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O N
T H E
T H E O R Y
O F
L I T E R A R Y
STYLE
S EY M O U R
CHATMAN
W e
are indebted to W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M onroe Beardsley
for
making precise issues that must be faced in formulating a theory of
style. O pposing the idea of style as mere ornam ent, as a set of rhetorical
devices which remain
after
me aning is extracted, as something that is
superficial,
a
kind
of
scum,
1
they have asserted
its
intrinsic meaning-
fulness. W imsatt has written: That which has for centuries been called
style differs from
the rest of writing only in that it is one plane or level
of the organization of meaning; it would not be happy to call it the
outer cover or the last layer; rather it is the
furthest
elaboration of the
one concept that
is the
center .
2
And
Beardsley: The style
of a
literary
work consists of the recurrent features of its texture of meaning... Style
is detail of meaning or small-scale mean ing ... (or m ore specifically) style
is
detail,
or
texture,
of
secondary meaning plus general purport.
3
I am concerned primarily with the latter definition. To grasp it fully,
we
need
to
examine
its two key
terms. Secondary meaning
is
Beards-
ley's term for the sentence equivalent of word connotation: what a
sentence suggests, rather than states explicitly, what we may infer the
speaker (the a utho r) prob ably believes. From Beardsley's exam ples
it
is to be
assumed that
th e
inferences
are contentual:
they
refer not
to the speaker (author) but to other things, things that he is talking
about.
Our
inference from Mrs. Sm ith
is
prettier than Mrs. Jones
is
that both
are
pretty,
and
from Mrs. Jones
is
uglier than M rs. Sm ith ,
that
both
are
ugly.
On a
scale
of
beauty, M rs. S mith would rank some-
what higher than Mrs. Jones,
but both
would rank very high
is
neutral,
essentially without secondary meaning. General purport is the capacity
to convey information about other characteristics of the speaker , i.e.,
W. K.
Wimsatt,
Jr. he
Prose Style of Sam uel
Johnson
(New Haven, 1963),
p. L
2
Ibid. p. 14.
8
Monroe
Beardsley,
Aesthetics
(New York, 1958), pp. 222-224. All the examples
in the
rest
of
this paragraph
are
taken from Beardsley.
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SEYMOUR CH TM N
information other than that about his
beliefs
( cognitive purport ) or
his feelings
( emotive purport ).
To use Beardsley's examples, a statement like It's growing dark is
essentially cognitive:
it tends to make the hearer think that the speaker
believes that
it's growing dark. A statement like Alas , on the other
hand,
is emotive; it has
virtually
no
cognitive purport, since
all
that
is
conveyed
is that the speaker feels sad. General purport refers to char-
acteristics
of the
speaker which
are
neither cognitive
nor
emotive:
his
nationality,
social
class, religious
affiliation, state,
status,
or
condition.
In a few
features
the
difference
between general purport
and
emotive
purport seems
merely
a question of relative persistence. A m an m ay
be sad for so long that at some point sadness is a fixed part of his char-
acter; then its communicative aspect might be said to contain general
(identifying) purport as well as or instead of emotive purport.
It seems to me essential to recognize
that Style
in Beardsley's
definition is being applied not to a single but to two ra ther different things,
and
that
the
word
plus
is
m isleading. There
is no
deep connexity
between
the two
things,
and not
much more than
historical
accident
joins them together under
the
same term . W hat results
from
small-scale
differences of secondary meaning, meaning
inferred
and pertaining only
to content, is one thing. The product of general purport is distinctly
something else,
and it is
under
the
latter category that
we
think
of
features
relating
to manner to
authorial practice.
If an author's (an
era's, a
genre's,
a school's
4
)
style
in the
sense
in
which
the
term
is
used
in
most literary criticism has any semantic aspect at all, it is that of
general purport,
of identification. It
seems essential
to
keep these no tions
-
content-inferred m eaning and general purpo rt
-
separate,
to
avoid con-
fusion
of
purpose, even
at the
risk
of rejecting
tradition al usage. Indeed,
it m ight
be
useful
not to use style to
refer
to
content-inferred meaning
at
all, except insofar
as it
also signals general purport.
Consider another implication of that plus in Beardsley's definition:
What
is the
relation between
the IM E N S I O N
primary-secondary mean-
ing
on the one
hand
and
cognitive-emotive-general
purport
on the
other?
