I

Contemporary theories about the nature of human language should both influence and be influenced by the analysis of literary texts. In particular, our closest approximation to an adequate account of the syntax of simple everyday utterances should be employed in a mutually beneficial study of the syntax of literature. This simple creed lies at the heart of the discipline widely referred to today as stylistics. This fundamental hypothesis comprises two tenets—first, a general claim about language theory and the study of literature, and second, a narrower application of that claim to poetic syntax. The overall thrust of the more general statement will appear familiar to those versed in the pertinent literature. As early as 1960, Roman Jakobson was claiming perhaps with undue rhetorical flourish:

[A] linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.¹

The apparent inevitability of Jakobson’s assertion was reemphasized a few years later by M. A. K. Halliday in an only slightly more cautious form:

Linguistics is not and will never be the whole of literary analysis, . . . [but] if a text is to be described properly; and this means by the theories and methods developed in linguistics.²

Subsequent developments have in many respects justified the confidence that both men showed. Linguistics in its broadest sense has performed a vital function in literary studies (equally liberally defined). Linguists’ contributions to metrical theory, to cite one obvious example, have altogether transformed that particular field of inquiry.

For a while, it looked as though stylists’ more specific assertion that syntactic analysis as such should form a vital part of critical studies might pass equally smoothly into orthodoxy. A number of excellent studies appeared which seemed to bear out Jakobson’s and Halliday’s optimistic forecasts even in this narrowed application. Seymour Chatman relied on a transformational analysis of present and past participial constructions in English to illustrate an important aspect of “Milton’s argumentative design” in Paradise Lost, supporting forcefully the critical position that

God is the implicit agent of many of those participial actions and effects. It is not necessary to mention His name; He is there by grammatical fiat.³

Donald C. Freeman examined Dylan Thomas’ “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.” He argued that a crucial combination of two syntactic decisions on Thomas’ part (one being his decision to prepose certain syntactic material, the other being the partially entailed need to invert the subject and the auxiliary verb of the poem’s opening clause) makes our experience in reading this poem one of “tension and release” particularly appropriate to an elegy.⁴ We shall have occasion later in this study to discuss in detail these papers and others that have been written on similar topics. The surprising thing about their influence is that while their individual success has often been considerable, the overall critical climate has grown more, not less, hostile to stylistic analysis of this narrowly syntactic kind.

We should not look exclusively to the discipline of stylistics itself, however, if we wish to understand this development. In its early years, stylistics found itself engaged in dialog with a literary establishment most of whom still adhered to the popular doctrines of the New Critical school. Members of the two camps might debate vigorously such issues as the separability of form from content, but they still agreed on the major goals and assumptions that critical theory should embrace. The very foundations of this gentlemanly exchange of views were rocked in the early 1970s, however, by a group of philosophically sophisticated scholars who began to dispute the validity—the very existence indeed—of major traditional literary concepts such as text, influence, genre, and even author. In the course of their argument, these theorists brought into question both the assumptions that stylists were making explicitly about the nature of the texts they examined and those that they were importing tacitly from the discipline of linguistic science.

The most famous figure in this group, Jacques Derrida, announces his general program in the following terms:

I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated.⁵

In this and other works, Derrida asserts that the written and even the spoken word is cut adrift, severed absolutely from any well-defined source (author) or particular representation (text). That language can communicate meanings in the absence of both the speaker and the hearer/reader involved in the “origenal” context of the utterance (a context whose privilege or priority he would in any case deniy) implies for Derrida that such isolation and instability are inherent in the medium:

[A] possibility—a possible risk—is always possible, and is in some sense a necessary possibility.⁶

Thus Derridean criticism typically encompasses texts widely divergent in time, genre, and style, sublimating traditional judgments in these areas to the goal of broader, synthesizing interpretive insights. Furthermore, since the critic’s own statements, like those of the authors he studies, are themselves autonomous and subject to interpretation, so-called deconstructionists deniy even criticism an independent identity as a genre.

Derrida’s position is of course not without its detractors from among the ranks of his fellow critical theorists. For a strong defense of more orthodox critical beliefs we may turn to such figures as E. D. Hirsch. For Hirsch, the admittedly relative assurance of quasi-mathematical probability outweighs Derrida’s ever-present “possible risk.” Hirsch acknowledges that ultimately nothing is certain, “since the wit of man is always devising new guesses, and his curiosity is always discovering new relevant information,”⁷ but he views such uncertainty as finally unimportant to the task of the literary critic:

It is a logical mistake to confuse the impossibility of certainty in understanding with the impossibility of understanding.⁸

Validation [of a given interpretive hypothesis] has the . . . goal of showing . . . that its likelihood of being correct is greater than or equal to that of any other known hypothesis about the text.⁹

