558
SUSAN SONTA&
In other words, what is inevitable in a work of art is the style.
To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise
(without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality
of
its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the
illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he
in
his
style. Compare that which is forced, labored, synthetic in the
construction of
Madame Bovary
and of
Ulysses
with the ease
and
hannony of such equally ambitious works as
Les Liasons Dangerewes
and Kafka's "Metamorphosis." The first two books I have mentioned
are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.
For an artist's style to have
this
quality of authority, assurance,
seamlessness, inevitability, does not, of course, alone put
his
work at
the very highest level of achievement. Radiguet's two novels have it
as
well as Bach.
The difference that I have drawn between "style" and "styliza–
tion" might be analogous to the difference between will and
willful–
ness.
An
artist's style is, from a technical point of view, nothing other
than the particular idiom in which he deploys the
forms
of
his
art. It
is for this reason that the problems raised by the concept of "style"
overlap with those raised by the concept of "form," and their solu–
tions will have much in common.
For instance, one function of style is identical with, because it
is
simply a more individual specification of, that important function of
fonn pointed out by Coleridge and Valery: to preserve the works
of
the mind against oblivion. This function is easily demonstrated
in
the rhythmical, sometimes rhyming, character of all primitive, oral
literatures. Rhythm and rhyme, and the more complex fonnal
re–
sources of poetry such as meter, symmetry of figures, antitheses, are
the means that words afford for creating a memory of themselves
before material signs (writing) are invented; hence, everything that
an archaic culture wishes to commit to memory is put in poetic fonn.
"The fonn of a work," as Valery puts it, "is the sum of its perceptible
characteristics, whose physical action compels recognition and tends
to
resist
all
those varying causes of dissolution which threaten the expres-
