philosophies of style and their implications for composition

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Philosophies of Style and Their Implications for Composition Author(s): John T. Gage Source: College English, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Feb., 1980), pp. 615-622Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/375906Accessed: 28-11-2015 06:05 UTC

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College Vol. 41, No. 6 * FEBRUARY I1980 > ?

English

JOHN T. GAGE

Philosophies of Style and Their Implications for Composition

THE NEW EDITION of Robert M. Eastman's composition textbook, entitled Style: Writing as the Discovery of Outlook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), opens with the following epigraph by Paul Tillich: "Every style points to a self- interpretation of man, thus answering the question of the ultimate meaning of life." Those of us who must read composition textbooks are well aware of the inflated claims made on their behalf. But, none of us who teach composition, I hope, think of ourselves as teaching "style" precisely in order to answer the question of the ultimate meaning of life for our students. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which Tillich's words "self-interpretation"-more modestly conceived-are related to the teaching of style, as I hope to show. Tillich's statement is not simply an assertion about style. It is also a representative theory of style, one which competes with other theories on a philosophical level. If one theory of style purports to answer ultimate questions and another does not, then clearly the problem of style is more than a linguistic or a rhetorical problem. It is also an epistemological one.

The fact that style is at once a linguistic, a rhetorical, and a philosophical concept is one of the reasons that the term itself is in dispute. It is possible to be satisfied with a definition of style on one of these levels (or from one of these perspectives, to avoid the metaphor of hierarchy) only to discover that it raises problems on another. As a linguistic concept, style may be defined in terms of grammatical norms and operations of variance. But such a definition can provide little help in settling typical

John T. Gage is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. His previous contribution to College English, "Conflicting Assumptions about Intention in Teaching Reading and Composition," appeared in November 1978.

Professor Gage's essay is revised from a paper delivered at the Confirence on College Composition and Communica- tion, Denver, April 1978. He wishes to thank the NEH and the University of Colorado for the opportunity to attend the Summer Institute in Aesthetics, "The Concept of Style," in Boulder, June 1977, where many of the ideas of this essay were discussed.

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stylistic questions raised from a rhetorical perspective, such as whether all stylistic features thus defined are chosen and, indeed, whether they will have an effect on an audience. For the rhetorician, then, style may be defined in terms of what is chosen and what does create effects. This perspective, however, raises questions about the relationship of form and content, or even more problematically, about free will (the nature of choice) and belief (the relation of what is said to reality). Rhetoric always illustrates the problem of the relation of wisdom to eloquence, but does not provide the means, it seems, to solve it. And so rhetoric, likewise, may not provide a methodology for answering questions about style that may be of interest to a philosopher. It is the interesting thing about methodology-as Aristotle pointed out-that the first principles of any method (in this case the definition of style) cannot be established by using the techniques of the method itself. This vexation is compounded by the fact that in discussions of style we often shift from one method (or definition) to another without acknowledging that we are doing so, as we draw on evidence from linguistics, for instance, to prove a rhetorical point, or from rhetoric to prove a philosophical one. The evidence in such cases is often quite valid, of course, because these perspectives interrelate in non-trivial ways. My point momentarily will be that evidence drawn from a philosophical perspective even pro- vides premises for linguistic and rhetorical conclusions, and that a linguistic or rhetorical stance usually implies an ideological one. Ideology bears on our conception of style precisely at the point that we consider language as either adequate or inadequate to the task of depicting reality. Whether language is considered to be either often depends on the sort of reality that is posited, and on the further question of the mind's ability to perceive it. By ideology, then, I mean simply a conception of what is real, in the sense that materialism or relativism are ideologies.

