Susan Sontag
ON STYLE
It would
be
hard to find any reputable literary critic today
who would care to be caught defending
as an idea
the old antithesis
of style versus content. On
this
issue a pious concensus prevails.
Everyone is quick to avow that style and content are indissoluble,
that the strongly individual style of each important writer is an organic
aspect of his work and never something merely "decorative."
In the
practice
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 fact, to talk about the style 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 im–
plicitly, 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.
One way in which the old duality lives on in the practice of
criticism, in concrete judgments, is the frequency with which quite
