narración y estilo

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Narrative and Style

Author(s): Arthur C. DantoReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer, 1991), pp. 201-209Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431474 .

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ARTHUR C. DANTO

Narrativeand Style

In an entertainingessay on recurrentefforts tostandardize and stabilize the mother tongue,Hugh Kenneroffers a spectacularexample ofwhat I once termed narrative sentences-sen-tences by which an earlier event is describedwith reference to a later one, yielding therebydescriptions under which events cannot havebeen witnessedat the time of theiroccurrence,for whateverreason it is that their future washidden o thosewho mighthave witnessedthem.Wehave no difficulty with them, however,sincetheirfuture is ourpast, which the narrative en-tence serves to organize undernarrativestruc-ture. No observer,stationed n the Romanprov-ince of Gallia, say some time after the Franks,underClovis, had infused witha largishGermanvocabulary and a characteristicdiphthongiza-tionof vowels, theLatinspokenthereas a linguafranca, could have asserted, in that demoticidiom, whatKennerretrospectivelyandin liter-ary English, writes about theirlanguage: "TheGaulswere preparing he tongueof RacineandCocteau" not evenif thiswas intruthwhatwashappeningbefore their eyes, insidiously,gradu-ally, irresistibly. Nor, moving forward aboutthree centuries, can a populist chancellorhaveremonstrated with Charlemagne, when thatHoly Roman Emperorsought, suitably to hisimperialstation,to reviveclassical Latinagainstwhathe perceivedas a badly degeneratedLatin,which we of course perceive as perfectly re-spectableOldFrench,thatwerehe to succeed inthis ill-advised reform, Phedre will never bewritten nor Les enfants terribles see actuality.Forreasons at once too obvious to haveto workoutfora non-philosophical udience, andfar toodifficult to work out to the satisfaction of aphilosophicalone, such descriptions would nothave been intelligible to those of whom they

were true, nor can they figure among descrip-tions under which whatever hey did counts asamong their intentionalactions. The Academiefrancais was established in 1635 precisely todrive a stakethrough he heartof linguisticevo-lution, and though its success was limited-twentieth century French differs not only invocabulary from that of the seventeenth cen-tury-it is, alas, unavailableto us to cite themasterpiecesof twenty-third enturyFrench it-eratureaborted nconsequenceof its regimenta-tions. What great works of Afro-anglafiolo-6,the lingua-francaof the westernhemisphereofthe early yearsof the FourthMillennium,areatthis very moment being prepared hroughthedepartures rom standardEnglishof Madonna,Dan Quayle, the rapgroup Public Enemy,andJapanese writers of users' manuals for mini-satellites, not to mention the RussiansettlersofBrightonBeach?There is in my view no better way to experi-ence the vividness of what Martin Heideggerwould certainly have called the historiness ofhistory, hanto feel the almostviolent comedy ofputting nto thepresent ensesentenceswhichdonot wrench the imagination at all in the pasttense, like that of Hugh Kenner's, and thenendeavoringto imagine what they could haveconveyed at the time of which they were true.Someone at the Merovingian court certainlycouldhave formedas soundsLefils de Minos etde Pasiphae but would have been speaking intongues. And how would he have describedRacinewithoutsayingwhat he was to writejustunder a thousandyears ahead?Indeed, a goodtest for the iongue duree of human ife consistsin seeing whether a narrativesentence couldhave been accepted withoutconceptualpertur-bationsat the timeof itstruth."Iboughtmy first

