548
SUSAN SONTA6
What haunts all contemporary use of the notion of style
is
the putative opposition between form and content. How
is
one to
exorcise the feeling that "style," which functions like the notion
of form, subverts content? One thing seems certain. No affirmation
of the organic relation between style and content
will
really carry
conviction-or guide critics who make this affirmation to the
re–
casting of their specific discourse-until the notion of content
is
put in its place.
Most critics would agree that a work of art does not "contain"
a certain amount of content (or function- as in the case of architec–
ture) embellished by "style." But few address themselves to the
positive consequences of what they seem to have agreed to. What
is
"content"? Or, more precisely, what is left of the notion of content
when we have transcended the antithesis of style (or form) and
content? Part of the answer lies in the fact that for a work of art
to have "content" is, in itself, a rather special stylistic convention.
The great task which remains to critical theory
is
to examine in detail
the
formal
function of subject matter.
Vntil this function is acknowledged and properly explored, it
is inevitable that critics will go on treating works of art as "state–
ments." (Less so, of course, in those arts which are or have largely
gone abstract, like music and painting and the dance. In these arts,
the critics have not solved the problem; it has been taken from them.)
Of course, a work of art
can
be considered as a statement, that
is,
as the answer to a question. On the most elementary level, Goya's
portrait of the Duke of Wellington may be examined as the answer
to the question: What did Wellington look like?
Anna Karenina
may be treated as an investigation of the problems of love, marriage
and adultery. Though the issue of the adequacy of artistic representa–
tion to life has pretty much been abandoned in, for example, painting,
such adequacy continues to constitute a powerful standard of judg–
ment in most appraisals of serious novels, plays and films. In critical
theory, the notion is quite old. At least since Diderot, the main
tradition of criticism in
all
the arts, appealing to such apparently
dissimilar criteria as verisimilitude and moral correctness, in effect
treats the work of art as
a statement being made in the form of a
U!ork of art.
