LANGUAGE
Changing concepts of style
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S. JAGADISAN and M.S. NAGARAJAN illuminate us with a survey of changing trends in the use of language over the last 400 years.
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EVERY artist employs a particular medium to communicate his experiences or view of life. For instance, the painter chooses colours, the musician sounds and the sculptor stone. The literary artist in a similar manner makes use of words and sounds to convey his impression of life. The purpose of a writer, whether he is a poet or dramatist or novelist or essayist, may be to record his response to life. It may be didactic, descriptive or critical.
The term "style", when used in relation to literature, may be broadly defined as a writer's manner of expressing his ideas or experiences. It is his method of organising words, images and metaphors to create the particular effect he seeks to achieve. The well known dictum that "Style is the man" implies that the distinctive quality of a writer's style depends on his intensity of experience and depth of perception coupled with his capacity for a discriminating choice of words and phrases. A writer's style is determined by three factors or influences. The first is the force of his own individual personality. The second is the occasion or purpose which compels him to write. A broad distinction can be made between two kinds of style — the easy, simple, familiar style and the heavy florid style. In every literary period, we notice instances of both.
It is generally accepted that modern English literature was born in the second half of the 16th Century which was coeval with the Age of Elizabeth and the Renaissance. It was an age of inquiry, expansion and exploration. The spirit of adventure and experiment became manifest in the employment of language as well. Thanks to foreign influences, particularly Latin and Greek, on the English vocabulary, a large number of foreign words were absorbed in the English language. The Elizabethan writers exploited the native as well the foreign resources to lend variety and colour to their style. One tendency was to model style on that of Latin writing and writers. The following sentence from John Lyly's book Eupheus, published in 1578, is an instance of elaborate and consciously cultivated writing. Describing a young Athenian gentleman, Lyly says:
This young gallant of more wit than wealth and yet more wealth than wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant conceits, thought himself superior to all in honest conditions, in so much that he deemed himself so apt to all things that he gave himself to nothing.
Examining this sentence, we notice that careful, deliberate balancing, antithesis and contrast of words and phrases — wit and wealth and wealth and wisdom, inferior to none, superior to all, apt to all things gave himself to nothing. The other elements of this way of writing are alliteration, repetition and allusions to classical mythology and natural history. In the fields of drama and poetry, Shakespeare, Spenser and a host of others delighted to play with the English language. Bacon, in his Essays, adopts an epigrammatic style. "Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man." "Revenge is a kind of wild justice." Such short sentences, pregnant with meaning provide a contrast to the long sentences and accumulation of words which distinguish the style of the other writers of the period.
Early in the 17th Century, a significant influence upon the English style was the Authorised Version of the Bible, published in 1611. While Milton could not escape the influence of the Latin style, John Bunyan, another outstanding puritan, writes a simple, free, narration style. The decorative manner of the Elizabethans had given way to the simplicity of sweetness of common speech.
As I walked through the wilderness, of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, a book in his face and a great burden upon his back. I looked and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he read he wept and trembled; he broke out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"
This well-known passage from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress goes straight to our hearts. The tendency to simple, direct, homely expression got established and confirmed with the inauguration of the great Age of Prose, hailed by Mathew Arnold as "our indispensable eighteenth century." Dryden, followed by Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Swift and Defoe, employed a simple, clear, effective style. Side by side, the other manner of writing was also in evidence. Johnson's expression is manly, vigorous, grandiloquent and bombastic. Such a style has come to be called Johnsonese. Burke, concerned over the American question, adopted a rhetorical, persuasive eloquent style charged with his own passionate fervour.
A shift in emphasis came in the early 19th Century with Hazlitt reacting against florid expression. Charles Lamb's style is a mixture of quaintness and natural simplicity. Jane Austen's novels are an example of clear, direct narrative. The element of rhetorical emphasis and eloquence reappeared in idealistic Victorian writers like Ruskin, Carlyle and Arnold whose mission was to combat the influence of modern materialism. Later appeared Oscar Wilde and Shaw imparting to language a rapier-like flash and sharpness. In this age of speed, when people have no time to stand and stare, but have enough time to rush through the headlines, brevity forms a distinguishing mark of style. The growing interest in Science has resulted in the emphasis on clarity and precision. Whether it be literary writers like Lynd or Lucas or exponents of serious thought like Joad or Russell, the elements of clarity and directness are pronounced.
In more recent times, in the context of what is termed globalisation, English language has come to be used more and more by writers who do not belong to Britain. English is an effective tool to communicate their national sensibilities or arouse national consciousness. The genre prose merges with the genre fiction. And in presenting fictional reality, the age-old distinction between content and form, matter and manner ceases to exist. Writers resort to newer and yet newer ways of representing reality. Narratology in fictional poetics deals with multiple forms of narration employed by serious artists like Conrad, Hemingway and Faulkner and in our times, the Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, to achieve what Henry James once called "solidity of specification". Is not fiction a living organism? Virginia Woolf's "stream of consciousness", Toni Morrison's "rememory" and Salman Rushdie's "magic realism" are some examples where writers seek out some technique, adopt some textual strategy to probe the truth within. Rushdie, for example, creates a form which, by weaving realism and fantasy, allows the miraculous and the mundane to coexist at the same level, as the same order of event. Over a period of 400 years, English prose style has undergone several changes. What the course of change would be in the fortunes of English style is unpredictable. Change is the condition of human life. Forms of art do constantly evolve and it is this that insures it from going extinct.
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