We seldom talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the sense of style. They have their styles of course. Take Dostoevsky as an example: the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin made us aware that Dostoevsky creates a dialogic, polyphonic discourse in his novels and follows a European literary tradition of carnivalization. But is it “style”? Maybe yes, but Dostoevsky is no doubt much bigger than a so-called stylist, so also Tolstoy, Dickens and so on. Sometimes we talk about James Joyce’s or Ezra Pound’s styles; this is because, probably, we feel uncertain whether we can catch hold of them thoroughly. We try to tell ourselves what they have done, as if we could only explain the world clearly by sufficiently explaining the experiments they have made.
Some smaller writers are more suitable for the word “style”. I think I am not underestimating the literary values of these “smaller” writers. It is in fact a choice usually made from the start by these writers. Style for them is something like a religion. In order to acquire a style, they have to be professional enough in their writing and get rid of all kinds of literary burrs, defects, casualties, bad tastes, and try their best to be perfect and to avoid failure. When E. M. Forster talks about Miss Adela Quested’s and Mrs. Moore’s passage to India, he has a style. I mean, he is a master in setting the noble literary method of “minus” into practice in his writing. And it seems to me that the American writer William Saroyan achieved nothing but style (sorry I am being extreme). I didn’t know why my University professor was so interested in Saroyan; could it be that Saroyan’s writing fulfilled all his needs for the beauty of literature? I didn’t realize it until I became a writer myself and saw that I was surrounded or even besieged by some fatal obstacles.
Then what is style? For a lazy person like me, the easiest way of placing this issue is to go back to the book A Glossary of Literary Terms written by American professor M. H. Abrams. He says: “Style has traditionally been defined as the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse—as how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say. The style specific to a particular work or writer, or else distinctive of a type of writings, has been analyzed in such terms as the rhetorical situation and aim; characteristic diction, or choice of words; type of sentence structure and syntax; and the density and kinds of figurative language.” —Great to review the old textbook! Prof. Abrams then goes on to Roman thinker and rhetorician Cicero and cites his sayings on three levels of style: High (or grand), Middle (or mean), low (or plain).
In the Chinese cultural context, there are also theories about style. One of the sources we can trace back to is Liu Xie’s (or Liu Hsieh, 5th century) classic on literary theories Wen-hsin Tiao-lung (which might be translated as The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons or Carving a Dragon at the Core of Literature). It discusses from a kind of Confucian perspective the literary forms and the achievements made by the pre-Liu Xie poets. Another holy book of poetics which stays at the center of most Chinese literary minds is Sikong Tu’s (or Ssu-k’ung T’u, 837-908) Er-shi–si-Shi-Pin (which might be translated as Twenty-four Gradings of Poems). In Er-shi-si-Shi-Pin, Sikong Tu classified poems into types—1, Potent, Undifferentiated; 2, Limpid and Calm; 3, Delicate-Fresh and Rich-Lush; 4, Firm and Self- Possessed; 5, Lofty and Ancient; 6, Decorous and Dignified; and so on. It’s really difficult to be a poet. You have to develop such sensitive ears that you are able to catch the slightest sound made by a needle falling down to the ground. Sikong Tu is absolutely correct, but maybe too correct.
Since the late 19th century, it seems, the concept of style has been greatly enriched and has been getting much more complicated. It is no longer simply an output of personal literary tastes. In some countries that are economically less advanced, or once-colonized, or at the stage of pre-modernity, the concept of style found itself in difficult conditions like a servant to two masters or more. Owing to political situations and burdensome traditions and newly- flourished nationalism, national style was and is raised as something important, and cheapened the so-called personal style. To be a writer from a country like this, you have to be talented enough to meet all the demands ordered by history and the nation. American Marxist professor Fredrik Jameson asserts in his theory of rhetoric of otherness that third world literatures are mostly national allegory. He gives the example of Lu Xun’s (1881-1936) writing on Chinese characteristics. Although national allegory is not a term with a direct relationship to style, style can no longer neglect it. In a certain sense, the need of a national style has become common sense among some writers and most readers, at least in China. You will be criticized for the lack of it. And what is more interesting is that you will also be criticized in this way by some foreign professional readers, because they want to visit a literary museum, given that you come from a country with a long history of literature.
