The Event of Style in Literature

M. Aquilina

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137426925
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Event of Style in Literature brings discussions about the question of style up-to-date by schematising the principal issues relating to the topic through a critical overview of the canon of style studies. It reads the work of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Hans-Georg Gadamer as groundbreaking and 'eventful' interventions.

1

Traditional Theories of Style

Style and metaphors of exteriority

When Susan Sontag, in ‘On Style’, claims that ‘talk of style must rely on metaphors [, and] metaphors mislead’, she does not so much suggest that we have to work towards non-metaphorical ways of discussing style – what would presumably amount to styleless discourse – but that already existing metaphors of style, practically all of which ‘amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside’, are misleading.¹

That discussions of style are seldom free from metaphor is difficult to deny. However, rather than a source of perplexity and something against which we should work in developing more objective definitions of style, this reliance on metaphor may be seen as indicative of the non-essentiality of style, its anti-teleocratic non-essence. Taking as a premise Roland Barthes’s claim that ‘style is never anything but metaphor’ (WZ 13), we may follow Laurent Milesi in deducing that ‘if metaphora is always already, in our western heritage, another name for transport and trans(-)lation’, then style ‘leads us astray’. Which begs the question: ‘if style is metaphor and being what withdraws itself from it, how can style “be” something and how can one answer the aporetic question: “What is style?”’²

Applying dichotomous terminology inspired by I. A. Richards, one may say that a body, a face, a mask, a signature, a dress, a soul, the surface or the inside of a container and a part of a living organism are just a few of the metaphoric vehicles employed to discuss style, the tenor of these metaphors.³ Each of these metaphorical formulations reflects but also helps in creating a different understanding of style. The metaphor of the body, for instance, suggests the possibility of the same body twisting and gyrating into different postures. Pointing in a different direction to embodiment, the dress metaphor that recurs in classical treatises on rhetoric depicts style as an external form. A dress appears on but is not part of the body. It can be worn and discarded at will. It can fit well or not at all. It may be too ornate or too plain for the occasion. The signature, on the other hand, allows us to think of authenticity but also of forgery, of individuality but also of imitation. A signature, while identifying an individual through almost identical repetitions, is ultimately external to its owner: it is a product of his handwriting, an externalisation of his being. The list of such examples may be extended at length – and several more metaphors are discussed below – but what invariably emerges is a situation in which trying to retrace the path of the vehicle back to the tenor of the metaphor leads, every time, to a different tenor.

In matters of style, separating tenor and vehicle is difficult because style challenges neat distinctions between concepts and their expression. The continuous disagreements between Classical and Renaissance rhetoricians and logicians about the best ways of classifying different topics and figures under Logic and Rhetoric are early testimony to this.⁴ Trying to determine what style is behind the metaphoric discourse used to discuss it or aiming at an ostensibly direct and clear identification of the concept means forgetting the way style infiltrates all discourse, including that which purports to be styleless. To see the problem in another way, one may say that trying to define style by removing metaphor means, ironically, relegating style to what Rodolphe Gasché calls ‘a status of metaphoric secondariness’ – styled language conceived as being at one remove from styleless, objective language, whatever that may be.⁵ Indeed, within linguistic or literary ‘mimetologism’, style is deemed inessential, ornamental, misleading or simply reflective of an anterior and independent concept or subject matter. Like metaphor, style may be considered supplementary by certain discourses – especially philosophy intent on distinguishing itself from literature – but, as Derrida shows in his reading of Immanuel Kant in ‘The Parergon’ (TP 37–82), distinguishing between the central and the marginal – as in the attempt by Kant to posit philosophy as mastering art – will expose the abyssal structure that implicates the one in the other, thus risking collapsing the distinction altogether.

Metaphoric language, a stylistic staple of discourses on style, reveals the divergent assumptions at the basis of different theories of style. Not only that but it also allows certain conceptions of style to become thinkable in the first place. To use a questionable dichotomy, style in theoretical and philosophical discourses of style is internal even when these discourses may metaphorically present it as an external supplement.

Indeed, style as a form of exteriority is the most frequently recurring trope in theories of style. The dominance of this motif can be traced back to classical rhetoric and treatises on oratory; it runs through two and a half millennia of philosophical tradition, and it has also been at the heart of institutionalised scientific discourse since its rise in the seventeenth century.