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49:3 Summer 1991


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202 The Journalof Aestheticsand Art Criticismetchingin 1957,"said in 1990, rotatessmoothlyinto the presenttense as somethingthe speakermight have said in 1957 when he bought anetching, even if in 1957 it makesa special claimon the future thatthe boughtetchingwill notbethe last oronlyetching bought.Andso with "Westarted our family in 1952," when there re-mained the possibility, had it been said in 1952,thatthechild referred o was to be anonly child.Or even, said with callow confidence, "I goforth to forge the uncreated conscience of myrace"as markingan ambition, eventhough thatconscience stood at that moment sufficientlyunforged hat no one has a clue as to the form inwhich it will leave the anvil-and anywaythepoet can say he wentforth to thatend thoughhefailed, withoutquite being able to say what itwas he failedto forge, forthen he would nothavefailed. All these make claims on the future,butnot historicalclaims on the future. It is, on theotherhand,an historicalsuch claim when Eliz-abeth,the wife of Zacharias,carryinghim whois to be the Baptist,cries out "Whenceis this tome, thatthe motherof my Lordshould come tome?" when Mary, merely pregnant, wantingperhapsonly to exchange female confidences,makesher visitation. Elizabeth is able to makethis startlingidentificationonly because she isfilled, as Saint Luke tells us, with the HolyGhostand the knowledge is revealedwhichoth-erwise only in the fullness of time would beunderstoodbythevernacular. trequiresnothinglike revelationo explaintheclaimson thefutureinthedurnedefinedthrough ustthatfact, whichare underwrittenby the routinecausal beliefswhichdefine a worldin whichpeople startcol-lections by buying etchings, begin families byhaving a child, go forthto forge a consciencebypurchasing wo thirdclass tickets to Calais. It isan historical claim on the future when evenformingthe intentionto do what will be nar-rativelyredescribedin terms of what happenslater,requiresknowledgeof a sort which mightas well be thoughtof as revelation, nasmuchasthroughno extension of ordinarycognitive pro-cesses can we explain howtheagentshould haveknownwhat was necessary to form the intentioninquestion.There is, I think, a powerful difference toregisterbetweenthefuture hatthecausalbeliefsof the iongueduree will not enable us to grasp,but which is compatiblewith those beliefs, and

the futurethey will not enable us to know be-causethey no longeroperate,andthingshappenincompatiblywith them. MichaelIgnatieff haswrittenverymovingly,indiscussingtheRussianRevolution, of "The sight of an immemorialordercollapsing-the new visionof historyas anirrationalorrentrather hananorderlystream-[which] seemed to rob its defenders of any ca-pacityto resist."Ignatieffcites the memoirof acavalryofficer'sdaughter:"It ustseemed to methat one day the soldiers changed, their shirtswere hanging out, their belts were around heirnecks and they were eating sunflower seeds:everythingwasdirty-all of a sudden,fromoneday to another."Ignatieffwrites that "Thewillto resistvanished with the recognition hat his-tory had turned against them." This momentmarks a sort of caesura, at least of the iongueduree of the rulingclass, and in some degreeanyone of a certain age will have experiencedsomethinglike it in the formof a chaos: therewereprofessorsatColumbia n 1968forwhomaformof life regardedas immemorialcollapsedunder their feet; there were men and womenfor whom the feministmovementof the 1970sseemed to dissolve the naturalorder;certainlytherewere blacksand whites for whom a worldended in the 1950sbecauseof politicalupheav-als no one appeared o be directingorknewhowto direct;the emblematiccrumplingof the Ber-lin Wall in 1989 went contraryto the expecta-tions of everyone who thought in terms of ahistorywhichcould changeonly externallyandthrough war. A less agonized example is thevignette, I am uncertain f fact or imagination,of Willem de Kooning and BarnettNewman inan art gallery in the mid-sixties, shakingtheirheads inpaineddisbeliefat a paintingof MickeyMouse, or perhapsDonaldDuck, which criticsand collectorswere actuallytakingseriously.Ittoo was the end of a world.My sense is that thepointof Braudel'smasterpiecewas thatthe his-toryof thenarrative entencewenton inthelongperiod he covers, without penetrating he lifewhere the causalbeliefs of the iongueduree hedefined through them went on. If true, thismeantthat those who lived around he Mediter-ranean hrough hatepoch ledbyand arge fortu-nate lives. Butif someonecares to arguethatthedifference between compatible and incompati-ble futuresonly defines two levels of historicalchange, one level being just slower and more