By
saying
plus
general
purport ,
Beardsley suggests
that
general
purport is not a kind of secondary meaning. Neither, of course, can
it be
primary meaning. What
a man
shows himself
to be
(say,
his age
or sex or provenance) is neither susceptible of the
truth
test (primary
meaning) nor of the
misleadingness test (secondary), hence
is outside
4
Throughout
this
paper, I will use author or speaker to mean not only indi-
viduals but these larger stylistic groupings as well.
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ON THE
THEORY
O F
LITER RY STYLE
15
the confines of meaning in the
sense
the word bears in most
discussion.
Style, in one sense, cannot mean anything: it refers to no
referent,
but to the
speaker himself. Both
cognitive and emotive
meanings,
of
course,
do
have primary
and
secondary dimensions.
For
example,
if
the imperative
Watch out for that truck
is taken
at the
written level, with
no
real-life setting,
it has
only primary
cognitive meaning
and
secondary cognitive implications,
as
follows:
P U R P O R T :
Cognitive
Primary (The speaker believes that you should watch out for the truck).
Secondary (The statement infers that moving trucks
are
sources
of
danger).
T he full setting, complete with anxious intonation contour, fills ou t
the
emotive
purport:
P U R P O R T : C O G N I T I V E E M O T IV E
Primary
÷
(The speaker fears
the
approaching truck
as
a frightening thing).
Secondary ÷ (The speaker infers that moving trucks
are
frightening).
But the
fact
that the
speaker
may
sound like, say,
a
cultured
old
Southern-
er, is not
analyzable
on a
statement-inference
scale;
hence,
GENER L
B u t it might be argued, this goes to o far : small-scale inferred meanings
m ay
play a
role
in style-as-manner.
Consider some observations made
by
Wimsatt
in his
study
of
Johnson's prose style.
One of the
chief
characteristics of
Johnson's
style is a syntax rich in parallelism and anti-
thesis. Wimsatt notes the expressive purpose of such features. By
enumerating objects necessary to a whole meaning a parallelism like
the prince and the princess or they clambered with great fatigue
among crags
and
brambles gives range, scope,
definition to the
context.
5
5
Prose
Style pp. 20 21.
P U R P O R T :
P r imary
Secondary
COGNITIVE
X
X
EMOTIVE
X
X
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16 S E Y M O U R CHATM AN
The first example, the prince and the princess
gives
the
E X A C T
range
and the
second, crags
and
brambles
gives an
I L L U S T R A T I V E
range (one
could equally have chosen boulders, logs
or
anything else that might
have obstructed them). S urely this expressive purpose
is a
kind
of
secondary meaning. Johnson's cognitive purp ort is his belief about
princes
and
princesses (whatever
they m ay be in
this instance)
and
about
the effects of clambering among crags and brambles. But he also com-
municates
exhaustiveness
and range of manner. T he exhaustiveness
or
range, however, must
be
stylistic insofar
as
these traits refer
to the
author,
to his
persona
or
role,
in
Johnso n's case,
the
role
of an
exhaustive
and
weighty moral instructor.
Inferences about exhaustiveness are clearly not the same kinds of
things as inferences about boulders and logs or trucks or the general
level
of
Mrs.
Smith's and
Mrs. Jones' beauty; they
do not refer to the
objects in the
S T A T E M E N T
but to the
S P E A K E R
to his nature, his stance,
his
dem eanour. Inferences about
subject
matter
p r s are not
stylistic,
although inferences about its organization may be,
insofar
as they tell
us something about
th e
speaker.
It is
worthwhile
to
consider aspects
of the
Johnsonian style further.
In comparing Johnson with other users of parallelism, like Addison and
Hazlitt,
Wim satt discovers
that
Jo hnson m ore typically utilizes that
figure
for purposes of E M P H A S I S (virtual redu nda ncy: a deeper search, or a
wider
survey ) than range (showing slightly different aspects of a thing:
offering
its
cool fountain
or
tempting
shade ).
Also Johnson
is
more
inclined to the use of identical
elements
or nearly identical con struction s
of
almost equal length
and
weight . Particularly characteristic
is
the
elaboration of parallels of two or m ore elements , for example: A ccord-
ing to the
inclinations
of
nature,
or the
impressions
of
precept,
the
daring
and the cautious may move in
different
directions without touching upon
rashness
or
cowardice.
