The violation of style: Englishness in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels

Abstract

This article explores the meaningfulness of ‘style’ as a critical concept in contemporary English literary studies. Despite appearing to have fallen out of fashion with the rise of theory in the 1970s, style remains closely linked to canons of historical thought. The article reflects upon how the vicissitudes of English literary style emerge from the historical conditions of upper class Englishness, particularly its ridiculing of Enlightenment abstraction. Through a close reading of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels (1992–2011), it is argued that style remains an ‘English’ inheritance, but that it has been infiltrated by the legacies of Nietzschean and psychoanalytic conceptions of modern subjectivity, and by the voices of literary modernism. The novel sequence disquietingly suggests that St Aubyn's protagonist, Patrick Melrose, was inducted into style when raped as a child by his father. Shorn of its aristocratic confidence, style appears by turns coercive and vulnerably self-conflicted. Violation bequeaths to Patrick a pointed and painful subject position in narrative and in language, as his subsequent addiction to baroque similes reveals; it also re-connects the novels’ celebrated literary elegance to a moment of constitutional violence.