One key to understanding the pervasiveness of the metaphor of exteriority is the pre-occupation with ‘propriety’ (‘decorum’ in Latin or ‘τó πρέπον’ in Greek) in classical rhetoric. As Richard A. Lanham argues, ‘no idea was more carefully worked out in rhetorical theory nor more universally acclaimed; everyone writing about rhetoric touches on it in one way or another’.⁶

While an immediately recognisable variant of the word ‘style’ does not exist in Ancient Greek, classicists translate ‘lexis’ (‘λέ ξις’) as style though its meaning is closer to ‘word choice’ or ‘diction’. This term is frequently ascribed the same metaphors used for style by the Latin rhetoricians.⁷ In The Art of Rhetoric, whose section on style has been described as ‘the first systematic study of the nature of prose style in the history of Western literary criticism’,⁸ Aristotle establishes a resilient motif when he writes that choosing a style ‘is like having to ask ourselves what dress will suit an old man’ and that in such circumstances the choice should ‘certainly not [be] the crimson cloak that suits a young man’.⁹ Style, for Aristotle and classical rhetoricians, is an aspect of language regulated by its suitability or otherwise to something external to it and that precedes it. It is like a dress that may or may not be appropriate to the age and sex of its wearer, to the formality and atmosphere of the occasion, to the sensitivities of the others, or to the original intentions of the person. As Aristotle’s words imply – ‘it is not enough to know what we ought to say: we must also say it as we ought’ – within rhetoric, style is a response to external obligations.¹⁰

Aristotle’s echo reverberates in different classical theories, most of which conceive style either in terms of levels or in terms of characteristics or types. From classical antiquity to the middle ages, style is often discussed in terms of a triad of levels: high, middle and low, or of the loosely analogous categories of the Attic, the Asiatic and the Rhodian styles.¹¹ Which of the three, occasionally four, levels is preferable depends on the principle of decorum.¹² Cicero’s scheme is perhaps the most well-known theory of style based on levels in the genera dicendi or the genera scribendi. The three levels he identifies – the grandiloquent, plain and tempered – correspond, respectively, to the rhetorical purposes that the orator may wish to fulfil – to move, to teach and to please.

While the idea of levels is very common in the Roman tradition of rhetoric, alternative accounts in the Greek and Byzantine tradition classify style in terms of characteristics. Hermogenes, in On Types of Style, proposes a very complex system comprising six basic types (Clarity, Grandeur, Beauty, Rapidity, Character and Sincerity) and thirteen subcategories. Within this scheme, however, it is still ‘awesomeness’ (‘δεινóτης’), that is, ‘the utilisation of all the forms in a manner suited to the occasion’, or decorum, which is ascribed the primary role.¹³

What these different categorisations by different rhetoricians share is a teleocratic conception of style. When Cicero, for instance, echoes Aristotle in claiming that a good orator ‘knows to adapt to his pleading the words that have the happiest effect upon the ear’ depending on the circumstances, he encapsulates the traditional meaning of style for rhetoric, that is, a linguistic tool used to affect the audience.¹⁴

We will return to the implications of thinking of style as exteriority in the context of the relationship between style and philosophy, but some key conceptual issues can also be traced within rhetoric itself. If style is external to substance, then style or, more precisely, certain kinds of style, quickly become suspicious and worthy of distrust, if not outright moral condemnation. Quintilian formulates this thought through a bodily image. He compares the use of a ‘variegated style [by] some speakers’ to the depilation of a male body ‘in an effeminate fashion’, which makes it ‘eminently repulsive by the very labour bestowed in beautifying’ it.¹⁵ Style, for Quintilian, must be ‘bold, manly and chaste’.¹⁶ Inappropriate style leads to perversion, an effeminate diversion from masculine truth.

Another classical text proposing a similar argument is Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogues about Oratory), attributed to Tacitus and dated to the first century. In a debate about the best oratorical styles, Messala, one of the interlocutors, clearly expresses his distaste of certain styles through a series of metaphors:

If I must put on one side the highest and most perfect type of eloquence and select a style, I should certainly prefer the vehemence of Caius Gracchus or the sobriety of Lucius Crassus to the curls of Maecenas or the jingles of Gallio: so much better is it for an orator to wear a rough dress than to glitter in many-coloured and meretricious attire. Indeed, neither for an orator or even a man is that style becoming which is adopted by many of the speakers of our age, and which, with its idle redundancy of words, its meaningless periods and licence of expression, imitates the art of the actor.¹⁷

Apart from exemplifying the classical conception of style as the dress of thought (recurrent to the point of having attained what Tzvetan Todorov calls a ‘canonical’ status), this passage is an early instance of the typical strategy of associating style with art for the purpose of defining a different discipline.¹⁸ Messala is here speaking of oratory as a discipline to be distinguished from the unrestrained use of language in the theatre. However, the strategy of positing art or literature as an ‘other’ is also common in philosophy and science.