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Danto Narrative and Style 203gradual han the other, I wouldput upvery littleresistance.The differencebetween a futurewefeel we have a right to expect and a future wehave no right to expect andcannot even formu-late, maymerely be indexedtodifferent evelsofignoranceratherhandifferentordersof change.Itwas still natural orMichaelIgnatieffto speakof it as having been history which had turnedagainstthe Russianancien regime.When Macbeth returnsto Inverness, he isforthwithhailedby his lady as "GreatGlamis!"which he is-but also, in the spirit of SaintElizabeth, as "WorthyCawdor!!"-which he isnot, any morethan he is "Greater hanboth, bythe all-hailhereafter!".LadyMacbethhas beenrotatedout of the ionguedureeof causalexpec-tationsby what Macbethhadcommunicatedas"The more than humanknowledge" possessedby the spirits who had addressed him both as"Thane of Cawdor"and "Kingthat shalt be.""Thy letters have transportedme beyond/Thisignorantpresent,"Lady Macbethexults, "AndIfeel now thefuturein the instant."Knowingthefuture,theonly task is to lend the helpinghand,and her resolution is to weaken "All that im-pedes thee from the golden round,/Whichfateand metaphysical aid doth seem to have theecrownedwithal."There s a certainrecklessimproprietynhav-ing bracketed ogether the mother of JohnTheBaptist (a fine narrativedescription) with shewhom Malcolm came to call a "fiend-likeQueen,"butI want henarrative entence"SaintElizabeth, like Lady Macbeth,believed herselfpossessed of more than humanknowledge." Iwant this because it qualifies as a narrative en-tence by the criteriaadvanced, and could havebeen asserted of Saint Elizabethwhen she satgravid with the Baptistonly if the asserterwerepossessedof morethanhumanknowledge-whoknew, at the threshold of the Christianera, ofeventsandpersonsto be in Scotlandcirca 1050AD, andperhaps heirrepresentation n Londoncirca 1606 AD?Butit fails to do whatone wouldordinarily expect a narrativesentence to do,namelyyield a narrative,since the two events inquestion-Elizabeth'spiousandLadyMacbeth'sgloatingsalutationscannoteasily be thoughtofas forming parts of one. The two events havebeen unitedthroughan act of philosophicalwillprimarily n orderthatthey should fall asunderthroughnarrativeunconnectedness.One could,

I suppose, write the history of beliefs in theexistence of more thanhumanknowledge, withboth womenfiguringin it as exemplars. Butthebook would in effect be a chronicle, listing ex-amples in chronologicalorder.The same infor-mationcould be presentedin an encyclopediaof such beliefs, where entries are alphabetical,under the names of their holders. My cobblednarrativesentence is a trivial fallout from thecircumstancethat makes a doctrineof internalrelationsseem initiallyplausible-that anythingcan be redescribed with reference to anythingelse, which incidentally underliesa lot of nar-rative heory at themoment.What is missing, obviously, is anexplanatoryconnection: it is a narrative when the earliereventreferred o through he narrative entenceenters into the explanationof the later one. Nodoubt this raises moreproblemsthanit solves:explanations ntailgeneral aws, but aws defineaduree,andyetone wants henarrative entenceto meet the constraintthat its assertion at thetime of theearliereventwouldappear o require"more thanhumanknowledge"since it makesanhistoricalclaimonthe futurebeyondwhattheduree-defining aws can license, which afterallis what "the historiness of history"seemed torequire. In its heyday,the CoveringLaw Modelof explanationwas supposed to supportpredic-tions-explanation and predicationmerely re-flected whereone stoodin thetemporalorder nregard o theeventcoveredby the law. Thiseasysymmetrywasheavilycriticized nthatera, withcleverexamplesinvented o showthat haton thebasis of which we predict goes no distance to-wardexplainingthe eventspredicted.Still, thekinds of historicalclaims on the futuremade bySaintElizabethandLadyMacbeth,which couldat best be revealedthrough "morethanhumanknowledge,"markeda futurewhichwasimpen-etrably blank withoutit, standing as we other-wise wouldin "theignorantpresent."So how dowe buildinto the narrative entence an explana-tory constraint?A fair makeshiftresponse might be this: ifthereare threeevents, A, B, and C, thenA mayexplain B and B explain C, so there are lawscoveringAB andBC, butno historicallaw cov-ering AC. We might then havea tiny narrative,withABC in thatorderas beginningmiddle andend, andevensaythat A entersinto theexplana-tion of C since without A not B and withoutB


