Lecture
In antiquity, style was understood as a peculiarity of handwriting, and later as a «special arrangement of words». It was only in the eighteenth century that people began to speak of literary style. The first to draw attention to the individual «manner» as a guarantee of a work’s originality and of the writer’s distinctive self-expression was
Goethe.
In a holistic analysis of form in its conditioning by content, the category that reflects this wholeness comes to the fore – style. In literary theory, style is understood as the aesthetic unity of all elements of artistic form, possessing a certain originality and expressing a definite content. In this sense style is an aesthetic, and consequently an evaluative, category. When we say that a work possesses style, we mean that in it the artistic form has attained a certain aesthetic perfection, has acquired the capacity to act aesthetically on the perceiving consciousness. In this sense style is opposed, on the one hand, to stylelessness (the absence of any aesthetic significance, the aesthetic inexpressiveness of artistic form), and on the other, to epigonic stylization (a negative aesthetic significance, the mere repetition of already-discovered artistic effects).
In contemporary literary scholarship two views on the essence of style coexist:
1) style is an ideological-artistic phenomenon that concerns, in equal measure, both the form and the content of a literary
work;
2) style is a form-generating principle, manifested in the character of depiction,
in the features of composition, intonation, and the speech of the work.
Although style manifests itself above all in individual creative work, there are
grounds for identifying the distinctiveness of stylistic dominants at particular historical stages
in the development of literature.
Discovering, in the history of literature, stylistic forms
generated by the artistic life of a particular epoch presupposes clarifying the features of their unity and
distinctiveness. World literature developed according to the following stylistic scheme: I.
the monumental style; II. the age of the ornamental style. III. transitional ages. IV.
the Renaissance and the Reformation. V. Baroque. VI. Classicism. VII. Romanticism. VIII. Realism. IX.
Modernism. X. Postmodernism.
In the Middle Ages the Romanesque (ninth–twelfth centuries), Gothic (twelfth–fifteenth
centuries), and Byzantine (sixth to mid-fifteenth century) styles predominated. The art of the Renaissance is divided into:
the «Early Renaissance» and the «High Renaissance». In the development of the Baroque, too, different
tendencies are discernible: early, high (mature), and late. Classicism, Sentimentalism, and Romanticism
retained a monolithic stylistic unity.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the crisis of Realism became evident, modernist
tendencies appeared in literature, laying the foundation for the diversity of most of contemporary world
literature.
A writer is a unique individuality who
manifests himself in the results of the creative process – artistic works. The key to knowing
the individuality of the artist is his creative style. Only a vivid individuality is capable
of creating a unique style. This attests to the interconnection between creative individuality and
individual style. Creative individuality is characterized by: wholeness – a combination above all
of a psychic nature; uniqueness; independence; inner freedom and freedom of choice,
a sense of dignity. The style of reproducing the objects that fall
within the writer’s field of view – that is, the principle of organizing artistic material – depends on the type of perception of reality. The evaluative aspect of creative work, conditioned by the writer’s worldview position, depends on the character of
his comprehension of reality. He, like every person, has his own system of values – a distinctive criterion
for comprehending situations, human actions, and public deeds. This is how the problematics
of his work is formed, reflecting his individual interests, impulses, aspirations. In his relation
to social existence, the artist’s creative temperament is manifested – his ability to pose, sharply and masterfully,
urgent questions addressed to society, to particular categories of people. Creative
temperament is an important individual characteristic of a writer, influencing the dynamics of
his style and determining his relationship with the reader.
4. Since the word «current» is more of a figurative designation than a term, it makes sense to replace
it with the word «variety», which corresponds to the structural peculiarities of the literary process and
belongs to the scholarly terminological system. A stylistic variety is an artistic manner
inherent in a relatively small group of literary works; a figurative-linguistic system organized
according to a principle providing for the dominance of one of the devices of artistic self-expression.
A stylistic variety may form and function within a literary period as
a component part of a certain type of creative work, or combine with other varieties into a complex
cultural-artistic phenomenon, which, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century, were
Modernism, the avant-garde, and Postmodernism.
The aesthetic effect of an artistic work on the reader is due precisely to the presence of style. Like any aesthetically significant phenomenon, style may be liked or disliked. This process occurs at the level of primary reader perception. Naturally, the aesthetic evaluation is determined both by the objective properties of the style itself and by the peculiarities of the perceiving consciousness, which, in turn, are conditioned by a wide variety of factors: the psychological and even biological properties of the personality, upbringing, prior aesthetic experience, and so on. As a result, various properties of style arouse in the reader either a positive or a negative aesthetic emotion. It must be borne in mind that any style, regardless of whether we like it or not, possesses objective aesthetic significance.
Stylistic regularities. As already noted, style is an expression of the aesthetic wholeness of a work. This presupposes the subordination of all elements of form to a single artistic regularity, the presence of an organizing principle of style. This organizing principle, as it were, permeates the entire structure of the form, determining the character and functions of each of its elements. Thus, in Tolstoy’s epic novel «War and Peace», the main stylistic principle, the regularity of style, becomes contrast – a clear and sharp opposition realized in every «cell» of the work. Compositionally, this principle is embodied in the constant pairing of images, in the opposition of war and peace, Russians and French, Natasha and Sonya, Natasha and Hélène, Kutuzov and Napoleon, Pierre and Andrei, Moscow and Petersburg, and so on.