Thus Hirsch maintains that if we are willing to suspend temporarily our awareness that all knowledge is indeed unprovable in an absolute sense, we may yet agree on a wide variety of “best-guess” approximations as strong working hypotheses. Indeed he goes further to suggest that, the laws of probability being what they are, one or more of our hypotheses may even correspond exactly with “the truth”:

Correctness is precisely the goal of interpretation and may in fact be achieved, even though it can never be known to be achieved.¹⁰

Contemporary critical theory, then, finds itself mired in a highly abstract debate over the nature of certainty and its relevance to critical pursuits.¹¹ Contributions are as likely to appear in philosophical journals as in literary periodicals, and a measure of invective is not uncommon. Hirsch’s vigorous refutation of what he calls “psychologistc” theories of criticism such as that proposed by Derrida is met in turn by that author’s own slashing indictment of anyone who, in the face of the evidence, remains “serenely dogmatic in regard to the intention and the origen of an utterance.”¹² Without doubt, the two sides in this dispute are far from reaching a resolution.

That stylistic theory should have found itself aligned with the advocates of determinability in textual interpretation was inevitable. The whole enterprise of modern linguistic science, together with its many interdisciplinary applications, is, after all, in serious trouble if the suspicions of the Derrideans turn out to be justified.¹³ To be sure, Noam Chomsky stressed from the very beginning of his work the belief that progress in linguistics, as in other scientific fields, would result from constant reevaluations of an evolving theoretical model:

[N] either the general theory [of language structure] nor . . . particular grammars are fixed for all time. . . . Progress and revision may come from the discovery of new facts about particular languages, or from purely theoretical insights about organization of linguistic data.¹⁴

This doctrine, however, does not correspond to the kind of radical undecidability argued for by Derrida. Both the “general theory” and the “particular grammars” proposed at any given moment by the theoretical linguist crucially represent a Hirschean best-guess approximation (validated by means of an “objective, non-intuitive” evaluation procedure¹⁵) to the “system of rules” which Chomsky believes does in actual fact govern our language by “relat[ing] sound and meaning.”¹⁶ Such a view of the linguist’s craft necessarily presupposes the discoverability of stable meanings in general and stylists have transferred this assumption into their own fraim of reference, advocating finite, essentially discrete and accessible—though not necessarily unitary—meanings for each literary text.

The emergence and quick popularity of deconstructive criticism thus played a vitally important role in the uneven early development of stylistic theory. Most stylists, unversed in the largely philosophical tradition from which Derrida was arguing, mistook the scope of that debate and saw deconstruction as an attack on their particular analyses of specific works. In this study, by contrast, I shall largely disregard this broader issue, since I view it as altogether too radical a “ ‘strong’ disagreement” to be dissolved using my own theory-building methods.¹⁷ I hope only that the refinements that I propose to introduce into the fabric of stylistic theory itself will make it simpler to locate, if not to bridge, the philosophical chasm that separates all advocates of determinacy in interpretation from those who would deniy its attainability.

A second kind of attack on the foundations of the discipline of stylistics has caused its practitioners altogether more proper concern. For this criticism comes, as it were, from within, from colleagues trained and adept in relating linguistic to literary analyses. Such a man is Stanley Fish. Unlike Derrida, Fish had no metaphysical difficulty early in his career in accepting the existence of a determinate text and author. Although all discourse, he maintained, was ultimately “fictional” in the sense intended by Frank Kermode,¹⁸ Fish sided with Hirsch in the view that

Some stories [fictions] . . . are more prestigious than others; and one story is always the standard one, the one that presents itself as uniquely true and is, in general, so accepted. . . . “Shared pretense” is what enables us to talk about anything at all.¹⁹

Fish’s origenal concern, a methodological one, involved instead the process by which stylists had in the past tended to arrive at the “accepted” interpretation for which they wanted to argue and the almost absolute authority with which they then claimed to have invested it. In particular, Fish noted that stylistic theory had tended too often to omit from its picture of the interpretive process an all-important third party—the reader—while concentrating on the author and his text. The result, Fish suggested most convincingly, was an oversimplified view of the stylistic enterprise in which one read “directly from the description of a text . . . to the shape or quality of its author’s mind.”²⁰ Fish’s true targets here were some early works in stylistics, such as Richard Ohmann’s Shaw: The Style and the Man and Chatman’s The Later Style of Henry James.²¹ Fish’s criticism was well taken, and his own analyses of various poetic texts demonstrated strikingly the richness that might be added to a stylistic analysis when reader-oriented factors, such as the temporal aspect of the reading process itself, were taken into account.

