THE ‘individuality’ of individual persons is something we all recognize. We can recognize our friends, and distinguish them from ‘just anybody’. Perhaps we can even recognize ourselves. By the operation of the schema of style outlined above, we can first distinguish objective phenomena, recorded as sensory data, and identify them as distinctively human ways of behaving. This is already a stylistic distinction. We can then proceed to a further step, the particular ‘way of being human’ characteristic of our old friend Charlie, for instance, and no one else. Charlie is distinguished from just anybody by perceived stylistic differences. The bundle of phenomena we call Charlie differs from any other identified bundle, if only in terms of space and time: no other person can occupy the same space at the same time as someone else; so even if almost all the sensory signals were the same for two individuals, they would still be distinguished stylistically as two (and not one) by position in space and time.
This subject is filled with paradoxes and difficulties, and in this part of the book, the particular stylistic distinctiveness of the individual will be treated in general and tentative terms.
Many more questions will be asked than answered. We will concentrate on the stylistic distinctiveness of literary artists, as exemplified by their use of language.
The uses of language in the public games already described are not characteristic, as such, of the poets employing them, but rather seem to be evoked by the specific occasions of the poems in which they are employed. The ability of the poet to rise to the occasion is not an individualizing trait of the artist but a general ability of the poet as craftsman in the public literature game. When Pope makes the reader hesitate in performing the Ajax lines from An Essay on Criticism, when Hopkins and Yeats cause a subjective rise in spirits in the reader by programming a buccal lift, and when Donne performs the opposite feat in ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’, these effects characterize the public skill of accomplished artists; they are not distinguishing signs of the style of these writers as individuals. We must look elsewhere for the portrait of the artist, and the effect of the stamp of specific individuality on the reader of a literary artefact.
It has long been the practice of literary critics, especially Continental ones in the Romantic tradition, to attempt to isolate the private characteristics or personal philosophies of writers, as distinguished in their language styles. Leo Spitzer discerns in Cervantes a characteristic avoidance of commitment in relation to proper names in Don Quixote; the Don himself has three versions of his family name, as well as a number of periphrastic titles. Other characters in the novel are treated with the same consistent lack of definition, which Spitzer suggests is a private characteristic of Cervantes himself. In the works of Diderot, on the other hand, the characteristic clue to the personality of the author is not on such a semiotically complex level, but rather consists of syntactic rhythms reminiscent of those of such bodily functions as sexual intercourse. In the work of the novelist Charles-Louis Philippe, Spitzer finds an excessive use of unjustified causatives, as if Philippe were attempting to explain connections that he himself was uneasily aware were not there.1
The tradition of distinguishing personality traits in the characteristic use of language by writers is Continental in origin. However, critics in the Anglo-American tradition have recently been active in the same pursuit. One of the most impressive analyses in this field has been performed by Anthony Burgess on the chameleon of style himself, James Joyce. While admitting that Joyce has indeed a formidable array of other people's styles at his command, Burgess will not therefore admit that personal style is henceforth redundant, and that only collage techniques remain. Joyce has a style, a paradoxically ‘impersonal’ but distinctive approach to ‘what might be termed literary engineering’. Burgess quotes a number of sentences from Ulysses:
(a) The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.
(b) The cold smell of sacred stone called him.
(c) He waited by the counter, inhaling the keen reek of drugs, the dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs.
(d) He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved.
