the case of a scientific paper reporting the results of an experiment. It has several points of interest for our purpose. In the first place it could surely be maintained with some plausibility that there is here a pre-linguistic matter to be clothed in verbal dress. It would be possible not to write the paper at all, but simply to summon those with whom it was desired to communicate to witness a wordless repetition of the experiment. Or the result could be expressed entirely in mathematical formulae. If ever it is reasonable to talk about language as the dress of some pre-verbal complex of thought, surely it is here. But the strictly stylistic problem is limited; the range of choice is extremely narrow. Feeling is excluded in a scientific paper; tone (attitude towards the reader) is neutral; verbal play is superfluous or taboo. Yet even within these limits the stylistic choice still exists. It is possible to announce the subject of inquiry, to describe the experimental means used to investigate it, to state the results, in a variety of ways—economically or diffusely, clearly or obscurely. Above all it is possible to write the paper in such a way that curiosity is aroused, the resulting tension sustained for the appropriate time, the curiosity satisfied at the logically and psychologically appropriate points. And these things are all parts of what we will call style. It is possible that so much of style can occur even in a non-verbal medium—as when a mathematical paper is commended for its ‘elegance’.

In a properly literary context the matter is always more complex and the possibilities of choice are far greater. The feeling of the writer towards his subject, his attitude towards the reader, both become significant. And here it is surely less appropriate to talk of a predetermined subject, which the writer can choose to express in one of a number of ways. The feeling and the tone are parts of what is to be expressed. They are parts of the meaning, not supererogatory embellishments or means of ingratiation. But however we choose to look at them, they are there to be discussed, and the verbal means by which such attitudes are established are open to observation. The choice of this word rather than that, of this kind of syntactical construction rather than another, is a visible fact, whose nature and effects can be examined. The initial response to a work of literature is general; we respond to the whole complex, without being aware of what goes to make it up. Most readers stop there, and feel no impulse to go farther. The minority whose interests lead them to closer inquiry may take a variety of courses. They may be led back from the work to its genesis in the author’s experience; they may examine the philosophic or religious ideas that it embodies; they may concern themselves about its moral or social effects. But if their interest is in the maker’s art itself, rather than in its causes or its effects, they will inquire into the particular verbal means by which the total form has been achieved. In that case the inquiry will be a stylistic one. If its results bring about a new understanding of the total literary form, the stylistic inquiry will have had real critical results.

The organic unity of a work of literature is not something ready-made; it is not an entire and perfect chrysolite found lying about in nature; it is something achieved. This organic whole may be arrived at in a variety of ways. The lyric poet sometimes has a rhythm in his head before he knows what words will ever be found to fit it; he may conceive a line or a phrase before he knows what poem it is going to belong to; only on rare occasions does he experience a whole poem as given, dictated at once in its final shape. The expository writer begins with an argument, perhaps vaguely apprehended as a general form, but refined and knit together only in the process of working out the appropriate organization, syntax and vocabulary. The novelist can be aware of fictional characters and situations, just as he can be aware of characters and situations in life, without any thought of their linguistic presentation. Most writing involves a process of revision, conducted either on paper or in the mind before anything is written down. There is some evidence that different writers look on this revising process in very different lights; some see it as the progressively more accurate embodiment of a preconceived meaning; some see it as a continual change and modification of meaning itself. In either case it is best for the critic to look at the matter prospectively. The work of literature is a project; when it is complete the result is a unity, a whole. But it is a whole composed of linguistic elements that we also know in other combinations; we can therefore by a process of abstraction become aware of them sep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The concept of style and the origins of style-study
• 2 Linguistic style-study
• 3 Literary stylistics: methods and problems
• 4 Some practitioners
• 5 Conclusion: limits and possibilities
• Select Bibliography