Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature

David Hoover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000262704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style employs the tools and methods of computational stylistics to show that style is extremely resistant to changes in how texts are produced. Addressing an array of canonical writers, including William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, along with popular contemporary writers like Stephen King and Ian McEwan, this volume presents a systematic study of changes in mode of composition and writing technologies. Computational analysis of texts produced in multiple circumstances of composition, such as dictation, handwriting, typewriting, word processing, and translation, reveals the extraordinary durability of authorial style. Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature will be essential for readers interested in exploring the rapidly expanding field of digital approaches to literature.

1
MODES OF COMPOSITION AND THE DURABILITY OF LITERARY STYLE

Introduction

In every age since written language began, rhetorical forms have been to a considerable extent influenced by the writing materials and implements which were available for man’s use. This is a familiar observation in studies of the past. Is it not, then, time that somebody inquired into the effects upon the form and substance of our present-day language of the veritable maze of devices which have come into widely extended use in recent years, such as the typewriter, with its invitation to the dictation practice; shorthand, and, most important of all, the telegraph? Certainly these agencies of expression cannot be without their marked and significant influences upon English style.

(O’Brien 464; qtd. in Seltzer 6–7)

What should we expect to happen to the styles of authors who change from one mode of composition to another? This question seems relatively speculative, but the artistic and personal nature of literary composition suggests that a writer’s style might well be affected by a change in the way the text is produced. More than a hundred years ago, when Robert Lincoln O’Brien wrote the quotation that begins this chapter, he obviously thought writing technology affected style. He immediately added, however, the prediction that “the saner and nobler literature of the world will always be written in more deliberate, and perhaps old-fashioned ways, by mechanical methods in which there has been little change from Chaucer to Kipling.” When his prediction proved false, would he have expected the style of “nobler” literature to be affected by writing technology as well?

Writers’ own perceptions that changes in mode affect their writing provide another justification for studying the question, even given the notorious inaccuracy of authorial opinions about their own texts and styles. The well-known differences between speech and writing, famously discussed by Walter Ong and others in terms of orality and literacy and more recently confirmed by corpus linguistics, suggest that producing a text by speaking rather than writing might cause significant and systematic differences in the resulting text. The differences between speech and writing also suggest the possibility that the use of dictation might affect dialogue and narrative in different ways or to different degrees. The fact that a handwritten (or typed or word-processed) text is immediately visible to the writer, while a text dictated to an amanuensis is not, might also have some effect. There is also evidence that handwriting and typing involve different mental processes and even different parts of the brain, and there has been some research suggesting that the ease of revision during composition with word processors facilitates the production of text and may affect the quality of writing, at least among young writers. These a priori grounds for thinking that style may be affected by mode of composition are sufficient for my purposes.

One complicating factor is that, for many of the writers known to have changed how they write, the reason for the change in mode of composition might itself also affect their styles. Henry James’s wrist pain, Joseph Conrad’s gout, the painful stomach problems of Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy, Stanley Elkin’s finger pain because of multiple sclerosis, and Stephen King’s pain following a car accident certainly cannot be ruled out as causes of stylistic change. Conrad’s early use of dictation was also partly because of pressure to produce text more quickly, and Scott was hurrying, too, publishing three novels, a total of more than 370,000 words in 1819 alone, and speed of composition might also affect an author’s style. Encroaching blindness might also have caused changes in Booth Tarkington’s style, though its gradualness and the fact that he apparently began to dictate while his vision was still good enough that he could have handwritten his texts suggest that the cause of change of mode might not be as significant as the change itself.

William Faulkner’s transition to typing most of his first drafts directly on the typewriter rather than writing them by hand about mid-career was apparently a matter of convenience, so that the cause of his change in mode seems much less likely to have altered his style than does the new mode of composition itself. This case is complicated by the fact that he had already been typing his initial handwritten drafts very shortly after writing them, so that editing, amplifying, and correcting at the typewriter were clearly very familiar by this time in his career. Similarly, the transitions from typewriter to word processor in the middle of a novel by both Arthur Clarke and Octavia Butler might seem relatively minor changes of mode, but the ease of immediate revision, and especially the ease of moving text from one part of the document to another, seems like differences significant enough for a possible stylistic effect. Clark and Butler, like Faulkner, switched voluntarily for convenience and speed, so that their cases present fairly pure tests of the effect of the change in mode.

Ian McEwan is another author for whom the change in mode was a voluntary one. After handwriting his first two novels, he switched to a word processor for later work. Stanley Elkin made the same change in mode, but not voluntarily. Instead, as noted earlier, he got a word processor because of finger pain caused by multiple sclerosis. Both McEwan and Elkin are attractive targets for analysis because they have also both written about their perceptions of how word processing changed their writing.

The case of Stephen King is exceptionally complex. King got a typewriter for Christmas when he was eleven (On Writing 13). Because he changed from handwriting to typing before the publication of his first book in 1974, his initial change in mode of composition is not testable. He switched to word processing in 1981 but went back to handwriting for two novels: Bag of Bones (1998) and Dreamcatcher (2001), with one word-processed novel between. After 2001, he returned to word processing. Intersecting with these seemingly promising changes of mode, however, is a complex history of alcohol and drug abuse that King has discussed openly. King reports that he wrote under the influence of alcohol or cocaine up to at least 1989, about six years after he began using a word processor. This seems to make the two late handwritten novels a good testing ground. In 1999, however, King was very seriously injured when he was hit by a van while taking a walk, and he wrote Dreamcatcher, the second late, handwritten novel, under the influence of Oxycontin because of severe pain. In spite of these difficulties, King’s case presents a fascinating testing ground for the effects of both substance abuse and change of mode of composition on his writing style.

