Barthes and Style

We saw that for Synge, style was born from the encounter and shock of geographical and cultural otherness, the jump and juxtaposition between fin-de-siècle Paris, on the one hand, and the small peasant communities of the West of Ireland on the other.  

For Barthes, style is rooted in the body. The site of an otherness which percolates into language is not the geographically or culturally remote but this inner Otherness, that uncanny strangeness which lives within us, and even sometimes turns against us.

Style exists at the intersection of the linguistic - our customary expressions, our grammar, the whole symbolic apparatus of language in fact – and the extralinguistic, the somatic peculiarities of the individual self. In the idiosyncrasies of Style we detect “the fragments of a reality absolutely alien to language”. Style is a kind of seismograph registering this Otherness.

In some sense, Barthes seems like the culmination of the modern notion of style as the principle of individuation, that which marks me out as separate and distinct. For this individuality is best pictured in terms of the quirks and tics, the abilities and malfunctions of the individual body, which are never simply replicated in another person. It is also perhaps one of the last versions of the idea of style, and thought itself, arising on the back of an encounter between language and its outside, thought and its outside.

But what we also know is that the body, it’s pains and pleasures, its tensions and tremors, are not simply outside language. We know that culture in general – the great invasive weight and reach of the values, distinctions and priorities that culture carves out and continues – and our family in particular as a bearer of this general culture, enter and transform the body. The pains, pleasures, tensions and tremors, the anxieties and rushes of release, all partly somatic, have been created and determined via innumerable edicts, prohibitions and aspirations not simply native to our constitution but delivered and drummed in by the culture in general and the family in particular. And this process always has a linguistic dimension, and cannot operate without words and symbols.

Barthes is nonetheless right that the body is not reducible to language, to the symbolic in the broadest sense, and will often resist and object to what has been introduced into it from the outside. It is always a site of resistance if we’re able to listen to its non- linguistic messages. But in this sense, what we said about style, that it exists at the intersection of the linguistic and another alien and non-linguistic reality, is first of all true of the body itself.

Literary style would then be the continuation and refinement of this amalgam which is the body.