What purpose, if any, does an ornate lambrequin serve, that decorative strip of cloth set above windows or set on the back of a door? It is, after all, decorative. Some lambrequins are quite simple, almost sheer, and others are an intricate weave of patterns and fabrics. For now, let's leave this be.
Mannequins are, I would think, more immediately identifiable, and although they represent a being significantly more complex than even the most demanding lambrequin design, mannequins are by and large featureless save what they display. It is their very featurelessness that heightens the "style" of their, well, style.
I will return to these two images, which I believe symbolize in some way my own thoughts on style. For now, I will examine two chapters from Brian Ray's Style: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, and selections from Paul Butler's Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric, hoping I come to a greater appreciation for their arguments even if I do not fully buy or endorse their conclusions, explicit or implicit.
First, Ray. In two distinctly non-succinct yet engaging chapters, he summarizes and examines the development of style "From Ancient Greece through Rome," and then "From the Middle Ages through Nineteenth Century US." While these swaths of history are almost too broad to be considered as a whole, what Ray finds common to employers of style (my term to cover authors, poets, orators, pastors and preachers, and all others who might be concerned specifically with the catch-all "style") is the non-static nature of style. Pre-Sophists had a broad understanding of "style" (20). Music and recitation, rhythm-keeping, all had a place in this era. "After the classical era, rhetoric shifted from a subject devoted primarily to oratory, falling from its place as the culminating part of a student’s education" (19, 20). This owes at least something, as Ray alludes, to Aristotle's prolonged influence in multiple fields. Rhetoric then, some centuries later, became associated with "adornment of thought," or philosophy, and that style, becoming increasingly concerned with mimesis, shifted "to polish sermons and poetry, and to compose letters. Rhetoric occupied a lower place as stylistic embellishment until the Renaissance" (20).
Let's connect this to "Susan Jarratt [who] re-interprets sophistic theories of language through the lenses of social-epistemic, feminist, Freirean, and poststructural theories of language and literacy" (24). While Jarratt's scholarship has no doubt advanced language theory within her own numerous fields, these seem largely to be non-concerns of the contemporaries studied within Ray's history. This, I believe, is important because of how significantly style is linked to both history and a culture's wider metaphysics, even their mimetic triangulation (cf.: René Girard). We will come back to this, too.
The chapter bringing us to the Nineteenth Century focuses on the immense contributions and alterations to style made by women, not the least of whom is Christine de Pizan who "advocates silence as a stylistic resource" (62). Boethius, many decades before, had argued (through a well-made argumentum ex silentio) that "style—and even rhetoric itself—was the ornamentation of thought and, therefore, not a central concern" (61). Because we take for granted the pervasive presence of texts and books, we overlook how definitively the printing press transformed writing, which now could be a more wide-spread concern for style, whereas before style was concerned more with oratory or the privacy and usefulness of letter-writing (58-9, 63-4). This, in turn, had significant, unfathomable impact, a generation later when Wycliffe, Hus, Melancthon, and Luther changed the public's relationship to the printed word/Word.
While I have less to say about Butler's Out of Style, I will point us to two places late in the work. For all the good and needful redresses contained within the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language," this declaration is not without its complications: "the tendency to want to make writing transparent, or to have it seem invisible to those reading it, as if it points to some definitive underlying reality. Thus, at least part of the problem in the disappearance of stylistic study, I argue, is that composition has essentially been
interpellated by myths regarding clarity as well as other public myths about style....Like these public intellectuals, we want to help writers compose with attention to style and contextually appropriate grammar and vocabulary" (Butler 131-2, 141).
So, let's connect these. Views and employment of style, it would seem from these arguments, cannot be divorced from the overarching metaphysical stance of the culture within which they arise. Aristotelian metaphysics has a (significant) place within Augustinian thought, within Greek and Roman culture; as philosophy changed with the greater exposure and influence from Christian thinkers, the need for or uses of style changed and became more or less important. The fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, being nearly twenty centuries away, had little to no influence on style, though psychology as reflected through myth split style into what might be termed masculine and feminine uses (not related here to sex/gender, but to myth) even into the 13th century. Style, currently, reflects our cultures current concerns, but in what ways is this style connected to a larger anthropology or a metaphysics?
Both lambrequins and mannequins have a spectra of uses of wide and varying. Style as expression is at least semi-revelatory, a demonstration or affirmation of who the author is; style as ornamentation is invitational, or can be. With light coming through it, or around it, its intricacies are revealed too. Both mannequins and lambrequins have good uses, while both "styles" can be explored, understood, studied. I am not confident or even arguing that my example of the lambrequin has a metaphysical significance the mannequin does not. All I know is that these two examples typify for me a question that deserves more personal reflection and perhaps critical examination. If once in time, we believed style revealed the man, how, through a study of style, does style reveal Man?
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