Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: "Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body." Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an oppostion between a style that one assumes and one's "true" being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face. . . .

Most critics would agree that a work of art does not "contain" a certain amount of content (or function—as in the case or architecture) embellished by "style." But few address themselves to the positive consequences of what they seem to have agreed to. What is "content"? Or, more precisely, what is left of the notion of content when we have transcended the antithesis of style (or form) and content? Part of the answer lies in the fact that for a work of art to have "content" is, in itself, a rather special stylistic convention. The great task which remains to critical theory is to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter. . . .

To treat works of art [as statements] is not wholly irrelevant. But it is, obviously, putting art to use—for such purposes as inquiring into the history of ideas, diagnosing contemporary culture, or creating social solidarity. Such a treatment has little to do with what actually happens when a person possessing some training and aesthetic sensibility looks at a work of art appropriately. A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. . . .

Inevitably, critics who regard works of art as statements will be wary of "style," even as they pay lip service to "imagination." All that imagination really means for them, anyway, is the supersensitive rendering of "reality." It is this "reality" snared by the work of art that they continue to focus on, rather than on the extent to which a work of art engages the mind in certain transformations. . . .

In the end, however, attitudes toward style cannot be reformed merely by appealing to the "appropriate" (as opposed to utilitarian) way of looking at works of art. The ambivalence toward style is not rooted in simple error—it would then be quite easy to uproot—but in a passion, the passion of an entire culture. This passion is to protect and defend values traditionally conceived of as lying "outside" art, namely truth and morality. but which remain in perpetual danger of being compromised by art. Behind the ambivalence toward style is, ultimately, the historic Western confusion about the relation between art and morality, the aesthetic and the ethical.

For the problem of art versus morality is a pseudo problem. The distinction itself is a trap; its continued plausibility rests on not putting the ethical into question, but only the aesthetic. To argue on these grounds at all, seeking to defend the autonomy of art. . .is already to grant something that should not be granted—namely, that there exist two independent sorts of response, the aesthetic and the ethical, which vie for our loyalty when we experience a work of art. As if during the experience one really had to choose between responsible and humane conduct, on the one hand, and the pleasurable stimulation of consciousness, on the other!

Much of Sontag's essay is concerned to break down the opposition between "style" and "content," but unlike others who sometimes complain about the persistence of this opposition but do so mostly in order to banish "style" from critical discussion altogether—it's just the writer's way of communicating his/her content—Sontag maintains it is content that should recede, becoming simply the word for a "special stylistic convention." Style is the real substance of art, content its outer decoration, the enticement to the reader's attention that allows the "experience" of art that style enables.

Sontag was unfortunately denied her wish that critical theory might move "to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter." Academic criticism has gone in precisely the opposite direction, dismissing form altogether in order to focus on the "subject-matter" that satisfies the critic's pre-established theoretical disposition, while there's very little "critical theory" at all in general-interest publications of the sort that once published writers like Susan Sontag. Essentially, the debate over the fraught relationship between "style" and "content" is about where Sontag left it.

Unfortunately, she left it presumably resolved to her own satisfaction, but not in a way that satisfies any current attempt to advance the argument that "style is on the inside." Since the notion that subject-matter is mostly a formal function seems if anything more outlandish even than it must have in 1965, a case needs to be made for it that extends beyond Sontag's somewhat idiosyncratic account and that avoids what I consider her more serious missteps.

The most serious problem with "On Style," in my opinion, is that Sontag can't finally unburden her argument of the criticisms of aestheticism made by the moralists she otherwise castigates. It seems to me her observation that it is quite easy to keep separate "responsible and humane conduct" from "the pleasurable stimulation of consciousness" without the latter contaminating the former would entirely suffice as a rebuttal of these criticisms, but she spends a great deal of her essay—the heart of it, really—defending the notion that art should not be judged by the standard of "humane conduct, " since art and the experience of art are phenomena of "consciousness," not actions requiring moral scrutiny. In fact, immediately after making the observation she begins to back off, assuring skeptics that "Of course, we never have a purely aesthetic response to works of art—neither to a play or a novel, with its depicting of human beings choosing and acting, nor, though it is less obvious, to a painting by Jackson Pollack or a Greek vase."

Since we never have a "pure" response to anything, I can't see that this proviso is necessary. If it isn't obvious to readers that a depiction of "human beings choosing and acting" is not the same thing as human beings choosing and acting and that it would be irrational "for us to to make a moral response to something in a work of art in the same sense that we do to an act in real life," then any further attempt to heighten those readers' aesthetic awareness isn't going to accomplish much in the first place. Although Sontag argues that "we can, in good conscience cherish works of art which, considered in terms of 'content,' are morally objectionable" (her brief defense of Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries is the best-known illustration of this possibility), finally she can't let "morality" go as an issue relevant to the creation and experience of art. "Art is connected with morality," she asserts. "The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligen
t gratification of consciousness."

