Language and Style

E. L. Epstein

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781032297194
• eBook ISBN: 9781136491795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We are living in a time of rapid radical social change. In New Accents each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change, to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study. This book offers a new focus on various connected topics in the treatment of style as a human phenomenon, and especially the style of literary artefacts. The subject of style is of intense and continuing interest, and the bibliography in the field of literary style alone is enormous. The essays that follow are therefore an attempt to contribute to the literature of a continuing study.

1

STYLE AS PERCEPTIVE STRATEGY

STYLE is the regard that what pays to how.

To human beings the world is full of orders – breathe! drink water! eat food! work! From these iron commands there is no appeal. Yet the amount of freedom outside these commands seems to be immense. Each one of the billions of humans on the earth is distinguishable from the others. Each has a different way of obeying life's commands, a distinctive how in respect of the what that life consists of, that marks him or her as an individual to fellow humans and to himself or herself.

The how of human behaviour, the style, is felt at many levels, from the primitive distinguishing of yourself from everybody – and everything – else, to the identifying of groups of friends and foes, and of men and women (gender itself, a fundamental case of how, might be said to be a matter of style). It is perceived in the style of arts and games (the stylish tennis player, the stylish violinist), in fashions (Style with a capital S), and in literature. The basic act of making sense out of the what which nature presents to our senses necessarily involves the how of style. If style is the man, it is also the world he first constructs and then inhabits.

In this book there will be description only of style in language – a broad area with subtle ramifications – but there is no reason why this method of description cannot be extended to other fields.

I

Style exists on many levels. It distinguishes many degrees of difference.

Early in Huxley's Point Counter Point,¹ Lord Edward Tantamount, an experimental biologist, is transplanting the organs of newts in his home laboratory and talking to his assistant, Illidge, about the principles of developmental biology. Downstairs in Lady Edward's party, a chamber orchestra is playing Bach's B minor Suite.

Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.

Lord Edward begins to talk about the unlikelihood of growth to a definite shape in living creatures:

‘Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it.’

Illidge begins to comment, but Lord Edward's attention is caught by something else.

But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant. He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side. He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something. He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened. A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.

‘Bach?’ said Lord Edward in a whisper.

Pongileoni's blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on it to vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward's apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward's membrana tympani, the interlocked malleus, incus, and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered ‘Bach !’ He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up.

Lord Edward is beginning to make sense out of a non-laboratory world. As the result of ‘a vast number of obscure miracles’, he assigns the name of a dead human being to a complex acoustic phenomenon. Human beings, if they are not deaf, live all their lives receiving up to ten thousand bits of information every second through their ears, of which they notice little, and remember less. Although Lord Edward at first did not know that he was hearing the music of Bach, he eventually recognized that he was listening to a type of noise called music, and music once created by an individual whom he can name.

Lord Edward was recognizing style, in one form or another. He may have recognized a fragment of music he had heard before, in which case, if we are not to take refuge in a simple-minded behaviourism, the identification of ‘Bach’ was in fact a stylistic reidentification. A more interesting possibility is that he assigned the name of Bach to a melody he had not heard before, in which case it was a primary act of stylistic judgement. In either case, the phenomenon of stylistic identification had taken place, either in the past or in the present. To understand how this happens we must look at the sort of creatures we are.

All of the senses ceaselessly receive information. A million bits of information enter the eye every second; the skin, the nasal passages, the mouth, the musculature, the semicircular canals of the ear, all of these constantly experience an unremitting barrage of signals. Even silence is not silent; the collision of molecules of air can occasionally be heard as a shrill hiss. Every time your nerves ‘change’, you have received ‘information’. The condition of the sensory receptors alters rapidly and constantly in the face of this flow, but not even in the eye, the most receptive and responsive of the sensors, can all the stimuli be consciously registered. We ignore vast amounts of information. We notice, or ‘apper-ceive’, about ten to twenty bits of information per second out of thousands of millions. A concert pianist, working at top capacity, can notice up to twenty-two bits of visual information per second. However, even this reduced flow is not retained; most people can only retain in their long-term memory the equivalent of two to six bits per second.² This adds up to an enormous number of recollections of aural stimuli in a lifetime.

Now, by some mysterious mechanism, Lord Edward had selected from the gigantic number of aural stimuli present in his life a certain set which he can call Bach, and by which he can organize a mass of degenerate and fragmentary data. His feat (one which we all perform every day of our lives) is possible because of the phenomenon of style.

