Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The novelist Adam Thirlwell has argued that the meaning of the word style changed in 1857.[162] In the convincing story he tells, style flipped over, almost in one go, from being a description of the elegance of a whole manner of expression to being about just one subelement in the composition of prose—the sentence. The culprits for this radical reduction of style were Gustave Flaubert, his novel Madame Bovary, and the many comments Flaubert made about sentences in his partly teasing letters to his girlfriend, Louise Colet. Since 1857 or thereabouts, Thirlwell argues, critics and readers have needlessly restricted their idea of a writer’s style to those low-level features of grammar and prosody that can be exhaustively identified between a capital letter and a period. Henri Godin, writing about “the stylistic resources of French” just after the Second World War, was quite certain that style and syntax are the same thing and reach their point of perfect harmony in the writing of … Flaubert.[163]

Because the grammatical forms, the sounds of individual words, and the characteristic voice rhythms of any two languages do not match (if they did we would call them the same language), the “Flaubert shift” made style instantly untranslatable. Thirlwell’s main aim is to show that this is nonsense—and that the novel is a truly international and translinguistic form of art.

At some point in the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of style as “the aesthetics of the sentence” got thoroughly muddled up with a completely different tradition that came to France and Britain from German universities. Scholars in departments of Romance philology tended to justify the attention they paid to canonical writers on the grounds that their works represented special, innovative uses of language, distinct from the norms of the speech community, and were therefore important factors in the course of linguistic change. Poets, they argued, were not simply users of language but the creators of it; a language was not a smooth and rounded whole but a gnarled old potato marked by bumps and dents that speak the history of its creation. “Style research,” or Stilistik, pursued with fervor for a hundred years, and reaching its brilliant peak in the essays of Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), was an exciting but quite circular pursuit: the language of a “great work” becomes a fine-grained map of the ineffable individuality of some great writer’s “self”; but the “self” or the essence of, let us say, Racine is entirely constituted by what can be mapped through his language, subjected to a particular kind of analysis of his style. Style in this sense is inimitable by definition—that’s the point of it. And if it can’t be imitated in the same language, it’s not even worth trying to translate it.

But it isn’t true. Most of the features of language use that Spitzer identified as significant aspects of Racine’s “self,” for example, can also be found in the language of Racine’s contemporaries writing in the same literary genres. Yet the remarkable tenacity of the philologists’ principle that every great writer has a manner that is unique and inimitable led people to reinvent the very history of the idea of “style.” They went back to Buffon’s famous “Discourse,” took his maxim that le style c’est l’homme même (“style is what makes us human”), lopped off the last word, and recycled the remainder—le style, c’est l’homme—so as to prove that “the style is the man.” As the noted Oxford scholar R. A. Sayce put it in his 1953 study Style in French Prose, “details of style … reveal the deeper intentions and characteristics of a writer, and they must be dictated by some inner reason.”[164]

“Style” thus has a very curious history. A sentence uttered in 1753 as a defense of literary eloquence came to be touted around as a pithy formulation of the idea that no two people speak or write in exactly the same way because no two speakers are the same person.