ON STYLE
553
tent. Both are. Both need no justification; nor could they possibly
have any.
The hyperdevelopment of style in, for example, Mannerist paint–
ing and Art Nouveau, is an emphatic form of experiencing the world
as a esthetic phenomenon. But only a particularly emphatic form,
which arises in reaction against an oppressively dogmatic style of
realism. All style-that is, all art-proclaims this. And the world
is,
ultimately, an esthetic phenomenon.
That is to say, the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately,
be
justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be per–
formed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to
another-not when we consider all there is.
The work of
art,
so far as we give ourselves to it, exercises a total
or absolute claim on us.
"If
art is anything," as Robbe-Grillet has
written, "it is everything; in which case it must be self-sufficient, and
there can be nothing beyond it."
But this position is easily caricatured, for we live in the world,
and it is in the world that objects of art are made and enjoyed. The
claim that I have been making for the autonomy of the work of art–
its freedom to "mean" nothing-does not rule out consideration of
the effect or impact or function of art, once
it
be granted that in this
functioning of the art object as art object the divorce between the
esthetic and ethical is meaningless.
I have been using the metaphor of nourishment for art. To be–
come involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience
of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself also
returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
If
Hamlet
is "about" anything
it
is about Hamlet, his particular
situation, not about the human condition. A work of art is a kind
of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to
consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit. Inso–
far as it is true that we cannot judge (morally, conceptually) unless
we generalize, then it is also true that the experience of works of art,
and what is represented in works of art, transcends judgment though