I wish to illustrate the relation of such conceptions to language and style by turn-

ing to a particular controversy, and I choose one sufficiently remote to be easily reduced to a main point of conflict, but which nevertheless concerns many issues still with us. I am referring to the controversy between two schools of classical

grammarians, the analogists and the anomalists, which is given perhaps its fullest treatment in the De Lingua Latina of Varro in the first century B.C.1 The conflict is

interesting, from our point of view, because the clash between concepts of grammar resulted precisely from conflicts between philosophical systems. On the one hand, the analogists believed language to be a system of perfectly ordered relations in which patterns of symmetry and repetition governed grammatical forms. The

analogists conceived of language in this way because they considered it to be part of a universe which was itself a system of perfectly ordered relations governed by the same patterns, hence the name "analogists" (though if such a school were to exist

today, we might call its members "isomorphists"). For the analogist, language was not only a part of the law and order of the universe, but it was itself a sign of that law and order, and thus a way of discovering and verifying universal truths. The

analogist grammarians, therefore, who were concerned primarily with using analogy as a method of correcting Greek texts such as Homer's-written in what for them

'See R. H. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe with Particular Reference to Modern

Linguistic Doctrine (London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1951), pp. 50-55, and F. H. Colson, "The Analogist and Anomalist Controversy," Classical Quarterly, 13 (1919), 24-36.



Philosophies of Style and Their Implications for Composition 617

was a dead language-buttressed their editorial efforts by appealing to metaphysical evidence to support their grammatical revisions.2

The anomalists, on the other hand, countered this method with the new science of etymology, for they were quick to point out, against the analogists' claims, that a living language was anything but a perfect system, that it was, in fact, full of irregularities due to the nature of its development. Just as in the case of the analogists, this fact had metaphysical implications, for it meant to the anomalists that language either did not reveal signs of an orderly universe or else the universe which it re- vealed was not orderly. Just as the analogist position supported an epistemology because it conceived of language as a source of knowledge about reality, the anomalist position embraced skepticism. If language was disordered it could not be a source of knowledge, or else it was a source of knowledge of disorder, which was hardly any better. The controversy itself was limited mainly to debates about the proper form of grammatical construction in problematical cases, the analogists tending toward the revision of language, the anomalists tending toward trying to account for the irregularities and separating philosophical inquiry into truth from the in- adequacies of language.

The value of remembering what the analogists and the anomalists debated is that it illustrates that notions of grammar, and style itself, are subject to such philosophical concerns as the assumed relation of language to reality. Very few stylistic con- troversies manage to escape them. The current debate about the gender of pro- nouns, for example, seems to have an underlying analogist vs. anomalist basis in that those who argue against the use of the generic "he" cite the reality behind the word and those on the other side cite conventions of usage that have no such reality "really." Each defends a theory of how language reflects what is true. The original analogists and anomalists, in fact, struggled over similar problems of gender.

To say that modern linguistics has adopted an anomalist view of language, because it grounds meaning in usage and convention, or because (after Whorf) it as- sumes that such conventions influence perception, is obviously to tell only half the story. If one replaced the notion of "universe" with the notion of "mind," I think it could be said that the efforts of the generative grammarians are motivated by something like the analogists' faith in the existence of order when they seek to create the most "elegant" set of rules to account for "any and only" grammatical sequences or when they seek out language "universals." Recent stylistic discussions of poetry, on the generative model, have even attempted to make the previously so-called "de- viant" structures in poetry conform to such an underlying order by advocating the augmentation and perfection of the grammar to account for them.3

My purpose in citing these cases has been to show that in our speculations about the nature of language we make assumptions about the adequacy of language to reveal the structure of reality, based on our sense of language as either a direct manifestation of an orderly reality or a useful but imperfect (at any rate, indirect) manifestation of a reality maybe orderly, maybe not. And further, such philosophi-

2Colson, 25-26. 3See Uriel Weinreich, "Explorations in Semantic Theory," in Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. Thomas

A. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), and the discussion by Samuel R. Levin, The Semantics of Metaphor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), esp. p. 18.



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cal questions can be related directly to style, and so must, indirectly at least, influence our thinking about the teaching of writing.

Louis Milic, in an essay called "Theories of Style and Their Implications for Com- position," has shown that theories of style can be categorized as either dualistic or monistic, referring to those theories in which style is something akin to "manner" on the one hand, and something akin to "vision" on the other.4 The former is exemplified by the rhetorical tradition, in which style is seen as a separate part of the composing process, or elocutio. The latter is exemplified by the "New Critical" position, as in Monroe Beardsley's contention that every change in style is a change in meaning. It would seem, and does seem to Milic, that you cannot have it both ways. Style is either separate from invention or it is one of the aspects of invention. In the one case, the reality of the thing said and the way in which it is said are assumed to exist separately; in the other case they are not. Each way can be taught, however, as Milic points out, and each will "imply vastly different strategies" for teaching. Later, I wish to show that we do "have it both ways" when we teach, and why, in a way, we must.