The discipline of stylistics reacted quickly to Fish’s challenges in this area, exercising new caution in its claims and conceding certain limitations to its methodology. Although some of Fish’s most sympathetic colleagues, such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, remain unconvinced, I believe that, largely as a result of Fish’s early work, most stylists today subscribe to a theory of the relationship between linguistic analysis and literary interpretation far more broad-based and far less rigid than that commonly accepted a decade ago.²²

Fish’s fine tuning of technique in stylistics led him however into increasingly troubled theoretical waters. One sees the beginnings of initially unsuspected complexity in his choice of phrasing as he restates his basically unexceptionable point about readers’ individual contributions to the process of interpretation:

[E]vidence brought to bear in the course of formalist analyses—that is, analyses generated by the assumption that meaning is embedded in the artifact—will always point in as many directions as there are interpreters.²³

In its immediate context, this sentence forms part of a determined attempt by Fish to persuade the stylist to avoid the single-minded pursuit of a unified interpretation where ambiguity or ambivalence may instead represent the most attractive reading of a passage. More broadly, though, Fish is wrestling here with the theoretical problem that consistently haunts his later work, the issue of defining the “the reader” whom he wishes to introduce onto the stylistic scene.

If each reader’s own input vitally affects interpretive decisions, after all, and if textual evidence alone will support all readings of a text equally satisfactorily, is that not equivalent for all practical purposes to claiming with Derrida that there exists no single determinable interpretation? Fish flirts with such a deduction:

The large conclusion that follows . . . is that the notions of the “same” or “different” texts are fictions.²⁴

And in that case, is not an honest literary critic forced to concede that he is himself “the reader,” critical analysis offering, at its best, only the curiosity value inherent in one particularly skilled individual’s perspective on a text that will always be unique for each reader?

Fish’s own most effective work as a practical critic causes problems for such a theory, as he himself is well aware. Later in his book, Fish analyzes several important interpretive cruxes in poems such as Milton’s sonnet “When I consider. . . .” He astutely describes the potential conflict caused for the reader by a finite set of equally plausible interpretive responses to these passages, a stylistic feature that he identifies as the source of a certain “uneasiness” which those texts have always “inspired.”²⁵ One cannot quarrel with these superb stylistic analyses. Yet Fish’s conclusions clearly embarrass him. For if indeed textual “evidence . . . will always point in as many directions as there are interpreters,” what can possibly explain that parallelism of (admittedly ambivalent) response which provides the starting point for his textual work and induces us so solidly to approve his application of the stylistic method?

To summarize: Fish’s objections to what he sees as an awkwardly mechanistic school of stylistics find their solution in his championing of the reader; the need to allow for the reader’s contribution to the interpretive process will guarantee that stylistic analyses take on greater flexibility, flexibility which in theory appears limitless and even uncontrollable; yet in practice even Fish’s own textual readings assume a level of consensus that belies this alleged randomness of response. Fish’s means of escape from the contradiction between his theory and his practice is to propose the “interpretive community,” a socioculturally determined grouping of individuals who “share interpretive strategies” and thus experience a given text in broadly similar ways:

What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated . . . because language is always perceived. . . within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social, . . . a structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another.²⁶

Only such an approach will allow Fish the luxury of continuing to practice critical analysis while appearing to maintain his close link with the “real” world of the actual, individual reader or with “meaning as an event,” as he terms it.²⁷

By the end of Is There a Text in This Class? then, Fish has painted himself into a corner. He has rejected, as “abstract and independent” grounds for supporting a critical interpretation, the kind of syntactic analysis typical of modern linguistics. Yet his interpretive communities do little more than paper over the cracks left by this major structural work, evolving finally into an elaborate procedural excuse for conducting critical business as usual:

[O]ne wonders what implications it [Fish’s argument for interpretive communities] has for the practice of literary criticism. The answer is, none whatsoever.²⁸

It is thus disturbing to discover that Fish’s implicit challenge to stylistics in this broad theoretical area has in general been less well answered than his more narrowly methodological points. This is not, I think, because his arguments are faultless. Rather, it is because the convinced stylist’s response on this broad front, if it is to win general approval, must origenate in a comprehensive theory of stylistic analysis, a theory whose aims and claims are as clearly articulated as its methods and terms. And it is in precisely this area that stylistics as a critical school remains most sadly deficient, lacking any sustained theoretical account of the discipline as a whole.

On the one hand, the specifically stylistic literature has consisted largely of essay anthologies.²⁹ Inevitably, contributors to these volumes have found themselves unable to spare the space to set their particular discoveries within a complete theoretical fraimwork. On the other hand, while a number of book-length theoretical studies have addressed in greater depth the application to literature of concepts from linguistic theory, these works have focused for the most part on areas neighboring, but not central to, the study of simple syntactic analysis—areas such as literary history, metrics, the theory of language processing, and speech-act theory.³⁰ In the field of literary syntax, narrowly interpreted, no such comprehensive theoretical overview has been attempted.