Much is elided in that formulation "intelligent gratification." Is "unintelligent" gratification immoral, or just lack of artistry? Is lack of artistry itself a moral issue, or simply a critical/evaluative judgment? Does only the greatest art perform the "moral service" Sontag associates with the "intelligent gratification of consciousness"? I don't object to the formulation itself—John Dewey would probably have found it usefully synonymous with his own notion of "art as experience"—but to insist that it must have a moral dimension seems to undo almost completely Sontag's case—which she admits she has made "uneasily"—for the autonomy of art:

But if we understand morality in the singular, as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to art is "moral" insofar as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just blindly and unreflectingly obeying. Art performs this "moral" task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinteredness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life.

Again, there isn't much here with which I would fundamentally disgree, but Sontag comes close to suggesting that art needs this moral justification, that "contemplativeness" and "attentiveness" are not in themselves sufficiently desirable qualities. They are "moral" insofar as they are good things to exercise, but I can't see that an explicit justification of them—and thus of aesthetic experience itself—on moral grounds is otherwise relevant. Either art needs no moral justification to strengthen its appeal or it is an impetus to moral action after all. Sontag wants to believe the first, but really seems to believe the second.

To be continued

This “new kind of writing” is necessary for realism’s sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers “has different ideas of reality,” that “the classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal,” the task of coping with “the objective modifications of reality” that have continued to develop at an ever increasing pace since the 19th century requires that the novel remain open to the kind of formal innovation that might—for the moment, at least—begin to “account for what is real today.”

But Robbe-Grillet didn’t think that the “realism” of novels consisted of merely reflecting the “real world” it encountered but that it actually worked to create reality:

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. All those—politicians and others—who ask of a book only stereotypes, and who fear above all the spirit of contestation, can only mistrust literature.

Robbe-Grillet comes a little closer to commenting on the kind of realism one finds in his own books when he reflects on a trip he once took to the Brittany coast:

On the way I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things ‘from life’ and to ‘refresh my memory.’ But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other hand it couldn’t have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary.

Those gulls inside the head are the gulls that make it into Robbe-Grillet’s novels, even if they are described with a kind of obsessive exactitude that makes us believe they’re a copy from “real life.” Or, for example, we get this, the opening paragraph of Jealousy, which describes the south side of the house that will be the immediate setting for all of the novel:

Now the shadow of the column—the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof—divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This verana is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house—that is, its front and west gable-end—are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

Already we can see Robbe-Grillet beginning to “constitute” the reality of the novel’s setting, which will extend to the banana plantation of which this house is the center, all described in the same painstaking, concentrated manner. And it is a particularly literal-minded kind of description: no fussy, unnecessary adjectives, no figurative flourishes to get in the way of a full-on apprehension of the house and its wooden walls, its veranda flagstones and “vertical surfaces.” Robbe-Grillet’s approach has at times been called “cinematic,” but what could be less cinematic than this description of the banana trees:

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

It is generally assumed that film provides a more immediate and more distinct rendering of perceptible objects (at least visually), but passages like this demonstate that verbal depictions of such objects are, potentially at least, capable of a far greater range of effects, of bringing us much closer to the palpable qualities of things. In his essay, Robbe-Grillet writes of Kafka that “if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced realing convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. . .Perhaps Kafka’s staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them, step by step, following the detail of the banisters and the risers. Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that the memory lingers, on their cracked whitewash, their crevices.” The same is true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions; they force our attention on what is there. We remember (or should) the arrangements and textures of the plantation house, the symmetries of the banana rows.

Some might say that Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions don’t qualify as “realism” at all, since they appear to reject the principle of selectivity of detail and renounce the effort to enhance the real through figurative language, both of which are believed by such guardians of literary realism to be among its most crucial enabling conventions. But this is to confuse the practice of a certain kind of commercialized storytelling with realism, the latter of which probably becomes more genuine the farther away it gets from storytelling. It is to pin the concept of realism down to a few customary gestures that assume a stability of reference to “the real” and denies that this is a state of affairs to be discovered rather than presupposed. In abandoning these gestures, Robbe-Grillet’s “experimental” fiction is actually an experiment in the further possibilities of realism, a realism that accepts, as Robbe-Grillet puts it in his essay’s conclusion, that “everything is constantly changing” and that “there is always some
thing new.”

The realism of Jealousy is about as far away from modern “psychological realism,” and especially the mode of narration James Wood defends as the “free indirect” method, as it could be. Our access to the characters and their environment remains entirely on the surface, our knowledge of what they are “thinking” confined entirely to what we can infer through their actions. This, is, of course, faithful to the way we do in fact experience reality, and the spurious notion that fiction is some magical way for writers to open up consciousness to our direct examination beyond what people say and do is duly dispensed with in Robbe-Grillet’s novel. This is not to say that we don’t ultimately gain access to a character’s mental state, but this character is neither A. . . (not further named), the plantation wife, nor her possible lover, Franck (we’re never entirely sure they are lovers), the ostensible protagonists of Jealousy. One could say that the true protagonist of the novel is the emotion named in the title, which we finally come to understand is expressed by the narrator, who is not the detached omniscient narrator we first assume him to be (or at least is also more than that) but the husband of A. . . and an observer of her suspicious behavior.

