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Questions of Theory

Javier Suarez

The man without style

Let´s imagine a person who sees his reflection in a mirror and says “I am not stylish”.When we hear or read the word “stylish”, we probably think about fashion. Why somebody

is not stylish? Maybe, this person has not chosen the best clothes for his personality or for a particular occasion. What is stylistics? Let´s go to the dictionary. There says that stylisticsis “a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of characteristic choices in use of 

language, especially literary language, as regards sound, form, or vocabulary, made by

different individuals or social groups in different situations of use”. The element thatconnects stylish and stylistics is one: choice. Style is a matter of choice (and of taste);

stylistics tries to understand this choice and its consequences in the realm of verbal

language or even better, but not only, within artistic language. Let´s return to our friend

who does not like the clothes he is using. If he asks us for help we have two options:

maybe, we can tell him that is only his choice (and avoid helping him) or we can suggestsome clothes we think are more suitable for him. I think that we can agree in the fact that

our recommendation would vary if our friend have a meeting with Harvard´s president or 

with an old friend in John Harvard´s brewery. The point is that, according to our  sensuscommunis, the majority of people knows that the election of an outfit depends on the

circumstances, of the context in which we are. Something similar happens with the style in

literature. Why we prefer a metaphor to a metonymy to describe that character, why we prefer the a-sound instead of i-sound when we want to represent laughter (jajaja)? Why?

One of the limitations of linguistics, with scientific pretension, is that it tries to isolate the

choice (and its materialization in the work of art) from history and all its implications. As

Fish says, “every description is always and already an interpretation, and that therefore thefirst act of any criticism, and especially of linguistically bases criticism is to constitute the

text”. This statement is really interesting because it says that even if two people choose the

same clothes, we will not describe them exactly with the same words (if we want todescribe how they use the clothes and not the clothes themselves); that is why Fish affirms

that “the two grammars would be making different texts”.

With stylistics something similar happen: to describe only the words or theexpressions themselves isolated of history would be the same that to describe the clothes in

a shop which have never been used by anybody, they just are there waiting for somebody.

In stylistic (if it means something yet), the possibilities of language are analyzed when they

are incarnate in the discourse of a poet, a novelist or any person who has the  freedom tochoose its style and develop it. I think it is important to mention two elements regarding

stylistics: the rhetorical and the social; I will call Cicero and Voloshinov/Bakhtin to help

me with this. Long time ago, humanities students used to learn something called rhetoric, it

consist in the training of the student in the use of many rhetorical figures (asyndeton, polysyndeton, zeugma, and many crazy names1) that help him/her to develop a persuasive

and stylish speech in front of an audience. One can ask today: what is the use of learning so

many and “ boring” figures? (In fact, we do not learn them anymore.) Maybe an answer could be the following: to develop a personal style, to be stylish. How come? In the past,

these figures were learned with the aim of sharing and exchange information with other 

 people (to have a common ground of communication); but each person could develop, from

1 Cf. Arthur Quinn. Figures of Speech.

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this common background, a personal use of these figures (topoi) according to his interests

(choice) and to his circumstances (history/context). Having a personal style depended, quite

 paradoxically, on the tradition of these figures that were appropriated personally (from

Cicero to Vico2, just to mention some names). Let´s go to the other element: the social one.

Bakhtin and Voloshinov have a really interesting linguistic theory; briefly, they say that

“words” and, consequently, their elections have a history. When we use a word, a phrase or any topoi we are always already inside history, so the aim of a historical stylistics would beto understand, in historical terms, why a particular work of art or a particular author uses

those particulars words, phrases or topoi.

Just to finish this briefly commentary, I want to come back to my example of fashion (or better, clothes´ personal selection

3). As I have just said, to have a style (or many

of them) we need clothes´ options and a society4

(that can see the clothes, and who also

dresses): within society, we can choose (or create our choices) and we are with persons

with whom we can share and talk about our choices of clothes. Similarly, literary style

needs tools, choices, to develop (rhetoric being only one example of these tools) and alsothe literary style is always incarnated, it is in dialogue (smoothly or struggling) with the

 past and the present (authors and audience which can understand our personal style); we are

within a tradition. But what happens, when we do not have tools to choose? What happenswhen all the choices we have are already market-made? What happens when our choices do

not belong to a tradition, a history, but change every day according only to our self-

necessity of affirmation and recognition? What happens when it is not us who create our tools or who learn them from the traditions? When, on the contrary, models are imposed by

a market which only needs new things without taking into account the intersubjectivity of 

literature or art (or clothing)? What happens when we do not share with the people acommon background of tools so that we can understand each other? What happens when

the theoretical fashion of a literary critic becomes so personal that it becomes impersonal?

Is this possible? What happens, even more, when we write a book with many beautiful

references to our tradition but nobody can recognize them because of the oblivion of tradition? What happens? Maybe what we have now is only men without style or, as Musil

said, without qualities.

2 It is really interesting to see how Vico, following Cicero in his understanding of rhetoric, transforms

classical rhetoric in accordance with his social, political and cultural context: Renaissance Naples. Even

though Vico follow Cicero in many things, he is not Cicero, but Vico; he has and style.3 I am understanding fashion as the selection of clothes within a society. I am not talking of fashion as an

alienating process in the sense of Adorno or Benjamin; I think that is the consequence of fashion within

capitalism.4 In an imagined one- person society, it would be useless to have a style; the aim would be to survive… (or the

die?).