Among other considerations, then, stylistic issues revolve around the question of whether style is itself expressive or whether it merely permits expression, so that one can speak of a writer as either having a style or of working in a style, a distinction recently argued by Richard Wollheim.5 It is similar to a distinction made by Aristot- le in a discussion of virtue: Anyone can do virtuous things, Aristotle said, but that does not make one a virtuous person. Rather, a virtuous person is one who does virtuous things virtuously, meaning, presumably, as a matter of internalized habit. Likewise in the matter of style. A given feature in a work of art or writing is am- biguously either a manifestation in a style, such as a forger is able to produce, or a manifestation of a style, in which case style is that artist's unique "signature." These conclusions, Wollheim argues, derive from methods of stylistic investigation. On the one hand, features in a style result from the adoption of a taxonomic method, i.e., the labelling of features according to what style they are in, categories coming from outside the work itself. On the other hand, features of a style result from the adoption of a generative method, as Wollheim calls it, i.e., the description of the habitual process of creation as a set of operations, unique to the work or its maker's psychological habits. Style as the integration of personality, in other words, is conceived of as a process. Style as the application of conscious choice is conceived of as a structure of elements.

Just as in the case of the analogist and anomalist controversy, these views of style and methods of stylistic description suggest differing assumptions about reality, in this case the reality of personality. On the generative model, personality is conceived as a fixed entity, and on the taxonomic model it is conceived as a flexible entity, or at least one that is unknowable through its expressions, as in the case of the successful forgery. This distinction makes it somewhat easier to see why Tillich can say that style "points to a self-interpretation of man," because "style" is used

4In Contemporary Essays on Style: Rhetoric, Linguistics and Criticism, ed. Glen A. Love and Michael Payne (New York: Scott, Foresman, 1969), pp. 15-21.

5"Two Views of Visual Style," Lecture, The Summer Institute in Aesthetics, University of Colorado, Boulder, June 6, 1977. The following example from Aristotle is Wollheim's also.




here, generatively, to refer to a process by which personality is discovered, a true personality which is a visible sign of an order, or consistency, residing within and therefore, for Tillich, part of an ontological proof. The monistic ideals that have been suggested for style in this sense not only identify form and content but content and person, and in some cases content and truth. Thus, in discussing "style without rhetoric," Remy de Gourmont could once advocate that "It suffices . . . to use no word when one is not sure of its meaning-that is, its symbolic connection with reality-to speak only what one has seen, heard, felt."6 More recent advocates for such "honesty" in writing abound. The dualistic ideals that have been suggested for style, however, not only separate form and content, but, in a sense, they also separate the self from the expression, and from the truth. Thus, the rhetorical ideal that language is a tool, potentially to be applied equally in the service of truth or false- hood, has the effect of relativizing the self and the truth. We get, then, in the rhetorical tradition, a range of epistemologies from the relativism of the sophists to the concept of self within "a community of selves," which, in Wayne Booth's at- tempts to replace the idea of self-evidence with the idea of assent,7 is shown to be a way of seeing the effect of the relativizing of the self in a positive philosophical light.

Milic concludes his essay by saying that not only must the composition teacher choose between the monistic and the dualistic theories of style, but also that the choice must be in favor of the dualistic theory. To him, this is the only way that one can teach writing as a skill. In the terms I have used to discuss style, this would mean adopting a taxonomic, rather than a generative, method. It would also mean, in other terms, relativizing the idea of "self' and, possibly, of belief. To an extent, we must sympathize. The opposite choice is a disadvantage to any teacher who thinks, as I do, that it is possible and necessary to show students that what they have written is not the best way of saying what they meant. But it seems clear to me that what we actually teach is a combination of both theories, and I would feel safer in asserting that it is not a question of having to choose, but rather one of being clear about what assumptions we appeal to when we employ either strategy.

