Stylistics and Ethical Literary Criticism
Geoff Hall
School of English, University of Nottingham, Ningbo
199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo 315100, China
[email protected]
Abstract Stylistics is the study of linguistic choices. Ethics is the study of
moral choices. Both disciplines attempt to understand and explain the choices
individuals make and the significance the most fine-grained choices can sometimes
make. The two disciplines, indeed, both originate in classic Aristotelian rhetoric,
which fully recognised the ethical import of the words we choose. Choice is
unavoidable in language and life, and choices matter. The awareness that comes
from engagement in ethical choices through literary reading is one important
way into this desirable moral education. Classic English literature of the late 19th
century seems particularly concerned with the moral choices characters make and
their consequences — fictions like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, or Jekyll and Hyde come immediately to mind. One of the finest
discriminators in the English language in that period was Henry James, noted for
his distinctive stylistic elaborations as well as for his moral concerns. In a recent
Handbook chapter I argued that literary criticism could benefit from a closer,
more systematic and better informed attention to language.1 Here I take instances
from ethical and stylistic studies of James’s fiction to suggest what a stylistic
awareness or at the least an awareness of stylistics might offer to literary criticism’s
pursuit of what Blake valued as “Minute Particulars”: “He who would do good to
another must do it in Minute Particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel,
hypocrite and flatterer” (William Blake, Jerusalem).
Keywords stylistics; style; Henry James; language choices, language education,
stylometry
Author Geoff Hall is Professor and Head of the School of English at the
University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Dean of Arts and Education from August
2015, and Editor of the journal Language and Literature (Sage) since 2010. A
second edition of Literature in Language Education is available from Palgrave
Macmillan from May 2015. Recent publications include chapters in The Routledge
Stylistics and Ethical Literary Criticism
Literary stylistics may be characterised as a discipline which gives primary
attention to the linguistic features of the text or texts at hand, looking systematically
for distinctive features or patterns of features from a viewpoint informed by a
knowledge of linguistics. Stylistics will hesitate to attribute value to a text or even
to a linguistic device though it may attempt to explain why actual readers have
valued or tend to value certain features of a text. Interpretations inevitably arise
from stylistic analysis but the first object of stylistic analysis is to understand how
a text “works,” how it is constructed, rather than to explore possible interpretations
of the features identified. This is the classic idea of “poetics”: how does it mean
rather than what does it mean. For this kind of classical approach to the practice
of stylistics, it is a poetic handmaiden, a complementary activity to those of the
literary critics.
Literary criticism, by contrast, will characteristically refer to the language of
the text only in passing, impressionistically and selectively and with no special
awareness of or training in linguistic analysis. Any incidental linguistic points
are made as convenient for the development of a larger argument, aiming to get
straight to the point of the meaning of the text and to evaluate its worth. They are
usually presented as self-evident rather than the complex and critical issues they
will present to the linguist reader. For ethical criticism, the first and most urgent
question is to explore the meaning of the text as also a search to establish ethical
significance. Is this text worth reading / good / bad, why might that be, ie. how can
a reading of this text contribute to a better life, whether the critic be a Marxist, an
ecocritical reader, feminist or neoliberal, or perhaps some combination of these
or other ethical positions. My proposal here is that this urgent agenda tends to
skip proper investigation of critical linguistic stages on the way to meaning and
interpretation.
Thus both stylistic and literary critical approaches are important and I have
argued in various publications (as, e.g., Hall 2014) that they are approaches that
need each other to do their work properly. They are not mutually exclusive. I have
argued that literary critics would produce fuller and more interesting readings
by paying closer, more informed and more systematic attention to the language
of the texts they study. At the same time, stylisticians need to engage better with
the literariness of literary texts, what specific affordances for understanding and
development literary experience offers, and why such texts are worth our attention
at all if we are not linguists interested only in the workings of language use.
The proposal then in short, to recapitulate, is that stylistics and ethical
criticism can be brought into fruitful dialogue if we start from the idea of choice,
which is a notion basic to both stylistics and to ethics. The words used in a text and
the words of readers express preferences and perspectives which will often have
ethical import. Linguistics and ethics both stat out from the understanding that
other words could have been chosen. To say one thing is not to say another. Not to
say something, to stay silent, is also an ethical choice of a kind: why did modernist
writers in England such as Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence not write directly
about World War I, as it came to be known? This is not a blame game, nobody can
write about everything, or not directly, but it is a question with ethical import.
Scrolling back to a slightly earlier generation, to what historians have called
the age of anxiety, or the “strange death of liberal England,” classic English
literature of the late 19th century seems particularly concerned with the moral
choices characters make and their consequences: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, or The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde come immediately
to mind. One of the finest discriminators in the English language in that period
was Henry James, noted for his distinctive stylistic elaborations as well as for
his moral concerns. Only the most attentive readers of James can fully rise to
his ethical demands by paying the closest attention to his linguistic choices, just
as his characters must be precise readers of each others’ words. The later novels
have been felt by critics to be particularly demanding (and sometimes to fail) in
this respect. In his celebrated essay “The Art of Fiction,” James as self-conscious
theoriser of story writing refers to “the conscious moral purpose” with which
writers like himself write, and the importance of “solidity of specification,” that is,
precise language use, in the task of pursuing a moral purpose. My epigraph from
Blake gestures towards the same idea: it is arguably a claim for value common to
many literary texts. Writers, James proposes, in a term somewhat scandalous to our
own age, pursue “the truth” of their imagined worlds and characters. They make
“a selection,” a selection which is intended to be representative and meaningful, as
they write. If James has a criticism of the English novel in this essay, it is that of
“timidity.” They have a moral purpose, why do they pretend they do not or shrink
from it? Here James strays into more theoretical areas than I propose to tackle
at present. I propose for now only to note and to respect James’s idea that novel
writers have a “conscious moral purpose” in writing, and the job of the reader and
writer is to collaboratively explore the value of that moral purpose, and, moreover,
that they will do it through precise engagement with language use.
