Dolven, Jeff. Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation. University of Chicago Press, 2017. viii + 253 pp. Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780226517117.  Cloth $75.00 ISBN: 9780226517087. E-book $25.00 ISBN: 9780226517254.

Jeff Dolven’s Senses of Style is both a highly experimental work of criticism and an easy read, at once elegant and companionable. The book’s experimental gambits include distilling the author’s insights into ‘nearly four hundred brief, aphoristic remarks’ (as the dust jacket advertises), and stringing these quick prose forays across an elaborate conceptual grid designed to generate multiple pathways for reading, beyond the initial and quite enjoyable saunter from page 1 to page 183 (or 226 if you read the notes, which reward attention). The most compelling of the many threads woven through this grid is an extended cross reading of the lives and texts of two poets whose styles notoriously resist definition, Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara.

The plural ‘Senses’ in Dolven’s title points to one rationale for the ‘digressive and interruptive’ (vii) movement of the book’s thinking: ‘style’ for Dolven is not a concept but a topic, constituted by the variety of its effects and manifestations and by the contradictions entangling its motives. The remarks, numbered sequentially from 1 to 396, are grouped into ten unnumbered clusters that look like chapters. The first and last of these, ‘Continuing’, emphasise the way style ‘holds things together, things and people, schools and movements and periods’ (1) — the way it enables both connection and continuity. The intervening eight sections alternate between four ‘Ironies of Style’ (part and whole, art and nature, individual and group, description and judgement) and four ‘Antitheses’ (style v. substance, style v. aesthetics, style v. interpretation, and style v. narrative). There are also nine ‘Limits’, boundaries beyond which style fades into incoherence, plainness, helplessness, nature, sameness, action, passion, God, or death.

You may wonder (as I do), why these nine? Could there be a tenth limit, or is nine the limit of limits? Is the term ‘limit’ here a proper concept, or a critical trope? Dolven isn’t going to answer such questions, except perhaps by indirection. If you want to know what a ‘limit’ is in this context, you will have to read the nine segments to analyse how the term is deployed in each. Which it turns out to be, trope or concept, will depend on how your analysis proceeds.

The remarks threaded across this frame are learned, witty, sometimes whimsical, informative, subtle and agile: for any proposition about style Dolven is willing, indeed determined, to entertain its opposite. Particular threads are designated by means of a supplementary, parenthetical numbering: thus ‘§34 Whoso List (1)’ finds a remote counterpart in ‘§308 Whoso List (2)’, while other threads (‘Style as History’, for example, or ‘Style as Deviation’) may link six or eight remarks across several clusters. In addition to these often long-range connections, the remarks continually send out tendrils of unmarked echo and association linking them to their neighbours, and these in turn complicate the more distant pairings. The two segments on ‘Whoso List’, for instance, appear in different sections, the first in ‘Part and Whole’, the second in ‘Description and Judgment’, and must be grasped in situ before the relations between them can be worked out. The segments leading up to §34, for instance, tease the question whether Wyatt knew what he was doing, and ask whether there can be such a thing as a ‘style of failure’. The later thread, pondering judgements (bad style vs. no style), builds upon H. A. Mason’s judgment that ‘There is not the slightest trace of poetic activity’ in Wyatt’s verse (§308). The immediate rejoinder is muted—Dolven turns Mason’s ideas in the light for a sentence or two before disagreeing—while the more distant rejoinder, back in §35, is unmistakable, and offers a fair sample of Dolven at his best:

The poem leans upon commonplaces, as Wyatt often does: to try to hold the wind in a net was proverbial. It probes and retreats, tests and relents, or perhaps just changes its mind, or mood. Its lability gives the impression of an utterance in real time, some mix of urgent persuasion and internal debate. If the poem has an interlocutor, imagine the challenge, for that poor man, of gauging whether he is a confidant or a rival. Wyatt is on the balls of his feet, assured, even commanding, and then, abruptly, on his heels, and already, precociously weary, helas, as though he has suddenly aged. Or is the wariness just a ruse? “I put him out of doubt.”

The weave of local context in Senses of Style may be illustrated with any stretch of the text. The opening section, ‘Continuing’, takes up the way ‘style keeps things going and keeps them from falling apart’ (vii). §3 ‘Trying to Keep Going’ quotes from a letter in which O’Hara describes to a friend his experience of writing the poem ‘Biotherm’; as the passage unspools, it becomes clear that for O’Hara the real challenge is not achieving closure but resisting it:

I don’t know anything about what it is or will be but am enjoying
trying to keep it going and seem to have something. Some days I
feel very happy about it, because I seem to have been able to keep it
‘open’ and so there are lots of possibilities, air and such.

