THE BELLES-LETTRES STYLE

Of all the functional styles of language, the most difficult to define is the belles-
lettres style. Franz Kafka defines this style as organised violence done on ordinary
speech. iterary !orks create their o!n !orld. "ach is a uni#ue entity. $ust as a painter
uses paint to create a ne! image, a !riter uses !ords to create a te%t. &n important thing
to recognise about literary !orks is 'ust ho! carefully and consciously they are crafted.
(ords are the ra! material of literature and literary !riters stretch them to their limits.
). *rystal +,--./ said that the literary language is the art in making the unnatural
appear natural. For e%ample, a play!right or novelist may !rite a dialogue !hich is
naturalistic 0 i. e. it employs collo#uialism, dialect !ords and so on 0 but this dialogue is
very different from spontaneous speech. 1t !ill contain no non-fluency features, it !ill
probably be less repetitious and more dramatic than ordinary speech.
Other forms of literature make no attempt to appear natural 0 in fact they
deliberately surprise the readers2 e%pectations. 3hey might use familiar !ords in
unfamiliar !ays as e. e. cummings does, or they might coin ne! !ords as 4erald
5opkins does. 6erhaps !e e%pect poets to use deviant language, but prose !riters like
$ames $oyce do it too. 3he belles-lettres style is a generic term for three substyles in
!hich the main principles and the most general properties of the style are materialized.
3hese three substyles are7
,. the language of poetry
8. emotive prose
9. the language of the drama
"ach of these substyles has certain common features. First of all comes the common
function !hich may be called aeshetico-cognitive. 3his is a double function !hich aims
at the cognitive process and, at the same time, calls for a feeling of pleasure. 3his
pleasure is caused not only by admiration of the selected language means and their
peculiar arrangement but also by the fact that the reader is led to form his o!n
conclusions. :o the purpose of the belles-lettres style is to suggest a possible
interpretation of the phenomena of life by forcing the reader to see the vie! point of the
!riter. ;othing gives more pleasure and satisfaction than realizing that one has the ability
to penetrate into the hidden tissue of events, phenomena and human activity and to
perceive the relation bet!een various seemingly unconnected facts brought together by
the creative mind of the !riter.
From all this it follo!s, that the belles-lettres style must select a system of language
means !hich !ill secure the effect sought. 3he belles-lettres style rests on certain
indispensable linguistic features !hich are7
,. genuine, not trite, imagery, achieved by purely linguistic device
8. the use of !ords in conte%tual and very often in more that one dictionary meaning
9. a vocabulary !hich !ill reflect to a greater or lesser degree the author2s personal
evaluation of things or phenomena
<. a peculiar individual selection of vocabulary and synta%, a kind of le%ical and
syntactical idiosyncrasy
=. introduction of the typical features of collo#uial language.
3he belles-lettres style is individual in essence. 1ndividuality in selecting language
means and stylistic devices is one of its most distinctive properties.
1. LANGUAGE OF POETRY
3he first substyle !e shall consider is v e r s e. 1ts first differentiating property is its
orderly form, !hich is based mainly on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the
utterances. 3he rhythmic aspect calls forht syntactical and semantic peculiarities !hich
also fall into a more or less strict orderly arrangement. >oth synta% and semantics comply
!ith the restrictions imposed by the rhythmic pattern, and the result is brevity of
e%pression, epigram-like utterances, and fresh une%pected imagery. :yntactically this
brevity is sho!n in elliptical and fragmentary sentences, in detached constructions, in
inversion, asyndeton and other syntactical peculiarities.
2. EMOTIVE PROSE
3he substyle of emotive prose has the same common features as have been pointed
out for the belles-lettres style in general., but all these features are correlated differently
in emotive prose. 3he imagery is no so rich as it is in poetry, the percentage of !ords
!ith conte%tual meaning is not so high as in poetry, the idiosyncrasy of the author is not
so clearly discernible. &part form metre and rhyme, !hat most of all distinguishes
emotive prose form the poetic style is the combination of the literary variant of the
language, both in !ords and synta%, !ith the collo#uial variant. 1t !ould perhaps be more
e%act to define this as a combination of the spoken and !ritten varieties of the language,
inasmuch as there are al!ays t!o forms of communication present 0 monologue +the
!riter2s speech/ and dialogue +the speech of the characters/.
1t follo!s then that the collo#uial language in the belles-lettres style is not a pure and
simple reproduction of !hat might be the natural speech of living people. 1t has
undergone changes introduced by the !riter. 3he collo#uial speech has been made
?literature-like. 3his means that only the most striking elements of !hat might have
been a conversation in life are made use of, and even these gave undergone some kind of
transformation. "motive prose allo!s the use of elements from other styles as !ell. 3hus
!e find elements of the ne!spaper style in :inclair e!is2s 1t *an2t 5appen 5ere, the
official style in the business letters e%changed bet!een t!o characters in 4als!orthy2s
novel ?3he @an of 6roperty, the style of scientific prose in *ronin2s *itadel !here
medical language is used.
>ut all these styles under the influence of emotive prose undergo a kind of
transformation. 6assages !ritten in other styles may be vie!ed only as interpolation and
not as constituents of the style. 6resent day emotive prose is to a large e%tent
characterized by the breaking-up of traditional syntactical designs of the preceding
periods. ;ot only detached construction, but also fragmentation of syntactical models,
peculiar, une%pected !ays of combining sentences, especially the gap-sentence link and
other modern syntactical patterns, are freely introduced into present-day emotive prose.
3. LANGUAGE OF THE DRAMA
3he stylization of collo#uial language is one of the features of plays !hich at
different stages in the history of "nglish drama has manifested itself in different !ays
revealing, on the one hand, the general trends of the literary language and, on the other,
the personal idiosyncrasies of the !riter. 3hus the language of plays is a stylized type of
the spoken variety of language. 3he analysis of the language te%ture of plays has sho!n
that the most characteristic feature here is to use the term of the theory of information,
redundancy of information caused by the necessity to amplify the utterance. 3his is done
for the sake of the audience.
3he language of plays is entirely dialogue. 3he author2s speech is almost entirely
e%cluded e%cept for the play!right2s remark and stage directions. 3he language of the
characters is in no !ay the e%act reproduction of the norms of collo#uial language,
although the play!right seeks to reproduce actual conversation as far as the norms of the
!ritten language !ill allo!. 3his variety of belles-lettres style has used the norms of the
literary language of the given period. :o ,.
th
century drama is much different from 8A
th
century drama.