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204 The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticismnot C. Thus in Oscar Hijuelgo'snovel, MamboKings Play Songs of Love, it is Cesarwanting ofool around with Vanna n the back seat of theDesoto that explainswhy Nestor is driving, it isNestor's depression that explains the skid thatkills him, enabling the novelist to display the"more than human knowledge" of things hischaracters ould nothaveknownatthe timetheyweretrue:thatNestor "Hadtakenhis lastpiss ...played his last trumpet line ... taken his lastswallow of rum ... had tasted his last sweet."Everything Nestordoes in these two wonderfulparagraphs, ommonplacenonevents n this un-happy person'slife, take on a tragicdimensionin the retrospective ight of the death the Nar-ratorhas in store for him. It is like the spirituallight in a great Flemish painting hat gives defi-nition to everything bathed in it, down to theleastpebble, andacertainnearlysacred dentity.It is a light of course to which we are blindin "the ignorantpresent," and what makes itignorant.Historical knowledge always seems morethanhumanknowledge, justbecause it is alwaysinaccessible to thosewho are its objects, thoughthemselvescognitivebeings, since the historianknows the outcomes of the narratives hey areliving, wheretheseoutcomesdefine boundarieson thedurees, knowledge of whichjust is humanknowledge. Theboundariesof thedurees are theboundaries of human knowledge, and to livewith the sense of doingso historically s to knowhow narrow hoseboundariesreallyare. But, aspartisans of the iongue duree and of a non-eventival historiographyappreciate, much oflife is lived unhistorically,which explains theagony described by Michael Ignatieff. In hisgreat essay on the use and abuse of history,Nietzsche contrastshumanbeings with beastswho, as he puts it, see "Every moment reallydie, sink into night and mist, extinguished for-ever." ButBraudel'spoint is thathuman ife toois, much of it, lived thatway.It is quiteconsis-tentwithsucha formof life thathumanpracticesshouldhavea narrativetructure,with theFrenchof Racine and Cocteau evolving out of Latin,sincethechangeswereinsidious, andtook placeata ratenegligiblyslow inrelation o theaveragelife-spans of speakerswho perhapsnoticed no.greaterchange in vernacular peech thanin ver-nacular costume or cottage architecture. Forsome centuries it was believed that Christians

approached he year 1000 AD with acute trep-idations, expecting the Day of Judgment,andthat,ingratitude oritsdeferral,theyerected hecathedrals f gratitude crossthefaceof Europe.Thealleged source of thefearwassome claiminthe Book of Revelationsconcerninga reignof athousandyears under Christ. But in truth,evenamong those who readthe Book of Revelations,therewas hardly any sense of whatyearit was.Calendarswere not householdobjects. Peoplelivedunder hedureeof sunandseason, andthefatefuldate in fact wentunnoticed,like the pre-anniversariesof each of our deaths, a day likeevery other.Therecould even be a historyof art under heiongueduree.Therecouldbe a practiceof mak-ingpots,orreligious icons, orfunerary tatuary,ormasks,whichto thosewhoparticipatednthepracticewouldappearas unchangingas the restof thepractices hatdefinethe dureeof ordinarylife, and only someone who archeologized thepracticemightnoticechanges occurringat ratesslow in comparison with that at which artisansdied out and new ones moved into theirplaces.There could be a narrative of such changeswhose explanatory principle would be varia-tions in the Darwinian manner,a kind of aes-thetic evolution and adaptation ittle differentotherwise fromchanges in flora andfauna. Onecould, in the mannerof Hugh Kenner,describethepottersof stratumalphapreparing he formson stratumalpha 1000. Eva Brann, when anarcheologist, was always puzzled why potschangedand styles ended, after a lapse of cen-turies. In any case, artisanscould live in thesehistorieswith a senseof living onlyin a duree: itwould be as thoughthe forms hadan historicallife of theirown.Still, narrativechange-the sort of changerepresented in narratives-requires somethingin excess of the conditions I have been workingwith thus far. I ratherrecklessly identified thethreeevents in my ABC as "beginning,middle,andend" when in fact we may have hadonly acausal chain, linked by explanatoryties whichallow redescriptionbut which fall shortof a truenarrative. It was an artifact of having chosenthree events, when in truthcausal chains canstretch on and on, and so A in ABC must linkwitheventswhich go back and backand C witheventswhichgo on and on, so thatABC is but afragment nippedout, without heunity it strikes