What does all this mean in practice and how might such moral-linguistic
choices be studied? I proceed with some examples of such work as well as
references to more recent extensions of this stylistic ethical critical work. Booth,
Nussbaum, Phelan and others arguing for ethical criticism take us some of the
way. Henry James is indeed not coincidentally a favourite example for Booth too.
He contends that James’s writings are suffused throughout with the question of
“how one should live,” “the complexities of human life,” and that this interest of
the novelist is inseparable from “the shape and cadence of a novelist’s sentences,
his choice of metaphors, his use of sound and rhythm” (26). Nussbaum similarly
admires the ethical demands of “exacting demarcations” in the late James novel
The Golden Bowl. The experience of weighing the words of James’s narrators and
characters, for Booth and Nussbaum, or for Hillis Miller, teaches us the reality and
complexity of ethical decisions beyond any simplistic maxims or slogans. Many
readers of this paper would surely agree broadly with all these points, but I would
contend that these formulations are too vague, and only too characteristic of literary
criticism. In place of general assertions like these, we need worked examples and
practical methodologies. It cannot be assumed that all readers can read with the
subtlety of a Booth or Nussbaum or Hillis Miller, with their analytic principles and
procedures left implicit and unstated. Hillis Miller, for example, uses speech acts
as a loose metaphorical frame with which to approach selected fragments of his
chosen texts, but the principle for selection is nowhere made clear, nor how exactly
to use speech act theory beyond a loose and suggestive metaphorical approach
to the construct. Phelan’s ‘rhetoric’ would be called stylistics in the UK (“textual
signs” drive interpretation, we are told, so that judgments of ethics in literature
reading will be made “from the inside out,” but frustrates the stylistician by its
loose and apparently ad hoc application in examples offered (eg Phelan) though the
increasingly principled and empirical study of the experience of literary reading
by researchers like Phelan or cognitive stylisticians like Sklar is very much to be
welcomed for deepening our understanding of how literary texts work, including
the reader’s negotiation of “otherness.” The unreliable narrators pioneered by
James and his generation extended greatly the reach and value of ethical learning
from narratives. The learning and thinking, including ethical thinking and learning,
prompted by processing of literary discourse is of the greatest interest to all of us
as educators, teachers and learners. The classic concerns of narratology directly
impact on ethical understandings and positions we adopt as we read fiction: who
speaks? who sees? free indirect speech, focalisation and the rest are involved. Such
questions are raised and only to be answered through careful study of the language
of these texts. This is particularly obvious in the cases of less experienced or less
successful readers, but more experienced professional readers can also benefit from
careful consideration of what linguistic choices might be taken to mean with respect
to developing interpretations. It has been shown that good readers read actual
individual words and linguistic details more carefully not less, and so for example
will notice intertextual references bringing to bear their wider reading experience
on precise instances of language use. Characters and narrators are understood and
judged linguistically in the first instance, even though our understanding must be of
language as discourse, ie. fully imbricated in real world contexts and experience not
free-floating as less subtle readings of Derrida, say, can sometimes seem to suggest.
(More careful uses are to be found in Derek Attridge’s work or in Hillis Miller).
How to Study Stylistic Choices?
There are various ways to stylistic analysis, and I would refer the interested reader
to Simpson as the best single introduction to the field at the level of the textbook.
One useful approach advocated here with no claim to great methodological
originality is to study transformations made to original source texts, including
changes of perspective, of narrator, of narration and characters. Similarly
adaptations, versions, revisions and other “readings” by the author and others could
be used for the purpose of the study of choices (compare Sanders). Booth gives
a useful example of such an approach in discussing Henry James’s Portrait of a
Lady:
Gilbert Osmond sees Isabel in the first edition “as bright and soft as an April
cloud” (as presumably the author had seen her too). In the second edition
equivalent passage, the simile has changed significantly to show Gilbert’s
attitude to his wife to be: “as smooth to his general need of her as handled
ivory to the palm.” “Need” rather than “use” still indicates a certain sympathy
with or understanding of Gilbert by a generous narrator, but the idea of
unscrupulous exploitation is a new and unequivocal message from the later
narrator (and actually prescient in the light of present day controls upon
unethical uses of ivory). James’s revisions and prefaces, working notebook,
letters and so on are invaluable sources for such an approach just as (say) we
can examine Hardy’s revisions for his “Wessex” edition roughly twenty years
after the novels were first published, and in the light of the commentary they
had prompted at the time and since. (Mapping the Ethical Turn 26)
The general point here is that nowadays with ever easier access to drafts,
manuscripts and various versions of texts online or in reproduction, especially for
modern texts (19th century on), it is easier than ever before to study the genesis of
a text into the version most readers will finally become familiar with. We can trace
linguistically the genesis and evolution of an idea through the linguistic choices
demonstrably made. Oxford University’s on line presentation of Wilfred Owen’s
diary shows successive reworkings of what were to become classic and widely
quoted poems in their final versions. This, to take another example from Booth, is
what he does himself in the memorable exploration of textual variants to Yeats’s
poem “After Long Silence” in The Company We Keep, though the point would have
to be made that once again the evolution of the text is presented in a “commonsense”
way which linguistic analysis could make more precise and revealing, particularly
if a consistent pattern or patterns of revisions could be identified pushing the
account and so the reader’s interpretation in a particular meaningful direction.
