Discourse and Style: What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other

In his famous essay on style, Schopenhauer writes, “Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.” The quirky German philosopher goes so far as to say, “To form a provincial estimate of the value of a writer’s production, it is not directly necessary to know the subject on which he has thought, or what it is that he has said about it . . . . It will be enough, in the main, to know how he has thought” (120). Behind Schopenhauer’s adulation of style, however, lies a profound sense of mysticism and nihilism, a kind of grim outlook he shares with Nietzsche, that language provides at best a flimsy, shaky link between our inner thoughts and outward expression. Most writers and philosophers, who still value language as a vital means of communication, would be unwilling to go down the rabbit hole Schopenhauer has prescribed. Even Cicero, who probably should be credited with the invention of the theory of style, warned that style over substance should be avoided. Confucius was harsher in condemning style as a jumble of gewgaws, opining in the opening chapter of The Analects, “Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue” (139). Or, to turn to a more modern iteration, we have the American poet Charles Olson, quoting Robert Creeley, proclaiming in his landmark essay “Projective Verse” (1951), “Form is never more than an extension of content” (250).For all these reasons, narratologists, for instance, have steered away from style and opted for the seemingly more substantive term discourse to refer to the level of presentation. But how is narratology’s discourse different from stylistics’ style, or are they really two sides of the same coin? That is the central issue in Discourse and Style: What Narratology and Stylistics Can Do for Each Other by Dan Shen. An Edinburgh-trained Chinese stylistician turned narratologist, Shen has previously authored in English many articles and three books—Literary Stylistics and Fictional Translation (Peking UP, 1995), Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction (Shen), and Dual Narrative Dynamics (Routledge, 2023)—in addition to countless publications in Chinese. Her interdisciplinary approach to stylistics and narratology, in particular, has led to her discovery of a kind of “covert progression” behind overt plot development in narrative fiction, a significant finding deemed by the late J. Hillis Miller as being “strikingly original and groundbreaking” (x). The fact that a flagship journal like Style would devote a special issue in 2021 to the discussion of Shen’s target essay, “‘Covert Progression’ and Dual Narrative Dynamics,” with contributions by sixteen experts from nine countries, only testifies to her sterling international reputation in both stylistics and narratology.Her fourth monograph in English, Discourse and Style, once again showcases Shen’s critical acumen and intellectual prowess. Ingeniously tackling the essential differences between discourse and style—the former relates to how a story is told and the latter to how the content is presented—Shen identifies shrewdly the fault lines separating these two seemingly interchangeable terms. She points out that “there is hardly any room in stylistics’ ‘style’ for the temporal arrangement and levels and types of narration that figure prominently in narratology’s ‘discourse.’ Similarly, narratology’s ‘discourse’ provides virtually no space for the essential constituents of stylistics’ ‘style’ in the shape of various linguistic choices” (40). What underlies this fundamental difference, she suggests, is the divergent trajectories narratology and stylistics took as each discipline emerged from its cradle in the mid-twentieth century: “Fictional stylistics has inherited the tradition of poetic analysis, but narratology has departed to a great extent from that tradition” (41).Having surveyed the terrain like a seasoned, sharp-eyed prospector, Shen then zeroes in on two most notable overlapping areas between discourse and style: point of view and modes of speech presentation. And it is in the investigation of these two areas, to which the majority of her book is devoted, that Shen firmly stakes her interdisciplinary claim and makes a significant contribution to the fields of both narratology and stylistics. And she has done so by simultaneously engaging with theorists whose ideas she cites and critiques and diving into a rich sampling of both English and Chinese prose fiction to bolster her case. Regarding point of view, Shen draws upon Gérard Genette’s useful theory of “focalization,” which separates speaker from perceiver and thereby points to the shortcomings in stylistics’ narrow focus on language choices, which tends to elide the difference between the narrator’s voice and the character’s focalization. Speaking as a scholar who cut her teeth in stylistics, Shen writes, “I subscribe to the stylistic concern with the narrator’s belief, attitude and commitment as reflected in modality, but I do not buy into the exclusive concern with the narrator’s voice” (81). However, she also identifies a crucial weakness in the conceptual model proposed by Genette and his followers in narratology. Engaging with an impressive lineup of narratologists that includes Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gerald