have it your way and mine: the theory of styles

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Have It Your Way and Mine: The Theory of Styles Author(s): Ellen Spolsky Source: Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 27, No. 5/6, A New Direction for Literary Studies?

(1993/1994), pp. 323-329Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30204556Accessed: 19-07-2015 11:17 UTC

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Have It Your Way and Mine: The Theory of Styles

Ellen Spolsky

Bar-llan University, Ramat Gan, Israel e-mail: f24084 @barilvm.bitnet

Abstract: Olsen is right to note what can be done with a good theory and the right machine. His particular theory, however, is not transferable to literary studies. If we need a new model, I would suggest that cognitive science can provide a few interesting ones. I have begun to do some work based on David Marr's VISION, in which he hypothesizes two levels of processing within the visual module. My speculation has been on the parallel existence of distinguishable levels of conceptual or language organization which would correspond to the viewer and object centered perspectives Marr describes for vision. I propose to explore the possibility that we may find here the model for the existence of stylistic individualism within overarching historical stylistic generalizations, and even more, that this may be what feminists are searching for when they try to resist being coopted by the masculine language of objectivity.

Key Words: interpretive theory, meaning, computer-assisted research, stylistics, style, cognitive theory, private language, feminist language theory

There is no denying that the theoretical founda- tions of stylistics were faulty. Anyone who has not read Stanley Fish's 1973 article, "What is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" had better do so at once. Fish points out that a computer cannot discover patterns the researcher cannot prespecify. Since we would only prespecify a pattern we have already decided is meaningful, the computer is not, as had been claimed, "finding" patterns not apparent to human readers, and certainly cannot assign meaning to

Ellen Spolsky teaches English literature and

literary theory and is the Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research at Bar-Ilan

University, Israel. Her latest book is Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (SUNY Press, 1993).

the patterns it traces. The machines themselves, as Olsen notes, were not the problem, except in that they masked the enterprise of counting with the veneer of scientific rigor.

Olsen is therefore right to assume that what computer-aided research in literature needs is good theory. Semiotics, however, is not that theory - it is just more of the same stylistics, but on a larger scale. It still requires the kind of prespecification of meaningful units and leaves the key interpretive act to the human reader, namely the assignment of "meaning" to the units we have located and counted or compared. It is, however, the assignment of meaning itself that is the theoretical problem, and the computer's work has not made any contribution to it. All the language theorists quoted by Olsen, from Roland Barthes to Halliday and Jones, support, with different twists, Olsen's assumption that to declare language meaning to be socially constructed is to solve the theoretical problem of the source of meaning. But if meaning were always and only socially constructed, then there would be no such thing as personal style, because there would be no way for language to express anything different from (there would be nothing separable from) socially constructed systems. The theory we need will have to address both aspects of meaning assignment: how is the meaning of language socially constructed, and how does it, nevertheless, manage here and there to evade the conventions of the dominant system and communicate non-conventional meaning?

Recent work in cognitive science suggests a model by means of which we can explore the possibility that socially constructed semiotic systems do not exhaust the possibilities of meaning and communication, and that focus on

Computers and the Humanities 27: 323-329, 1993. @ 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



324 ELLEN SPOLSKY

them alone distorts and limits our understanding of language in general and literary texts in particular. I have recently written, within the context of a study of the modularity of knowledge systems within the human brain, about some research on the visual system which offers, I believe, a way of thinking about the problem. David Marr's 1982 book Vision, as amplified by Ray Jackendoff, suggests the possibility that language, like vision, might be a dual-coded system. If so, it might provide a theoretical escape from the traps Olsen identifies, and those he does not, so that we can begin, as he recommends, to take advantage of the power of computers to process very large amounts of text.

The part of Marr's theory that interests me is his discrimination between object centered and viewer centered vision, and his assumption that we need and make use of both simultaneously. His work suggests that the theoretically important distinction between one's private or self-centered understanding and one's more public, conven- tionally shared understanding actually has cognitive and physiological analogues. While I describe his theory briefly, it should be kept in mind that I intend to propose that the human language system may also make a similar distinction between object and viewer centered understanding.

