Against Interpretation (6 page)

*   *   *

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 harmony of such equally ambitious works as
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
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.

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The difference that I have drawn between “style” and “stylization” might be analogous to the difference between will and willfulness.

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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 solutions 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 form pointed out by Coleridge and Valéry: 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 formal resources 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 form. “The form of a work,” as Valéry 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 expressions of thought, whether it be inattention, forgetfulness, or even the objections that may arise against it in the mind.”

Thus, form—in its specific idiom, style—is a plan of sensory imprinting, the vehicle for the transaction between immediate sensuous impression and memory (be it individual or cultural). This mnemonic function explains why every style depends on, and can be analyzed in terms of, some principle of repetition or redundancy.

It also explains the difficulties of the contemporary period of the arts. Today styles do not develop slowly and succeed each other gradually, over long periods of time which allow the audience for art to assimilate fully the principles of repetition on which the work of art is built; but instead succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare. For, if one does not perceive how a work repeats itself, the work is, almost literally, not perceptible and therefore, at the same time, not intelligible. It is the perception of repetitions that makes a work of art intelligible. Until one has grasped, not the “content,” but the principles of (and balance between) variety and redundancy in Merce Cunningham’s “Winterbranch” or a chamber concerto by Charles Wuoronin or Burrough’s
Naked Lunch
or the “black” paintings of Ad Reinhardt, these works are bound to appear boring or ugly or confusing, or all three.

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Style has other functions besides that of being, in the extended sense that I have just indicated, a mnemonic device.

For instance, every style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we perceive. This is easiest to see in the contemporary, self-conscious period of the arts, though it is no less true of all art. Thus, the style of Robbe-Grillet’s novels expresses a perfectly valid, if narrow, insight into relationships between persons and things: namely, that persons are also things and that things are not persons. Robbe-Grillet’s behavioristic treatment of persons and refusal to “anthropomorphize” things amount to a stylistic decision—to give an exact account of the visual and topographic properties of things; to exclude, virtually, sense modalities other than sight, perhaps because the language that exists to describe them is less exact and less neutral. The circular repetitive style of Gertrude Stein’s
Melanctha
expresses her interest in the dilution of immediate awareness by memory and anticipation, what she calls “association,” which is obscured in language 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 incessantly, 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.

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In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something 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.

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What I have said about style has been directed mainly to clearing up certain misconceptions about works of art and how to talk about them. But it remains to be said that style is a notion that applies to any experience (whenever we talk about its form or qualities). And just as many works of art which have a potent claim on our interest are impure 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.

[
1965
]

II

The richest style is the synthetic voice of the leading character.

PAVESE

The artist as exemplary sufferer

C
ESARE
P
AVESE
began writing around 1930, and the novels which have been translated and published here—
The House on the Hill, The Moon and the Bonfires, Among Women Only,
and
The Devil in the Hills
—were all written in the years 1947-49, so that a reader confined to English translations can’t generalize about his work as a whole. From these four novels alone, however, it appears that his main virtues as a novelist are delicacy, economy, and control. The style is flat, dry, unemotional. One remarks the coolness of Pavese’s fiction, though the subject-matter is often violent. This is because the real subject is never the violent happening (e.g. the suicide in
Among Women Only;
the war in
The Devil in the Hills
) but, rather, the cautious subjectivity of the narrator. The typical effort of a Pavese hero is lucidity; the typical problem is that of lapsed communication. The novels are about crises of conscience, and the refusal to allow crises of conscience. A certain atrophy of the emotions, an enervation of sentiment and bodily vitality, is presupposed. The anguish of prematurely disillusioned, highly civilized people alternating between irony and melancholic experiments with their own emotions is indeed familiar. But unlike other explorations of this vein of modern sensibility—for example, much of French fiction and poetry of the last eighty years—Pavese’s novels are unsensational and chaste. The main action always takes place off-stage, or in the past; and erotic scenes are curiously avoided.

As if to compensate for the detached relations which his characters have with each other, Pavese typically attributes to them a deep involvement with a place—usually either the cityscape of Turin, where Pavese went to the university and lived most of his adult life, or the surrounding Piedmont countryside, where he was born and spent his childhood. This sense of place, and the desire to find and recover the meaning of a place, does not, however, give Pavese’s work any of the characteristics of regional fiction, and this may in part account for the failure of his novels to arouse much enthusiasm among an English-speaking audience, nothing like that aroused by the work of Silone or Moravia, though he is a much more gifted and original writer than either of these. Pavese’s sense of place and of people is not what one expects of an Italian writer. But then Pavese was a Northern Italian; Northern Italy is not the Italy of the foreign dream, and Turin is a large industrial city lacking in the historical resonance and incarnate sensuality which attracts foreigners to Italy. One finds no monuments, no local color, no ethnic charm in Pavese’s Turin and Piedmont. The place is there, but as the unattainable, the anonymous, the inhuman.

Pavese’s sense of the relation of people to place (the way in which people are transfixed by the impersonal force of a place) will be familiar to anyone who has seen the films of Alain Resnais and especially of Michelangelo Antonioni—
Le Amiche
(which was adapted from Pavese’s best novel,
Among Women Only
),
L’Avventura,
and
La Notte.
But the virtues of Pavese’s fiction are not popular virtues, any more than are the virtues of, say, Antonioni’s films. (Those who don’t take to Antonioni’s films call them “literary” and “too subjective.”) Like Antonioni’s films, Pavese’s novels are refined, elliptical (though never obscure), quiet, anti-dramatic, self-contained. Pavese is not a major writer, as Antonioni is a major film-maker. But he does deserve a good deal more attention in England and America than he has gotten thus far.
3

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Recently Pavese’s diaries from the years 1935 to 1950, when he committed suicide at the age of forty-two, have been issued in English.
4
They can be read without any acquaintance with Pavese’s novels, as an example of a peculiarly modern literary genre—the writer’s “diary” or “notebooks” or “journal.”

Why do we read a writer’s journal? Because it illuminates his books? Often it does not. More likely, simply because of the rawness of the journal form, even when it is written with an eye to future publication. Here we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego in an author’s works. No degree of intimacy in a novel can supply this, even when the author writes in the first person or uses a third person which transparently points to himself. Most of Pavese’s novels, including the four translated into English, are narrated in the first person. Yet we know that the “I” in Pavese’s novels is not identical with Pavese himself, no more than is the “Marcel” who tells
Remembrance of Things Past
identical with Proust, nor the “K.” of
The Trial
and
The Castle
identical with Kafka. We are not satisfied. It is the author naked which the modern audience demands, as ages of religious faith demanded a human sacrifice.

The journal gives us the workshop of the writer’s soul. And why are we interested in the soul of the writer? Not because we are so interested in writers as such. But because of the insatiable modern preoccuption with psychology, the latest and most powerful legacy of the Christian tradition of introspection, opened up by Paul and Augustine, which equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.

The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art. The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffering in the economy of art—as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.

The unity of Pavese’s diaries is to be found in his reflections on, how to use, how to act on, his suffering. Literature is one use. Isolation is another, both as a technique for the inciting and perfecting of his art, and as a value in itself. And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.

Thus we have the following remarkable sequence of thought, in a diary entry of 1938. Pavese writes: “Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: ‘You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secrets by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.’… The other defense against things in general is silence as we muster strength for a fresh leap forward. But we must impose that silence on ourselves, not have it imposed on us, not even by death. To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship … Those who by their very nature can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. This is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.”