6
From
a
theoretical point
of
view, what kinds
of
statem ents are these? In observing that John son
prefers
emphasizing
to ranging parallels, we are making an essentially descriptive statem ent,
a categorization. We discover a relation of syntax and word-choice to
meaning
(i.e.,
Johnson's parallel words
are
more
frequently
virtual
synonyms than semantically different but syntactically aligned items);
and we find a difference in practice among authors which, we suggest,
prov ides a basis for characterizing one of them. This might be called
pure
descriptive
stylistics , and it is to be
noted
that its
statements
are
•
Ibid. p. 31.
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ON TH TH ORY OF LITERARY STYL 7
made without any reference to purport at all. Of course, we may go on
to stylistic inferences about the author's stance or
role.
In Johnson's
case
following
Wimsatt, we may
infer
a ponderousness
7
in the accu-
mulation of emphasis by parallelism. Insofar as we can relieve this term
of a burden of valuative overtones, we can see the
trait
as an element
in th weighty, erudite, judicious tone which Johnson is shown to com-
municate by other means as well, for example, by a highly characteristic
diction Latinate, philosophical , heavily suggestive of science and
technology
but also general, abstract and non-sensory.
Lexical
style may be analyzed in the same way. Wimsatt cites
shut
the
door vs. Pope's The wooden guardian of our privacy quick on its axle
turn . Insofar as we focus upon how the elegance of the latter - an
artifact of metaphor, inverted word order, etc. - points to a correspond-
ing elegance in the speaker we feel comfortably within the realm of style.
Insofar as we
focus
on differences in the
real word between door
and
wooden guardian
of our
privacy we are using style in its
other,
beclouding
sense. The contentual differences between these phrases are of course
cognitive
- a door may be viewed under its privacy-protection aspect
or under its inhibitory aspect
( shut
the gate to my
cage )
or under its
commercial aspect ( that excellent product
of the
lumber industry
and
the carpenter's skill ) or under hundreds of other aspects. But what
makes
a
statement about
a
door stylistic
in the
sense that usually interests
literary critics is its
identificatory
power, and
that
is clearly in a different
universe
of discourse, that of authors with styles.
It is
clear then
that
we
cannot
go
directly
from
style-as-small-scale-
inference
to
style-as-general-purport.
Beardsley tacitly admits as much
himself: ... with these fragmentary examples [e.g.,
Go
home vs. eturn
to your abode]
we are not
able
to
explore
the
richness
of
larger stylistic
differences;
between Bertrand Russell and William Faulkner, Sir Thomas
Browne and George Santayana, or Karl Marx and Carlyle. But the
essential points can perhaps be made even with scale models. Where
there
is
either
no difference of
meaning
at all or
else
a
gross
difference
we
do not say there is a
difference
in
style;
where the
difference
in mean-
ing is
relatively subtle
and is
present along with some basic similarity
on the primary level, we call the difference in meaning a
difference
in
style.
8
The trouble is that in no meaningful sense of the phrase
that
one
can
think
of is it
possible
to say
that
the
difference between
Go
7
Ibid.
p. 35.
8
Beardsley, p. 224. See also Style in Language ed. T. Sebeok (New York, 1960),
p. 422.
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SEYMOUR
CH TM N
home and Return to your abode is a S C L E M O D E L of the differences
between the styles of Bertrand Russell and W illiam Fau lkner. Surely
between these
tw o
authors there
is
also
so
gross
a
difference
of
m eaning,
primary as well as secondary, that if we strictly followed Beardsley's
advice, we could not say that they differ in style because they
differ
too
radically
in
content.
But that
goes against common sense
and the
prac-
tical achievement of style criticism. It is not
difficult
at all to abstract
something of the way from the what of these authors, to discuss
features of Faulkner's technique completely separate
from
haystacks
and decomposing mansions, and to compare them with features ab-
stracted from Russell's discussions of values, political insights, or the
like. W hen Conrad Aiken com ments on that strangely fluid an d slippery
and heavily mannered
prose ,
in which it seems as if Faulkner in a sort
of hurried despair had decided to try to tell us absolutely everything,
every
last
origin
or
source
or
quality
or
qualification,
and
every possible
future
or
permutation
as
well,
in one
terrifically concentrated effort:
each sentence
to be, as it
were,
a
microcosm ,
we
understand perfectly
well
what he means; we share an insight into Faulkner's manner which
clearly
contrasts with Russell's manner.