In Marr's account (which, it should be noted, is a cognitive, computational account, not a neurological one), the visual system produces and manipulates several distinguishable levels of representation. Of particular interest to us are the "2 1/2D sketch" and the "3D model." The 2 1/2D sketch represents (in Jackendoff's formulation):

the geometry of the surfaces visible to the observer - including their contours, depth, and orientation - so it is more than a flat, two-dimensional image (a "picture in the head"). But since it represents only visible surfaces, not volumes, it is less than a full three-dimensional representation. (1987, p. 172)

The 2 1/2D sketch is considered to be viewer centred because the information it provides is encoded with reference to the viewer's position at the moment of encoding. It represents only surfaces, not objects, and is probably not depen- dent upon memory, and thus not culturally constructed. The 2 1/2D sketch assembles and represents incoming perceptual information for immediate use, but does not store it. A person

needs viewer or self-centered information in order to move among objects. If, however, every one of the successive takes on the world that passed in front of one's eyes were stored, the memory would very soon be full of out-of-date information.

The 3D model

is object centered rather than viewer centered: it makes explicit the shape and size constancy of objects, regardless of the viewer's position. It is therefore the level most appropriate for encoding an object's shape in long-term memory, so that it may be recognized on subsequent occasions.... (The viewer is unlikely to see it from exactly the same position again.) ...

What is particularly interesting about the 3D structure of an object is that it is hierarchical: it represents the three-dimensional structure of objects not just in terms of holistic shape (i.e., it is not a "statue in the head"), but rather in terms of a hierarchical decomposition of the object into parts and parts of parts. (1987, p. 174)

Hierarchical decomposition means that, for example, the finger is understood to be a part of the hand, the hand of the arm, the arm of the body. The visual equivalent of chains of inferences about relationships are thus part of the 3D model. If you see a part of a body (or of a familiar object) you assume not only the existence of the rest. You infer, as well, many characteristics of its physical disposition in relation to the part you have seen: if you see a limp, bloody hand in a movie frame, you infer a horizontal body. Jackendoff explains that

this, then, is what Marr means by saying the description is object centered: through recursive elaboration, the posi- tions of the parts of an object are specified ultimately with respect to the main axes of the object as a whole and can therefore be specified without mention of the viewer's position. (1987, p. 175)

The construction of the 3D model is surely aided by information already in the visual memory, even in making decisions about what constitutes an object. Memories and/or experience (if there is any difference) are what allow the visual system to make inferences about parts of the object that are occluded, or are not available for physical evaluation. Where memory and experience enter the model, we can begin to explain cultural construction: it is our experiences within the world and within culture that condition our interpretations of the visual field at this level of representation.

It is important to note that in the visual system,



THE THEORY OF STYLES 325

the viewer centered representation and object centered representation are both necessary to full visual competence. It is crucial that the construction of a higher level 3D model does not substi- tute for or supersede the 2 1/2D representation. What the visual system provides is a system of double coding, permitting adaptability as double coding does in other parts of our cognitive system, say, between the conceptual and visual modes. Either one or the other is, at a given moment, able to provide the appropriate representation for a given function. Furthermore, either model provides some sort of resistance to the too easy acceptance of the other simply by virtue of its presence or possibility. The resistance or correc- tive comes not from the object centered model but from the differences between the two versions.

The opposite of viewer centered representation in this description, namely object centered representation, need not be any more "true" or "real" than the viewer centered model. It is, if anything, less "real" since its three dimensionality is not present to the retina, but must be inferred. Its "objectivity" means only that it is understood in relationship to itself; it postulates object conti- nuity. It constructs the hierarchical relationships encoded in the model so that the existence and spatial orientation of a whole object can be inferred from the perception of a part.

