ON STYLE
555
pation, which are functions of "closeness." It is the degree and mani–
pulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute
the style of the work. In the final analysis, "style"
is
art. And art is
nothing more or less than various modes of stylized dehumanized
representation.
But this view--expounded by Ortega y Gasset among others--can
easily be misinterpreted, since it seems to suggest that art, so far as it
approaches its own norm, is a kind of irrelevant impotent toy. Ortega
himself greatly contributes to such a misinterpretation by omitting the
various dialectics between self and world involved in the experiencing
of works of art. Ortega focuses too exclusively on the notion of the
work of art as a certain kind of object, with its own, spiritually aris–
tocratic, standards for being savored. A work of art
is
first of
all
an
object, not an imitation; and it is true that all great art is founded
on distance, on artificiality, on style, on what Ortega calls dehuman–
ization. But the notion of distance (and of dehumanization, as well)
is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away
from but toward the world. The overcoming or transcending of the
world in art is also a way of encountering the world, and of training
or educating the will to be in the world. It would seem that Ortega
and even Robbe-Grillet, to take a recent exponent of the same posi–
tion, are still not wholly free of the spell of the notion of "content."
For, in order to limit the human content of art, and to fend off tired
ideologies like humanism or socialist realism which would put art in
the service of some moral or social idea, they feel required to ignore
or scant the function of art. But art does not become functionless when
it is seen to be, in the last analysis, contentless. For all the persuasive–
ness of Ortega's and Robbe-Grillet's defense of the formal nature of
art, the specter of banished "content" continues to lurk around the
edges of their argument, giving to "form" a defiantly anemic, salutarily
eviscerated look.
The argument will never be complete until "form" or "style"
can be thought of without that banished specter, without a feeling of
loss. Valery's daring inversion- "Literature. What is 'form' for anyone
else is 'content' for me"- scarcely does the trick. It is hard to think
oneself out of a distinction so habitual and apparently self-evident.
One can do so only by adopting a different, more organic, theoretical
vantage point-such as the notion of
will.
What is wanted of such a
