Riffaterre begins his article with a characteristic invocation of ‘science’:
Subjective impressionism, normative rhetoric and premature aesthetic evaluation have long interfered with the development of stylistics as a science, especially as a science of literary styles.1
He says that what is required is a set of criteria to separate the ‘stylistic’ elements from the ‘neutral’ elements in any given text, so that we may subject the former to linguistic analysis. Style is understood as ‘an emphasis (expressive, affective, or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed by the linguistic structure, without alteration of meaning’.2 (I shall waive at this point the question whether there can be neutral elements in a literary structure, or whether meaning in literature can survive different stylistic emphases unchanged.) Style is the means by which the writer, or in linguistic jargon ‘encoder’, ensures that his ‘message’ is ‘decoded’ in such a way that the reader not only under- stands the information conveyed, but shares the writer’s attitude towards it. In speech, communication is ‘elliptical’: many signals can be ignored by the receiver, who is assisted by context, situation, and predictability. The writer aims to avoid this erratic, elliptical communi- cation by ‘encoding’, at the points he deems important along the writ- ten chain, features that will be inescapable, no matter how perfunctory the reception. And since predictability is what makes elliptical decod- ing sufficient for the reader, ‘inescapable elements will have to be unpredictable’.3
The analyst of style is therefore concerned with ‘the elements which
remaining doubts should have been dispelled by Gordon Messing’s long and mordant review of the volume in Language, XXXVII, 1961, pp. 256–66.
limit freedom of perception in the process of decoding’. (This, of course, runs counter to much literary theorizing of the Empsonian kind.) Riffaterre then makes the important point that the author’s encod-
ing is permanent, but the process of decoding changes as the language
changes in the course of time. ‘[S]tylistics should encompass this sim- ultaneity of permanence and change.’4 (He does not tell us how, and indeed it is difficult to see how it could be encompassed ‘scientifically’. The paradoxical relationship between the formally fixed artefact and the necessarily variable human responses to it is one of the grounds for asserting that literary criticism can never be a science.)
The simplest way of identifying stylistic devices (or ‘SDs’) as defined would be, Riffaterre suggests, to compare the author’s intentions with his realization of them. But he recognizes the intentional fallacy. So he turns to the reader’s response.
Our problem is to transform a fundamentally subjective reaction to style into an objective analytic tool, to find the constant (encoded potentialities) beneath the variety of judgments, in short to transform value judgments into judgments of existence. The way to do it is, I believe, simply to disregard totally the content of the value judgment and to treat the judgment as a signal only.5
Accordingly, he proposes that the style analyst should record the responses of a sample of readers to a literary text, categorizing every linguistic feature commented on by the readers as an SD, whether the readers considered that it represented artistic success or failure. The results of this sample are then consolidated as the Average Reader (AR) criterion for distinguishing stylistic devices.
Acknowledging some of the shortcomings of the AR criterion, Rif- faterre proposes an objective characteristic of SDs which will control the AR experiment, and indicate when the AR has mistaken a neutral element for a stylistic element. This is the concept of deviation in a more sophisticated form: stylistic devices deviate—not from an external linguistic norm (the existence of which is doubtful, in any case)—but from the linguistic norm set up in its immediate context. Thus a Verb-Subject order will be a stylistic device if the context estab- lishes Subject-Verb as the norm, and vice versa. This concept is buttressed
by the notion of ‘convergence’, where several stylistic devices which, taken independently, would be expressive in their own right, together ‘converge into one especially striking emphasis’.6 Riffaterre illustrates this with a good commentary on a sentence from Moby Dick.
It is interesting to trace the logical stages of Riffaterre’s pursuit of a science of literary styles. They may be set out as follows:
(1) Style is the means by which a writer obtains certain effects in communication.
So (2) One way of studying style would be to relate the writer’s intentions to the verbal forms he uses.
But (3) Intentions are not recoverable.
So (4) We study the responses of readers.
But (5) Readers’ responses are distorted by subjective value judgments.
So (6) We consider the readers’ responses as mere indications of the presence of stylistic devices.
But (7) Readers’ responses may be unreliable merely as
indications of the presence of stylistic devices.
So (8) We shall control the evidence of readers’ responses by the structural criteria of deviation from contextual norms.
Then . . .
Then what? The style analyst has his data, a catalogue of all the stylistic devices in a given text,* but he is still confronted with the task of deciding whether (a) any particular SD has worked, and (b) how it has worked in relation to all the other SDs in the text. Is there any objective, ‘scientific’ way of answering such questions? I think not. The basic contradiction in Riffaterre’s argument is that, while he holds that style is the means by which a writer ensures that his ‘message’ is ‘decoded’ according to his intentions, he regards any particular decod- ing as inherently unreliable evidence of stylistic effect. This amounts to saying that style is rarely, if ever, successful.
