ONTE style SUSAN SONTAG
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of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. It is not so easy, after all, to get unstuck from a distinction that practically holds together the fabric of critical discourse, and serves to perpetuate certain intellectual aims and vested interests which themselves remain unchallenged and would be difficult to surrender without a fully articulated working replacement at hand.
In the practice
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of a particular novel or poem at all as a “style,� without implying, whether one wishes to or not, that style is merely decorative, accessory, is extremely hard. Merely by employing the notion, one is almost bound to invoke, albeit implicitly, an antithesis between style and something else. Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.
In fact, to talk about the style
Nevertheless, the notion of a style-less, transparent art is one of the most tenacious fantasies of modem culture. Artists and critics pretend to believe that it is no more possible to get the artifice out of art than it is for a person to lose his personality. of style changes.
YET
the aspiration LINGERS — a permanent
dissent
n art,
from m oder
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**
612
TO SPEAK OF STYLE IS ONE WAY OF SPEAKING ABOUT THE
TOTALITY OF A WORK OF ART.
LIKE ALL DISCOURSE ABOUT TOTALITIES, TALK OF STYLE MUST RELY ON METAPHORS. AND METAPHORS
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MISLEAD.
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** The experience is also, in a certain measure, more Intense; for when suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be avid. But, as Ortega argues, “a preoccupation with the human content of the work [of art] is in principle incompatible with aesthetic judgment.”[1] Ortega is entirely correct, in my opinion. But I would not care to leave the matter where he does, which tacitly isolates aesthetic from moral response. Art is connected with morality, I should argue. One way that it is so connected is that art may yield moral pleasure; but the moral pleasure peculiar to art is not the pleasure of approving of ants or disapproving of them. The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. What “morality” means is a habitual or chronic type of behavior (including feelings and ants). Morality is a code of arts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, which prescribe a standard for behaving or trying to behave toward other human beings generally (that is, to all who are acknowledged to be human) as if we were inspired by love. 10
[1]
of consciousness, which is aesthetic experience. Only when works of art are reduced to statements which propose a specific content, and when morality is identified with a particular morality (and any particular morality has its dross, those elements which are no more than a defense of limited social interests and class values)—only then can a work of art be thought to undermine morality. Indeed, only then can the full distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical be made.
[1]
Needless to say, love is something we feel in truth for just a few individual human beings, among those who are known to us in reality and in our imagination. . . . Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices. If morality is so understood—as one of the achievement of human will, dictating to itself a mode of acting and being in the world—it becomes clear that no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness, aimed at action, which is morality, and the nourishment
[1] Ortega continues: I’m work of art vanishes from sight for a beholder who seeks in it nothing but the moving fate of John and Mary or Tristan and Isolde and adjusts his vision to this. Tristan’s sorrows are sorrows and can evoke compassion only insofar as they are taken as real But an object of art is artistic only Insofar as it is not real . . . But not many people are capable of adjusting their perceptive apparatus to the pane and the transparency that is the work of art Instead, they look right through It and revel in the human reality with which the work deals. . . During the 19th century artists proceeded in all too Impure a fashion. They reduced the strictly aesthetic elements to a minimum and let the work consist almost entirely in a fiction of human realities.
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12
just a few
for
in truth
something we feel
love is
in our imagination
and
in reality
among those who are known to us
human beings,
individual
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14
A work of art may contain all sorts of information and offer instruction in new (and sometimes commendable) attitudes. We may learn about medieval theology and Florentine history from Dante; we may have our first experience of passionate melancholy from Chopin; we may become convinced of the barbarity of war by Goya and of the inhumanity of capital punishment by An American Tragedy. But so far as we deal with these works as works of art, the gratification they impart is of another order. It is an experience of the qualities or forms of human consciousness.
The objection that this approach reduces art to mere “formalism� must not be allowed to stand. (That word should be reserved for those works of art which mechanically perpetuate outmoded or depleted aesthetic formulas.) An approach which considers works of art as living, autonomous models of consciousness will seem objectionable only so long as we refuse to surrender the shallow distinction of form and content. For the sense in no content is no different from the sense which a work of art has in which the world has no content. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could they possibly have any.
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** The hyperdevelopment of style in, for example, Mannerist painting and Art Nouveau, is an emphatic form of experiencing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. But only a particularly emphatic form, which arises in reaction to an oppressively dogmatic style of realism. All style—that is, all art-proclaims this. And
T H WORL IS, ULTI MATELY,
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That is to say, the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately, be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another窶馬ot when we consider all there is.