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Danto Narrativeand Style 205me a narrativerequires:there has to be a dif-ference, one feels, between the end of a nar-rativeand thelatestlinkina causalchain,evenifthe causalchainterminateswith it. More to thepoint, the chain can go on when the narrative sended, as they live happily ever after thoughtheir story has come to itsend. I thinkthis ratherescaped me when, bent upon assimilatingnar-rative o the covering law modelof explanation,I did not perceive, in Analytical Philosophy ofHistory,that something more was required.Mysense is thatDarwin wantedTheDescentof Manto be a narrativewhichends, gloriously,thewayanoperaor a symphonyends, withMan-capital-M. But the standingcriticismis thatthe mech-anisms of adaptation and survival point tono finally privileged form, and that evolutionshouldgo on thoughManbecomesextinct.Thiswould of course allow Darwin the option ofsaying that hestoryof evolutionendswithMan,thoughevolution goes on and on, afterthe storyis over. But the question would be what, inaddition to being the latest link in the causalchain, would make the emergence of Man theendof a story?What does a storyrequire?The answeris reasonablyclear in the case ofDarwin:hethoughtof Man-capital-M s the endnot merelyin the sense of the latest andlast, butin the sense of a telos or goal-as that for thesakeof whose emergence all that had happenedhadhappened, he crown and glory of evolution.Had Darwin been seriously an Hegelian, hemight havethought that the theory of evolutionas articulatedby himself were the end of evolu-tion, the process coming to consciousness ofitself in his own great books. But many of uswould balk at thepromotionof ends as termini oends as goals, towardwhichtheentiresequenceswas driven, and at least one school of thoughtwill subscribeto the view thatnarratives re butwaysof presenting, or organizing acts, withouthaving objective anchoragein the facts them-selves. To ask what makes the end of a causalchain the end of a narrative,on this view, is toexpose oneself to a possibly deep criticism, thatone has allowed certain featuresthat belong toourmodesof representationo be takenas objec-tive featuresof the world.Endsof stories belongto stories, not to reality.There is nothing, then,beyondthe explanatoryfactorsthat we have toadd to thetruthconditionsof narrative entencesin order for them to yield narratives. On the

other hand, there is perhaps a rhetoricto nar-rative accounts that correspondsto nothing intheworld.I takethis to be the view of HaydenWhite, asit is of David Carrier,whose views, as a rela-tivist, are explainedthroughhis havingstudiedwith White, thoughWhitedid not write inorderthat Carrier hould be a relativist. "Youcantella story endingwhereyouchooseaboutwhateveryou wish," Carrier ecentlywrote "... Thereareendings in texts but not in historyas such." Letme say that in my own essay, "NarrationandKnowledge," I offered a view not remarkablydifferentfromthat, offering it as a criticism ofHegel's philosophy of history which exportsinto the domain of historical change featureswhich insteadbelongto the domainof historicalrepresentation. shall call this positionde dictunarrativism,and it is very compelling. Lately,however,I have been speakingof the end of art,of which narrativismde dictu would be a deepcriticismunless thereis roomfornarrativismdere. Carrierwrites: "Whetherwe see the historyof art as continuingorending dependsuponourgoals." So I suppose if it was Vasari'sgoal toglorify him, he mighthave said the historyof artendedwithMichelangelo, andif hisgoal were todiminish the achievementof Michelangelo, heinsteadmight havesaid thatpaintinggoes on andon. But in truth,Vasari believedthe history ofart culminated in Michelangelo, which madehim a narrativistde re. And whatI want to say,too, is that if one thinks that art ends, one iscommitted-or I am-to narrativismde re-thebelief that the historyof art itself is narrativelystructured.Its having an end depends then notupon my goal but upon its. Carrier s anxiousthatnarrativesbe true. Butif narrativism e re istrue, there in order of fact beyond whatevermakes de dictu narratives rue, mainly, I sup-pose, that the events all happenedand that theystandin the righttemporaland explanatoryor-der, everything else being Menschenwerk.Thedarkquestion is what this further order of factshouldbe, if a realistview of narrative s to havea chance at truth.What we want, as I see it-viewing causationin strictly Humean terms as an external rela-tion-is some credible internal relationshipbe-tweenbeginningand end. Hume's deep thoughtwas that until experience inscribes a habit ofexpectation,we wouldhaveno wayof knowing,


