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SUSAN SONTAG
admirable works of art are defended as good although what
is mis–
called their style is acknowledged to
be
crude or careless. Another
is the frequency with which a very complex style is regarded with
a barely concealed ambivalence. Contemporary writers and other
artists with a style that
is
intricate, hermetic, demanding-not to
speak of "beautiful"-get their ration of unstinting praise. Still, it
is clear that such a style is often felt to be a form of insincerity–
evidence of the artist's intrusion upon his materials, which should
be
allowed to deliver themselves in a pure state.
Whitman, in the preface to the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass,
expresses the disavowal of "style" which is, in most arts since the
last century, a standard ploy for ushering in a new stylistic vocabulary.
"The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the free
channel of himself," that great and very mannered poet contends.
"He says to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my
writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way
between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in
the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely
what it is."
Of course, as everyone knows or claims to know, there is no
neutral, absolutely transparent style. Sartre has shown, in his excellent
review of
The Stranger,
how the celebrated "white style" of Camus'
novel-impersonal, expository, lucid, flat- is itself the vehicle of
Meursault's image of the world (as made up of absurd fortuitous
moments). What Roland Barthes calls "the zero degree of writing"
is, precisely by being anti-metaphorical and dehumanized, as selective
and artificial as any traditional style of writing. Nevertheless, the
notion of a styleless transparent art is one of the most tenacious
fantasies of modern 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. Yet the aspiration lingers-a permanent
dissent from modern art, with its dizzying velocity of style
changes.
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 mislead.
Take, for instance, Whitman's very material metaphor. By
likening style to a curtain, he has of course confused style with
