PARTISAN REVIEW
393
ences are to an earlier period and to the French who are often saved
from banality by their aloofness from reality.
The essay on Silence is a good example of Susan Sontag's
method. The idea of silence actually is used as a metaphor for the
opposite of talkiness in art, talkiness being too full of subject matter,
too directly .aimed at an audience, too bustly in its language, too
neatly constructed - all suggesting a closed, stale view of existence.
Art that babbles thinks of itself as finished, with an audience out
there, an inert, voyeuristic mass. Only a silent medium can properly
engage an audience, because it is not performing but completing it–
self. The ideal form for Miss Sontag, as one would expect, is the
movies, which is able to deal with subjects, that is, with verbal
material, by splintering and transforming them into immediate visual
associations and experiences. And several long and quite brilliant
essays in the book, on Godard, Bergman and the relation of theater
to film, explore the possibilities of the most modern art. She has also
just made one striking movie and is about to do another. I, myself,
have not found enough successful movies to be convinced they can
replace other genres; but clearly there is today a greater artistic in–
vestment in the movies than in any other art, and this must have
something to do with the way things are going. But I should say I do
not know enough about movies to have strong feelings on the sub–
ject. Aside from the question, however, whether Miss Sontag is right
about the fate of the various media, the implications of her method
are important. Throughout all her essays, she attacks the idea of the
separation of form and content as the main source of the illegitimate
moral and social demands on art, particularly since the dichotomy,
she says, leads to the primacy of content. This is not exactly a new
idea for academic criticism, though her insistence that despite all dis–
claimers the separation of theme from form is rooted in our cultural
habits goes beyond the usual analysis. Nor is she able to solve the
problem, which, I suspect, is not soluble today because the terms
in which it is put preclude a solution. But the most suggestive
approaches have been taken by younger critics like Susan Sontag
and Richard Poirier who argue that style is the shape and meaning
of the "content" ; and that an examination of the style is an examina–
tion of the "subject." (Susan Sontag thinks of "material" rather than
