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SUSAN SONTA6
anticipation, what she calls "association," which is obscured in langu–
age by the system of the tenses. Stein's insistence on the presentness of
experience is identical with her decision to keep to the present tense,
to choose commonplace short words and repeat groups of them inces–
santly, to use an extremely loose syntax and abjure most punctuation.
Every style is a means of insisting on something.
It
will be seen that stylistic decisions, by focusing our attention
on some things, are also a narrowing of our attention, a refusal
to
allow us to see others. But the greater interestingness of one work of
art over another does not rest on the greater number of things the
stylistic decisions in that work allow us to attend to, but rather on the
intensity and authority and wisdom of that attention, however narrow
its focus.
In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are inef–
fable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable.
Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as some–
thing rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the
greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules
of "decorum"), of the contradiction between expression and the
presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of
avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often,
its silences.
It remains to be said that style is a notion that applies to any
experience (whenever we talk about its form or qualities). Just as
many works of art which have a potent claim on our interest are im–
pure or mixed with respect to the standard I have been proposing, so
many items in our experience which could not be classed as works of
art possess some of the qualities of art objects. Whenever speech or
movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the
most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the
world, we may look at them as having a "style," and being both
autonomous and exemplary.
