Critical Evaluation

“Jeff Dolven treats no novels in Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation, but Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica stages a moment of just the sort that animates his study. An ex-model now suffering from hepatitis, Gaitskill’s narrator, Alison, coins the term ‘style suit’ to refer to the fashions of her moment. “I thought the new style suit was who I really was,” she remembers with a cringe. Not a costume to be donned or discarded at will, style, for Alison, is the outward manifestation of an inner self, as solid and unchangeable as we might wish our selves to be: ‘I thought that everything had changed forever, that because people wore jeans and sandals everywhere and women went without bras, fashion didn’t matter anymore, that now people could just be who they really were inside.’

Looking back, Alison dismisses her thinking as naïve, but she can be forgiven for the confusion. Style is the product of art, but it is just as often treated as the mark of nature. It is what distinguishes the individual from her surroundings, but it also indexes her membership in a group. Set against these conflicting definitions, Alison’s confusion starts to look less like naïveté and more like the breakdown of a concept that has meant too much for too long. Too much, we might think, and also too little. How can a concept so riven in its senses manage to mean anything?

Senses of Style is the antidote to this question. Taking as his case studies the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara, Dolven offers a critique of style in Kant’s robust sense of that word: “an account of the word’s proper limits,” as he puts it, ‘of when and where the word is useful, and for what purposes, and what is at stake when the limits are tested, breached, redrawn.’ Rather than seeking to resolve the contradictions of style or to do away with them, Dolven embraces them. The ironies latent within the concept ‘are aspects of a life-enabling double-consciousness, a way of living with contradiction, carrying on in the face of a problem that cannot, on its own terms, be solved.’ ”

Matthew Hunter, “The Ironies of Style.” Los Angeles Review of Books. November 9, 2017.

 

First Excerpt

“Style holds things together, things and people, schools and movements and periods. It makes us see wholes where we might be bewildered by parts.—But it makes us see parts, too. Say you are asked to identify or describe a style, to account for an act of recognition. (That sounds like Gertrude Stein, or that looks like a Holbein.) You might pick out a detail like a figure of speech or a quality of line, and you might well find a name for it, isocolon or crosshatching. Style, with all of this specialized language, is manifestly an art, a technical accomplishment with terms and rules that can be taught and learned.—Then again, can’t style feel like something you are simply born with? Something that is in your gait or your hands, something you couldn’t lose if you tried? A long habit, or even your nature, whether you like it or not. Style’s idiosyncrasy is the individual signature that modernity, and not only modernity, wants from every great artist.—And yet, is it not style that dissolves the artist into her time, his country or city, her circle of friends? Everyone and everything has a style, a style that is nothing more or less than location in social and historical space. None of us can escape that space, nor could we ever finally want to.”

 

Second Excerpt

“Can there be a style of failure? The question probes another contradiction. On the other hand, the answer must be yes. For better or worse, you can have a habit of incontinent oath-swearing, or of drinking too much and speaking too sharply. There he goes again. Anything can be style, whether or not it is desired or desirable. On the other hand, if it were to be said of such lapses, that’s his style, there would likely be some irony in the tone. For style usually carries some implication of self-command, or if not command, then at least the relative ease of an accustomed way of doing things. To have a style can simply mean that you have settled into habits that make you familiar to yourself and to others. If that is what style is, a good-enough way of continuing, then a style of failure makes less sense. Failure would have to lie instead in the rupture of the style, the moments and actions that don’t fit, that make you feel anxious and exposed.”