Burgess argues that the reader's vocal equipment is thoroughly exercised by Joyce's writing: ‘each sentence seems to play a tune independent of the sense. It is as if Joyce were given a keyboard capable of striking all the English vowel phonemes and he at once began to play as many different ones as he could, leaping in wide intervals rather than treading a scale.’ He also finds in these sentences ‘language behaving a fraction more unexpectedly than we would find’ in an ordinary novelist. The language contains ‘small lexical surprises’ – the coldness of the sacred stone, the keen reek of the drugs. Burgess believes that ‘there is a curiously impersonal quality’ about Joyce's playing of the linguistic instrument; ‘it is the impersonality, of course, that Joyce requires’.2
However, this ‘impersonality’ is not what it seems. Joyce, in fact, deploys three styles, all ‘impersonal’ in one way or another, but all these cohere to produce a portrait of the artist. In addition to Joyce's notorious skill in borrowing the styles of others, and the ‘impersonal’ style discerned by Burgess, there is a third style, even more ‘impersonal’ in intention than the other two, which attempts to secure the phrase juste, in the Flaubertian tradition. Here, the notion of style as private idiosyncratic personal choice, based on personal intellectual ‘rhythms’, is swallowed up in the task of discovering the only public way to express some external or internal process, one, in theory, not affected by personal idiosyncrasies.3
Joyce often succeeds in being directly imitative in this third manner, and therefore truly impersonal. In the famous last line from the Proteus chapter, he mimes the mental process which first perceives attributes, and then combines them to form a noun:
Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.4
The mind first perceives a motion in the air, then notices the three masts (though without yet arriving at the word ‘ship’), then notices the sails, and identifies the destination of the motion, observes the silence of the approach, and finally, summing up all of the attributes, arrives at the word ‘ship’. However buccally active the sentence is, it escapes being classified as ‘characteristically Joycean’ through its attempt to express the only and thus inevitable way to describe the experience exactly. This is not Joyce's ‘personal’ style, that of playing on an ‘impersonal’ instrument; this is Joyce (and humanity with him) publicly discovering the only way to describe the approach of such a ship. Joyce's three styles – pastiche, Burgessian virtuosity, Flaubertian mimesis – are not ‘personal’ in the traditional Romantic sense, but they do characterize the modern creator in the Romantic line.
There have been a number of recent treatments of this kind, of writers’ individual traits – Milic on Swift, Paul Kiparsky on Walt Whitman, Ohmann on Matthew Arnold and Shaw, among many others.5 Richard Ohmann speaks for this school of criticism with his declaration that ‘literary criticism is the study of mental structures’. The structures in the text as perceived by the reader can indicate distinctive choices of diction and syntax, or more high-level structures of content and of rhetorical approach. These structures outline the ‘epistemic choices’ or the path taken by the thinking process, and suggest the shape of the writer's mind and of his individual style:
The very many decisions that add up to a style are decisions about what to say, as well as how to say it. They reflect the writer's organization of experience, his sense of life, so that the most general of his attitudes and ideas find expression just as characteristically in his style as in his matter, though less overtly. Style, in this view, far from being intellectually peripheral ornament, is what I have called ‘epistemic choice’, and the study of style can lead to an insight into the writer's most confirmed epistemic stances.6
We have seen above how Ohmann discerns the hard-driving character of D. H. Lawrence in his characteristic repetition (with deletion) of sentences. Ohmann also finds characteristic effects in the syntax of Henry James, Faulkner, and Hemingway, effects depending upon choice between different syntaxes for the ‘same’ content.7
The resources of transformational-generative grammar are helpful here since, at one stage of the development of that science, ‘optional’ transformations were postulated: re-orderings of the elements of declarative sentences to produce strings of words whose import was generally ‘the same’ as that of the ‘original’ structure but whose appearance was different. Sentences like ‘Bill was kicked by John’, and ‘It was John who kicked Bill’ were held to be paraphrases of each other, and of sentences like ‘John kicked Bill’. Different individuals would produce stylistically differing paraphrases of the same basic utterance.* This phenomenon has been noted independently by Orwell, in his description of the style of Big Brother:
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speak-write toward him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them (‘What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lessons – which is one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc – that’, etc., etc.), easy to imitate.8
Winston's ability to produce a pastiche of Big Brother's style testifies to the presence of ‘epistemic choice’ in Big Brother's syntax. The ‘self-questioning’ transformation, as it could be called, is immediately recognizable as a stylistic trait of the entity ‘Big Brother’. This can be distinguished from a less characterizing type of utterance, which would be something like: ‘Comrades, we learn lessons from the fact – lessons which [demonstrate] one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc, that…’; or perhaps a simpler discourse entirely: ‘Comrades, we learn lessons from the fact. These lessons are that… This is one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc’ These sentences can be recognized as paraphrases of Orwell's text but without the ‘characteristic’ self-questioning.
