On the concept of "style" in modern literature

I’ve been thinking about the modern concept and practice of literary “style”, particularly the notion of style as the signature of an individuality. Each writer must discover or create (there is often an ambivalence about this) a unique and recognisable style, to express or define their uniqueness, yes, but also to distinguish them from other writers in the marketplace. 

The need for this individual signature relates to the familiar distinction between traditional and modern modes of subjectivity. Traditional modes of subjectivity are defined by immersion in long established, handed-down and practices which have become “naturalised” through time, and because there is no visible alternative. The modern subject, by contrast, feels himself free to reflexively choose his values and practices. They are objects of purposeful intention - and invention. 

In traditional societies, where there are common oratorical and rhetorical practices shared by writer (or bard) and audience, the “problem” of hammering out a style does not arise in the same way. But in the modern era, nothing can be taken for granted. Literary style becomes a problem and an object of reflection and choice. 

“Style” in this sense, as a kind of principle of individuation, is most pronounced in high modernism (Fredric Jameson): 

the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms 

… the Faulknerian long sentence with its breathless gerundives, Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism, Wallace Stevens’ inveterate hypostasis of non-substantive parts of speech (‘the intricate evasions of as’), the fateful, but finally predictable, swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos into village accordion sentiment

Yeats, despite gravitating towards the ‘traditional’, in the form of Ireland’s peasantry and the world of oral storytelling, is nonetheless immersed in the modern present, and recognises the necessity of forging a distinctive style, albeit inspired and galvanised by that West of Ireland he encounters in its moribund and pathetic magnificence. Like Synge, he will reach into this older oral world in order to assist in the modern quest for a unique stylistic “signature”.

This leads us to a sub-category of this modern notion of style, the idea of style arising from an encounter with difference. Yeats famously suggests that J.M Synge leaves the languor of Paris and goes to Aran in the Western seaboard of Ireland, a move which leads to the development of Synge’s distinctive and melodious prose. “Style”, Synge explains to Yeats after his Aran sojourn, “Comes from the shock of new material”. Aran offered him this material. 

This idea that style, the creation of a distinctive linguistic signature, arises from the shock of an encounter is also a peculiarly modern idea. Often the shocks are supplied by the “insistent jerky nearness” of the new metropolises. But as often, paradoxically, as in Synge’s case (and Yeats’s) the “new material” is the traditional, various “older” or more “primitive” forms of social and cultural life - the "shock of the old".

One could also trace a line from Synge’s idea to a series of modern artists and thinkers for whom not just style but various forms of creativity arise from Shock, from an encounter with the strikingly or brutally different:

"Eisenstein’s argument: [..] thought depends on shock which gives birth to it.”(Deleuze).

Thought, and artistic and literary creation, do not come simply from within themselves, from being immersed in literature or philosophy, from developing prior genres or rules. They are galvanised, prompted, set in motion by something outside themselves. Thought (etc) is confronted with its “outside” – that which its categories and protocols cannot simply enclose or assimilate. 

In one sense, this displaces the subject from its centre. The subject is not the pure origin of thought, style, innovation. The initiative, the force, has come from outside. On the other hand this same subject is creatively strengthened precisely in answering destabilisation, by way of resistance. This at least is what we get in Yeats. The idea of style as a creative resistance around the shock of otherness.

So to recap, the modern notion of style involves: 

1. the notion of style as the signature of an individuality, and the sense that arriving at and creating such a style is of crucial importance.

2. the idea of style as the result of an encounter with otherness, with something that jolts or disrupts the mind and senses of the artist, writer or thinker. 
3. Style as a sort of discipline forced on the subject by the encounter with otherness. 

Second part of these reflections to follow...