For style to be maximally useful as a critical term, it ought to be
limited even furth er, to refer to a literary man ner w hich is homogeneous
and recognizable. The stylists are those whose m ann ers have a sufficient
persistence
of
quality,
a
charac terizing density such
that no
m atter where
one cuts the discourse he is likely to get something which is character-
istically
it
W e are m ost interested in stud ying styles which are so unique
and characterizing that knowledgeable readers, for example, can open
books
at
random
and
expect
to
m ake correct
or
reasonable identifications
in short order, or can recognize P S T IC H E S easily. Style in this most
restrictive
but
critically most
useful
sense
is a
characteristic
and
unified
exploitation
of
general purp ort. W hether
the
author's exploitation
is
conscious or not is beside th e point, and concern with the matter is one
m ore kind o f intentional fallacy. The true stylists have eliminated ran-
domness
in
general purport; they display
a fine
unity which points
directly
and
unmistakably
to
themselves
as
separate entities
in the
universe of authors.
Furthermore, it is relative homogenity and persistence that distin-
guishes style from other expressive effects, like those with emotive pur-
port. The
point
is
worth
an
extended illustration. Consider
the
style
of
a character, for
example, Achilles. Here
is Pope's
translation
of
lines spoken by Achilles in Book I of The Iliad:
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ON THE
THEORY
OF
LITERARY STYLE
9
Insatiate king (Achilles thus replies),
Fond of the power, but
fonder
of the prize
Would'st thou the Greeks their
lawful
prey should yield,
The due reward of many a well-fought field?
The spoils of cities razed and warriors slain,
W e share with justice, as with toil we
gain;
But to resume whate'er thy avarice craves
(That trick
of
tyrants)
may be
borne
by
slaves.
Yet if our chief fo r plunder only fight,
The spoils of
Ilion
shall thy loss requite,
Whene'er, by Jove's decree, our conquering powers
Shall humble to the dust her lofty towers.
9
Pope, decidedly more than his predecessors, Chapman and Dryden,
"improves the keenness" of the cutting edge of Achilles'
tone,
while
adding a note of graceful eloquence. He dispenses with the honorifics
of
the
original address; êõäéóôå
¢ôñåéäç,
translated
by
Chapman
"King
of us
all"
and by
Dryden
"O first in
power",
is
interpreted
by
Pope as "Insatiate king". Pope adds epithets of legality, to sharpen the
indignation:
Would'st thou the Greeks their lawful prey should yield,
The du e
reward
of
many
a
well-fought
field?
(Chapman:
"Why should the
great-souFd Greeks/
Supply thy lost prize
out of
theirs?"
And
Dryden:
"Wouldst thou
the
Grecian
chiefs,
though largely
souled,
Should
give
the
prizes they
had
gained before,
And
with their loss
thy
sacrilege restore? *)
What in the original is simply "divided" or "split"
(äÝäåóôáé),
trans-
lated
by
Chapman
as "shared", and by as
Dryden
"got... by
dividend
of
lot", becomes in Pope a
matter
of justice,
sanctified
as is the labor
of the hand:
The
spoils
of
cities razed
and
warriors slain
W e share with justice, as with toil we gain.
Unlike
Dryden's
Achilles,
who refers back to
Agamemnon's demand
9
From
The
I l iad
o f
Homer
translated
by
Alexander
Pope
(Chicago,
n.d.).
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SEYMOUR
CH TM N
with the simple relative which ( which to resum e, were both
unjust
and
base ), Pope's
Achilles comments
on
that
demand
in
distasteful
terms, in a nasty
aside:
But to resume whate'er thy
avarice craves
(That
trick of tyrants) may be borne by slaves.
Pope's Achilles' implication is stronger than Dryden's or Chapman's:
Slaves can truckle under if they want, but I'm certainly not going to .
And the extreme sarcasm continues in the final lines. Like Dryden's,
Pope's Achilles' does not deign to make the direct request; it is only
by
implication
that
Agam emn on should understand that his prize
must
be
given
up. But he is too
elegant
to
indulge
in a
blunt proposition
like Dryden 's But this we can . Obliquely, insultingly, rather, in a
sneering //'-clause:
Yet if our chief for plunder only fight,
The
spoils
of Ilion
shall
thy
loss requite.
If that's the sort of soldier-hero y u are.... How ironic the possessive
our rings in the context. Pope's Achilles' emotive pu rpo rt is angry
and hostile, more extreme perhaps than
in any
other English version;
it is achieved by w ords like insatiate ,
avarice , craves ,
and tyrant .
