The Value of Style in Fiction, by Garrett Stewart

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Value of Style in Fiction by Garrett Stewart Philip Davis (bio) The Value of Style in Fiction, by Garrett Stewart; pp. vi + 147. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, $69.99, $26.99 paper, £49.99, £18.99 paper. It has been, to my mind, a noble cause: what in a more recent collection Garrett Stewart dares to call “actual reading,” in the face of more theorized criticism, has been his vocation for almost fifty years (“Actual” in Further Reading, edited by Matthew Rubery and Leah Price [Oxford University Press, 2020], 112). In The Value of Style in Fiction, he remarks wryly on the way in which Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem (2006) is a belated defense of old-fashioned literary criticism “in its foundational mode of close reading,” without any explicit “recantation of his own career-long theoretical and political agenda” (6). Beneath a certain wit, he also notes, with some frustration and pain I think, the sidelining effect of “an identity politics that has rendered a collective cultural voice of more primacy than individual gestures of expression” (11). The Value of Style in Fiction arises out of classes taught at the University of Iowa over many years, and offers itself to those seeking to learn the craft of attentive reading and inventive writing at the level of the sentence as a form of mini-plot. Stewart offers numerous definitions of style, in denial of a precious belletrism and in opposition to mere [End Page 467] value-added. The best of his formulations are, variously: “Style is language in action,” “writing in process” (1); “Style inheres, rather than adheres” (34); “Style is the constitutive first glimpse we have of a fictional scene,” “the discernible fictional energy of the prose itself, its level of pure invention” (3); “style delimits the how we feel in advance of what we think” (83). To me the two most helpful of his statements are “Style is the Writing behind the written” (4) and, with specific relation to his subject here, “The prose of fiction manifests the central nervous system of narrative writing” (126). In both statements, the sense of something live and happening in the act of both writing and reading is made resonant. But it is the examples that matter, and what they are examples of. There is at the end of the book an inventory of terms, mainly taken from stylistics. The book itself reveals them arising in practice, “to show the underlying impetus or drive” instead of merely offering a “structural toolkit” (21). It is hard to find a form in which to write about apparent minutiae—significant matter almost disproportionately contained within the small, quick, and transient—without becoming tedious or dizzying. But Stewart adds to the difficulty by making what I think is a serious structural error, in that he never indents his quotations. He loves to get in among his passages but he does not first of all give them to us, fully respected, in their own right and feel. The result is an overpacked page, what feels like a lifetime of subordinate clauses, and something similar to what he himself describes as the “excruciated nuance” of style in Henry James, “a fuss verging on obfuscation, an exactitude pursued to distraction” (78). So readers have to do the clean pulling out for themselves. Stewart intricately reads Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) at the moment of Jane feeling the shock of potential bigamy: The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded—not to weep, not to mourn, I was yet too calm for that, but—mechanically to take off the wedding dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last time. I then sat down: I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and my head dropped on them. And now I thought: till now I had only heard, seen, moved—followed up and down where I was led or dragged— watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure: but now, I thought. (edited by Stevie Davies [Penguin...