Even here we have a certain difficulty in regarding this insight as one which indicates a particular, distinctive personality. For one thing, Big Brother is almost certainly a composite, a name like Pharoah, or The O'Neill, the title of a leader, so the ‘individuality’ of his style is a false one, and easily imitated by those whose function it is to speak in his name. This uneasy blend of personality and synthetic structure is, in fact, characteristic of the society controlled by Big Brother in the novel, and reflects the psychological presuppositions of the rulers of that society – private personality is an abomination to them. Big Brother has a style which is made up of recognizable elements from military and academic backgrounds, the least talented but most common representatives of both. This problem, however, is a general problem with this sort of analysis: how much of the material analysed is personal style and how much is impersonal borrowings? And what ‘personality’ emerges?
The problem is compounded when the choice of words (lexis) of a writer, rather than his choice of syntax acts as the determining criterion of style. How can we tell which words he characteristically favours? How do we recognize a ‘deviation’ from general patterns of word choice? It is likely that the range of general choice of words cannot be defined explicitly. There are, to be sure, a few dozen words – functors – which appear with roughly the same frequency in the writings of almost everybody, words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘to’ and so on; a few hundred words account for more than 85 per cent of any text, and those remaining, which usually bear the content weight of any text, jostle non-significantly for the role of ‘outstanding’ words.9 I have noticed, for example, that Orwell often uses ‘disgusting’ unexpectedly, in the middle of a context in which he is obviously trying to be neutral in tone, and to keep his temper. It is as if the underlying revulsion cannot be indefinitely kept under. This observation does not come from a careful statistical analysis of Orwell's style but rather from a Riffaterrian intuition of a departure from a norm, derived from the continuous unconscious process of analysis which takes place during the act of reading Orwell (see below, p. 75).
Joyce employs ‘old’ and its derivatives 612 times in Ulysses, which brings it out of the range of information words and well up within the range of common functors; it is actually more common than such words as ‘this’, ‘are’, ‘we’, ‘which’ and so on. ‘Young’ and its derivatives only appear 210 times. In Finnegans Wake, ‘old’ and its derivatives occur (undisguised) 535 times, which a rough check reveals to be more than any other word in the Wake, not counting the hundred most commonly appearing words; ‘young’ appears only 91 times. In Yeats's poetry, ‘old’ and its derivatives appear 575 times, which makes it the most common information word in his poetic work next to ‘all’ (if that is an information word). It may seem significant that the same word ‘old’ has such a statistical predominance in the works of both Irish writers; but the method employed to discover this is, as the reader can see from the above, nothing more than the following up of an intuition, employing only an inexplicit method of description, perhaps because no other method is justified.
The whole question takes on an unreal glow when we realize that we are attributing prominence to a word because it appears in a text fifty times, rather than forty – and this in a text where the most common words in the language each appear several hundred or even several thousand times! The notion of ‘general’ lexical prominence vanishes in a cloud of squabbles over insignificant precedences. What is it to the general structure of English if the word ‘disgusting’ appears a few more times than you might expect in the works of Orwell, or the word ‘old‘ in the works of both Joyce and Yeats, or that Yeats uses derivatives of the word ‘sudden‘ sixty-eight times in his poetry?10 How many times does the average speaker of the language use these words, and is it really possible to set up elaborate tables of precedence and reach conclusions about style on the basis of such meagre representation? Except for the most commonly used words of the language, all tables of general usage merely reflect, with considerable accuracy, the content of the texts chosen for analysis, and little more.
Word choice may be, and indeed, very likely is, in the realm of personal choice and idiosyncrasy; Riffaterre11 persuasively notes prominent appearances of certain words in contexts which bear a strong personal impression of the author. Yet is it possible to describe these word choices as statistically unusual against general patterns of word choice with any degree of precision? Must the study of word choice remain impressionistic?
There are, then, two basic problems in the analysis of individual styles of writing: one is that the elements of style may be too general to be privately characterizing – e.g. Orwell's military-pedantic style for Big Brother. The other is that some of the elements of style may not be general enough. That is, it is difficult to recognize absolute deviations in word choice and rhetorical presentation (not to mention content choice) in any piece of writing, since the systems from which the author may deviate cannot be described for any language as a whole, in any form that will meet scientific standards of explicitness.