To illustrate just one way in which as composition teachers we straddle the fence between the monistic and dualistic, the analogist and anomalist views-seeming to hold two contradictory sets of assumptions about language and reality-consider the process of revision and its relation to what we might call the "plain style." I know of no composition textbook that does not advocate revision as a means of teaching students to exercise control over the options they face while writing. Re-writing, then, is viewed as a means of improving a first attempt, bringing it closer to the student's intentions. Usually, students are advised to re-write in the direction of clarity and economy, toward saying exactly what they mean, which might involve eliminating circumlocution, using the specific or idiomatic expression in favor of the general or technical, among other ways of adjusting the diction to fit a presumed intention. In the first place, by stressing revision, we are advocating a separation between the way a thing is said, in its unrevised form, and the ideas themselves, unclothed, that is, in words. In the second place, however, by stressing clarity and

6Selected Writing, ed. and trans. Glen S. Burns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 126. 7See Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. pp.

126-137.



620 COLLEGE ENGLISH

the "plain style"-the precise and straightforward way of saying a thing-we seem to call upon precisely the opposite assumption, namely that there is one ideally suited linguistic formula for each idea. The idea that there is such a thing as a "plain style," so considered, carries with it the assumption that words can unequivocally stand for reality, and further, perhaps, that the mind can pierce through the clutter of words, using such a purified style, to speak the truth which the abstract or roundabout or imprecise way of saying a thing is blamed for concealing from us. Thus in poetic theory, the "plain style" is often contrasted with "rhetoric," or those verbal excesses which cloud the poet's perception and which have to be purged from poetry if it is to report the truth.8

To illustrate further, there has been a lengthy discussion by teachers of composition recently about "double-speak" and our responsibility to make our students aware of it and to set a good example as educators by eliminating it from our own deliberations. George Orwell's illustration of the power of language over our thinking-double-think-is sufficient reason to take up this endeavor whole- heartedly. I have no quarrel with the idea that double-speak is pernicious. But I begin to get nervous when arguments for its elimination propose as the alternative a purified diction in which the direct, unmediated correspondence of word to idea is restored to some assumed original state. I do not think that this is the alternative, because I would argue, perhaps from an anomalist's perspective, that such a uni- vocal relation of word to idea is wishful thinking, at best, and has not been shown to exist. Certainly the question of double-speak, like so many other stylistic questions, is a matter of audience, not a matter of the corruption of "pure" meaning. Meaning results from conventional agreement within a rhetorical community, no less so when we choose the "plain" word as when the technicians communicate with each other perfectly in their pernicious jargons. Yet I find Orwell's advice compelling. Simplify your language, he said in "Politics and the English Language," and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be evident, even to yourself. This is what Tillich meant by style as a process of self-interpretation. But it is also self-interpretation in a less absolute sense than Tillich intended, that is, within a rhetorical community of others. We might want our students to avoid "double-speak" in order to be able to know when they are saying something stupid. But we also want them to know that they are speaking to, and participants in, an audience. We are educating them as members of audiences as much as "selves."

Thus, I think that we ought to go on teaching both revision and a preference for the precise, even though these ends seem to involve us in conflicting assumptions. What this conflict tells me is that we cannot teach writing in the absence of its relation to thinking and to knowing. It seems to me that this requires acknowledging both sets of assumptions at once, by acknowledging that a change in style is a change in thought-if we consider monistically that ideas and their expression are inseparable-and at the same time that a change in style is not a change in thought-if we consider dualistically that intention and its expression must be separable or we could never know what we wanted to say until we had already said it.

8As Herbert Read, for example, maintained by calling rhetoric "a corruption of the poetic conscious- ness" in "The Image and Modern Poetry," The Tenth Muse (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 122.




