Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler

Notes toward a Reappraisal of Malory’s Prose Style

tyle: Jonathan Swift unhelpfully tells us that “proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.”1 More helpful are elizabeth Closs traugott and Mary louise Pratt, whose Linguistics for Students of Literature provides a useful approach. As they put it,“style results from a tendency of a speaker or writer to consistently choose certain structures over others available in the language . . . we can distinguish between ‘style’ and ‘language’ by saying that language is the sum total of the structures available to the speaker,while style concerns the characteristic choices in a given context.”2 Throughout this essay, I refer to Malory’s “style”in the sense of his choices,especially with regard to word choice and clause structure. Any discussion of Malory’s prose style must first note the two book-length studies of that style: P. J. C. Field’s magisterial Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style3 and Mark lambert’s Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur.4 Many other scholars ranging from Sir Walter Scott through George Saintsbury to eugène vinaver himself have discussed Malory’s style; limitations of space force me to leave them undiscussed here, except to note that bonnie Wheeler herself has contributed one of the most thoughtful essays on Malory’s prose, one in which she writes that Malory’s paratactic style profoundly affects both his episodic plot development and his audience’s sense of “gaps in causal structures” which readers are impelled to fill in.5 I am indebted to the scholars noted above and to their many here-unnoted colleagues; their comments on Malory’s style have stimulated my own thoughts. I must note,however,that none of them has discussed Malory’s style in his own terms. one cannot fully discuss Malory’s writing style without reviewing the literary culture for which and within which he wrote—a manuscript-based culture which received much of its literature through the ear rather than through the eye. Notes toward a Reappraisal of Malory’s Prose Style D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. S 80 I have separated those two basic assertions into a one-sentence paragraph to emphasize them; just as Malory undeniably wrote for a readership whose reading habits he knew to be governed by manuscript conventions, likewise he wrote for an audience most of whom, he knew, would not “read” the Morte; they would receive it by ear (aurally) rather than by eye. That Malory’s was a manuscript culture is a given; that his was an oral-aural culture is not so obvious but is indubitable .The chief recent study of his oral-aural culture is a special issue of Arthuriana: Reading Malory Aloud: Then and Now, jointly edited by Karen Cherewatuk and Joyce Coleman.6 It contains essays by Rosamund S. Allen on syntax, Janet Jesmok on “poetic qualities” of the Morte, and Michael twomey on “the voice of aurality,” among others.7 The issue, especially those three articles, fully supports the oralaural element of the Morte. In this essay, I base my argument chiefly on one fact: our earlier manuscript culture used no syntactic punctuation. Syntactic punctuation was invented by printers following Malory’s time.8 Instead of punctuation, Malory used verbal cues to syntax. His practice is now unfamiliar to us; his syntactic cues—chiefly coordinating conjunctions—may in a modern punctuated edition seem crude or unnecessarily repetitive. Then, they were essential to constructing meaning. Modern scholars have largely ignored this fact. Thus P. J. C. Field suggests that the following wording shows Malory “least at his ease” as a narrator: “And the name of thys knyght was called balyne, and by good meanys of the barownes he was delyverde oute of preson, for he was a good man named of his body, and he was borne in northehumbirlonde” (1:62.36–63.2).9 This “sentence,” as Field terms it, seems to him clumsily to hold “misfit clauses awkwardly tacked on late in the sentence,” a result of Malory’s unthinkingly applying his paratactic clause structure.10 note that in the manuscript, and of course in Malory’s knowledge of syntactic conventions, this set of clauses could have no commas; thus the “And . . . and ...for ...and”construction which Field deplores results from a style based not on the modern concept of the sentence but on the concept of the clause.The conjunctions serve as markers for new clauses, and were by later conventions replaced by commas and...