Writing on ‘The Semantics of Style‘, Chatman deals with the first of these difficulties:
It should be noted … that taking style as individual manner does not require us to insist upon the uniqueness of each of its components. The fact that a feature characteristic of an author's style was generally popular in his period or school does not make it any less characterizing of him. It is added to other features to make up his unique pattern or configuration. Because of its complex nature, the recognition of a writer's style is not a mere act of perception, as that term is generally defined, (for example, ‘whenever we “perceive” what we name “a chair”, we are interpreting a certain group of data [modification of the sense organs], and treating them as signs of a referent.’) Perception entails the recognition of a thing as an instance of a Class of things, whereas style-recognition, as the recognition of a personality, is something more, namely the recognition of an individual as a unique complex or pattern of perceived features. That is why perception tends to be virtually instantaneous whereas the ability to recognize an author's style takes time to acquire.12
It seems as if Chatman is here defending the use of general components in determining the components of a stylistic perception, while suggesting that there are other components that take longer to interpret, perhaps specifically private ones, special to the individual perceived. Chatman may be right in his defence of an author's use of general components in a personalizing way. Although there are only a few ‘optional’ transformations, about a dozen or so at last count, they may be combined or employed in an unlimited number of ways to provide many different paraphrases, and if indeed the preference for one set of transformations over another is a sign of personality, there are certainly enough possibilities in the realm of syntax to fit anyone. By combination, anyone may sew himself together a syntactic suit of clothes that expresses his individuality.
This would be possible even if the basic components of the game were more abstract and limited than they seem to be. What could be more constricting than the rules of chess? Yet how powerful is the sense of personality rising up from the games of Alekhine, Capablanca, Rubinstein, and dozens of others. Alekhine himself noticed this. In a remarkable passage from his work My Best Games of Chess 1908–1923, he isolates a feature highly characteristic of his own style, and yet it is derived from no element more personal than the rule defining the Bishop's move:
The reader will clearly perceive a similarity with other games (which also gained brilliancy prizes) [Alekhine is here analyzing such a game, with Bogolojuboff in 1921] … The leading characteristic in these games is an unforeseen but immediately decisive attack.
The chief point in these attacks lie in the fact that none of them was prepared in the immediate vicinity of its objective. On the contrary, all the preliminary manoeuvres which tended to divert the adverse pieces from the defense of their King took place in the centre or on the opposite wing. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the deciding move, a real hammer-blow, is played by a Bishop and always involves sacrificial variations.
These repeated attacks in the same manner, in the course of games of widely different character, seem to me to constitute a very precise criterion of a player's style.13
As Alekhine makes clear, the elements of personality in chess style are not different from those that make up its rules but are characteristic methods of applying and combining those general elements described in the rules. One component of the system of chess is rigorously and negatively determined: if a Bishop moves on a rank, it is not a move in chess. The other component is completely free – the strategy of the player. Indeed, the player is not even constrained to win; he may play brilliantly to lose, or to draw, or to stalemate – an analogue of the literary artist writing to be personally impersonal, or to construct a ‘person’ from a collage of impersonal materials. The potentialities for combination in language are much richer than those of chess in this regard. They even allow a certain degree of individuality to the hack who has made himself the voice of his time so successfully that he is indistinguishable from dozens of his fellows. This last is an individuality of sorts, but a poor one – where is the honour in being described as the perfect hack?
The opposing problem – that of the inherent non-generality of certain elements of language – is not so amenable to analysis as the problem of excessive generality. It could be said that while the determining of general patterns of word choice (general lexis) is a chimera for any language, individual lexis is usually well-defined – each person can produce statements that he himself will agree with, statements that, in theory, represent adequately the state of his lexis at any one time, and can exhaust the contents of his opinions on the world of facts at any one time. If, then, only individual lexis is capable of definition, it stands as the only viable criterion against which to judge the lexical choices of others. Perhaps all judgements of lexical deviation as a measure of style are really disguised personal judgements on the part of the critic, disguised from himself perhaps by a belief that he is speaking in the name of the English language (or any other language).
Riffaterre deals with just this dilemma. He postulates that the reader, who has been unconsciously characterizing the writer's private choice of words during the act of reading, is able intuitively to recognize a sudden deviancy in that choice of words. But this ‘intuitive grasp’ of the artist's style may well also be based on the reader's personal stylistic tendencies. In the field of lexical choice, all that a critic can do is declare modestly that the impression of personality based on lexis is derived from a personal judgement on his, the reader's, part. If the reader and the writer have certain language elements (syntax and phonology) fundamentally in common, meaningful statements can be made about deviation from general norms in these areas alone. Beyond that all is faith, and testimony of witness.
