Vagrant sympathies: from stylistic analysis to a pedagogy of style

Style, Spring, 2003 by John Tinker

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk.

--Donald E. Westlake

"Tell me, do you remember the first sentence of all?"

"Indeed I do," Anna said. "'So lam with them, in London."'

"With a comma after the 'them'?... The comma is good; that's style .... I should like to have seen it, I must say."

--Elizabeth Bowen

Difficult to define, you know it when you see it. Style identifies the writer. It frames sensibility. It compels the reader's interest, or it doesn't. It jars him or her to sudden recognition, or it doesn't. And the writer's style makes reading either a pleasure or a disagreeable task. Style also, according to several recent studies, is the essential element of language that shapes subjectivity and subcultures. Studies by Clement Hawes and Garrett Stewart analyze the styles of Christopher Smart and Virginia Woolf, and each, drawing on varied methods and sources, argues that the self-conscious stylization of language helps to express identity and group affiliations. This paper investigates the methods and claims of these studies of literary style and asks what these scholars' methods and findings suggest about the teaching of style in the writing classroom.

Writing about style seems to encourage aphorisms. Compte de Buffon famously declared that "Style is the man," and Arthur Schopenhauer that "Style is the physiognomy of the mind." Fredric Jameson writes that "The end of the bourgeois ego.., means the end of style." And in The Importance of being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has Gwendolen say, not specifically about style in language but not excluding it either, that "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing," suggesting that style performs a range of communicative tasks, including expressions of class affiliation and taste. Most importantly, the ironic qualities of the sentence show that style communicates with a nuance that is read only by an insider, and in this sense, that style shapes how one identifies oneself and to what communities one claims belonging.

The degree to which one understands style as essential to subjectivity and subcultures depends in part on how one arranges the several pairs of oppositions that traditionally frame the study of style and on how one applies these oppositions to theories of the subject. Is style added to thought, or is style organic to thought? Is style a matter of following models? Or does style only become visible when a writer deviates from models? Does style consist strictly of linguistic features--of word choice, grammar, and syntax, of sound textures, phonemes, and lexemes? Or is style a matter of narratological or other metalinguistic features, such as the handling of motifs, point of view, and genre conventions? (1)

Among the earliest language theorists, the sophists understood style as the studied choice of rhetorical figures, figures which were classified first by Greek and later by Roman rhetoricians. Aristotle divided rhetorical occasions into the categories of epideictic, forensic, and judicial, a division that Cicero mirrored with his enduring hierarchy of high, middle, and plain style, and both prescribed that the rhetorical subject and occasion, not the speaker's personal characteristics, should determine the choice of rhetorical figures (Lanham, Handlist 78-80, 174-78). Richard Puttenham extended the tripartite division of style into English with his 1589 The Arte of English Poesy, in which he argues that epic and tragedy require the elevated style, the concerns of "mean men, their life and business" the middle style, and satire and pastoral the plain (Lemer 814). To the extent that style reflects the character of the speaker for each of these theorists, it is the rhetorical situation that determines what that c haracter should be. For the sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, and for the rhetorical tradition beyond them, the writer's character is understood as persona or ethos, as a performance crafted in part by stylistic choices. Style is not intrinsic or organic to the speaker himself, but the means by which the speaker makes himself a credible bearer of his message. Put simply, for classical rhetoric and its followers, style is added to content or thought, and stylistic decisions are a matter not of personality but of subject and occasion.

The idea that personality determines style and that style is organic to thought or content has its origins in romanticism, and it is augmented by the emergence of psychoanalysis and its concept of personality, a word which comes to mean the collection of unique qualities that define an individual only in the middle of the nineteenth century, and a concept that subjectivity itself displaces--subjectivity, in simplest terms, being the consciousness of oneself in language. Roland Barthes offers vivid organic metaphors to describe style as intrinsic to thought. In "Style and Its Image," Barthes claims that all is style, that content itself is an illusion. We only style, he writes, not the thing-as-it-really-is. Using the comparative metaphors of an apricot and an onion, Barthes suggests that literary language does not reveal a kernel of truth, but simply layers form on form, enveloping "nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces" (10). Here and in his other studies of style, Barthes distinguishes between li terary language and "the regular god of communication," a distinction common throughout discussions of style until relatively recently. The assumption that style expresses characteristics unique to the writer--the writer's unique sensibility and affiliations--is not necessarily a component of Barthes' conception of style, but most students of style over the past few decades agree that all utterances involve choices that one can call style (Kinneavy 358), and that there is a coincidence between style and personal authenticity. Semiotic theories of subjectivity, for example, define subjectivity itself as a component of discourse, implying that the style of that discourse affects the subject. From the perspective of composition theory, Peter Elbow argues that "real voice" in writing and speaking has "resonance," and that the stylistic choices that produce this real voice produce powerful writing precisely because this voice expresses the writer's sense of self and community belonging (279-373). Allowing his own allusive style to convey a nuanced opinion, Laurence D. Lerner writes that "Style as personality is now a truth universally acknowledged" (815).