Prince, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, interwoven with contrasting views from stylisticians such as Roger Fowler, Paul Simpson, Geoffrey Leech, and Mick Short, she draws attention to the fact that Genette’s distinction between perception and voice, while conceptually useful, often blurs the area of ideological point of view. Indeed, both narratology and stylistics, Shen states, “fail to see that the two types of ‘point of view’—structural observing position and the narrator’s attitude/judgement/tone are important to the interpretation of a narrative. Significantly, whether the concern is the observing position or the way of narration, language choices should not be neglected in investigating point of view” (77).Having analyzed the partiality of both disciplines, Shen calls for an interdisciplinary, narratological-stylistic approach in order to account for a narrative situation where both the perceptual and attitudinal points of view are important. Such a novel approach would necessarily demand a new definition of point of view, which she generously supplies, rendered in a lucid language: “A narrative situation has two aspects of point of view if it involves the narrator’s explicit or implicit comment: the point of view of the focalizer and the point of view of the narrator. As to the focalizer, the point of view or focalization is primarily perceptual, concerning the observing position vis-à-vis the story, with the perception possibly colored by the observer’s ideological and emotive orientation. As regards the narrator, the point of view is primarily attitudinal, concerning the narrator’s mental disposition, judgement, or tone toward what is narrated as indicated by or reflected in the narrating voice. If a narrator reports what s/he perceives or recalls with explicit or implicit comment, the point of view would come from the narrator-focalizer, or more specifically, from both the narrator’s voice and the narrator’s perception” (82).With such a conceptual breakthrough under her belt, Shen moves on to tackle the issue of modes of speech presentation, the second area of overlapping for discourse and style. Contrary to the proverbial truism that the devil is in the details, with Shen the genius lies in the details. Whether she is addressing disciplinary differences between stylistics’ emphasis on the distinction between first-person and third-person narration and narratology’s elision of such a stylistic feature, or the coexistence of the narrating self’s and the experiencing self’s focalization in the first-person mode—a point often missed by stylisticians, or the dominant note of irony in an intriguing passage of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Shen guides the reader patiently, step by step, through a dizzying array of critical perspectives and textual samples like a seasoned sports commentator, dissecting the game play by play. Along the way, she also points out repeatedly, without any superciliousness and always with respect and reason, the infelicities, misconceptions, confusions, and errors found in the works of her predecessors and peers, including the impracticality of Rimmon-Kenan’s ternary distinction among story, text, and narration (22), the regrettable lack of differentiation in Fowler between focalizing characters and other characters (100), and the disappearance of irony in a Chinese edition of Pride and Prejudice when the translator obviously misses “the implicit commentary that secretly conveys the narrator-focalizer’s ironic attitude” (135).Which brings me to my next point. In a virtuoso demonstration of how narratology and stylistics may complement each other, Shen’s book is not only a tour de force of interdisciplinary approach but also a profoundly cross-cultural, translingual work. As a leading Chinese scholar, she has a commanding view of the historical undulations of the two fields in China. Moreover, she is especially attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese narrative tradition and the peculiarities of speech presentation in Chinese prose fiction. She draws our attention, for instance, to the fact that in Chinese, due to the linguistic convention of occasionally omitting the subject and/or pronominal references, “it is possible to shift implicitly from third-person narration to first-person omniscient narration and vice versa.” This kind of flexibility, she states, “becomes notable only through a comparison with corresponding Western texts [and] has eluded previous attention” (128). Such an interesting discovery, which comes about only in a translingual approach, would help us avoid the pitfalls of any universalist claims that disciplines born in the soil of Anglo-European languages and traditions are occasionally fond of making.In a larger sense, Shen’s deep dive into discourse and style returns us to the ancient battle between style and substance. At a time when large language models and generative AI have become increasingly sophisticated in their ability to produce narratives virtually in any style—Schopenhauer must be turning in his grave now—human experts in both narratology and stylistics, facing an existential threat to their disciplines—indeed, to literature in general—may do well to heed Shen’s call for collaboration across fields, languages, and cultures.