It is
also
one of
righteous indignation,
a
righteousness conveyed
by
legalistic diction: due , lawful , justice . Achilles' gen eral pu rpor t,
his
style, a product of sophisticated word choice and balanced syntax
an d neatness of construction , is one of elegance an d luxurious command;
these
are
traits which characterize
him his way of
speaking,
not his
sub-
ject
matter. Assum ing stylistic un iformity (and how can we suspect Pope
of anything else?),
one
could open Pope's version
at
random
and
expect
to find his
Achilles continuing
to
sound elegant
and
masterful, despite
his m ood, his emotive purport of the m om ent.
But now we must face the fact that we are going to run into
difficulty
even
with our modestly pruned semantic definition. In looking through
the
critical literature
we
feel some pressure
to be
able
to use
style
as a
cover term
for
ALL idiosyncratic differences, even those whose semantic
implication, in general purp ort, is tenuous or non -existent. There are
characteristic differences - differences in metrical practice or narrative
design, for example, important
traditional
S TY L I S T I C
- which do not
seem to
mean
in any normal sense of the word at all, cognitively,
emotively
or
generally.
A
rigorous application
of the
Semantic Theory
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ON
THE
THEORY
OF LITER RY STYLE 2
of
Style
would exclude them
from
discussion
and to
that extent
seems
needlessly restrictive. W e can
save
it,
perhaps,
by
broadening general
purport
to
include any feature which seems
to
distinguish
th e
speaker
(author) from th e multitude of other language users, whether or not it
can be described by epithet or not.
Wimsatt
himself
has
w ithdrawn somewhat from
an
extreme identifica-
tion
of style and
meaning.
In an
essay
entitled Verbal Style (1950), he
wrote as
follows:
A study of verbal style (if there is such a thing as verbal style in any peculiar
sense) ought
to cut in
between
a
Platonic
or
Crocean monism, where meaning
either as inspired dialectic or as intuition-expression is simply and severely
one meaning, and the various forms of practical
affective
rhetoric, Aristotelian
or modern, where stylistic meaning bears to substantial meaning a relation
of how to what or of means to end. The term verbal style if it is to have any
clear use, must
be
supposed
to refer to
some verbal quality which
is
somehow
structurally united
to or
fused with what
is
being said
by
words,
but is
also
somehow to be distinguished from
what
is being said. A study of verbal style,
though it ought to deal only with meaning, ought to distinguish at least two
interrelated levels
of
meaning,
a
substantial level
and
another more like
a
shadow or echo or gesture.
10
This revived interest
in
style
as the
W A Y
as
much
as the
W H A T
is
echoed
by a later stylistician, Richard Ohmann,
11
w ho combines a modified
semantic definition of
style
with one popular among linguistically
orien ted stylists,
12
namely, the conception of style as C H O IC E . An author's
style in this view is the idiosyncratic selection o f features he makes from
the language's reservoir
O V E R
AN D
A B O V E
the
features
required by the
structure of the language itself.
A writer s
style,
in
this
view, may be
said
to be his particular
recur-
rences, his favorite patterns of choice, or as Jakobson puts it, his sub-
code . Consider the instance of
Johnson s style quoted
by
Beardslcy:
As this practice is a commodious subject of raillery to the gay, and of declama-
1 0
Verbal Style ,
The
Verbal
Icon Studies in the Meaning of
Poetry (New York,
1958), 201-202. But see remarks in Style in Language pp. 420-421, where the earlier
position
seems
reaffirmed.11
Richard Ohmann, Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose
Style ,
English Institute
Essays 1958: Style in Prose Fiction (New
York,
1959).
12
M.
Riffaterre, Criteria
for Style
Analysis , Word
XV (1959), 154-174; M.
Riffa-
terre,
Stylistic Context , Word XVI
(1960), 207-218; Stephen
Ullmann, Style
in
the French
Novel (Cambridge,
1957);
B. Bloch,
Linguistic
Structure and Linguistic
Analysis , Report
of the
Fourth Annual Round Table
Meeting on Linguistics and Lan-
guage
Teaching
(Washington, 1953), p. 42; Charles Osgood, Some Effects of Moti-
vation on Style of Encoding , in Style in Language p.
293;
Rulon Wells, Nominal
and Verbal Style , Style in
Language
p. 215.