I am not sure how people accept and digest and change the concept of style in other languages. When I am re-thinking the changes that happened to 20th century Chinese writers—writing in vernacular Chinese, which also originates in the May 4th Movement of 1919—in their understanding of the concept of style, I found it meaningful that style in the Chinese context was, by and by, bounded by something like belle-lettrism. While the revolutionary writers focused on Grand Narrative, writers who preferred to be away from the historical turbulences found that they had another job, that of writing beautiful literature. Usually they were a little bit weak in creativity and well-educated and with self-respect and, maybe, had a taste for decadency. During the high time of revolution in the 1940s, 1950s until the late 1970s, they were criticized again and again by the communist party and by ordinary people; once the revolution declined, they came back like literary heroes. It seems that they had the right reason to insist on writing so—that is, they tried to show that the modern Chinese language could also be used as a good and sufficient tool in expression, that it could compete with the ancient Chinese on which they set a fire. In this sense, style could be political.
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz is also political. But he provides another notion of being a poet or a writer. He once said that he never talked about poetry without referring to the local history, suffering, and living conditions of the Balkans. In his poem Ars Poetica? he says: “In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent”. I think it was Milosz’s social (even socialist) experience that made him write “indecent” poems. Only that kind of writing could meet his demand for writing. He became a model poet, maybe even a classical poet not because he tried to have a style, but because he was absolutely honest to himself. Later people found that he had a solid style. Shall I quote W.B. Yeats to make myself more clear? Yeats ends his poem The Coming of Wisdom with Time with the line: “Now I may wither into the truth.” “Wither”, a strong word. I think, for most writers who are burdened with bunch of concerns, Time will help them with a reductive knife: when the many other secular and social aspects of a certain writer become vague, his special style emerges.
Although each writer has the dream or ambition of acquiring his or her style, he or she may find that a true style has its own will – whether it will come or not, who knows? And another’s style is not yours, although sometimes we mix them up. We may only get a weak style if we haven’t understood that a true style is part of creativity. The buds of style hide themselves in human sufferings, weaknesses, the brightness and darkness of the nature, the shadows of philosophy, social changes. All social contradictions, paradoxes and oxymorons may lead to a way of thinking and eventually make a language. During the last three decades, China changed a lot. Before that, there was the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in and after the revolution and was thrown into its mayhems and turbulences. And after the revolution I find myself peddling a kind of so-called self-colored socialism. The way in front of me is not from A to B, but from A to X. It makes me need new ideas, new images and new syntaxes. By and by, what I have learnt from previous writers and poets, their schools and isms, regardless of whether they were Chinese or not, is not sufficient any more. It seems to me that history and reality are themselves inventing a kind of literature. To be honest to oneself means to be loyal to your sense of reality. You don’t need to mirror that reality, but you need to be symmetrical to the vigor of history and of reality. Style comes as a reward. And now, I can say that I don’t care about it.
In the fall of 2008, the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun and the Canadian poet Tim Lilburn were invited to Beijing Normal University and gave a joint speech on their writings. I was lucky to be there, and felt that what they said inspired me a lot. The two of them came from different cultural and historical backgrounds. Tomaz said he always gives a kind of lightness to his images and language, whereas Tim is always interested in bringing heaviness to his writing. I might say that they two have different styles. They gave their reasons for this to the students: Slovenia was a communist country and changed completely in the last two decades, and Canadians are actually too nice and mild and the Canadian life is in fact too calm, and people hate any challenges; Tim felt an urgent need to anchor that life. He asked the question: How to live here (in Canada) ? The two poets left me lots of questions to think about: I too have my difficulties and conditions.
Xi Chuan 西川 (penname of Liu Jun 刘军) was born in Jiangsu in 1963 but grew up in Beijing, where he still lives. One of contemporary China’s most celebrated poets, having won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001) and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize (2003), he is also one of its most hyphenated littérateurs—teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet, and has been described by American writer Eliot Weinberger as a “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang Dynasty numismatics.” A graduate of the English department of Beijing University, where his thesis was on Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations, he is currently professor Creative Writing at Beijing Normal University. He was recently awarded Sweden’s Cikada Prize.
Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator, as well as assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his scholarship and criticism has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. Other publications include October Dedications, his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018), as well as the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, recently won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.