However, personal and impersonal elements may be divided in the search for personality. Human communication, properly so called, seems to be impossible without at least the potentiality of individual style, however defined. A tree or a sunset does not have a ‘style’; it would sound very odd to say that it did. It is true that the word ‘communication’ is sometimes used by information theorists to signify any emission and reception of information, but this would make ‘communication’ possible between a man and a sunset, and this in a non-metaphorical sense; after all, the man receives information from the sunset, and he assumes that nothing but the sunset emits the information. The ordinary use of the word ‘communication’ implies an intention to contact, and intention can be postulated only for human beings. A dog's ‘intention’ to communicate is, I think, an act of anthropomorphizing, and the Being that emits information from the light of setting suns is, despite Wordsworth, a hypothesis.
The emitter of information must be recognized as human for intention to be imputed, and therefore for a communication to be truly communicative. There must, in other words, be the potentiality in the signal as received and interpreted for the message to have had a different form; there must be a base identificative component and a non-base stylistic component for communication to take place.
However, this is only to say that the penultimate grade of stylistic perception operates enough to identify the emitter of information as human. Why is there an ultimate stage of apprehension, that of individual personality? Why is the style the man? Perhaps human beings need to defend themselves against a ceaseless necessity to generalize caused by an excess of sensory information. There is always present in the process of interpreting the millions of physical alterations in the sense-organs produced by the physical universe a tendency to see the whole universe as one huge ‘ditto’ sign, a sign which suppresses novelty in the name of sanity. Literature has been described by a number of modern critics as an opposing force to these deadly acts of generalization, an assertion of individual freedom and personal coherence. Father Walter Ong finds that
all verbalization, including all literature, is radically a cry, a sound emitted from the interior of a person, a modification of one's exhalation of breath which retains the intimate connection with life which we find in breath itself. [With this modified exhalation] persons commune with persons, reaching one another's interiors in a way which one can never reach the interior of an ‘object’.
The function of language is intimately associated with this ‘interiority’:
Language retains this interiority because it, and the concepts that are born with it, remain always the medium wherein persons discover and renew their discovery that they are persons, that is, discover and renew their own proper interiority and selves.14
Other critics, like Georges Poulet, find in the exposure of interiority less a passive appreciation of another's ‘exhalations’, like Father Ong, and more an active attack on the integral self of the reader or listener:
Because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to me … Reading is just that: a way of giving way not only to a host of alien words, images, ideas, but also to the very alien principle which utters them and shelters them … Reading implies something resembling the apperception I have of my self, the action by which I grasp straightway what I think as being thought by a subject (who, in this case, is not I).15
The description of the characteristics of the alien object in terms of the linguistic structures it contains, that is, those clues to performance that assist the subjective consciousness to identify it as Other, is the subtlest task of modern stylistics. Certainly, if Father Ong is right, the ‘voice’ in literature bears the most intimate signs of its origin in the personality of another. And as students of language we must be prepared to say from what elements, precisely, this image of ‘another’ is derived, if this description is possible.
We must not assume that all human artefacts and pursuits are inherently describable by human beings, simply because human beings produce and enjoy them. It has been seriously suggested that the ultimate reaches of music and chess are beyond the power of human description and will remain so. Perhaps the same is true of literature. What a study of style based upon language can undertake, therefore, is essentially a ‘silhouetting’ function: a linguistic stylistics can distinguish those elements of a literary work that attain their effect from public norms and operate to mime the world of facts and processes, and can also distinguish public components of a subjectivity which is felt by the reader to form part of another personality. The limit may be reached when the alien personality expresses itself only as itself. Before the ultimate expression of privacy the public voice falls silent.
* ‘John kicked Bill’ was, at one stage of the development of Chomskyan syntax, regarded as somehow more basic (or ‘simplex’) than its paraphrases. The notion that the simplex utterance ‘means the same’ as its paraphrases has been under attack. Certainly the effect of ‘It was John who kicked Bill’ is different from that of ‘John kicked Bill’. However, their truth values are the same: if ‘John kicked Bill’ is true, then its paraphrases are true and vice versa.