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206 The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticismon the basis of what gets redescribedas cause,whatif anything o expect whenit firsthappens,so that relative to this state of innocence, allcausal knowledge is more than humanknowl-edge: it becomes human knowledge when itformspartof the longue dure'eof our lives. Mysense is that if this is true, it really is true, asmuch for Shakespearianwitches, as much formothersof saints-to-be,as it is for the rest ofhumanity which it helps define. Since humanknowledge,on thisview, requires hattheeffectis uninscribed in the cause, to which it is thenexternally adjoined through experience, whatwe require s that an end shouldbe that kindofeffect which is inscribed in its cause. Even ifillegible to mortals, thosepossessedof the HolySpirit as cognitiveprostheticcan havesaid, withthe Narrator f East Coker,"Inmybeginningismy end," not in the trivialanalyticalsense thatwhateverbegins ends, but in the somewhator-ganic sense that it is not a real beginning thatdoes not have the end inscribed or coded in it.Or, to use a less fashionablemetaphor han thatof writing to convey thatthe end is contained nthebeginning, one can look to the way the pred-icate was said to have been contained in thesubject in Kant's intuitive first formulation oftheanalyticaludgement.Or, one can look to theway in which it was thoughtthat the theoremsbut make explicit what already is there in theaxioms, so thata being with morethan humanknowledgecan discern, as Galileo wrote, with"a single suddenintuition,"all the logical con-sequenceswhile the rest of us haveto drawthemout with deductivechains. WhatI want, amongotherthings, is a sense of beginningand endingin which we can see, afterward, he later worksof an artist alreadyvisible in his or her earlierworkthoughthey would nothave been visible tous were we contemporarywith these works.Among otherthings: for I clearly also want theend of the movement inscribed in the move-ment'sbeginning, the end of a period inscribedin its beginning.We areembarked,afterall, onsome metaphysicalhigh road, and it would beprovincial to suppose it leads only through theterritoryof thetheory andcriticism of art.But let us, just for now, thinkof the implica-tions forthecriticism of art,where, in looking atwork we are blind to features which will onlybecome visible in the retroscopiclight of laterwork, so thatthoughthese features were there,

an ascription of them to the work is not theordinary narrative redescription because the fu-ture only makes them legible. If the work ofMasaccio were contained already in the work ofGiotto, we can see this, after Masaccio-butwhat we see will have been there when Giottopainted at Assisi and at Padua. Let me hasten toadd that the artist will be blind to these features,as much as the critic, for just the reason that theartist does not know his future work. From this,I think it must follow that these are not featuresto be explained with reference to the intentionsof the artist, though-when they do becomeknown-they may explain the intentions. Fi-nally, let me propose that these features fallunder what Barthes would have considered"readerly reading"-they really are inscribed inthe work and not drapes across it like the swagsand tinsel of "writerly reading." They belong tothe substance of art and the sinews of art history.It will be instructive to have an example. Hereis a pair of descriptions from the 1980s of a bodyof work from the late 1960s by the Americanartist, Jennifer Bartlett:Earlyon she beganusing steel squaressurfacedwithbakedenamelin lieu of canvas(subway igns gave herthe idea), silk-screening them with graphlikegridsand filling the squares with seemingly random ar-rangementsof colored dots. Though at the time theyseemed like partsof the Minimalistmainstream,onecan now see howunorthodox heyactuallywere.That was John Ashbery writing in Newsweek,1985, and here is Calvin Tomkins at about thesame time in The New Yorker:Latein 1968, shehitonthe notionof using steelplatesas thebasicmodule forherpaintings. The minimalistartistoften usedmodularunits, butBartlett'sdea hadnothing to do with minimalist sculpture, or withphilosophicalmeditationson 'theobject' ... Whatshewasdoingsounded ike conceptualart; she wasusingmathematical ystems thatdetermined he placementof her dots.But the results, all those bright, astrin-gently colored dots, bouncing aroundand formingintoclusters on thegrid, never ookedconceptual."Seemed minimalist," "sounded like concep-tual art" are retrospective characterizations ofwork by which critics at the time did the bestwith that they could, applying what they knew.