There has to be some sense of coherence, as the poet seems to himself ‘to have something’, but the work of composition seems mainly devoted to keeping that something elusive, like air. O’Hara illustrates the abundance of possibilities by mentioning three different titles he keeps shifting among, and one of these is from Wyatt: ‘Wherebye Shall Seace’. This is, clearly, the polar opposite of O’Hara’s ‘going on’, but he takes delight in it: ‘The Wyatt passage’, O’Hara remarks, ‘is very beautiful’, and he quotes two lines: ‘This dedelie stroke, whereby shall seace / The harborid sighis within my herte’.

This segment, about a page in length, is followed by a one-sentence reflection on the titular theme of ‘Continuing’: ‘It is easier to have a style than not: ease and fluency are among the primary motives for style, and also avoiding the jeopardy of decisions you have not already made’.  §5 then acknowledges the surprise of Wyatt’s lines within O’Hara’s letter, where they appear not as a way of continuing but as a striking interruption, a clash of styles. §6 We Will Begin Again (1) then turns to the published version of O’Hara’s ‘Biotherm’ to locate the passage in which the lines from Wyatt appear. ‘After one of many interruptions’, Dolven observes, ‘O’Hara gathers himself to ask, “but we will begin again won’t we”’, and then answers himself:

                                                             well I will anyway or as 12,

“continuez, même stupide garcon”

                                                 “This dedelie stroke, wherebye shall seace

                                                        The harborid sighis within my herte”’

Wyatt’s lines, says Dolven, are an answer to the request to continue, but the answer turns out to be ambiguous: ‘What to make of the interruption, indeed whether it is an interruption, will depend on the sense of O’Hara’s style: whether it is broken by Wyatt’s lines or continuous across them … .’

This mini-series of linked reflections opens out in many directions. §4, quoted above, leads to §7 (‘Continuing (2): Synchronically’) and §9, (‘Continuing (3): Diachronically’), which are held barely apart by §8, ‘Everything Has a Style’:

Everything has a style. Take a shard of pottery, and place it in
the history of Athens; take a safety, pin, and stick it in your ear.

The fourth in this series, §12, will offer a fine paragraph-length discussion of Wyatt’s preferred term for continuing, ‘remain’. This segment may in turn be read as opening into many others that pause over Wyatt’s stylistic choices. §57, for instance, in the cluster that forms around the First Irony of Style, Part and Whole, quotes the first four lines from Wyatt’s translation of Petrarch’s Mirando ‘l sol (Rime 173) in order to observe the way the English poet ‘radicalizes’ Petrarch’s signature ‘decomposition of the self’: ‘The parts are all in Petrarch’s inventory. Their radical disarray is Wyatt’s, his style or his spell against style’.

It should be clear from these examples that we could ‘keep it going’, tracing different paths of reading, for as long as our energy or interest hold out, and that of course is deliberate. The result is at times reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s S/Z, with its five more or less systematic ‘codes’ operating in combination with the interruptive and digressive ‘starring’ of the text, splitting it into small segments and then intervening in their sequence with digressive mini-essays. Like Barthes, Dolven enjoys the play of his own verbal feints and flourishes, at once indulging and subtly deflating the impulse to formulate resonant proclamations.

The ‘aphoristic’ feel of Dolven’s prose reflects but perhaps also deflects, through parody, the impulse to sound definitive: ‘Style can be interpreted’, reads a typical sentence from §290, ‘as interpretation does have style, but neither can be reduced to the other, and style, at least, can go it alone’. Against this impulse to proclamation, there is the persistent fragmentation, discontinuity and dissemination of the thinking. The supplementary numeration tracking particular threads gestures toward wholeness but never totalises the claims put forward in any one remark or collocation of remarks. Often it can have the opposite effect, as in the series of sentences that begin each of the nine remarks on limits of style:

‘Everything has a style’ (§56 ‘The First Limit of Style: Incoherence’)
‘Everything has a style. Nevertheless…’ (§83 ‘The Second Limit of Style: Plainness’)
‘Everything has a style’ (§90 ‘The Third Limit of Style: Plainness’)
‘Everything has a style, except nature’ (§83 ‘The Fourth Limit of Style: Nature’)
‘Everything has a style, but style’s ease reaches a limit in easeful death….’ (§240 ‘The Fifth Limit of Style: Sameness’)
‘Everything has a style, except action’ (§310 ‘The Sixth Limit of Style: Action’)
‘Everything has a style, except passion’ (§321 ‘The Seventh Limit of Style: Passion’)
‘Everything has a style, but does Everything?’ (§357 ‘The Eighth Limit of Style: God’)
‘Everything has a style, except death’ (§378 ‘The Ninth Limit of Style: Death’)

You may recall that the formulaic ‘Everything has a style’ actually precedes this numbered series, appearing first as itself the title of a segment (§8) in the initial ‘Continuing’ cluster. Only later does it become the leitmotif of the nine limits of style.