Style is not an element but a property of artistic form; it is not localized (as, for example, elements of the plot or an artistic detail are), but is, so to speak, diffused throughout the entire structure of the form. Therefore the organizing principle of style can be found in any fragment of the text; every textual «point» bears the imprint of the whole (from which follows, incidentally, the possibility of reconstructing the whole from separate surviving fragments – thus we can judge the artistic distinctiveness even of those works that have come down to us only in fragments, such as Apuleius’s «The Golden Ass» or Petronius’s «Satyricon»).
Stylistic dominants. The wholeness of style is most clearly manifested in the system of stylistic dominants, and it is with the identification and analysis of these that the examination of style should begin. The most general properties of various aspects of artistic form can become stylistic dominants: in the sphere of the depicted world these are plot-orientation, descriptiveness, and psychologism, the fantastic and the lifelike, in the sphere of artistic speech – monologism and heteroglossia, verse and prose, nominativeness and rhetoricity, in the sphere of composition – simple and complex types. In an artistic work one to three stylistic dominants are usually distinguished, and these constitute the work’s aesthetic distinctiveness. The subordination to the dominant of all elements and devices in the sphere of artistic form constitutes, properly speaking, the principle of the stylistic organization of a work. Thus, for example, in Gogol’s poem «Dead Souls» the stylistic dominant is a pronounced descriptiveness. The entire structure of the form is subordinated to the task of comprehensively recreating the fabric of Russian life in its cultural and everyday aspects. Another example is the organization of style in Dostoevsky’s novels. Their stylistic dominants are psychologism and heteroglossia in the form of polyphony. Subordinated to these dominants, all elements and aspects of the form are artistically oriented. Naturally, among the artistic details the internal ones predominate over the external, while the external details themselves are, one way or another, psychologized – either becoming an emotional impression of the hero (the axe, the blood, the cross, etc.) or reflecting changes in the inner world (details of a portrait). Thus the dominant properties directly determine the laws by which the separate elements of artistic form combine into an aesthetic unity – style.
Style as a form of content. However, the wholeness of style is created not only by the presence of dominants governing the structure of the form. Ultimately this wholeness, like the very emergence of one or another stylistic dominant, is dictated by the principle of the functionality of style, by which is meant its capacity to adequately embody artistic content: for style is, after all, a content-bearing form. «Style,» wrote A.N. Sokolov, «is a category not only aesthetic but also ideological. The necessity by virtue of which the law of style requires precisely such a system of elements is not only artistic, and still less merely formal. It goes back to the ideological content of the work. The artistic regularity of style is based on ideological regularity. Therefore a full understanding of the artistic meaning of style is achieved only by turning to its ideological foundations. Following the artistic meaning of style, we turn to its ideological significance.» G.N. Pospelov later wrote of the same regularity: «If literary style is a property of the figurative form of works at all its levels, right down to the intonational-syntactic and rhythmic structure, then the question of the factors that create style within the bounds of a work would seem not difficult to answer. It is – the content of the literary work in the unity of all its aspects.»
Style and originality. In the concept of artistic style, originality, unlikeness to other styles, is conceived as an inalienable feature. An individual writer’s style is thus easily recognizable in any work or even fragment, and this recognition occurs both at the synthetic level (primary perception) and at the level of analysis. The first thing we sense on perceiving an artistic work is the general aesthetic tonality, embodying an emotional tonality – the pathos of the work. Thus style is initially perceived as a content-bearing form. From any line chosen at random from the poem «Lilichka!» one can recognize its author – Mayakovsky. The first impression made by the poem is one of expression of astonishing force, behind which stands a tragic intensity of feeling that has reached an extreme, unbearable degree. The stylistic dominants of the work are pronounced rhetoricity, complex composition, and psychologism. A generous, vivid, expressive figurative imagery appears in almost every line, and the images, as is generally characteristic of Mayakovsky, are striking, often extended (the comparison to an elephant and a bull); to depict feeling he mainly employs reifying metaphor («a heart in iron», «my love is, after all, a heavy weight», «I have burned out my soul, blossoming with love», etc.). To heighten expressiveness the poet uses his favorite neologisms – «kruchenykh-like», «I shall go mad», «having been hacked to pieces», «to roar oneself out», «scorched», and others. Complex, compound rhymes, which involuntarily arrest the attention, serve the same purpose. The syntax and the associated tempo-rhythm are nervous, full of expression; the poet often resorts to inversion («In the murky entryway, for a long time, a hand trembling with a broken shudder will not fit into its sleeve», «Will the dry leaves of my words make you stop, breathing greedily?»), and to rhetorical addresses. The rhythm is jagged, subordinate to no meter: the poem is written in the tonic system of versification and approaches the loosely ordered rhythm of vers libre, with an alternation of long and short lines, with the line broken up graphically in order to underscore additional emotional stresses and pauses. These two lines alone are more than enough to identify Mayakovsky unmistakably.
Style is one of the most important categories in the comprehension of an artistic work. Its analysis demands of the literary scholar a certain aesthetic sophistication, an artistic sensitivity that is usually developed through abundant and thoughtful reading. The richer the literary scholar’s personality is in aesthetic terms, the more that is of interest he will notice in style.
1. Characterize the concept of «literary style».
2. What is the typology of literary style?
3. How do you understand the individual style of a writer?
4. What is a stylistic variety?
5. How and under what conditions do stylistic varieties form?
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