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Danto Narrative and Style 207The first of Bartlett'sshows to attractattentionwas at the Reese Palley Gallery in 1972, and itwas reviewed by some impressive people: Lau-rie Anderson, Carter Radcliff, and DouglasCrimp, unanimous in perceiving the work asmathematical:"She uses colors forthe mostpartas signs, as abstractdifferentiations n illustrat-ing the Fibonacci series" (Radcliff); "Binarysystems, descriptionsof parabolas and mathe-maticalcombinations" Anderson), "Due to anundoubtedlycomplex mathematicalsystem forprogressionand limits, the result is that blankgrid spaces define horizontally situated para-bolic curves"(Crimp). These are heroiceffortsto respond o work in which curves seem plottedby dots, so the work seems Cartesianor evenPlatonic, rigorous, and austere. "Color is usednot as color," Radcliff wrote. Anderson'sreview is dense with termslike "co-efficient,""permutations," "group." Each is practicingwhat Michael Baxandallcalls "inferential artcriticism," inferring to an explanationof thearrayeddots whichthen licenses a set of criticalpredicates,anddefines a response to a body ofwork. Anderson writes "Often their inherentlogic supersedes the visual, which can seemprosaicbeside it."Infact thevisual waspretty mportant o Bart-lett, who selected from the twenty-five colorsoffered as Testor enamel, red, yellow, blue,black, and white-Mondrian colors, one mightsay, indeed the primary colors, as one wouldexpect from Platonistic work. It would havetaken a shrewdcritical eye to have dealt withthefact that she also used green. Later she toldTomkins"Italways mademe nervous ust to useprimarycolors. I felt a need for green! I felt noneed whateverfor orange or violet, but I didneed green." That need for green is the key toBartlett'swork, which was also less mathemat-ical than it looked. There were people, amongthem Paula Cooper, who were genuinely dis-tressedby Bartlett's"following a mathematicalsystem until it became inconvenient,and thenbendingordropping t altogether.Cooper calledher a nihilist. The nihilism was not especiallyvisible: Crimp speaks of her "straightforwardapproach o serial systems." Tomkins,in 1985,speaksof thedots "bouncingaround."Had yousaid that in the Paula Cooper gallery in 1972,youwould drawscornfulglances. Andersonwasin the spiritof the times in suggesting that the

workswere like "frames cut from a film aboutatomic interaction," in which case the atomsmight bounce but not the dots, which would,contrary to Radcliff, be signs. Tomkins seesthem on the surface, Anderson saw them aswithin pictorial space, out of the question ifreally minimalist. Bartlett said to me, not longago, that she felt as though she ought to be aminimalist,but that she couldnotlive withthat.And herwork, early and late, was by wayof animpulsivesubversionof its own premisses.Thiswould have been as much true of the early,seemingly austere squares, as of Rhapsody in1975, whichmade herfamous,orthe Fire Paint-ings of the pasttwoyears. The works n fact areby way of a battlefieldin which the severe im-perativesof Minimalism wars with somethingwarm,human, possibly feminine, certainlyro-mantic, rebellious,playful. The worksare alle-gories of theartisticspiritin theage of mechan-ical reproduction,or a wild collision betweenthe esprit de geometrie and the esprit definesse.That is not a readingthatcould be given whenthe workwas firstshown, thoughwhatit claimswas there when the work was shown, like aresident contradiction, a destiny, a Proustianessence accessible to memory having beenscreened from perception. I observe paren-thetically that as there cannot be bettercritics,closer to the workof theirtime, thanRadcliff,Anderson, and Crimp, the objectivity of cur-rentlyvisible featuresseverely imits the useful-ness for certain purposes of the InstitutionalTheoryof Art.In Painting as an Art, Richard Wollheim of-fers a thesis on individualstyle first as an ex-planatoryconcept and secondly as somethingthat is psychologically real. It is the psycholog-ical reality of the style thatexplainsthose char-acteristics we speak of as the characteristicsthroughwhich the artist is classed. What thispsychological realityis is somethingon which,Wollheim contends, I believe rightly, we arealmosttotally ignorant.Weare as ignorantof itas we are of whateverpsychological realityit isthroughwhich a personality is explained. In-deed, style andpersonalityarestronglyenoughconnectedthat we might as well invert Buffon'sastute thought and claim L'homme, c'est le stylememe.It is thisthatI am appealing o in thecaseof Jennifer Bartlett:an artistic style which isessentially her,whichemergesthroughher work