Stylistic Choices of Henry James: Example 1: Chatman (1972)
To save time and words within the remit of this short paper, let me now suggest
the uses of probably still the best stylistic study of James, by Seymour Chatman.
“Stylistic,” remember, means systematic and principled rather than eclectic
impressions, even those of experienced and expert literary critical readers, a fully
responsive account rather than a set of local reactions. Note, first, that Chatman
used precisely the methodological approach I have just advocated, of studying
author revisions, but also that this study is contextualised in statistics and a training
in linguistic analysis. In a travesty of a subtle study, let me summarise some of
Chatman’s main conclusions (but urge interested readers to check carefully the
original version for themselves!)
Her notion was (Portrait) vs “She thought” (characteristic James revision or
choice)
The most characteristic activity of a James character is thinking
second most characteristic activity is speaking
rare is physical action, movement
abstractness (James, eg, is measurably more abstract than his contemporary,
Conrad)
counterfactuals “it was as if” — seem, appear, — aspects of perception of
a single character or narrator, imperfect knowledge or understanding of
another’s intentions and motivations
nominalisation: “her eyes sought” (“she saw” etc — usually used
metaphorically if at all)
“thoughts are things in James”
revision The American: as pale as her daughter / “her consciousness had paled
her face” (in embarrassment): more precise, but also a moral point is being
made.
regular scare quotes foreground and problematise words and ideas readers
should pay attention to
James less interested in things than in the view of those things that characters
have and the meanings registering or developing in their minds
“He appeared thoughtfully to agree” (Strether)
in The Golden Bowl, a door opens, and Maggie sees not her husband, but “the
form, at any rate, of a first opportunity”
James’s dislike of adjectives. According to his amanuensis, he rejected
the “sugar” of adjectives for the “salt” of adverbs: arguably, this results in
evaluation as a requirement forced on the reader, rather than simply presented
by the narrator.
Chatman’s careful stylistic study yields not just interesting individual insights into
detailed features of James’s writing, though these are certainly there, but more
important we can see the emergence from all those empirically observed and
measured details of a wider correlating set of tendencies that amount to a more
general characterisation of James’s style, based on a full description and accounting
for the features observed, and this style itself can be seen as an ethical investigation
into the fictional worlds of his characters and narrators. This is a perfect example of
the kind of more satisfying meeting of stylistics and criticism I opened this paper
by discussing. One more example before I move to sum up what is intended to be a
straightforward intervention in literary studies.
Stylistic Choices as Ethics: Example 2: Hoover (2007) (Corpus Stylistics) and
the Late Style of Henry James
Stylometry provides powerful computerised techniques for examining authorial
style variation. Hoover’s study uses several such techniques to explore the
traditional distinction between James’s early and late styles. They confirm this
distinction, identify an intermediate style, and facilitate an analysis of the lexical
character of James’s style. Especially revealing are techniques that identify words
with extremely variable frequencies across James’s oeuvre-words that clearly
characterize the various period styles. Such words disproportionately increase
or decrease steadily throughout James’s remarkably unidirectional stylistic
development. Stylometric techniques constitute a promising avenue of research
that exploits the power of corpus analysis and returns our attention to a manageable
subset of an author’s vocabulary. Booth, interestingly (2001 and elsewhere), like
many critics, operates with an intuitive and implicit notion of “key words”, but
nowhere is the construct defined or explained. For the literary critic, “key words”,
it seems, are what the critic says they are on the basis of his or her careful readings
and re-readings. This is a good example of an area where I would propose that
the more precise and empirical work of the stylistician will help give more depth
and precision to literary critical intuitions. Key word studies are central to corpus
stylistics (software informed stylistic analysis). The advantage of such more
rigorous and explicit studies is that the more intuitive approach of the literary critic
can be tested and explored more carefully (not necessarily “corrected”, this is not at
all the idea I wish to convey).
The limitations of corpus stylistics are clear. Not syntax (surely crucial for
a full reading of James), not phonological properties, prosody etc. are examined,
but one linguistic level only, that of the word (“lexis”). Hoover did not even use
semantic software because (as often in such work) the form and the language are
prioritised. Chatman is much better on James’s convoluted syntax and parentheses.
There is nothing on punctuation in Hoover’s study — surely all those dashes
— many added in revision — are important? Nevertheless the study is at least
suggestive for critics and can be extended. I would simply suggest here that it is
better appreciated for what it shows us than criticised for what it does not. No
account can ever be a full and final one (compare Attridge, 2004, after Derrida). In
many ways, in fact, adding to its claims to validity, Hoover’s study appears very
compatible with Chatman’s classic stylistic study, adding weight thereby to both.