Messala plots oratorical style metaphorically on a scale of manliness and effeminacy as well as in terms of dresses with different colours and decorations. Too much ornateness is not natural and ‘becoming’ for a ‘man’ but something fit for the art of the theatre. By adopting certain styles, Messala insinuates, orators demean themselves to the level of artists – who, presumably, dwell in style – and, therefore, the less tangibly decorative the style of a speech the better.

Derrida engages the association of style with femininity and the notion of style as the proper or appropriate in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, but he also gestures towards its deconstruction in Glas, where we read, via a quotation from Jean Genet, how ‘Warda’, which means ‘rose’ in Semitic languages, ‘cleans her teeth, all day long, with a hatpin she calls her style. She is the one who does not believe in the truth’ (GL 58b). Style is thus here associated to feminine diversions from the truth through flowers of rhetoric.

For classical rhetoricians, however, these diversions from the truth through certain flourishes of style may not only indicate an undesirable femininity but also a lack of control over one’s speech. Demetrius warns us in On Style (De Elecutione) that to avoid making his speech sound like the ramblings of a drunkard the orator must use a style that is suitable to the subject-matter at hand.¹⁹ To be in control of himself but also of the audience, the orator must use proper style.

Some classical theories also give style the teleocratic function of pleasing through the beauty of language, specifically, through deviation from audience expectations since, as Aristotle puts it, ‘people like what strikes them, and are struck by what is out of the way’. In such instances, style is given a constructive role that differs from the warnings about its overuse. This view on style anticipates in some ways early twentieth century formalist definitions of style in terms of deviation and defamiliarisation. In ‘Style and Its Image’, Barthes remarks how style theory seems to be unable to move away from dichotomous formulations (RL 90–99). Style, he argues, is thought of within binary systems: style as exteriority, as expression, as disguise of content, as the inner or the outside, the male or the female. The dichotomy that is implicit in Aristotle’s call for controlled unfamiliarity in style as an effective rhetorical tool and that is also a recurring concern in Russian Formalism and Contemporary Stylistics is that between norm and deviation.

One consequence of the transition in Formalism from what Peter Steiner describes as the understanding of form as ‘a mere auxiliary mechanism necessary for expressing content, but completely dependent upon it’ to form as that which distinguishes art from non-art is that ‘literariness’ comes to be thought of primarily in terms of deviation.²⁰ Viktor Shklovsky, for instance, argues that art is meant to change the mode of the reader’s perception from practical to artistic by making perception difficult and unfamiliar. From such a perspective, style, as a collection of literary devices, has the teleocratic task of changing extra-aesthetic material into art through defamiliarisation. The more defamiliarising a literary device is the more it contributes to the aesthetic thrill of the reader according to what Steiner calls a ‘law of maximal effort’.²¹ One clear weakness of formalist theories of style is that, as Gerard Genette points out, they ‘can also privilege (even involuntarily) a mannerist aesthetic for which the most remarkable style is one that is the most highly charged with features. The risk is that the most mannerist of stylists thus become the greatest writers’ and the bizarre is equated with beauty.²²

The notion of deviation brings together a range of formalist and stylistic disciplines, and what is understood by the term may vary. It may refer to deviation from norms of language as a whole, norms of literary composition and even norms established within a particular text. The common problem is that determining what constitutes the norm is crucial for these theories but practically impossible. Another problem is temporality. If art is an effect created by formal defamiliarisation, how can literature written at a time when certain devices were new still retain its effect when these devices have become conventional? If literariness or the poetic is simply a matter of stylistic innovation measured as a departure from conventions at work at a particular point in time, the poetic loses its singular force once the innovative is recuperated.

In an attempt to sidestep the problems presented by deviation, several formalist theorists and stylisticians define style in terms of formal perceptibility that arises irrespective of deviation from external norms. In such theories, which follow in the footsteps of Roman Jakobson’s work on the ‘poetic function’ of language as the message’s emphasis on itself, ‘for its own sake’,²³ the focus is not on ‘a departure from a norm’ but on ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Traditional Theories of Style
• 2 Gadamer and Style as Wor(l)d-Making
• 3 Blanchot and the Anarchic Anachrony of Style
• 4 Derrida and Counter-Institutional Style
• 5 Of Stones and Flowers: Non-Teleocratic Readings of Style
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index