Style

I think style is extremely useful as a way into a text, and I often take it up instead of form if I want to attune myself to what is going on in a poem or even in critical/expository writing (I don't use it really while reading a novel, and I'd be hard pressed to put it into service even in a modernist text: issues of plot and character are simply more important there). As soon as it becomes the sole thing specified by one's interpretation, though, or the only upshot of the analysis, two problems emerge. Style becomes autonomous, replacing the issue of form, and thereby bolstering the hardness of the text rather than opening it up into language--in short style becomes something of the artifact. Style also can then become a mere informing presence, and remain at the level of the artist/genius who has a particular style, carries himself with a particular style, etc.

In Anglo-American criticism, all this is really confused by the introduction of the issue of form, which tries--despite what those in stylistics will tell you--to be more specific about precisely what is involved in style. It offers this as an alternative to the specification that comes in stylistics proper through linguistics, and I think (insofar as the retreat from linguistic analysis opens the text to practical criticism, as it does) represents an advance. At the same time, this formalist approach seems to suppose that stylistics itself from the beginning is quite crude, proceeding without its own particular act of specification.

This, however, is a minor problem brought up by the intrusion of form. The more significant one is when rhetoric comes back to supplement this formalism. Combined with the formalistic approach, what hasn't been approached in terms of form can be got with rhetoric. This is bad for both stylistics and formalism, since formalism has now merely become the former with its terms reversed: now one starts from minor units of argumentation and moves back only to the level of an informing presence more general and causal than any sort of actual tension in the object (which a stricter formalism would actually provide).

What seems to ameliorate this situation is 1) a general sense that the function of literary language is still communication and experience, however formally intricate it becomes (thus form always has to be subordinated to the task of shoring up language: in other words, one must have a sense that this increasing intricacy actually adds to the communicative ability of literature), and more precisely 2) the introduction of a distinction within style itself on the basis of this communicational thesis about literature--one which William Wimsatt once made in an essay entitled "Verbal Style" (collected in The Verbal Icon). The latter will then have effects on the formal level which will curb the slipshod use of rhetoric we just outlined.

Wimsatt's distinction is between logical and counterlogical stylistic virtues. What he means is basically that there are pieces of language that have a logical structure and pieces that are basically without logic. One just can't explain the latter except in something like associative terms--and in fact one does a disservice to them by reducing them to a logical framework. The greatest example of the logical he has is the parallelism--which he analyzed at length in his amazing early book The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson--and the greatest example he has of the counterlogical is rhyme itself. I quote from another one of Wimsatt's essays because there you see how the counterlogical is rightly described:

The music of the rhyme is mental; it consists in an odd, almost magic, relation of phonetic likeness which encourages us to perceive and believe in a meaning otherwise asserted by the words... The principle is well illustrated in a few of Pope's proper-name rhymes, where we may note an affinity for a certain old-fashioned and childish form of riddle to be found in the pages of The Farmer's Almanac. Why is A like B? Because the name of A or of something connected with A means B or something connected with B. Why is a dog dressed warmer in summer than in winter? Because he wears a fur coat, and in summer he wears a fur coat and pants. Why is a certain poet a dangerous influence upon married women? Because his name sounds like something.

Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope,
And curses Wit, and Poetry, and Pope.

Why is a certain scholar a graceless figure? Because his name shows it:

Yet n'er one sprig of laurel graced these ribalds,
From slashing Bentley down to pidling Tibbalds.
-"Rhetoric and Poems: Alexander Pope" in The Verbal Icon

If the sound is an echo to the sense, as Pope himself famously said (in a phrase tirelessly quoted in the 18th century), well the sense here must be nonsense--if we conceive of rhyme from a logical perspective. If we see it from a counterlogical perspective, the thing makes its own sense, because we have not narrowed sense down to simply logic (later de Man would describe all logic in terms of grammar, and this in turn skewed everything Wimsatt is trying to distinguish here--at the same time as making the act of analytic description much easier and indeed logical). Here is Wimsatt on a related phenomenon, the pun:

Puns have been assimilated into recent criticism so often with phrases like "fruitful ambiguity" or "paradoxical tension" that it is easy not to realize just what a curious thing a pun in poetry is.
-"Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical," 214

The literary critical tendency to reduce a piece of language to a form in which it is put back into service of the logic of the poem at the same time is a tendency to sever its connection with communication and experience. Or rather it is that formalist tendency (the phrase "fruitful ambiguity" is William Empson's, and the phrase "paradoxical tension" is Cleanth Brooks') to treat the piece of language as an artifact (or indeed a matter of fact). By no longer using "tension" as a heuristic tool (as I think it is often used by the formalists in practice, as I implied above) but as a substitute for rhetorical classification (a slackening formalism that after I.A. Richards--in fact as soon as Empson himself, and perhaps there most egregiously until we come to his later work--we can see growing), it becomes precisely a heuristic tool for producing logic out of the counterlogical, and a sense out of a more lived and experienced (and not artifactual) verbal affinity like a pun (it is experienced as wit, as a tapping of the contingent).

So if we rightly hesitate before thinking that a rhyme will support the meaning of a phrase--something that even now (and indeed perhaps especially now) is not done enough--it is because we are trying to open up analysis again to this more communicative level of language (full of the counterlogical alongside the logical) and in turn something about style: the fact that it remains chained to the twofold problem that I talked about above while also leading one into a poem by pointing to something beyond the form and rhetoric.