E. D. Hirsch

Stylistics and Synonymity

In this essay I shall be less concerned with stylistics as a practical method than with its characteristic assumptions, which I attack without any intention to impugn the usefulness of stylistic analysis, currently a feature of much literary criticism. My main purpose is the positive one of defending the existence and importance of synonymity, that is, the expression of an absolutely identical meaning by means of different linguistic forms. In conducting this defense of synonymity, it happens to be logically necessary to attack the postulate that, given an identical context, a difference in linguistic form compels a difference in meaning-a postulate that I take to be a basic assumption of stylistics. Since that postulate is often true for specific cases, the practice of stylistics can be useful and valid. The object of my attack is simply the false methodological optimism that seeks in stylistic analysis a reliable system of interpretation. That methodological hope, being falsely based, can never be realized. Even in context, meaning cannot be reliably decided or deduced on the basis of linguistic form. That is the G6dels theorem of language, a grasp of which might discourage excessive reliance on ever more refined methods of linguistic analysis.