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SEYMOUR
CH TM N
tion to the serious, it has been ridiculed with
afl
the pleasantry of wit, and
exaggerated with all the amplifications of rhetoric
18
The grammatical features were predetermined. Johnson had no freedom,
for example, to choose verb number once he had elected to use practice
as
subject:
the
singular form
is not are, had to be
used. Similarly,
this
and not these was predetermined. Having elected to speak in the passive
voice,
he
could
do no
other than
use the
appropriate inflections
by the
standard English
rules: be
plus the past participle. The use of the sub-
stantivized adjective gay required the pre-position of the definite
article. And so forth.
What then was Johnson stylistically free to do? In
part,
to introduce
ADDIT IONAL C O N S T R I N T S
upon
the
syntax.
He
elected
to
repeat
the
pattern of nouns and prepositions: (N^
0/N
2
to
N
3
( subject of raillery
to the
gay )
is
repeated
as
(N
x
) of N
4
to N
5
( of declamation
to the
serious ). Similarly, he elected to repeat much in the third clause, both
words and forms: it has been V (past participle), with all the N
x
of N
2
and V (past participle)
2
with all the N
3
of N
4
. Furthermore, he picked
diction whose sense contrast enforced
the
antithesis
( raillery vs.
declamation ,
gay vs serious ) or parallelism ( ridiculed and
exaggerated , pleasantry of wit , and amplification of rhetoric ).
These may be called stylistic rather than grammatical precisely because
their choice was within the author's control. And in balancing and op-
posing, these choices help to convey an air of judiciousness, of having
considered things f rom both
sides .
This
is
their general purport,
the
guise
in which they portray their author. Johnson was free to choose
in
other dimensions
as
well.
He
used
a
vocabulary
of a
certain kind,
a
kind which
has
been called either weighty
and philosophic or
pedantic
and obscure according to the degree of one's admiration
for his writing. In this passage he picked
commodious
instead of con-
venient or
easy, amplification instead
of addition or
expansion. Elsewhere
in his
writing
he
used words like
proemial, momentaneous,
interstitial
rather than their simpler synonyms.
Johnson's
principles
of
word-choice
have
been elucidated by Mr. Wimsatt,
14
who demonstrates how much
this kind of vocabulary contributed to the generalized, abstract, philo-
sophical tone of Johnson's learned moral discourse.
A radically
different
kind of prose is that of Sir Thomas Browne, who
has
been placed
in the
tradition
of the
curt
or
coupe style.
15
Browne's
18
From
The Ram bler,
no. 2.
14
See Chapter III, Diction , The Prose
Style
of
Samuel
Johnson, and Philosophic
Words (New Haven, 1946).
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ON THE THEORY OF LITERARY STYLE 3
characteristic
choices
were
clearly of a different o rder. Con sider this
passage:
The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that
I cast
mine
eye on: for the other, I use it but like my
globe,
and turn it
round
sometimes for my
recreation.
Here there was no desire to choose syntactic and lexical elements which
paralleled
or
balanced each other.
On the
contrary, choices were made
which
seem purposely asymmetrical.
The
clauses
are of
dramatically
different
lengths (seven, fourteen, an d eighteen words respectively). The
first
is
a
copula-predication with
the
emphasis
in the
subject
and a
simple,
curt predicate nominative.
The
second
has a
brief, dummy subject,
the
real subject I appearing a s a predicate nomin ative. Brow ne could just
as easily have said:
The
microcosm
of my own frame is
what
I
cast mine
eye on.
But he
seems expressly
to
have avoided
the
parallelism.
W e are
almost
tricked
by the
it beginning
the
second clause into
an
assumption
of
parallelism;
it
requires
a
slight shock
of
reorientation
to
recognize that
it refers not to the w orld , as w e might have expected, but to the
microcosm of my own
frame .
The
third clause, again,
is
asymmetrical,
avoiding a parallelism with either the first or second. The subject now,
for the first time is I . The clause has a compound predicate. An d
it is n ot the microcosm of my ow n fram e but rather the w orld
again. Furthermore,
the
order
of
statements differs.
The first is
literal,
the second semi-metaphoric, the third
fully
metaphoric.
Thus, Browne
n ot
only does
not use
parallels;
it
seems that
he has
gone
out of his w ay
to
avoid them.