AN AES THET IC PHE NOM ENON. **
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THE WORK OF ART,
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It also explains the difficulties of the contemporary period of the arts. Today styles do not develop slowly and succeed each other gradually, over long periods of time which allow the audience for art to assimilate fully the principles of repetition on which the work of art is built; but instead succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare. For, if one does not perceive how a work repeats itself, the work is, almost literally, not
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perceptible and therefore, at the same time, not intelligible. It is the perception of repetitions that makes a work of art intelligible. Until one has grasped, not the “content,” but the principles of (and balance between) variety and redundancy in Merce Cunningham’s “Winterbranch” or a chamber concerto by Charles Wuoronin or Burrough’s Naked Lunch or the “black” paintings of Ad Reinhardt, these works are bound to appear boring or ugly or confusing, or all three.
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" Every style is a means of insisting on something."
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i ind
emo d, a mn nic device. cate
F o r i n s tance,
eve
ry s le of Rob b t e y G l e r illet’s e sty emb nov o , th d e l i s e e s x- pr us an e ess Th e p s a perf istemo anthropomorphize” thin ec lo to “ em is g l t h e s l y v alidgi,cal deci sal cribeatssociat s exact s amount t if n sio io o s “ a n n a , ” r r de alls whi and less neutra stylistic deci ow , an i l. The ch sio n se, to c c c , n h i n r i o i t s e c o o n terpr o s b g s e c i v u red in langua ular r c ea s o g mm n t pu n c tua onp iti tio lac v e y th b e
os
n. E e s v er hort wo y r
what we perceive. This w and o h is e f o w e t e n e b a p s p n e i h r o so i ns t o i a t et rela o t e visual a nd t of th t in n u h o t op c c ig a ct og a x ertrude St e r G f o e i e n tyl f the tenses. ’s es St et roups of t s ep g y h s
se that I ha v tended sen e jus n t he ex t
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i eing,
nd
eans of
sting
m
is a means o style ds and rep tem eat f o ins is a i
.
o
hing met o s n
ng on
of b s true of all art es that . is no les nctions besid gh it of pe rs o t thou as other fu n s Style honscious period of the arts, treatmen and c selfsRobbe-Grillet’s behavioristic anguage that exis refu ts n el than sight, perhaps because th icipation, what sh to e nt da
isti ins
by m os an res em the p ent t de n p to ci al kee ure m w it h her decision to abj
ces
loose syntax a
in em
. tyl ing Every s e
e
awarene ss
, orar y o things and that things are not perso p m are als te s n n o nse modalities othe o s r . ec ly, se r l at pe h a h t t u t , m d e r i i m i y v f a l , n t e o i e on me exclud see iluti na hings; to d t : o f e s i t s i o e th g st rties rienc st in e e e hin r p e p sie t x t ro er in d of e ess resses h ic p an p n x t h s e e n e r s p a n ap ncth stence on the a l i xtremely e to use an oem , y M in’s ins l t et h n s sa
t
INTEREST
IT WILL BE SEEN THAT STYLISTIC DECISIONS, BY FOCUSING OUR ATTENTION ON SOME THINGS, ARE ALSO A NARROWING OF O ANOTHER DOES NOT REST ON THE GREATER NUMBER OF THINGS THE STYLISTIC DECISIONS IN THAT WORK ALLOW US TO ATT
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TINGNESS
OUR ATTENTION, A REFUSAL TO ALLOW US TO SEE OTHERS. BUT THE GREATER INTERESTINGNESS OF ONE WORK OF ART OVER TEND TO, BUT RATHER ON THE INTENSITY AND AUTHORITY AND WISDOM OF THAT ATTENTION, HOWEVER NARROW ITS FOCUS.
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sense, *In*the strictest all the contents of
are ineffable.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, i n d e s c r i b a b l e .
EVERY WORK OF ART, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something ren
but also as a certain handlin
in the GREATEST
ART,one is always aware of things that cannot be said
of the contradiction between
(rules of “decoru
expression
and the presence of the
STYLISTIC DEVICES ARE ALSO TECHNIQUES OF
The most
AVOIDANCE. potent elementS
in a work of art
are,
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often, its
i n e x p r e
I
ndered,
ng of
the ineffable
um�),
e s s i b l e .
e L
N
C
E.
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