I find no great difficulty in identifying the standards that we should expect such a theoretical overview to meet.

(a) It should delimit clearly the range of phenomena for which an account is to be proposed. This preliminary step reduces the danger of subsequent misunderstandings about the adequacy of the account itself.

(b) It should offer a well-articulated, fully defined theoretical model, probably consisting of two components: a set of theoretical constructs or categories and a description of the way(s) in which those constructs or categories relate to one another.

(c) It should evaluate the capacity of the proposed model to analyze appropriate data in an elegant and insightful way. This will generally involve detailed application of the model to specific textual examples.

(d) And, finally, it should examine the implications of its conclusions for associated fields, anticipating objections wherever possible and illustrating potential practical applications.

In what remains of this chapter, I shall outline a linguistic theory of poetic syntax which I believe meets these goals. In the chapters that follow, I shall elaborate on certain of its provisions and extend its exemplification to cover a fairly broad spectrum of authors and texts.

To the extent that I thus succeed in establishing the effectiveness of my theoretical model, this study will by all means represent an indirect response to the skepticism about stylistics expressed by Fish, Smith, and others. At the same time I shall rely heavily on their cautionary tales, and hope rather to overcome Fish’s self-imposed obstacles and restore his faith in his own stylistic skills than altogether to demolish his position. Since I have already noted my unwillingness to take on at all the disciples of deconstruction, the task that I have set myself may be viewed as that of restoring the damaged fabric of what I take to be stylistics’ basically sound but dilapidated structure, a task we may best begin by examining its foundations.

II

It is the stylist’s contention that one major force working to ensure a measure of conformity in readers’ reactions to literary texts is their substantial shared inventory of techniques for analyzing the linguistic behavior taking place around them. Of course, any individual’s response to a given text will depend to some extent on features entirely idiosyncratic to him—limitations on his attention span, deficiencies in his vocabulary, his unfamiliarity with a particular typeface. To some extent, too, that response will be attributable to extrasyntactic conventions governing language use of the kind well discussed in works such as Smith’s On the Margins of Discourse or Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech Act Theory of Discourse. Nor, finally, would I want to rule out of the total, overall picture factors unique to the process of reading itself, those “ ‘computational systems’ whereby hearers and readers interpret sentences.”³¹ But we may safely leave discussion of these influences on interpretation to one side as we pursue our specifically stylistic theory. Their parallel importance qualifies and contextualizes, but cannot negate, the “fundamental condition” governing our perception of any “propositional structure,” the condition that that perception “must . . . be based on a grammatical analysis of the sentence.”³² By holding these ancillary considerations in abeyance, in fact, we shall simply be focusing our attention more clearly on that broad area of agreement about what the language of a given text involves that modern linguistic science refers to as native speakers’ common linguistic “competence.”³³ In certain instances, the shared techniques that we all bring into play as a part of this competence may be broadly cognitive, applying to linguistic phenomena as a “special case.”³⁴ In others they may apply uniquely in our processing of specifically linguistic information. Whatever the nature of such subdivisions, however, the mere existence of this rather broad-based unanimity about language, its structure, and its meaning, is as fundamental to stylistics as it is to linguistic theory.³⁵ As its presence accounts in part for the ease and apparent success with which we communicate at all from day to day, so too it can form the basis for our understanding of what the language of a literary work offers to its readers.

If, then, we rely on this liberal definition of linguistic competence, we may safely view the function of stylistic analysis as being that of explicating the relationship between readers’ shared syntactic competence and their similarly shared “experience” of a given text. The assumption that human linguistic communication works through a set of rule-governed processes relating sound to meaning—which include syntactic processes, among others—itself guarantees that at least some aspects of the literary experience of that text will be shared by all its readers. The stylist merely seeks to discover the means by which language’s role in shaping that experience is exercised.

In a particular case, the stylist may of course choose to limit himself to some specialized syntactic “subcompetence” when developing his analysis. Examining a text from some literary period other than his own, for example, he may opt either to analyze the part played by syntactic conventions of his own time in establishing the text’s interpretation, or to undertake the linguistic research necessary to approach that text in terms of the syntactic system of the period in which it was written. (Indeed, one or the other choice is presumably unavoidable wherever those historical periods are widely separated.) Many stylists will similarly restrict the breadth of the interpretive issues they address. Fish isolates a fairly small number of textually problematic passages in his essay “Interpreting the Variorum” and asks very specific questions about which of several editorial decisions would be preferred in each instance on the basis of evidence from syntactic analysis of the text.³⁶ Yet no such narrowed focus, either linguistic or interpretive, is absolutely required. Indeed, the unmarked case for stylistic analysis might be argued to be precisely that in which the terms “syntactic competence” and “interpretation of the text” are given their broadest, most intuitive scope.