The assumption behind Riffaterre’s argument, that a ‘scientific’ description of style must precede any discussion of its literary function
* Supposing, that is, that the method is practicable, which seems doubtful.
and value, so far from assisting such discussion, actually impedes it. His method will burden the literary critic with a mass of indiscriminate data without advancing him one inch towards the completion of his critical task. This is not to say that some of the linguistic concepts used by Riffaterre are not useful. His own commentary on the Melville passage gains from the precision of his terminology. But there is no evidence that this commentary was produced by the application of his own laborious method. Rather, it seems as though, like any literary critic, he was struck by the literary interest and value of the sentence and of the whole novel of which it is part, and was moved to analyse the objective means by which this subjective response was evoked. J. WARBURG: APPROPRIATE CHOICE
Jeremy Warburg’s article, ‘Some Aspects of Style’ (The Teaching of English, Studies in Communication 3, ed. Randolph Quirk and A. H. Smith (1959), pp. 47–75), does not employ the specialized terminology of modern linguistics, but it is entirely characteristic of the latter in substi- tuting a theory of efficiency for a theory of value. The theory or theor- ies of value which it rejects, are those of the old-fashioned normative rhetoric (e.g. ‘Fowler’s injunction to “prefer the Saxon word to the Romance”’1). Such ideas are properly exposed as fallacies by Warburg. It is doubtful, however, whether his own concept of style as appropri- ate choice is very helpful to the literary critic. He begins by attacking the notion of ‘treating form and content as though they were separate entities, as though we knew the meaning of an utterance by any other way than by the way it had been said’.2 But his own concept of style seems to demand that we make such suppositions.
Warburg begins by postulating that the province of style is the connotative and not the denotative:
The good use of a language, then, consists in choosing the appropriate
symbolisation of the experience you wish to convey, from among all the possible words and arrangements of words (by saying, for example, dog rather than cat). Good style, it seems to me, consists in
choosing the appropriate symbolisation of the experience you wish to convey, from among a number of words whose meaning-area is roughly,
but only roughly, the same (by saying cat, for example, rather than pussy). That is to say, matters of style are necessarily linguistic matters:
linguistic matters are not necessarily—it is a common but misleading view—matters of styles3
Now, I would argue that, if style is to be a comprehensive term for the activity of the literary artist, then in art (as distinct from life) linguistic matters are necessarily matters of style. Since the imaginative writer does not use language to describe an existing set of circumstances, his ‘denotative’ use of words is of aesthetic significance. It is significant that Mr T. S. Eliot uses the word dog (instead of the wolf of Webster’s original lines) in,
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!4
Turning to Warburg’s criteria for good style, one is bound to ask: who is to measure the appropriateness of the symbolization? The way Warburg expresses himself suggests that the speaker or writer will be in the best position to do so. But this will be of little assistance to the critic. It seems that the critic must identify the experience which the writer is trying to express and then assess the appropriateness of the symbolization. If he looks for this ‘experience’ outside the utter- ance, however, he falls into the intentional fallacy, and Warburg, who quotes Wimsatt extensively, can scarcely mean that. But if the critic has knowledge of the experience only in the text or utterance itself, is he not back where he started, with the ‘style’ he set out to assess?
Warburg would presumably reply—No, because the language of the utterance is not all ‘style’. He would have to argue, I think, that the denotative level of the text conveys to us what the experience ‘is’, and that we recognize varying degrees of appropriateness in the connota- tive symbolization. Some such idea seems to underlie his comment on
Finnegans Wake: ‘in cases of this kind—like Joyce’s, it may be hard—
certainly at first—to make an assessment of the style, to decide whether or not it is conveying the experience it is intended to convey in the most efficient way; simply because we cannot be sure that we have understood the experience’.5 But, as I have just argued, we
cannot assume in poetics that there is a denotative level of language at which meaning is embodied prior to the expressive activity of the writer.
It seems to me that Warburg is circling round a profound paradox at the heart of literary language, without ever quite recognizing it. The paradox— inherent in Cameron’s argument—is that the imaginative writer creates what he describes. It follows from this that every imaginative utterance is an ‘appropriate’ symbolization of the experi- ence it conveys, since there is no possible alternative symbolization of ‘the same’ experience.
The confusion in Warburg’s argument can be traced back to his initial proposition that we know the meaning of an utterance by no other way than by the way it is said. This proposition is true as applied to literary utterances, but not as applied to non-literary utterances. (We may be assisted in understanding an utterance like ‘It’s raining’ by physical evidence of rain.) It is, however, non-literary utterance which Warburg takes as the model for his investigation of style. For it is only in relation to non-literary discourse that we can legitimately think of an experience as existing independently of some more or less appropriate symbolization of it.
Yet it is easy to see how we slip into the habit of thinking about literary discourse in the same way. The words used by the writer are meaningful only in so far as we connect them with the ‘real’ world of experience from which they acquire their meaning. We have all, as readers, experienced the ‘thrill of recognition’. If, in assessing literary texts, we are not assessing the appropriateness of symbolization to experience, what are we assessing?