I may seem to be engaging in a bit of "double-think" myself by saying both of these things at once, and I gladly confess it. I was pleased to hear Del Kehl, a member of the NCTE Double-Speak Committee, recently cite Montaigne on the essential double-ness of the mind, suggesting that the complete elimination of everybody's idea of what constitutes double-speak is not only impossible, but contrary to something deeply, and perhaps usefully, a part of the human condition. Montaigne's words are these: "We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn."9 We cannot rid ourselves of the language of double-speak, though we might condemn it, until we can believe in language purified of usage. And this is something that we seem to believe in while we use language to express ourselves, as Montaigne might say, only while we know to disbelieve it. When we confront a choice of styles, in our efforts to compose our thoughts, we discover that language is capable of expressing no more than half-truths. Such a discovery is preferable to a conception of language as expressing the whole truth, however, to the extent that we wish to view the imagination as capable of play and exploration. Thus, Wallace Stevens objected to the anti-rhetorical poetics of Imagism on just such grounds: with its notion of the plain style, of one and only one "exact word" for each glimpse of reality, came a deterministic view of the truth. It presumed a limit to what the poet could think and write, rather than a world of unforseen possibilities. This double-ness of vision, then, with both possibilities of language taken together, seems inevitable to me in teaching writing as both the end and the means of thought.

So, as I teach the composition skills of revision and clarity of diction, I am teaching, as Eastman's title suggests, a process by which outlook is discovered. I am, however, on the epistemological level, also teaching that outlook itself is not a simple matter of discovering one thing, or of making use of one faculty of the mind. Rather, I am teaching that as a composition is revised and words are substituted for one another, a writer is arbitrating between two things: the difference in what is thought and expressed and the sameness of what is thought and expressed. Put another way, these compositional acts reveal the power of words to provide and guide what we think, but they also reveal the power of intention. We could not be guided without some sense of where we wished to be guided to, a sense which is itself, perhaps, unguided and unprovided by words. Both of these powers-of language and of intention-are at work, it seems to me, when we compose. In regard to style, this means that we both undergo a process and hook into a taxonomy. In regard to the self, it means that what we discover as we write is both a "true" self and a self adapted to a rhetorical situation comprising other selves. In regard to truth, it means that how we know is both something like a process with rules and procedures and also something like an adventure with leaps and risks.

My contention here is simply that we should remain aware of these possibilities by acknowledging the assumptions we make about reality-both its knowability and its unknowability-as we advocate this or that technique or method. I say this only in order that we should not mislead either ourselves or our students. I do not see how a composition course can fail to confront students with the question of how they

9Quoted in Del Kehl, "Public Doublespeak: Hocus-Pocus and the Gift of Double Focus," College English, 39(1977), 396.



622 COLLEGE ENGLISH

know what they want to say, i.e., with epistemology, if only to the extent that it makes them aware that language is at once a tool and a trap. Since language is a way of seeing, to paraphrase Kenneth Burke on metaphor, it is also a way of not seeing. As a means of seeing it gives our ideas a quality of fixedness. As a tool for expression, however, it forces those ideas into forms that always seem to be only more or less adequate. Composition students, no less than anyone, can only benefit by being shown that the relation of writing to thinking is problematical. We have to thread our way between the idea that we come to know to the extent that we can say, and that we come to say to the extent that we can know.

Two contemporary poets amusingly express these points of view in epigrams. J. V. Cunningham wrote:

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.10

The danger of dualism, or pluralism, in other words, is more than the loss of belief. We might humanize teaching to the point of making our students into scatter-brains, and perhaps we have. Cunningham would have us be like Samuel Johnson, who kicked at a rock to refute Berkeley, and fall back on what we know. But Richard Wilbur composed this rejoinder to Johnson:

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.11

The danger of monism, then, is equally apparent. When you fall back on what you know, you trust the support of clouds of unknowing. The reason I illustrate these points by juxtaposing the two epigrams is this: The poems are controlled manifesta- tions of their intentions. They have a style in common, consciously chosen. They are also, however, the result of moments in the poets' attentions that cannot be explained as a result of having chosen and used this style. No amount of revision, deliberation, control can account for that instant when the right word popped into each poet's head, no more so than if it had come to him in a dream. Yet without control, deliberation, or choice, they could not have written the poems. And, of course, so long as the contrary sentiments are expressed by poems, we feel no com- pulsion to have to chose between them.

?The Collected Poems and Epigrams ofJ. V. Cunningham (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971), p. 117. lThe Poems of Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1963), p. 121.



philosophies of style and their implications for composition

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