Long-term storage of visual information, Marr assumes, is probably storage of the 3D model representation since that is more stable than the viewer centered appearance of an object in a fleeting world (Marr, 1982, p. 352). But this may be a mistake, based on Marr's not having read enough poetry, and on the assumption that there is limited storage space available - a neurological assumption which so far, at least, has no ground- ing. Not only poems but dreams, also, should make clear that we store all kinds of quirky aspects of our visual experience or visual imaginings, seemingly without regard to what our conscious selves would consider utilitarian purposefulness.

It is important to note that viewer centered and object centered perspectives do not necessarily overlap with the non-technical use of the terms "subjectivity" and "objectivity" in interpretive theoretical discussion, because both types of vision, as understood here, serve the individual. The object centered model is not objective either

in being unstructured by or irrelevant to the individual. Neither is it objective in the sense of being unambiguous, because it is far from being monolithic. It presents a hierarchy of relationships between distinguishable parts of an object, but what unit will be considered an object is left open, and is apparently responsive to the need of the moment. Thus we are free to infer several 3D views of an object or of a text, relating it to a number of expanding contexts. Different schools of criticism, I have argued (1993), define themselves as taking up these distinguishable perspectives, all of them in different proportions both object and viewer centered.

The existence of these two levels of visual representation suggests that the brain has similar flexibility in language ability, and that we might look for a similar distinction in language understanding and production. What do we find if we look for a distinction between talking about objects or ideas which are in some crucial aspects independent of the observer, in the public domain, as it were, and talking about speaker centered verbal understanding and production?'

One of the most interesting arguments for the non-metaphorical existence of and significance of double-coding throughout the interpretive system, derives from the recent and as yet inconclusive struggles of feminist scholars to understand the relationship between private and public language. They have been interested in investigating and nurturing a speaker centered stage of language, even while recognizing that any reports of such investigation must, in the meantime, be presented in the already in place language of wider communication. The difficulty of talking about one's dreams, and of expressing emotions in standard issue language, gives some sense of the difficulties of trying to express the private level in public. The "3D" language that allows individual experience to be shared also distorts it into a more public direction, making, as Jonathan Culler has observed, every "I love you" a quotation (1983).

A central issue for feminist theorists of language, then, has been how or even whether the valued individuality of the female subject can be preserved in its transformation from its bodily, primarily non-verbal awareness into conceptual- ization and expression in language. "Language," in these speculations, is routinely idealized and



326 ELLEN SPOLSKY

assumed to be univocal, hierarchical, object centered, public, and capable of expressing only those propositions that derive from what is usually thought of as rationality.2 Here is H616ne Cixous's famous attack on that kind of language, from her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa":

Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self- admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocen- trism. (1983, p. 283)

Other feminist scholars have proposed, however, that there is another kind of language representation. Call it, for the moment, as Cixous has, ecriture frminine.

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (1983, p. 287)

I propose we begin to think of this language as the equivalent of 2 1/2D vision, although I don't yet agree to give up the possibility of theorizing it. Indeed, the evidence from vision encourages attempts to describe and name it. We have some claims about what it will not be, and some guesses about what it will do. Its main function will be to allow and encourage the always present, but socially undervalued perceptions of individuals to be fully present to the individual's own intro- spective processes.3 It will be more attuned to the body than to abstractions, less bound by the hier- archies and logic of syntax (such as that may be) and more expressive of physical experience and private emotions. It certainly will not feel obligated to any kind of consistency. Cixous states:

A woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor - once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction - will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language .... Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. When id is ambiguously uttered - the wonder of being several - she doesn't defend herself

against these unknown women whom she's surprised at becoming, but derives pleasure from this gift of alterability. I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. (1983, pp. 289, 293)

Julia Kristeva talks about this new language in terms that connect it to postmodernist art and to political dissidence. In it, a writer

experiments with the limits of identity, producing texts where the law does not exist outside language. A playful language therefore gives rise to a law that is overturned, violated and pluralized, a law upheld only to allow a polyvalent, polylogical sense of play that sets the being of the law ablaze in a peaceful, relaxing void. As for desire, it is stripped down to its basic structure: rhythm, the conjunction of body and music, which is precisely what is put into play when the linguistic I takes hold of this law. (1986a, p. 295)

