Spanish Stylistics and the Idealistic or Genetic Approach
1. Introduction
Developed in Western Europe nearly simultaneously with the Eastern European Russian Formalism, stylistics coincides with the Russian school in many ways and attitudes in relation to literary work. We should not confuse what we call style, i.e., a critical current which is school in the 20th century, with reflection or interest on the general style, which had been a constant throughout the tradition of literary thought. We speak of stylistics especially to refer to what is usually called Idealistic or Genetic Stylistics, as this is the more properly literary style, that is, the more concerned with the artistic style of writing.
Like Russian Formalism, stylistics states immanentist on the linguistic study of texts (language). This new school was influenced by B. Croce whose Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902) can be considered the first work of stylistic theory. According to Croce, art is spiritualized form, i.e., form and not matter. In short, art is expression. This school is opposed to nineteenth-century positivism. Following Husserl, it attaches importance to individual expression which is in the use of language. It is designed also as an expression of consciousness or spirit, not as a social medium of communication. Not that Husserl and with it the style did not have social recognition of what is in the use of language, but this social dimension of language as a collective expression seemed inconvenient, and they dreamed of a pure and uncontaminated employment of language, that expresses nothing more than the individual conscience.
Do not forget, however, that the stylistic and theoretical-critical school also owes Charles Bally, a disciple of Saussure, who in his French Stylistics Treaty (1904) defined the style as follows: ‘The stylistic study therefore, the events organized language expression from the point of emotional content of these, ie, the expression of the facts of sensation language and action of the facts on the sensitivity of language’. Hence we can infer that the sole object of stylistics is the affective language.
German linguist K. Vossler chose to use positive methods of description and analysis, integrating them into a phenomenology and science of the spirit, so that after exhaustive analysis of the material, which tends to characterize all empiricism, he proceeded to search for the cause or the genesis hidden in the data.
For that reason, Vossler always lies in the spirit and, therefore, for him we must deal with the language style as individual creation.
- Vossler: Methodology = methodological philosophy + positive
- Spitzer: ‘Method of philological circle’.
Such individual attention to language, continues with Leo Spitzer, who, more influenced by psychology, is interested in the author’s mind in relation to their literary products. With his philological circle method, described in his Linguistics and Literary History (1948), the psychological trait, peculiar, namely the spiritual cause eminently subjective explains the peculiar characteristics of a style.
To him we owe the clearest formulation of the method of stylistic criticism, in essence, is to progressively develop hypotheses about the psychological trait or creative principle, from the material, ie the linguistic features of the text.
Although it may seem that philological circle method is not immanent, we are convinced however, that this method can be ascribed without problem to the theories of Literary immanentist, because in every moment of literary analysis we have in mind the text itself.
2. Spanish Stylistics
In connection with the previous current, in our country we have what is known as the Spanish School of Stylistics, initiated by Amado Alonso and Damaso Alonso. Already in 1931, making the most of his work in America, Amado Alonso translated into our language important articles by K. Vossler, C. Spitzer and H. Hatzfeld, in Introduction to Romance Stylistics. In addition, he made a brilliant theory of immanent critique on the basis of its broad language training and literary-critical.
In his Letter to Alfonso Reyes on Stylistics, Amado Alonso raised the subject of stylistics as follows: ‘the style serves preferably to the poetic values of gestation and formal than the “historical, philosophical, ideological or social” served by traditional criticism’.
The outstanding figure of this movement was undoubtedly Alonso, who sees stylistics as a “science of style,” while defining the style as “peculiar, so different from one talk.
For Damaso Alonso, the purpose of the stylistic constitutes ‘all significant elements of language’.
As regards methodology, Damaso Alonso agrees with Leo Spitzer in that each work requires a separate analysis and discovery in the keys of interpretation of a work plays an important role intuition: ‘attack styles is always a problem what mathematicians call a happy mind. This means that the only way to enter the venue is a lucky break, an intuition’.
According to Alonso, this intuition is produced in the gestation stage of the work by the author and in the recreation of the same by the reader, and the critic must discover the ultimate meaning of the text. It must be said that this concept of intuition no longer has the sense of hypotheses that gave Spitzer, but a mystical sense of access to the “mystery” reserved for beings as unique and singular as the authors whom he called ‘critical race’.
However, Damaso believes in the possibility of developing a science of literature that comes close to that mystery of poetic creation through scientific knowledge of literature, not through a purely intuitive knowledge that is actually scientist.
So he believes that this scientific knowledge of literature can only be obtained from the study of interdependence and complementarity between signifier and signified.
It is, finally, that in the works of Amado Alonso, Damaso Alonso and Carlos Bousono are the foundations on which will build the 20th century Spanish literary thought.