on the theory of literary style

8/19/2019 On the Theory of Literary Style

1/13

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).

Unauthenticated



11/13

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.

Unauthenticated



12/13

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

Unauthenticated



13/13

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).

Unauthenticated

on the theory of literary style

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