There is no shortage of skeptics to point out the difficulties of the project of excavation or inven- tion which these women have initiated.4 What is being written about this elusive, underdetermined level of language is metaphorical in the sense that all path-breaking scientific language must be metaphorical.' Figuration is not only inevitable but desirable at this early stage of theorizing when the goal is to describe a level of language which is specifically suited to the representation of those kinds of truths which are valued before, and also because, they are not yet fully negotiable in the public sphere. Indeed, both expressionist painting and literary language, if they are projected from this level of awareness, risk being misunderstood, and fail to communicate. Sometimes they need translators, as it were, to turn them into publicly understandable "messages." Overreliance on the public language, however, even when talking to oneself, has risks as well, as the feminists have recognized in a new way. But writers have always understood the danger of the loss of self within the public sphere.

There have always been, however, genres in which this language, or something near it can emerge - in poetry, and in fiction. The literary evidence of the existence of this level would offer an explanation for the quite proper reluctance of Cixous and Kristeva to assert that dcriture frminine is essentially gendered, i.e., is linked to sex chromosomes. Both women acknowledge that men and women can write in this mode. Cixous, for example, cites Colette, Duras, and Gen&t as




exemplars.6 Kristeva speculates about the appro- priateness of literature to this enterprise:

Is it because, faced with social norms, literature reveals a certain knowledge and sometimes the truth itself about an otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret and unconscious universe? Because it thus redoubles the social contract by exposing the unsaid, the uncanny? And because it makes a game, a space of fantasy and pleasure, out of the abstract and frustrating order of social signs, the words of everyday communication? . . . This identification with the potency of the imaginary . . . bears witness to women's desire to lift the weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders, to nourish our societies with a more flexible and free discourse, one able to name what has thus far never been an object of circulation in the community: the enigmas of the body, the dreams, secret joys, shames, hatreds of the second sex. (1986b, p. 207)

Kristeva acknowledges here that since women more than men have felt the burden of "the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactical sequence at the foundation of language and the social code" (1986b, p. 199), it is not surprising that they are carrying out the most active research and experimentation, from which, eventually, both men and women will benefit. She describes this work as

attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. I am not speaking here of a "woman's language," whose (at least syntactical) existence is highly problematical and whose apparent lexical specificity is perhaps more the product of a social marginality than of a sexual-symbolic difference. (1986b, p. 200)

The outcome of this new work, according to Kristeva, is "of epochal significance" (1986b, p. 200):

Through the efforts of thought in language, or precisely through the excesses of the languages whose very multi- tude is the only sign of life, one can attempt to bring about multiple sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void. This is the real cutting edge of dissidence. (1986a, p. 300)

From the explorations of feminist scholars, as well as from the evidence from vision, we are beginning to explore the entailments of the hypothesis that the ability to take advantage of parallel kinds of knowledge without collapsing them may be a general characteristic of human thinking. It is important to note that beyond postulating an additional level of structure to the model of language interpretation and production,

the above hypothesis crucially reweights the 2 1/2D and 3D levels in both language and vision so that, instead of the 2 1/2D being a step to be passed through and beyond, it is valued for the particular kind of knowledge it can provide. The relationship between the pairs of possibilities (visual/linguistic, viewer or object centered), then, could be said to be a cooperative one: each level will handle what it can do best.

Postulating a competitive relation between alternatives as a source of new knowledge, Karl Popper,7 has described the dialectics of mind as that between hypothesis formation and testing. We have various ways of knowing, and have to find out which one is best suited to a specific situation:

I think that the integration of the different senses and their mutual cooperation is very largely a matter of the mutual checking and mutual criticism, as it were, of one set of interpretations by another. (1977, p. 435)

If this hypothesis is anywhere near the mark, it installs the consideration of alternatives into a theory of interpretation. Multiple coding, on the view being argued here, produces a functional richness of interpretive possibilities and is also productive of change. Gombrich speaks about "the sacred discontent" that arises as the result of the perception that the expected and the actual do not match. Here is Gombrich's description of the par- adigmatic Renaissance artist:

