Marco legal

Western literary criticism arguably begins with Aristotle’s Poetics in the fourth century bc. In this chapter, however, I concentrate on literary criticism from the early twentieth century to the present day as it estab-lished itself as a respectable subject for study in western universities.

Not coincidentally this is also the period which saw the formation and expansion of stylistics, with literary criticism sometimes virtually indis-tinguishable, though more often each at loggerheads with the other or at least pursuing separate paths in relative ignorance of each other’s activities. Some history will help us understand the formative ideas of the two endeavours and some differences between them.

Relations have certainly not always been easy. Most notoriously in the Fowler–Bateson controversy (R. Fowler1971; extracted most accessibly in Simpson 2004: 148–57), the upstart new kid on the block, stylistics, came to prominence in the still prestigious literary journal Essays in Criticism. Fowler wrote of the ‘unnecessary schism between “language”

and “literature” which has so long marred English studies’ (see Simpson 2004: 149). He also pointed out that ‘there is no single thing “criticism”

any more than there is “linguistics”, although literary people faced with the imagined threat of linguistics, tend to talk as if there is’ (2004: 150).

‘For some reason, “interpretation”. . . and “evaluation” have come to be regarded as the only activities which are worth doing and which are actually done’ (2004: 150). But Fowler argued there is no ‘one objective in studying literature’, and stylistics has much to offer in the service of a more rigorous description of the language of literary texts, which can then inform more convincing overall accounts (2004: 150).

Both stylistics and criticism have moved a long way since the Fowler–Bateson debate. Stylistics for Fowler in the 1960s as well as for Bateson seems to be largely word-level grammatical analysis of text.

Similarly Bateson’s talk of a mysterious ‘full aesthetic response’ – you are or are not ‘born a literary critic’ (see Simpson2004: 151) – would be rejected by most scholars of literature today. At the same time, Fowler’s position that literary uses of language remain, ultimately, uses of lan-guage, or Bateson’s insistence that linguistics describes and criticism

evaluates are still recognisable and respectable positions. And yet both are aware of the paradox with which I began this chapter – ‘To invite the reader to look hard, really hard, at the words on the page is indeed what the modern critical doctrine of close reading amounts to, when it is reduced to its simplest terms’ (according to Bateson; see Simpson 2004: 151). The suggestion is that the purposes or the ends of the looking are different. But again, as with Bate (2002), although ‘style’ is seen by a critic as central to the critical endeavour, a key difference seems to be whether formal training or at least awareness of linguistic findings and methods is a help to such analysis or not, and the alternative to such knowledge and expertise is not spelled out but left frustratingly implicit by the critic – Bateson on this occasion: ‘Stylistic discrimination is the one indispensable prerequisite for the aesthetic appreciation of great literature’ (in Simpson 2004: 153). How does this discrimination work?

How might it be learned or taught? Neither Bateson, nor Bate, gives us any clues, but linguistic training is firmly rejected – ‘Mr Fowler. . . present[s]

the study of language as a necessary concomitant to the study of literature. . . this is simply not true’ (says Bateson, in Simpson2004: 153).

Characteristically the literary scholar sees ideas where the linguist sees language; the critic looks through language as through a window, the stylistician looks at it. ‘One synonym is as good as another’, Bateson proposes in English Poetry and the English Language (Bateson1934, quoted in Lodge 1966: 13). Fowler later comes to insist ‘I’m offering linguistic criticism as an alternative, an improvement on literary criticism’

(1981, also in Carter and Stockwell2008: 51) but by that time the under-standing of ‘linguistic criticism’ was informed by sociolinguistics, dis-course analysis, Ideologiekritik, the Bakhtin circle and more: ‘linguistic criticism – a careful analytic interrogation of the ideological categories, and the roles and institutions, and so on, through which a society constitutes and maintains itself and the self-consciousness of its members’

(R. Fowler1981: in Carter and Stockwell2008: 49). Superficially, Fowler’s later characterisation sounds much like cultural materialism. The weak-ness and conservatism of much Formalist criticism in the 1960s and 1970s led inevitably in literary criticism to the explosion of theory and more reflexivity. In parallel, in linguistics, formalism and obsession with lexis and syntax were overtaken by discourse analysis, sociolinguis-tics, pragmatics and other approaches more overtly concerned with meaning-making in contexts which should be of more interest to the non-linguist reading literature.