Hoover, then finds in James’s later fictional writings:
fondness for “-ly” adverbs
abstract words of thought and speech (cf Chatman)
statistically, “key words” are: assert(ed), imput(ed), somebody(‘s)
verbs of language, perception, mental and emotional processes are unusually
frequent
very few verbs of physical movement or actions are used (again, compare
Chatman)
there is increasing use of dialogue, colloquial and slang terms in later James
further keywords increasingly used: shimmered, hovered, faltered, gaping,
ironic, - ly.. (incl “sighingly”)
“Typical” passages of late James according to computerised stylometric analysis (ie.
as identified by a computer rather than a human analyst) are therefore:
(1) He’s prodigious; but what is there — as you’ve fixed it — to dodge?
Unless, he pursued, “it’s her getting near him; it’s – if you’ll pardon my
vulgarity – her getting at him”. (Golden Bowl)
(2) Cissy, from her charmingly cool cove, had watchfully signalled up, and
they met afresh, on the firm clear sand where the drowsy waves scarce even
lapsed, with forms of intimacy that the sequestered spot happily favoured. (The
Ivory Tower)
Interestingly, of course, such unremarkable passages would typically be unlikely to
feature in a more literary critical approach to the texts, interested in value (to use
shorthand) rather than typicality. My proposal is that both value and typicality are
related and a fuller analysis needs to report and account for both aspects of James’s
writing. The final words of example (2) above are evasive and euphemistic. That
is an interpretive comment, but the passage on which they comment has been
brought to the analyst’s attention as needing explication by a computerised analysis
informed by stylistic design. It is perhaps a commonplace to observe that James’s
late style is hesitant, repetitive, and arguably shows us the Master searching for
what Flaubert called the “mot juste”. For present purposes, let us emphasise that
“juste” means not only “exact”, “precise” but “just” as in “justice”, judicial and
a related set of terms. Once again, the stylistic choice and the moral choice are
inseparable.
Conclusion
Revisions to manuscripts, then, (cf. Booth and others above), or alternative endings
(Great Expectations etc) versions, adaptations, drafts, ‘readings’ and more (Sanders
2015) are one important way into the kind of work I am advocating here. The
mathematics of frequency and “deviance” subliminal to human consciousness but
nevertheless not without their effects, are another. Let me turn in closing to a recent
study which makes the links between stylistic readings, emotional and ethical
effects for readers, and education, an intervention from what the developing field of
“cognitive stylistics”, Howard Sklar’s The Art of Sympathy in Fiction (2013).
Sklar’s work is perhaps too easily faulted for a somewhat naive trust in the
empirical as advocated by experimentalist psychology, while others will miss
any Eagletonian critique of a liberal humanist approach which celebrates the
agonised bourgeois reader who can be led to “care” in all sorts of comforting
ways but is unlikely to go out and do anything political about poverty, the position
of women, race and all the other injustices literature draws our attention to. The
pedagogy proposed is not innovatory and again, seems unlikely in itself to make
the world a much better place. That’s not really the point. (Pedagogy, for example,
is a personal relation rather than a set of techniques or an “approach”). We may
feel uneasy at the lack of distinction in Sklar’s writings between real people and
fictional characters; the idea that individuals matter seems to be held at the expense
of wider sociological understandings of the needs of groups in society and group
membershipping. More awareness of the world of professional literary discourse
would clearly have helped produce a stronger publication. At the same time, the
value of this work, reminiscent of Phelan (2007 and later) is to investigate how
ethics begins from the bottom up, that reading of literature can demonstrably
change ways of thinking and understanding, and this begins with the use and
processing of language. Many in stylistics beside myself actually now recognise
that we need to supplement such textual analysis with readings of the language of
literary discussion in education, the media, in reading groups and by the proverbial
water cooler, on websites and in prize committees. A literary work has no clear
boundaries defined materially by the boards around the print (for those of us
still accessing literature primarily through the traditional book). (See, overview
of recent relevant stylistic work in Peplow and Carter, 2014). Such discourse
analytical work is important but exceeds the limits of this essay but note again that
it is first and foremost linguistic material to be analysed. For now, I hope at the
very least some readers will now want to reconsider the importance of linguistic
approaches to literature and literary reading and update their views (compare,
for example, the very badly dated and stereotypical strictures on stylistics of
Peter Barry). Stylisticians can only advance by better respecting the literary and
the literary critical professoriate, just as literary critics need to understand how
unfortunately and unnecessarily their work is vitiated and limited by lack of
awareness of advances in linguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis more broadly.
Note
1. Hall, G. “Ch. 7: Stylistics as literary criticism.” in The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Eds.
P. Stockwell and S. Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Works Cited
Attridge, D. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20-31.
Special issue “Ethics and Literary Study.”
Attridge, D. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Barry, P. Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd edition.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.
Booth, W. C. The Company We keep. An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Booth, W. C. “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple.” Eds. Davis, T. F. and Womack, K
16-29.
Chatman, S. The Later Style of Henry James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972.
Davis, T. F. and Womack, K. eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn. A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and
Literary Theory , Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001.
Hoover, D. “Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James.” Style 41.2
(2007):174-203.