The question of revision also complicates the question of how a change in mode of composition might affect style. For most of these authors, the process of revision still involved handwritten changes, so that any unwanted effects of a change in mode could, if noticed, be removed or reduced in the revision process. Fortunately, the authors who will be studied here vary significantly in the amount and intensity of revision they practiced. James, Conrad, Tarkington, Faulkner, McEwan, and Elkin were extensive revisers, but Scott was notoriously not so, and Hardy and King seem to fall somewhere between. Editorial intervention has also often been suggested as a confounding or complicating factor in the study of literary style, but, as Chapter 2 will show, actual evidence for significant effects of editors on authors’ styles is difficult to demonstrate.

Before turning to an examination of the possibility of stylistic changes caused by a change in mode of composition, the three elements of my title need some discussion: literary style, its relative durability, and the differences among the various modes themselves.

Literary Style, Authorial Style, and the Author

After some thousands of years of the study of the styles of individual authors, it seems peculiar to feel the need to begin a discussion of literary style, and especially authorial style, with a defense of the concepts themselves. The primary reason for this need is the immense influence, now perhaps waning somewhat, of ideas stemming from two essays originally published in the 1960s: Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Michel “What Is an Author?.” These essays rightly emphasized the social construction of authorship and the problematic nature of a reliance on authorial intention (for an interesting collection of essays on authorship and intention, see Irwin). In some academic circles, however, an extreme version has taken root that claims to invalidate the entire idea of authorship attribution and denies the existence of authorial style. The extreme version is, however, what Bertrand Russell once referred to as “a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life” (125), and there is ample evidence that it has always attracted more lip-service than real belief (Farrell, Varieties 6–10 and “Why”).

One source of the extreme form of the belief in “the death of the author” is undoubtedly Barthes’ claim:

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.

(6)

Although the rejection of a single essential and unchanging meaning of any text is now, justly, a commonplace, Barthes could not have known in 1967 that the claim that texts are tissues of unoriginal quotations would later become clearly and provably false.

Anyone who doubts my assertion is encouraged to do a web search for a sentence of eight or more words from a favorite novel, enclosed in quotation marks. Such a search almost invariably returns multiple copies of or quotations from the novel, but no hits from anywhere else. Searching similarly for sequences from Barthes’s essay also (ironically) returns only multiple copies of or quotations from the essay itself. Conversely, searching for a sequence of eight or more words from a sentence in this paragraph, again enclosed in quotation marks, will almost certainly return no hits at all. This is true of quite ordinary-seeming sequences like “will almost certainly return no hits at all” and “searching for a sequence of eight or more.” Perhaps Barthes did not mean that the actual wording of any text is not original (though “tissue of quotations” seems to refer to the wording itself), but it is useful to be reminded just how individual each person’s language use is, even when that language is fairly straightforward and unexceptional.

The individuality of authorial style is, simply put, an irreducible fact that no theoretical argument can afford to deny, as Harold Love has persuasively argued in Chapter 1 of Attributing Authorship, his excellent general introduction to authorship and authorship attribution. This individuality is what makes plagiarism detectable and authorship attribution possible, as will be shown in the next chapter. (For a further exploration of the use of giant corpora and the web as sources of evidence for literary arguments, see my “The End of the Irrelevant Text: Electronic Texts, Linguistics, and Literary Theory.” And for a critique of one extreme form of textual relativism, see my “Hot-Air Textuality: Literature after Jerome McGann.”)

The social construction of reality and of the self, another related idea with many important and fruitful consequences, has also sometimes been propounded in an extreme form that suggests that all forms of human knowledge and even reality itself are equally constructed and contingent. It was this extreme form that led one postmodern journal to accept Alan Sokal’s famous hoax argument that gravity is a social construct (see Hoover, “Argument” for discussion). Yet, surely John Guillory is right to point out that

if positivism is a holistic or totalizing ideology that reserves the name of knowledge only for the results of the scientific method (narrowly defined), it does not follow that the critical disciplines must be based on a counter-holism in which everything is interpretation, in which the very possibility of a positive knowledge is called into question.

(Guillory 504)

A strong form of social constructionism has also been taken by some critics as evidence that individual authorial styles cannot exit. The romantic individual subject, from whose genius the literary text flows, it is sometimes claimed, is an illusion because each self is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Modes of Composition and the Durability of Literary Style
• 2 A Proof of Concept: Identifying Differences in Style
• 3 Changing Back and Forth From Handwriting to Dictation: Thomas Hardy, Walter Scott, and Joseph Conrad
• 4 Changing Over From Handwriting to Dictation or Typing: Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner
• 5 Changing Over From Handwriting or Typing to Word Processing: Arthur Clarke, Octavia Butler, Stanley Elkin, and Ian McEwan
• 6 The Durability of Change: Handwriting, Dictation, and Style Evolution in Henry James
• 7 The Durability of Stephen King’s Style
• 8 Why a Change in Mode Is Not Enough: Translation and the Radical Durability of Style
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index