The effect,
according
to Croll, is
something like this:
The
first
member
is a ...
self-contained
an d
complete statement
of the
whole idea of the period. It exhausts the mere fact of the idea; log-
ically there is n othin g more to say . Follow ing members take up care-
fully, almost lovingly, ramifications
of the
original assertion,
as a new
apprehension or new facet of its general truth. It is like a turning jewel
emitting identical flashes which are none the less precious for their
redundancy.
The general purport achieved by this style is quite different from that
of
the
Johnsonian style.
The
brief
but
emphatic completeness
of the
outset conveys a sense of brilliance and impact of assertion. The facet-
15
See
Morris Croll, The
Baroque
Style
in Prose , Studies n nglish
Philology
(Minneapolis, 1929),
upon which these remarks
are
largely based.
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SEYMOUR CH TM N
like addenda do not function as balancing or rounding-out elements,
as in
Johnson's prose. They follow like marvelling attendants up on
their daring leader,
or
like musical variations upon
a
theme,
amplifying
and enriching the original experience, but in no way
O M P L E T IN G
it in
the logical sense, for it is already com plete. The author is pu rported
to be a highly original, intuitive creator, an artist in insight, asserting
and
then elaborating, adorning, making denser
and
more impressive,
but not in the way of
generalization
or
abstract classification,
a man
of
sudden mental leaps, convinced perhaps
by the
fervency
of his own
imagination and considering in the m om ents between creative break-
throughs what
it is that he has
really said. Qu ite another
mask from
Johnson's. Bu t it is not
enough
to say
that
any
definition
in
which style,
in
some Platonic unity,
is
taken
to be
coterminous with content cannot
provide
a firm
theoretical base
for the
total range
of
practical style
analysis as it has been carried on for generations, because one can easily
abstract the way
from
the what, as
Aiken
does in his comments on
Faulkner.
It is
also
the
case
that
there
are
many features with little
or
no
semantic implication
at
all, features which cannot
be
used
as a
basis
for characterizing epithets like weighty ,
agile ,
etc. Yet they clearly
serve to
identify authors
and
consequently m ust
be
thought
of as
having
a stylistic dimension. The characteristic phonological choices of two
different poets, for instance, their typical and
typifying
sound combi-
nations, their metrical preferences clearly may
differ
in the same way
that
Go
home differs
slightly from
Return
to
your
abode .
There
is
nothing conveyed
by G. M.
Hopkins' sprung rhythm
or
Wilfred
Owen's elaborate sou nd echoing to correspond to the general purp ortive
difference
between Johnson's judiciousness and Browne's imaginative
fervency . W hat critical epithet, for instance, can we apply to a fondness
for blank verse? Nor at the opposite pole of stylistic m agn itude, the area
of
broad design
of
discourse,
do
meanings clearly emerge.
The
epis-
tolary
style of
Richardson,
the
Greek chorus
of
Virginia
Woolf's The
Waves the young-man
stream-of-consciousness
of the first section
of Joyce's Ulysses
these do not
mean
in any normal sense of the
word. If, to save the semantic definition of style, they may be said to
have general
purport ,
then
the
general purport
is little
more than
that
Richardson, Woolf, and Joyce in their artistic wisdom, elected to use
them.
But be
that
as it
may,
as different
solutions
to a
standard artistic
problem they clearly
serve to
distinguish their creators'
art and so
deserve
to be
recognized
as
aspects
of
their
styles.
The Aristotelian definition tends ultimately to be more useful than the
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THE
THEORY
OF
LITERARY STYLE
5
Platonic
for practical style description. In Craig La
Driere's
terms,
Style is a
given
way, or manner, or fashion, of doing anything, of going
through
any
process;
the
concept
of
style cannot
in
practice
be
disso-
ciated from that of some
process.
16
The processes of literary com-
position
are by no
means solely
linguistic in the strict
sense.
A
rigorously semantic
definition of
style
can accomodate
only those
style choices with clear semantic implication, primarily features of syntax
and diction. It cannot work for other features traditionally thought of
as stylistic. Shall we throw the latter out? Or rename them, and if so
what?
The
generic notion
of
style includes
the
semantic
- the
semantic
cannot include the generic. The virtue of terminology is precisely its
assignability.
Let us
assign
style to an
author's characteristic way,
manner, fashion of writing and say that these
differen es
in manner may
entail
differen es in
meaning which
we can
label with convenient epithets
but that they need not and, in respect to some
features,
cannot.
University of California erkeley
16
Form , in J.
Shipley, Dictionary
of World
Literature
(Paterson,
1960).
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