Volcanic rocks are aphanitic, which is to say that they are composed of such fine grains of minerals — feldspar, quartz, biotite — that they are invisible to the naked eye yet texturally different than obsidian or other forms of volcanic glass that are non-crystalline. Similarly, the raw, mineral forms at the base of consciousness expend their agglutination in music, shapes that shift perception the way a paradigm shatters when a new theory changes prevailing notions. Our idea of what an atom is made from shifts over time just as how words — a phrase, a proof, a stanza — show the trace of a mind at work and in the process contribute a new way of looking or form of reasoning, a metaphor that uncoils in invention or connects two parallel lines of thought. If there’s chaos underlying shimmering pattern, there are flying buttresses holding up the void, which spurts in plume and ash from volcanoes that are active on 17 places in the world as I write this, smelting and turning the sky incandescent with the earth’s innards.
Say style is ontological. It’s a mode of being in the world so intractable from the mind’s syntactical manifestations that it possesses clear inevitability and shares in the sheer delight of mathematical proof. Literature while grounded in the sensory still verges to the purest form of abstraction, expressed more fully perhaps only by music and math. Walter Pater would have poetry be language that aspires to the condition of music and the poem arrives distilled, impacted with meanings that collide, othering itself just as it asks us to enter the speaker’s voice to share the pulse of internal rhythm, narrative drive, a lyric suggesting, a certain mode of perceiving that’s inseparable from the perception or from the use of repetition that accumulates power through detail. But not just in poetry. Take Hemmingway’s forceful staccato reportage, enclosed within a single point of view (save in a work like For Whom the Bell Tolls) versus Proust’s satirizing pastiches of Flaubert, which demonstrate in the words of Jed Deppman, “a mastery of such Flaubertian techniques as free indirect style, ternary structures, multiplication of the imperfect tense, and, most of all, what I will call (rechristening a modernist term) impassibility.”
Style is impassable. Not baby-back, flared, faded, beaded, skinnyrib, crocheted, cantilevered or pimped out proper, but Beckett stripping syntax to bone and Joyce layering cakes of connotation. Sappho writing such tremulously distinctive evocations that fragmentary work found on papyrus even today can still be attributed to her. Tagore retaining even in translation, what Yeats called a “lifting up into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the sunlight.” Not affect but essence. A quality that transcends each jot of robot or ounce of flounce. Not an imitation but the peacock itself: the abstract localized and concretized into a blazing blue eye. Style cannot be dissected because it’s made of the mere material of its movement in time. It’s like the transverse curve of a mangrove root anchoring and absorbing, a sinuous prop to support the tree. Or like shards of cliff polished into sand by the sea. What else could it be but what it be?
This condition of being innately a part is the defining characteristic of the text but there’s still a boulder at the threshold of logos that prevents us from delving too deeply into the true mystery of style. Because whether manifest as stride or mouthed as a liquid, whether reflexively self-reflexive or flatly reasoned into pure instinct, when the jellyroll rolls like a parade through town, the observer needs stop drop-jawed to regard. No choice in the matter. Something so funky, original, shocking but inevitable, an extension of mood into the music of being suffuses the moment, even when it takes the shape of boot cut denim shimmying to the backbone of a bass line or the concatenation of clauses invoking Norse allusions and etymological puns. Style inflects the natural order of things with variation. A metaphoric Darwinism enacts, evolves, shifts and alters forever what might come before and afterwards. Style might be period but it’s never the period period. Closer to comma in creating new lanes of exchange, pushing outwards to make inroads into something measured as both trochaic trimeter and the echocardiogram; the one using sound to intensify the sonic exigency, front-loading the beat to echo church hymnals, the other using ultrasound to show a cross-sectional slice of the chambers and valves of the beating heart. Both creations help assess direction and velocity. Both graph markings of living life in distinctive and utterly necessary ways. And even as the opposite is also true, style is vital in a way that the cardiac sciences are not.
The question though is if unlike sincerity, style can be mechanized. Literature has its equivalent of Andy Warhol’s factory churning out silk-screens or Sol LeWitt creating directions for assistants around the world to produce works even after he’s passed away. An algorithm for creating a poem according to certain highly restrictive restraints can produce something distinctive, even if not willed. And if over time the same algorithm with different inputs produces similarly syncopated and delineated texts, then is that style? Because one thing style marks is consistency. The one-off or the lark into social realism, the occasional satirical send up or rare genre experiment, don’t possess it the way Faulkner’s sentences, Charles Wright’s stanzas, Chuck Close’s faces, Laurie Anderson’s performances, Mozart’s symphonies, the polar bear’s haunches, the lemon’s acidity, or the upper atmosphere’s condensation, all do. Not as an integral part of their composition, inseparable from their other qualities. One can read style all the way down to the graviton’s induction of attraction between massless fermions. Even on that microscopic level there are rules that result in wildly oscillating results. If truth and pretense are forces pulling in opposite directions, style is that one central fulcrum point where there’s relative stasis — and from where all aesthetic and scientific movement arrives.
Ravi Shankar is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust and the founding editor of Drunken Boat. He has published or edited seven books of poems, including Deepening Groove, Radha Says, Seamless Matter, Voluptuous Bristle, Wanton Textiles, and Instrumentality. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.), called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared on the BBC and NPR, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.