Sunday, October 18, 2009

Highs & Lows with Sister Mary Ignatius' Explanation

In Chapter 8, Lanham is trying to make a distinction that he admits is difficult to describe. While the distinction between high, middle and low styles seems quite subjective, it is more the type of thing that a good critique recognizes when she reads it. As we have discussed profusely in the course of the class so far, good stylists often ignore or purposefully break 'the rules,' and Lanham's description of high style is particularly difficult to nail down because as he explains that the qualities that are often present in the high style do not necessarily combine to form the high style. What I find particularly interesting is how Lanham analyzes the importance of the social situation or context in which the piece fits. This is especially apparent in his description of Churcill's wartime radio addresses, which brought a public speech into private livingrooms, "The front-stage/back-stage antithesis was potentially healed, the whole range spanned, before Churchill began to speak...As we now know, over and over again he made the most of it, brought all Britain into a sublime unity where public and private worlds fused" (Lanham, 169). Lanham also disscusses the problem Hennesy has in reworking the carefully neutral historical tone of Marx in the Communist Manifesto into an angry feminist revolutionary cry, also a problem of situation.

Of the writers we have read so far, Baldwin would certainly be an example of high style. As we discussed, Baldwin's self-consciously scholarly and objective tone, with passive constructions and 'to be' verbs, is what makes his essay persuasive and his gross generalizations credible. While on the surface, Baldwin appears to be simply reporting the facts in a neutral, historical tone, Baldwin's subject matter is actually quite sublime, going to the heart of the experience of rage, fear and identity. As I analyzed in my post on Baldwin, his use of chiasmus throughout the essay is quite self-conscious and develops as a persuasive structure, as well as his metaphors, figurative language, and religious diction, that allow the essay to operate on multiple levels and depict a highly complicated and embedded situation. Baldwin also dissolves the antithetical framework of private/public by extending a personal experience into a universal experience for a group of people and reactionary experiences for other groups of people in different cultures.

For me, this is the most useful distinction that Lanham makes between high and low style:
"the style that has been discussed, analyzed, marveled at, has been the high style...Ornamented, emotional, spotlighted, it was the style you could see. And talk about. The transparent, neutral, unemotional style could be applauded but there wasn't much to say about it. Ideally it wasn't there at all. You looked right through it to the facts beyond" (Lanham, 165).
With Nabokov, the more you look, the more you find. You could read Nabokov for the rest of your life, and continue to discover new complexities, new twists of meaning. This is high style. As Lanham points out, low style can be quite self-conscious, quite literary, and quite entertaining, but it really only operates at one level, although it can incorporate multiple cultural reference points, as his example of car journalism does. It is the middle style that seems to be the most disappointing. Neither entertaining nor sublime, it can only be read as failing to attain the higher level to which it aspires. If it seems to aspire to nothing, it is drier than an elbow in winter.

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