Infinite Patience

All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. This ‘distance’ is, by definition, inhuman or impersonal to a certain degree; for in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of ‘closeness.’ It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work. In the final analysis, ‘style’ is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representations. … Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art. … 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.

That’s Susan Sontag — who I could go on quoting ad infinitum — brought in here to speak to the takeaway paragraph in a great discussion between David Winters and Anthony Brown over at 3:AM Magazine. The subject is modernism, “then and now”:

David Winters: You mention Bernhard in the same breath as Lydia Davis, which I think is fruitful. What I mean here is that I read Bernhard for the same reasons I read some recent American writers. I want to say that I read for the style, but I don’t mean ‘style’ in the ‘superficial’ sense you astutely describe [in discussing “Peter Gay’s ‘modernism as style’ position”]. In the work of the writers I most admire, a style is always also a stance. That is, for them, a way of arranging words on the page is also a way of reaching a view of the world.