Miller, J. Hillis Literature as Conduct. Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham UP,
2005.
Nussbaum, M. “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism.” Davis, T. F. and
Womack, K. 59-79.
Peplow, D. and Carter, R. “Stylistics and Real Readers.” in The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics.
Ed. M. Burke, London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 455-470.
Phelan, J. “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading.” Davis, T. F. and Womack, K. 93-
109.
Phelan, J. Experiencing Fiction. Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Study of Narrative
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007.
Sanders, J. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Simpson, P. Stylistics. A Resource Book for Students. 2nd edition. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2014.
Sklar, H. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction. Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013.
School of English, University of Nottingham, Ningbo
199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo 315100, China
[email protected]
Abstract Stylistics is the study of linguistic choices. Ethics is the study of
moral choices. Both disciplines attempt to understand and explain the choices
individuals make and the significance the most fine-grained choices can sometimes
make. The two disciplines, indeed, both originate in classic Aristotelian rhetoric,
which fully recognised the ethical import of the words we choose. Choice is
unavoidable in language and life, and choices matter. The awareness that comes
from engagement in ethical choices through literary reading is one important
way into this desirable moral education. Classic English literature of the late 19th
century seems particularly concerned with the moral choices characters make and
their consequences — fictions like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, or Jekyll and Hyde come immediately to mind. One of the finest
discriminators in the English language in that period was Henry James, noted for
his distinctive stylistic elaborations as well as for his moral concerns. In a recent
Handbook chapter I argued that literary criticism could benefit from a closer,
more systematic and better informed attention to language.1 Here I take instances
from ethical and stylistic studies of James’s fiction to suggest what a stylistic
awareness or at the least an awareness of stylistics might offer to literary criticism’s
pursuit of what Blake valued as “Minute Particulars”: “He who would do good to
another must do it in Minute Particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel,
hypocrite and flatterer” (William Blake, Jerusalem).
Keywords stylistics; style; Henry James; language choices, language education,
stylometry
Author Geoff Hall is Professor and Head of the School of English at the
University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Dean of Arts and Education from August
2015, and Editor of the journal Language and Literature (Sage) since 2010. A
second edition of Literature in Language Education is available from Palgrave
Macmillan from May 2015. Recent publications include chapters in The Routledge
Stylistics and Ethical Literary Criticism
Literary stylistics may be characterised as a discipline which gives primary
attention to the linguistic features of the text or texts at hand, looking systematically
for distinctive features or patterns of features from a viewpoint informed by a
knowledge of linguistics. Stylistics will hesitate to attribute value to a text or even
to a linguistic device though it may attempt to explain why actual readers have
valued or tend to value certain features of a text. Interpretations inevitably arise
from stylistic analysis but the first object of stylistic analysis is to understand how
a text “works,” how it is constructed, rather than to explore possible interpretations
of the features identified. This is the classic idea of “poetics”: how does it mean
rather than what does it mean. For this kind of classical approach to the practice
of stylistics, it is a poetic handmaiden, a complementary activity to those of the
literary critics.
Literary criticism, by contrast, will characteristically refer to the language of
the text only in passing, impressionistically and selectively and with no special
awareness of or training in linguistic analysis. Any incidental linguistic points
are made as convenient for the development of a larger argument, aiming to get
straight to the point of the meaning of the text and to evaluate its worth. They are
usually presented as self-evident rather than the complex and critical issues they
will present to the linguist reader. For ethical criticism, the first and most urgent
question is to explore the meaning of the text as also a search to establish ethical
significance. Is this text worth reading / good / bad, why might that be, ie. how can
a reading of this text contribute to a better life, whether the critic be a Marxist, an
ecocritical reader, feminist or neoliberal, or perhaps some combination of these
or other ethical positions. My proposal here is that this urgent agenda tends to
skip proper investigation of critical linguistic stages on the way to meaning and
interpretation.
Thus both stylistic and literary critical approaches are important and I have
argued in various publications (as, e.g., Hall 2014) that they are approaches that
need each other to do their work properly. They are not mutually exclusive. I have
argued that literary critics would produce fuller and more interesting readings
by paying closer, more informed and more systematic attention to the language
of the texts they study. At the same time, stylisticians need to engage better with
the literariness of literary texts, what specific affordances for understanding and
development literary experience offers, and why such texts are worth our attention
at all if we are not linguists interested only in the workings of language use.
The proposal then in short, to recapitulate, is that stylistics and ethical
criticism can be brought into fruitful dialogue if we start from the idea of choice,
which is a notion basic to both stylistics and to ethics. The words used in a text and
the words of readers express preferences and perspectives which will often have
ethical import. Linguistics and ethics both stat out from the understanding that
other words could have been chosen. To say one thing is not to say another. Not to
say something, to stay silent, is also an ethical choice of a kind: why did modernist
writers in England such as Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence not write directly
about World War I, as it came to be known? This is not a blame game, nobody can
write about everything, or not directly, but it is a question with ethical import.
