ON STYLE
557
Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of
the artist's will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite
number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles
for works of art.
Seen from the outside, that is, historically, stylistic decisions can
always be correlated with some historical development-like the inven–
tion of writing or of movable type, the invention or transformation of
musical instruments, the availability of new materials to the sculptor
or architect. But this approach, however sound and valuable, of neces–
sity sees matters grossly; it treats of "periods" and "traditions" and
"schools."
Seen from the inside, that is, when one examines an individual
work of art and tries to account for its value and effect, every stylistic
decision contains an element of arbitrariness, however much it may
seem justifiable
propter hoc.
If
art is the supreme game which the
will plays with itself, "style" consists of the set of rules by which this
game is played. And the rules are always, finally, an artificial and
arbitrary limit, whether they are rules of form (like
terza rima
or the
twelve tone row or frontality) or the presence of a certain "content."
The role of the arbitrary and unjustifiable in art has never been suf–
ficiently acknowledged. Ever since the enterprise of criticism began
with Aristotle's
Poetics,
critics have been beguiled into emphasizing
the necessary in art. (When Aristotle said that poetry was more
philosophical than history, he was justified insofar as he wanted to
rescue poetry, that is, the arts, from being conceived as a type of
factual, particular, descriptive statement. But what he said was mis–
leading insofar as it suggests that art gives us something like what
philosophy does: an argument. The metaphor of the work of art as an
"argument," with premises and entailments, has informed most critic–
ism since.) Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel
compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not
be other than
it
is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work,
remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows
what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been
otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects
is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the
whole.