The hallmark ... of the postmedieval artist is not facility, which he avoids, but constant alertness. Its symptom is the ... many sketches which precede the finished work and, for all the skill of hand and eye that marks the master, a constant readiness to learn, to make and match and remake till the portrayal ceases to be a secondhand formula and reflects the unique and unrepeatable experience the artist wishes to seize and hold. (1969, p. 173)

Gombrich's formulation, with its emphasis on the need to find an expression of "the unique and unrepeatable experience" of a particular person's perception at a particular moment, describes better than Popper's notion of refutation the way in which the conflicts between multiple representa- tions serve individual contingency without tri- umphalism. Popper understands science as tossing out refuted hypotheses, but at this point, the history of science and the history of poetry and art diverge. Harold Bloom would not stop reading Wordsworth because Wallace Stevens "revised" Wordsworth's vision (1973), nor would Gombrich



328 ELLEN SPOLSKY

banish medieval art from the galleries because its perspective was inaccurate. Perhaps we should conclude, then, that the insistence of readers on maintaining their own perspectives in interpretation should not ultimately be a barrier to understanding between people. One should be able to see an issue from different perspectives as well as from one's own, without having to dismiss either.

My speculation has been on the parallel existence of distinguishable levels of conceptual or language organization which would correspond to the viewer and object centered perspectives Marr describes for vision. It is here, I suggest, we might find the model for the existence of stylistic individualism within overarching historical stylistic generalizations, and that this may be what feminists are searching for when they try to resist being coopted by the language of objectivity, power, and public negotiation. Women and men who are searching for a feminine or private language, are looking for something that does seem to be within each of us, but has almost by definition been undervalued within the public culture. The writer who develops a personal style may be searching for a way to negotiate a self so as to avoid bumping into the hard edges and pointy corners of the public world.

In short, my proposal vis-a-vis Olsen's paper, is that we do not return to semiotics - it was the problem in the first place, because it did not deal with the complexities of how meaning is made. We might have, rather, in cognitive theory, encour- agement for the study of the interrelationship between any writer's personal language by means of which one describes one's private attempts to orient oneself in the world, and the public language in which one conducts much of life. Then, as Olsen suggests, we could use computers and vast text bases to provide, at a gross level of description, a picture of public language at different stages of history. We could use sheer quantity to overwhelm individual prejudices about what might or should be a meaningful kind of unit to count, by simply counting and comparing everything we can along as many parameters as we can. The study of 2 1/2D languages, or what we are used to calling individual styles, can be left to the close readers who have always known that all they can do is make guesses about how another

person may be trying to express a personal vision. I see that, in the end, I agree with Olsen's proposal about what we might actually do more than I agree with his explanation of why we should do it. We could certainly try.

Notes 1 See Spolsky (1993) for arguments that the parallel between vision and language is more than just metaphorical. 2 See Showalter (1981) for a summary of the ways women's language might be theorized as different from men's.

3 I am thinking here of Chomsky's insistence (1975) that the main function of language is to allow thought, and that it is only secondarily a means of communication between people. 4 See, for example, Moi (1985), Jones (1985) and Gilbert and Gubar (1987).

See Boyd, Kuhn, and Pylyshyn, in Ortony (1979) and Hesse (1988). 6 The undervaluation of the non-conventional is to be found in the perennial poetic complaint against poetic convention. It is interesting that Sir Philip Sidney pictures himself as woman when he voices his discontent in the first sonnet of his "Astrophel and Stella": "Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,/Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:/'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart, and write!'"

7 The discussion of Popper's position is clearest in his dialogue with the neurophysiologist John Eccles in the con- clusion to their jointly authored book, The Self and Its Brain.

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Cohen and Paula Cohen. In The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship. Eds. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 279-97.

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Fish, Stanley. "What is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" In Approaches to Poetics. Ed. Seymour Chatman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, pp. 109-52.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

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