Thus we do almost literally inhabit the consciousness of this character, and we are determined in our experience of Jealousy‘s fictional world by the skillful manipulation of point of view—in this case a third-person/first-person hybrid. But, since we can’t rest comfortably in the author’s probing of the character’s mind in a “free indirect” way, the effect is if anything to provoke us into re-reading the novel in order to direct our attention more carefully on the details and the actions through which, and only through which, can our awareness of the narrator’s jealousy be raised. Jealousy encourages the reader to be an active participant in assembling whatever “meaning” we’re to get from it; it doesn’t allow us to settle passively for the “insight” afforded us by Wood’s preferred strategy of “inflected” narration.

What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately “realistic” world that both mirrors the narrator’s own fixated absorption in detail—his “perpetual interrogation”— and uses that absorption to “invent” scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events—the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.—as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer’s determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.

James Wood’s greatest strength as a critic is that he does not spend much time and space on “what lies beyond the literary.” He certainly could not be accused of lacking “a passionate involvement” with literary texts—even if he can be charged with restricting his involvement too exclusively to a certain kind of text—but to his credit he devotes most of his attention to a close reading of the fiction he considers and leaves what’s “beyond” to those less interested in literature than he is.

According to Deresiewicz, the exemplars of modern criticism are the so-called New York critics, specifically Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe:

Wilson, who wrote about everything during his teeming career, from politics to popular culture, socialist factions to Native American tribes, warned about “the cost of detaching books from all the other affairs of human life.” Trilling’s whole method as a critic was to set the object of his consideration within the history of what he called “the moral imagination.” Kazin, whose criticism, like [Elizabeth] Hardwick’s, focused on the literature of this country in particular, sought to illuminate nothing less than “the nature of our American experiences.” The goal of Howe’s criticism, he said, was “the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America.” The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it—to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals.

With the possible exception of Wilson (who did indeed write about many subjects but whose essays on literary works were attentive to form and style and did mark him as, in part, an “aesthete”), Wood is a much better critic than any of these writers. Trilling is one of the most overrated critics of the 20th century, unwilling as he was to consider works of literature as anything other than what even his acolyte Leon Wiseltier describes protectively as “records of concepts and sentiments and values,” apparently unable to describe “the moral imagination” except in platitudes. Kazin is simply hopeless, a truly awful critic whose essays and books on literary topics are simply useless to anyone interested in criticism that might enhance the reading experience. On Native Grounds is a bloated assemblage of historical generalizations mostly about writers, not writing. It’s full of “remarks” about literature but no actual criticism. Like Trilling, Kazin bypasses the literary in order to arrive at banalities about “the nature of our American experiences.” Howe is somewhat better—he does often enough really examine the texts on which he is pronouncing—but why would anyone want to rely for insight into literary texts on a critic who confesses he is most interested in “the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America”?

It’s really rather amazing that Deresiewicz seems to believe that the approach to criticism represented by the New York critics has somehow been lost. In reality, criticism that obsesses about “politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society” is the dominant mode of criticism today, especially in academe and even more especially among so-called “intellectuals.” These critics condescend to put “literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognize its ability not only to represent life but. . . to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be,” blah, blah, blah. James Wood stands out as a critic willing to challenge this tedious preoccupation with “context” and to make an “inquiry” into the literary nature of literature his “center” rather than the intellectual pomposity of “questions about where we are,” questions that for Deresiewicz’s preferred kind of critic take precedence over all that “aesthetic” fluff, finally over literature itself. In my opinion, it is all in Wood’s favor that “what has happened in England since the end of World War II—anything that has happened in England since the war, politically, socially or culturally—simply doesn’t enter into his thinking,” and a testament to the force of his style, sensibility, and, yes, learning that he has managed to become widely known as a critic through publication in magazines that otherwise insist on relevance to politics and “the life of society.”

Some of the responsibility for casting Wood in this particular sort of negative light undoutedly lies with the magazine publishing Deresiewicz’s artice, The Nation. Left-wing editors, journalists, and “intellectuals” have always been particularly suspicious of “aesthetes,” of writers and artists who emphasize the formal elements of their work and are too far “removed from commerce with the dirty, human world.” Indeed, one hardly ever finds in The Nation reviews of fiction or poetry that isn’t either obviously politically intentioned or can’t be made to seem so. (Mostly, it has increasingly seemed to me, the magazine just doesn’t review fiction or poetry much at all.) Attacking James Wood as a pointy-headed aesthete is a convenient way for the magazine to restate the long-standing “progressive” disdain for art in any of its non-partisan manifestations. I don’t question that Deresiewicz believes all the things he says about Wood’s failure to engage with the world “beyond the literary,” but his conception of the role of both literature and criticism is clearly enough consistent with the Left’s utilitarian attitude toward both.

Deresiewicz observes that Wood “ignores the meanings that novelists use [their] methods to propose. . . Wood can tell us about Flaubert’s narrator or Bellow’s style, but he’s not very curious about what those writers have to say about the world.” This actually makes me feel reassured about James Wood’s prominence in current literary criticism. At least there is one critic with access to high-profile print publications who knows it isn’t the novelist’s job to “propose” anything and focuses his attention on writers’ art rather than on what they allegedly have “to say.”