Scrolling back to a slightly earlier generation, to what historians have called
the age of anxiety, or the “strange death of liberal England,” classic English
literature of the late 19th century seems particularly concerned with the moral
choices characters make and their consequences: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, or The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde come immediately
to mind. One of the finest discriminators in the English language in that period
was Henry James, noted for his distinctive stylistic elaborations as well as for
his moral concerns. Only the most attentive readers of James can fully rise to
his ethical demands by paying the closest attention to his linguistic choices, just
as his characters must be precise readers of each others’ words. The later novels
have been felt by critics to be particularly demanding (and sometimes to fail) in
this respect. In his celebrated essay “The Art of Fiction,” James as self-conscious
theoriser of story writing refers to “the conscious moral purpose” with which
writers like himself write, and the importance of “solidity of specification,” that is,
precise language use, in the task of pursuing a moral purpose. My epigraph from
Blake gestures towards the same idea: it is arguably a claim for value common to
many literary texts. Writers, James proposes, in a term somewhat scandalous to our
own age, pursue “the truth” of their imagined worlds and characters. They make
“a selection,” a selection which is intended to be representative and meaningful, as
they write. If James has a criticism of the English novel in this essay, it is that of
“timidity.” They have a moral purpose, why do they pretend they do not or shrink
from it? Here James strays into more theoretical areas than I propose to tackle
at present. I propose for now only to note and to respect James’s idea that novel
writers have a “conscious moral purpose” in writing, and the job of the reader and
writer is to collaboratively explore the value of that moral purpose, and, moreover,
that they will do it through precise engagement with language use.
What does all this mean in practice and how might such moral-linguistic
choices be studied? I proceed with some examples of such work as well as
references to more recent extensions of this stylistic ethical critical work. Booth,
Nussbaum, Phelan and others arguing for ethical criticism take us some of the
way. Henry James is indeed not coincidentally a favourite example for Booth too.
He contends that James’s writings are suffused throughout with the question of
“how one should live,” “the complexities of human life,” and that this interest of
the novelist is inseparable from “the shape and cadence of a novelist’s sentences,
his choice of metaphors, his use of sound and rhythm” (26). Nussbaum similarly
admires the ethical demands of “exacting demarcations” in the late James novel
The Golden Bowl. The experience of weighing the words of James’s narrators and
characters, for Booth and Nussbaum, or for Hillis Miller, teaches us the reality and
complexity of ethical decisions beyond any simplistic maxims or slogans. Many
readers of this paper would surely agree broadly with all these points, but I would
contend that these formulations are too vague, and only too characteristic of literary
criticism. In place of general assertions like these, we need worked examples and
practical methodologies. It cannot be assumed that all readers can read with the
subtlety of a Booth or Nussbaum or Hillis Miller, with their analytic principles and
procedures left implicit and unstated. Hillis Miller, for example, uses speech acts
as a loose metaphorical frame with which to approach selected fragments of his
chosen texts, but the principle for selection is nowhere made clear, nor how exactly
to use speech act theory beyond a loose and suggestive metaphorical approach
to the construct. Phelan’s ‘rhetoric’ would be called stylistics in the UK (“textual
signs” drive interpretation, we are told, so that judgments of ethics in literature
reading will be made “from the inside out,” but frustrates the stylistician by its
loose and apparently ad hoc application in examples offered (eg Phelan) though the
increasingly principled and empirical study of the experience of literary reading
by researchers like Phelan or cognitive stylisticians like Sklar is very much to be
welcomed for deepening our understanding of how literary texts work, including
the reader’s negotiation of “otherness.” The unreliable narrators pioneered by
James and his generation extended greatly the reach and value of ethical learning
from narratives. The learning and thinking, including ethical thinking and learning,
prompted by processing of literary discourse is of the greatest interest to all of us
as educators, teachers and learners. The classic concerns of narratology directly
impact on ethical understandings and positions we adopt as we read fiction: who
speaks? who sees? free indirect speech, focalisation and the rest are involved. Such
questions are raised and only to be answered through careful study of the language
of these texts. This is particularly obvious in the cases of less experienced or less
successful readers, but more experienced professional readers can also benefit from
careful consideration of what linguistic choices might be taken to mean with respect
to developing interpretations. It has been shown that good readers read actual
individual words and linguistic details more carefully not less, and so for example
will notice intertextual references bringing to bear their wider reading experience
on precise instances of language use. Characters and narrators are understood and
judged linguistically in the first instance, even though our understanding must be of
language as discourse, ie. fully imbricated in real world contexts and experience not
free-floating as less subtle readings of Derrida, say, can sometimes seem to suggest.
(More careful uses are to be found in Derek Attridge’s work or in Hillis Miller).
How to Study Stylistic Choices?
There are various ways to stylistic analysis, and I would refer the interested reader
to Simpson as the best single introduction to the field at the level of the textbook.