The effect of such repetition within variation is to reverse the polarity of the aphoristic form: instead of encapsulating a conclusion, marking a stopping-point for thought, each aphorism uses its burst of rhetorical energy to launch another line of speculation, linked ironically to its faux-definitive counterparts in the rest of the thread. This is one of many ways in which Dolven enacts in his writing the dance of starting and stopping that makes style at once an enabling condition of continuity and an edge, a reflective pause that then makes way for the next new beginning.    

The experience of reading the book is thus bound to a rhythm of always starting over again. But that is not quite the right way to put it. The strong tension between the book’s many markers of connection and its love of particularity, its courtship of discontinuity and scattering (there are two linked sections, separated by 139 others, bearing the title ‘Jujubes’[1]), means that there are many alternative rhythms of pausing and resuming, each the product of a different reading-track signaled either by the argument’s formal infrastructure or by the unmarked echoes and affinities that hover in the prose.

Readers of The Spenser Review may well wonder how such an open-ended and digressive argument will help them read The Faerie Queene, a poem that shares the qualities of self-consciousness, fragmentation, inconclusiveness, and (not least) formal gridwork that inform Dolven’s book. Neither text, I want to say, is a self-sufficient, completed work of thought: each in its own way is, rather, a machine to think with, a highly suggestive matrix for producing new thought. A recent thread on the Sidney-Spenser listserv began with a question about what rhetorical label would apply to one of Spenser’s more distinctive stanzas:

Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love do thus expell:
            Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede,
            Griefe is a flood, and love a monster fell;
            The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede,
            The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:
            But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;
            The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed,
            The drops dry up, and filth wipe cleane away:
So shall wrath, gealosy, griefe, love die and decay.
                                                               (FQII.iv.35)

Contributors to the thread proposed a wide range of technical terms to name the intricate patterning of the language in this stanza. I think they would enjoy Dolven’s technical analysis of the ‘painful formalism, a rack upon which to stretch the sentiment’, of the sestet from Wyatt’s ‘I find no peace’ (§41), with its elaboration of antithesis and isocolon. They might also find food for thought in his reflection on the impulse behind such analysis, which begins with the observation that ‘To see something in parts involves a certain resistance to its charisma’, and concludes, ‘Any dividing line you draw, anywhere, you draw around yourself’ (§58).

I said at the outset that the most compelling of the threads in Senses of Style is made up of critical and biographical mini-essays on Sir Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara. The juxtapositions are continually surprising and illuminating.  O’Hara was in fact fascinated by Wyatt’s verse. Dolven reproduces as the frontispiece for his book a mixed-media work by Joe Brainard and Frank O’Hara that contains a poem by Wyatt written in O’Hara’s hand:

‘Untitled (Cherries)’ (1964). Ink and collage on paper 13 1/2 x 10 3/4 in. Used by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard and the Collection of Kenneth Koch. 

‘If waker care’ is the sonnet in the upper-right. In its bricolage of glowing color and grey inscription, hyper-real cherries like gigantic jujubes shouldering aside and dominating the frail scraps of text with their archaic English and modern French, this work aptly represents the mingling of styles and influences both in O’Hara’s poetry and in Dolven’s trans-historical reading of the two poets’ lives and verses against one another. For Dolven, O’Hara’s sustained interest in Wyatt is ‘A Minor Puzzle of Literary History’ (§15): ‘It is not a matter of a one-poem stand, nor a few scattered allusions’, he writes, ‘but something more like a way of writing, even a way of living; a way, for O’Hara, of continuing. And of course a way of continuing for Wyatt, too, whose poems have another life in O’Hara’s’.

That other life involves a particular way of throwing Wyatt’s singularity into relief by finding it mirrored, surprisingly but unmistakably, in the very different verse experiments of the modernist O’Hara. If Dolven’s style of thinking in Senses of Style owes a debt to O’Hara, it pays that debt to Wyatt, shining a peculiar light on the stubborn idiosyncrasy of his life and writing. In one of its facets, this odd coupling of writers — ‘this affinity between the gay curator-poet from the New York City of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and the courtier-poet of the court of Henry VIII, supposed lover of the king’s consort, later wife, Anne Boleyn’ (§15) — also offers a model for Dolven’s relation to his own readers. Senses of Style is a highly-wrought instance of critical thinking performed in memorable prose, but it is also carefully crafted as a matrix for further thinking. Because of the flexible, open-ended structuring-effect of that matrix, Dolven’s fine phrases and casual aperçus open themselves to marginal dialogue, surprising connections, and against-the-grain counter-speculation. In this way his thinking has another life in ours, and that is one of the things he means by style.

David Lee Miller

University of South Carolina

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