II

Style derives from two fundamental notions that have been loosely characterized above as what and how: the notions, to be slightly more sophisticated, of some sort of ‘base’, and of some sort of variation from that base. Both ‘stylish’ and ‘non-stylish’ tennis players engage in the sport of tennis in a recognizable form (the what or ‘base’). They do not, for example, play with a violin for a racket, or insist that let-balls count for scores. If they did so, they would not be playing tennis. Thus, both ‘stylish’ and ‘unstylish^‘ tennis players play the same game according to the same rules. But although an ‘unstylish’ player may win a great many games, a ‘stylish’ player also wins admiration and attention at another level. It would seem therefore that the ‘stylish’ player, in addition to engaging in the minimum ‘base’ activity of playing tennis, is also perceived as doing something else. It is as if, once the minimum base activity is accomplished, there operates beyond it a set of variations in which the ‘stylish’ player engages, and which bears additional information to the spectator.

This ‘stylistic’ activity is often taken to be an expression of the personality of the individual performer. Yet whole teams can have style. The root notion of style, therefore, need not essentially involve individual expression itself, so much as an abstract quality of interpretation, a double perception on the part of the observer. The observer perceives an identificative element which establishes the nature of the activity; at the same time he also perceives the stylistic element, the one which distinguishes the way in which the activity is performed. This last may convey an impression of personality. Style as a process of interpretation underlies surface distinctions such as content and ornament. As has been suggested above, it is more abstract, a sort of Gestalt schema by which the memory records and indexes its information in terms of what and how.

So, a man playing tennis ‘stylishly’ could be perceived in two dimensions:

Identificative dimension (what) playing tennis

Stylish dimension (how) showing characteristic manner of playing tennis

It is possible to probe behind this notion to a more primitive sort of perception: the act of tennis itself can be a ‘stylish’ act, if the identification is of a more general activity:

Identificative dimension human motion

Stylish dimension playing tennis

Here the ‘non-significant variation’ is of the act of human motion; ‘playing tennis’ is not enough of a variant of human motion to become something other than human motion – it is a type of human motion, with governing tenets of its own which are not in conflict with those of human motion.

One may apply this schema even further back, to the most primitive level:

Identificative dimension raw sensory information

Stylish dimension human motion

Of the myriad impressions received by the senses, some may be combined into an impression of human motion, as opposed to others which provide information about other sorts of phenomena, or are ignored.

It is at this point that we begin to see by what process Lord Edward could begin to notice Bach. Among the ‘vast number of obscure miracles’ in his brain, a schema of mental organization proceeds hierarchically; it moves from impinging information to reactive information, to apperceived information, to identification as noise, then noise as noise of a certain subtype, then as the creation of one of the creators of music, then as the work of Bach. Schematically, each ‘style’ acts as the identificative dimension of the succeeding level:

(a) Identificative dimension acoustic disturbance of the air and the structure of the ear	Stylistic dimension partial apperceptions from total information
(b) Identificative dimension partial apperceptions from total information	Stylistic dimension apperception of part of received information, as music
(‘They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.’)	(‘He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something.’)
(c) Identificative dimension apperception of part of received information, as music (‘A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.’)	Stylistic dimension recognition as product of specific creator (‘Bach?’… ‘Bach!’)

The terminal point of this schematic application seems to be where the style perceived is that of an individual, in this case Bach. Even here perhaps we may apply the schema once more:

(d) Identificative dimension Bach as Baroque composer

Stylistic dimension Bach as individual

In this final schema we see Bach, a Baroque composer, being a Baroque composer in his own way, Bach's way. Many Baroque composers are never perceived this way – they are the voice of their age and not their own voice. The miracle of personal presence seems to be reserved for the genius and the eccentrics, an overlapping class.

III

The end of the schematic application is the recognition of a human being, an Other, one outside your own perception of the universe. Indeed, perhaps the existential view carries this notion one step further back: in perceiving the irredeemably Other, we perceive Existence itself, an existence distinct fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Style as Perceptive Strategy
• 2 Types of Linguistic Criticism
• 3 Playing the Literature Game: A Public and Collective Norm
• 4 The Private Game: Portraits of the Artist
• 5 Concluding Comments
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Index