I think we can only answer that question by saying that we are measuring realization, by which I mean, the art which exploits the resources of language in such a way that words ‘become’ what in non- literary discourse they merely represent. A number of critics have for- mulated this idea in different ways. A. N. Whitehead said that ‘The art of literature, vocal or written, is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates.’6 W. K. Wimsatt uses the analogy of the icon: the devices of literary language ‘present the things which language is otherwise occupied in designating’.7 Winifred Nowottny has put it this way:
The great and amazing peculiarity of poetic language is its power to bridge or seem to bridge the gap between what has meaning but no particularity (that is, ordinary language) and what has particularity but no meaning (that is, the reality language is, ‘about’).8
Since, as Cameron points out, literary discourse has the appearance of description though it is not true description, we naturally tend to think of the writer’s use of language in terms of appropriate choice. But we must recognize the limited scope of this concept. Clearly, the writer’s practice of his art can be described as a process of choosing certain verbal formulations in preference to others. But whereas in non-literary description, choice is limited by what is there to be described, the writer’s choice is strictly speaking, unlimited.* If I wish to describe an actual person, Mr Brown, I might be able to choose between calling him tall or big, dark or swarthy, and this would be stylistic choice in Warburg’s sense. But I could never ‘choose’ between calling him tall or short, dark or fair. If he is a character in a novel, however, I can choose to describe him as tall and fair, or short and dark, or short and fair, or tall and dark. I can also call him Mr Green or Mr Grey or by any other name. I could conceivably call him all these things for a special literary effect: Mr Brown, or Green as he was sometimes called, was short, but tall with
it. His fair-complexioned face was swarthy. As one of his friends remarked, ‘Grey is a difficult man to pin down.’
This freedom of choice makes the writer’s task not less but more difficult than that of ordinary descriptive writing. Everything becomes choice, and nothing determines his choice but his sense of the aesthetic logic and aesthetic possibilities of his literary structure. As Richard M. Ohmann puts it:
The stream of experience is the background against which ‘choice’ is a meaningful concept, in terms of which the phrase ‘way of saying it’
* A linguist might object, here, that it is only in lexis that the writer’s choice is unlimited, since grammar is a system of closed choices (e.g. in respect of number we can only choose between singular and plural). In talking about literary language, however, we are necessarily talking about units of particularized meaning, and hence about combinations of lexis and grammar. One cannot conceive of a literary work that was all grammar and no lexis.
makes sense, though ‘it’ is no longer a variable. Form and content are truly separate if ‘content’ is not bodiless ideas, but the formless world- stuff.9
Thus, when we say that a certain literary description is ‘inappropriate’ we can only mean that it fails to satisfy the expectations aroused by the literary structure of which it is a part. Similarly with choice: our sense of the ‘rightness’ of any particular literary description may be accom- panied by our sense of other, weaker possible or actual descriptions within roughly the same area of reference. But we are not, in this case, discriminating between various descriptions of the ‘same’ thing, but recognizing that the thing offered is more moving, interesting, beauti- ful, etc., than other similar things. In critical reading we often find that a literary description is unsuccessful, and we may express this by saying that the ‘wrong’ choice of words has been made. But we do not feel obliged to say what the ‘right’ choice of words would have been. To do so would involve writing another, different text—it would be an act of creation, not of criticism.
In short, what I am suggesting is that in literary discourse, the writer discovers what he has to say in the process of saying it,* and the reader discovers what is said in responding to the way it is said. In the reading of literature, therefore, the expressive, the cognitive, and the affective are inextricably mingled. The writer expresses what he knows by affecting the reader; the reader knows what is expressed by being receptive to affects. The medium of this process is language. Language—the particular selection and arrangement of words of which a work of literature is composed—is the only objective and fixed datum. The expressive origin of the work, and its affective con- sequences, exist, but the former is irrecoverable, and the latter variable. From this I conclude that, while a literary structure has an objective existence which can be objectively (or ‘scientifically’) described, such a description has little value in literary criticism until it is related to a
* Since writing this I have come across the following remark by Mary McCarthy: ‘I learn what I want to say in the course of saying it. I think this must be true of most fiction- writers,’ ‘Letter to a Translator about The Group’, Encounter XXIII (Nov. 1964), p. 76. This ‘letter’ is an interesting, and rather rare case of detailed analysis of verbal effects carried out by a practising writer on her own work.
process of human communication which is not amenable to objective description. The language of the novel, therefore, will be most satis- factorily and completely studied by the methods, not of linguistics or stylistics (though these disciplines can make valuable contributions), but of literary criticism, which seeks to define the meaning and value of literary artefacts by relating subjective response to objective text, always pursuing exhaustiveness of explication and unanimity of judgment, but conscious that these goals are unattainable.
F. R. LEAVIS AND THE MORAL DIMENSION OF FICTION