One useful approach advocated here with no claim to great methodological
originality is to study transformations made to original source texts, including
changes of perspective, of narrator, of narration and characters. Similarly
adaptations, versions, revisions and other “readings” by the author and others could
be used for the purpose of the study of choices (compare Sanders). Booth gives
a useful example of such an approach in discussing Henry James’s Portrait of a
Lady:
Gilbert Osmond sees Isabel in the first edition “as bright and soft as an April
cloud” (as presumably the author had seen her too). In the second edition
equivalent passage, the simile has changed significantly to show Gilbert’s
attitude to his wife to be: “as smooth to his general need of her as handled
ivory to the palm.” “Need” rather than “use” still indicates a certain sympathy
with or understanding of Gilbert by a generous narrator, but the idea of
unscrupulous exploitation is a new and unequivocal message from the later
narrator (and actually prescient in the light of present day controls upon
unethical uses of ivory). James’s revisions and prefaces, working notebook,
letters and so on are invaluable sources for such an approach just as (say) we
can examine Hardy’s revisions for his “Wessex” edition roughly twenty years
after the novels were first published, and in the light of the commentary they
had prompted at the time and since. (Mapping the Ethical Turn 26)
The general point here is that nowadays with ever easier access to drafts,
manuscripts and various versions of texts online or in reproduction, especially for
modern texts (19th century on), it is easier than ever before to study the genesis of
a text into the version most readers will finally become familiar with. We can trace
linguistically the genesis and evolution of an idea through the linguistic choices
demonstrably made. Oxford University’s on line presentation of Wilfred Owen’s
diary shows successive reworkings of what were to become classic and widely
quoted poems in their final versions. This, to take another example from Booth, is
what he does himself in the memorable exploration of textual variants to Yeats’s
poem “After Long Silence” in The Company We Keep, though the point would have
to be made that once again the evolution of the text is presented in a “commonsense”
way which linguistic analysis could make more precise and revealing, particularly
if a consistent pattern or patterns of revisions could be identified pushing the
account and so the reader’s interpretation in a particular meaningful direction.
Stylistic Choices of Henry James: Example 1: Chatman (1972)
To save time and words within the remit of this short paper, let me now suggest
the uses of probably still the best stylistic study of James, by Seymour Chatman.
“Stylistic,” remember, means systematic and principled rather than eclectic
impressions, even those of experienced and expert literary critical readers, a fully
responsive account rather than a set of local reactions. Note, first, that Chatman
used precisely the methodological approach I have just advocated, of studying
author revisions, but also that this study is contextualised in statistics and a training
in linguistic analysis. In a travesty of a subtle study, let me summarise some of
Chatman’s main conclusions (but urge interested readers to check carefully the
original version for themselves!)
Her notion was (Portrait) vs “She thought” (characteristic James revision or
choice)
The most characteristic activity of a James character is thinking
second most characteristic activity is speaking
rare is physical action, movement
abstractness (James, eg, is measurably more abstract than his contemporary,
Conrad)
counterfactuals “it was as if” — seem, appear, — aspects of perception of
a single character or narrator, imperfect knowledge or understanding of
another’s intentions and motivations
nominalisation: “her eyes sought” (“she saw” etc — usually used
metaphorically if at all)
“thoughts are things in James”
revision The American: as pale as her daughter / “her consciousness had paled
her face” (in embarrassment): more precise, but also a moral point is being
made.
regular scare quotes foreground and problematise words and ideas readers
should pay attention to
James less interested in things than in the view of those things that characters
have and the meanings registering or developing in their minds
“He appeared thoughtfully to agree” (Strether)
in The Golden Bowl, a door opens, and Maggie sees not her husband, but “the
form, at any rate, of a first opportunity”
James’s dislike of adjectives. According to his amanuensis, he rejected
the “sugar” of adjectives for the “salt” of adverbs: arguably, this results in
evaluation as a requirement forced on the reader, rather than simply presented
by the narrator.
Chatman’s careful stylistic study yields not just interesting individual insights into
detailed features of James’s writing, though these are certainly there, but more
important we can see the emergence from all those empirically observed and
measured details of a wider correlating set of tendencies that amount to a more
general characterisation of James’s style, based on a full description and accounting
for the features observed, and this style itself can be seen as an ethical investigation
into the fictional worlds of his characters and narrators. This is a perfect example of
the kind of more satisfying meeting of stylistics and criticism I opened this paper
by discussing. One more example before I move to sum up what is intended to be a
straightforward intervention in literary studies.
Stylistic Choices as Ethics: Example 2: Hoover (2007) (Corpus Stylistics) and
the Late Style of Henry James
Stylometry provides powerful computerised techniques for examining authorial
style variation. Hoover’s study uses several such techniques to explore the
traditional distinction between James’s early and late styles. They confirm this
distinction, identify an intermediate style, and facilitate an analysis of the lexical
character of James’s style. Especially revealing are techniques that identify words
with extremely variable frequencies across James’s oeuvre-words that clearly
characterize the various period styles. Such words disproportionately increase
or decrease steadily throughout James’s remarkably unidirectional stylistic
development. Stylometric techniques constitute a promising avenue of research
that exploits the power of corpus analysis and returns our attention to a manageable
subset of an author’s vocabulary. Booth, interestingly (2001 and elsewhere), like
many critics, operates with an intuitive and implicit notion of “key words”, but
nowhere is the construct defined or explained. For the literary critic, “key words”,
it seems, are what the critic says they are on the basis of his or her careful readings
and re-readings. This is a good example of an area where I would propose that
the more precise and empirical work of the stylistician will help give more depth
and precision to literary critical intuitions. Key word studies are central to corpus
stylistics (software informed stylistic analysis). The advantage of such more
rigorous and explicit studies is that the more intuitive approach of the literary critic
can be tested and explored more carefully (not necessarily “corrected”, this is not at
all the idea I wish to convey).