Comments of Bateson in the debate with Fowler suggest that he was unaware of sociolinguistics, presumably due to the dominance of the Chomskyan generative paradigm at that time. He and others hostile to stylistics may understandably have had an idea of stylistics as a Jakobsonian exhaustive analysis of Shakespeare sonnets (Jakobson and Jones 1970, a book-length study of a single sonnet!) or of Baudelaire’s

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‘Les Chats’ (Jakobson and Le´vi-Strauss1962). There is little or no interest, in these papers, in readers or readings, or value or cultural significance, which would have alienated literary critics at the time, but which also makes the analyses seem curiously pointless to the modern stylistician too. Such demonstrations of the intricacy of verbal patterning of a text were later shown by Werth (1976) and others through to Carter (2004) to be operating in any stretch of language use. Stylisticians gradu-ally came to the realisation that it was not the mere existence of patterning or parallelism or deviance that mattered as such, but rather what effects it was being used to achieve – the use of cliche´ or allusion, not its uncreative presence, as literary critic Ricks, for example, has always insisted (Ricks 1984, 2002).

Early analyses of literary texts by Halliday (1964) or Sinclair (1966) had deliberately and provocatively stopped short of any overt interpre-tation and evaluation, and were rightly criticised for such ‘naming of parts’. But what even these analyses showed was the value of moving beyond a school-level ‘parts of speech’ type of common-sense analysis of the language as found in literary-critical work to more linguistically informed attention to texts. Fowler was right to insist on this (see also Short1996or Leech1969). Lodge in1966criticised contemporary liter-ary criticism for

a somewhat provincial mistrust of formal grammatical analysis and description from which its own characteristically intuitive and empirical approach could benefit,

but then in turn criticised stylistics for its thin results,

in terms of interpretation and evaluation of individual texts. . . It has not really asked itself the fundamental questions about the nature of literary discourse. . . which are the commonplaces of literary theorizing in England and America. It remains blandly convinced of a success which is not altogether apparent to an outsider. (Lodge1966: 52) Traces of this unaware complacency or even triumphalism are not unknown in some stylistics talk and writing still today. But Lodge and Widdowson, Sinclair or Halliday would all have agreed that ‘no grammat-ical analysis of a poem can give us more than the grammar of the poem’

(Riffaterre1966: 36, quoted by Lodge1966: 30). Literary texts therefore came to be seen as acts of communication needing to be analysed as such – even if an unusual kind of communication, as indicated by ‘deviant’

features such as conversations with the dead or trying to achieve some other unusual perlocutionary end. This was the key idea of discourse stylistics, where context and meaning were brought into the picture as stylistics developed (notably in Carter and Simpson1989).

Jakobson, most obviously in his much cited 1960 polemical ‘Closing Statement’, would have bemused or even annoyed literary scholars by

his insistence on the decontextualised identifiable formal qualities of ‘a verbal work of art’ – notably parallelism and the ‘poetic function’, which he tried to separate from a reader, or the social context in which ‘function’

could come to be. (Compare Attridge’s (1996) critique of Jakobson’s exclu-sion of considerations of the reader). Even here, however, it is worth stressing how valuable notions like parallelism have been to analysts of poetic texts. Great works do often contain stimulating sets of parallel linguistic features, and the explicit recognition and examination of pat-terning can lead a reader on to more significant findings. The very word parallelism is taken from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, much admired by Jakobson for his startling and deviant uses of language just as he was canonised by literary critics through the twentieth century.

The argument is that valued creativity originates in exploiting human propensity to pattern matching to draw readers’ attention and prompt them into thought in verbal as in other forms of art. We remember the key idea of defamiliarisation of Shklovsky and the ‘Russian Formalists’, later to be followed by (say) Mukarˇovsky´’s Prague Circle investigations into the nature of poetic and ordinary language in which Jakobson also personally participated and where the functionalism that formed Halliday was first elaborated, or where a ‘New Critic’ later to be celebrated for his aesthetic subtlety, Rene Wellek, also began to develop his ideas and understanding of literature and the workings of language. Richards spoke with Jakobson at Harvard. New Critics at Yale bred deconstruction in their wake. The imbrications of modern linguistics, stylistics, and literary criticism and theory are more complex than we sometimes remember or perhaps more than some wish to be reminded of. I return to the example of Hopkins to explore such issues later in this chapter.