The Ways of the Word: Episodes in Verbal Attention by Garrett Stewart (review)

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• The Ways of the Word: Episodes in Verbal Attention by Garrett Stewart
• Tamsin Evernden (bio)

Garrett Stewart. The Ways of the Word: Episodes in Verbal Attention. Cornell UP, 2021. Pp. i + 239. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-6140-9 (pb).

Garrett Stewart's eighteenth book has a doubly self-reflexive thesis. Building upon previous work on "the linguistic infrastructure of […] textured prose" (from the blurb of Stewart's 2018 monograph, The One, Other, and Only Dickens), The Ways of the Word sets out to explore "simply letting verbal texture have its say" through a series of "readings in, rather than readings of, fiction" (19). The switch of preposition presages the book's focus upon the dividends of illogic. It also forewarns the reader of an echo chamber of analyses, so far-reaching in individual measure that the flow of argument is sometimes lost. However, in this Stewart exactly replicates his point, and fulfils it. "The Ways of the Word" are centrifugal in his eyes, to his ears, carrying sense through divergent tracks of etymology, phonetics, and ambiguity per se. The business of reading represents not so much a continuum as a series of pockets, each with expansive potential.

Stewart's book incentivizes the kind of competitive critique wherein metaphor outdoes metaphor. His consideration of how "words work overtime in literary prose" includes the implicit (industry), artisanship ("its woven way"), and living organism ("weigh those words […] take their pulse") (3; 19; 58). Inveterate word and, by extension, image play infiltrates practical criticism from Empson and Leavis to Kermode. (Stewart does not deviate [End Page 490] from the Western canon, although he does give thought to writing outside a native language). This idiom represents a true pleasure in wording, capturing the heft or inflection or mood of writing, its tonal climate. However, there's a balance to be struck. To shed an appreciative light upon a primary text is to widen the sphere of understanding, whereas to pull away into intellectual pyrotechnics is grandstanding. Stewart implies that appreciation is lost in (and on) the modern academy, "whose mainstream weathervanes are tooled for other disciplinary crosscurrents than wording's high- or low-pressure fronts" (4). The likely reality is that only appreciation as actively incisive as it is awed and in abeyance can stand in the stead of schools of criticism that are institutionally validated.

Although he cites him many times, Stewart does not abide by George Orwell's edict of plain writing. He articulates his points in long, multifarious sentences; facets of argument and apposite words dually collaborate. This creates richness or tautology, depending. Stewart quotes Emily Dickinson's wonderful line: "The brain is wider than the sky" (219). Dickinson pinions the way consciousness is not attendant to space, or time, but in order to compute her imaged thought we must see an un-variegated sky, otherwise comprehension gets thwarted by visualization. Analogously, Stewart's frequently fine observations cannot equate to seismic horizon change. Finding examples of the ways of the word is both infinite variety in detail, and infinite similitude in mode. An unexpected pedagogical takeaway from this book is how the pattern of transcription and analysis can seem burdensome when endlessly repeated. It made me realize something else too. Once we transcribe, we appropriate, and can play on different terms, in different tempo, because we feel the writing surreptitiously ours: moored.

Stewart's argument is ostensibly shuttled into three different provinces: "page, stage, and inner perceptual screen" (23). The multiple registers of the printed word are established territory. Stewart uses a performed (eight-hour) reading of The Great Gatsby, Gatz (2010), to explicate the effect of "oralized text" (90). I felt anchored by his reminding us of literature's aural heritage, and an example of Shakespeare on stage that sent him back to the text. Axiomatic, but somehow providing grip within his complex arguments. Stewart's chapters on the "screened" sentence are poised and lucid (115). Here he has form, having examined the conflation of film and literature before. I enjoyed his analysis of cinematic distance in literary prose; a trope being Hardy's placing of his characters in vast landscapes, but Stewart bypasses the "so to...