The limitations of corpus stylistics are clear. Not syntax (surely crucial for
a full reading of James), not phonological properties, prosody etc. are examined,
but one linguistic level only, that of the word (“lexis”). Hoover did not even use
semantic software because (as often in such work) the form and the language are
prioritised. Chatman is much better on James’s convoluted syntax and parentheses.
There is nothing on punctuation in Hoover’s study — surely all those dashes
— many added in revision — are important? Nevertheless the study is at least
suggestive for critics and can be extended. I would simply suggest here that it is
better appreciated for what it shows us than criticised for what it does not. No
account can ever be a full and final one (compare Attridge, 2004, after Derrida). In
many ways, in fact, adding to its claims to validity, Hoover’s study appears very
compatible with Chatman’s classic stylistic study, adding weight thereby to both.
Hoover, then finds in James’s later fictional writings:
fondness for “-ly” adverbs
abstract words of thought and speech (cf Chatman)
statistically, “key words” are: assert(ed), imput(ed), somebody(‘s)
verbs of language, perception, mental and emotional processes are unusually
frequent
very few verbs of physical movement or actions are used (again, compare
Chatman)
there is increasing use of dialogue, colloquial and slang terms in later James
further keywords increasingly used: shimmered, hovered, faltered, gaping,
ironic, - ly.. (incl “sighingly”)
“Typical” passages of late James according to computerised stylometric analysis (ie.
as identified by a computer rather than a human analyst) are therefore:
(1) He’s prodigious; but what is there — as you’ve fixed it — to dodge?
Unless, he pursued, “it’s her getting near him; it’s – if you’ll pardon my
vulgarity – her getting at him”. (Golden Bowl)
(2) Cissy, from her charmingly cool cove, had watchfully signalled up, and
they met afresh, on the firm clear sand where the drowsy waves scarce even
lapsed, with forms of intimacy that the sequestered spot happily favoured. (The
Ivory Tower)
Interestingly, of course, such unremarkable passages would typically be unlikely to
feature in a more literary critical approach to the texts, interested in value (to use
shorthand) rather than typicality. My proposal is that both value and typicality are
related and a fuller analysis needs to report and account for both aspects of James’s
writing. The final words of example (2) above are evasive and euphemistic. That
is an interpretive comment, but the passage on which they comment has been
brought to the analyst’s attention as needing explication by a computerised analysis
informed by stylistic design. It is perhaps a commonplace to observe that James’s
late style is hesitant, repetitive, and arguably shows us the Master searching for
what Flaubert called the “mot juste”. For present purposes, let us emphasise that
“juste” means not only “exact”, “precise” but “just” as in “justice”, judicial and
a related set of terms. Once again, the stylistic choice and the moral choice are
inseparable.
Conclusion
Revisions to manuscripts, then, (cf. Booth and others above), or alternative endings
(Great Expectations etc) versions, adaptations, drafts, ‘readings’ and more (Sanders
2015) are one important way into the kind of work I am advocating here. The
mathematics of frequency and “deviance” subliminal to human consciousness but
nevertheless not without their effects, are another. Let me turn in closing to a recent
study which makes the links between stylistic readings, emotional and ethical
effects for readers, and education, an intervention from what the developing field of
“cognitive stylistics”, Howard Sklar’s The Art of Sympathy in Fiction (2013).
Sklar’s work is perhaps too easily faulted for a somewhat naive trust in the
empirical as advocated by experimentalist psychology, while others will miss
any Eagletonian critique of a liberal humanist approach which celebrates the
agonised bourgeois reader who can be led to “care” in all sorts of comforting
ways but is unlikely to go out and do anything political about poverty, the position
of women, race and all the other injustices literature draws our attention to. The
pedagogy proposed is not innovatory and again, seems unlikely in itself to make
the world a much better place. That’s not really the point. (Pedagogy, for example,
is a personal relation rather than a set of techniques or an “approach”). We may
feel uneasy at the lack of distinction in Sklar’s writings between real people and
fictional characters; the idea that individuals matter seems to be held at the expense
of wider sociological understandings of the needs of groups in society and group
membershipping. More awareness of the world of professional literary discourse
would clearly have helped produce a stronger publication. At the same time, the
value of this work, reminiscent of Phelan (2007 and later) is to investigate how
ethics begins from the bottom up, that reading of literature can demonstrably
change ways of thinking and understanding, and this begins with the use and
processing of language. Many in stylistics beside myself actually now recognise
that we need to supplement such textual analysis with readings of the language of
literary discussion in education, the media, in reading groups and by the proverbial
water cooler, on websites and in prize committees. A literary work has no clear
boundaries defined materially by the boards around the print (for those of us
still accessing literature primarily through the traditional book). (See, overview
of recent relevant stylistic work in Peplow and Carter, 2014). Such discourse
analytical work is important but exceeds the limits of this essay but note again that
it is first and foremost linguistic material to be analysed. For now, I hope at the
very least some readers will now want to reconsider the importance of linguistic
approaches to literature and literary reading and update their views (compare,
for example, the very badly dated and stereotypical strictures on stylistics of
Peter Barry). Stylisticians can only advance by better respecting the literary and
the literary critical professoriate, just as literary critics need to understand how
unfortunately and unnecessarily their work is vitiated and limited by lack of
awareness of advances in linguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis more broadly.
Note
1. Hall, G. “Ch. 7: Stylistics as literary criticism.” in The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Eds.
P. Stockwell and S. Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
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