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208 The Journalof Aestheticsand Art Criticismas the workdevelops, and which we finally candiscernin the earlierworkwhere it wasoccludedby surroundingnoises in the artworld. "At acertainpointin the artist'scareer,certainimpor-tant advances, once made, are banked," Woll-heim writes, going on to suggest an analogywiththe way a languageis "banked," n thatthestyle generates works as a language does sen-tences.Now insofaras we explain a workthroughabanked individual style, construed as havingpsychologicalreality,intentionsdo not haveex-planatorypower:or the style explainsthe inten-tions. Whena work s explained hrougha styleIshallsayitexpressesthatstyle or, since styleandartistare one, that it expresses the artist. Bart-lett's intentionsvary fromworkto work,butthestyle itself remainsconstantor, if you like, it isthe same artisticpersonality hroughout.It is asif the stylewere the Platonicessenceof the artistwhich, as suchforms"participate"n individualthings, participate n individualworks, in vary-ing degrees and intensities. Construeddiachron-ically, however, the style is a history, and anarrativeof that history is a kind of artisticbiographyin which we trace not so much theemergence but the increasingperspicuitywithwhich the style becomes visible in the work.Now it seems to me there s a natural imit to astyle, as there is to a personality,a limit whichcannot be gone beyond, and it would be withrespectto such a limit thatI would speak of anend in a narrative ense, where we wantto sayofan artist thatshe or he has gone as far as it ispossible to have gone, within the limits of thestyle, after which furtherdevelopment s not tobe expected or hoped for, unless there is as itwere, a new style or a new personality, andhence a kind of rebirth. This idiom becomesmoredramaticwhenwe talk of styles in a widerreference thanthat of individual styles, wherethe developmentof the style is a collaborativeundertaking, in which several artists engageover a period of time. Wollheim, oddly for asocialist, stops short when it comes to grantingageneral style explanatorypower or psychologi-cal reality,butI see no reasonwhy informationcannot be bankedby those who form a move-ment,wheretheir interactions onstitutediscov-eries in a shared anguage. In any case the ideaof a natural imit has special applicationshere.Cubism was a shared style, certainly between

Picasso, Braque, and Gris, though my sense isthat it truly was an individualstyle for Braquebut only a momemenatry mannerismfor Pi-casso. Is it a limit on Cubism that it neverde-parted standardgenres like still life, landscape,andthefigure?Andthatneitherartistneverwentabstract?Everyonecan see the differencesbe-tween the different Abstract Expressionistsfarmoreeasily thanthey can see the general styleexemplified in Pollock, Kline, De Kooning,Rothko, Motherwell, Gorky, and the rest, yetthe best critics of thattime soughtto articulateageneral style whicheach internalizedn his ownway. Motherwelland De Kooningwenton paint-ing after the movement stopped, but it did notlast long enoughto come to an end, so we shallnever know what its natural imitswere. It wasended by Pop, whose end was inscribed in itsbeginnings, thoughof course the masters,on akind of tenure system were allowedto continueto paintas Popartists ong afterit stoppedbeingpossible to enterthe movement:Warhol's ormerassistant,RonnyCutrone,hasbythatfact a rightto go on paintingDonaldDuckamid soupcans,but the movement s otherwise over andended.Impressionism eached ts limits early,butendedwith the deathof Monetin 1926, since no seri-ous Impressionist areerwasany longeropen bythen. So we have cases of movementsstoppingbut notending, endingbut notstopping,endingand stopping, thoughthere is nothingthat ap-pears to be neither ending nor stopping. Theimportantconsideration s that art is killed byart, and the interesting onsiderations why thisiS SO.Suppose all these movements were but mo-ments in a very long lived style which begansome time in the thirteenthcentury but becamewidely bankedby the sixteenth, in which artistsperceived themselves as part of a narrativewhich advancedby continualrevolutionizing fthewayto paint?We get rather vivid pictureofthis from someone outside the traditionit de-fines, Gaeve Patel, an Indian, artist who writesof his own tradition this way: "[There] is theabsencehereof successiveschools, movements,andmanifestos, each attemptingo progressbe-yond the last." Patel, cynically, attributes his"quickturnover .. largely to the demandsof anaggressive market," leaving unexplained whythere is this market rather than another kind,perhaps he kind inwhichhe sells his own paint-


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Danto Narrative and Style 209ings. Then this narrative,the consciousness ofbelonging to which is partof thestyleof westernart which has Impressionism,AbstractExpres-sionism, Pop, and the like as but moments-might come to an end when the imperativesentailedby thatnarrative ecomeconscious, andartists should ask themselves if being artistsrequires them to carry art history forwardan-other notch. Here it may havebeen inscribed nthe beginningthat the style would end when itwas understoodthat it called for a deeper anddeeper understandingof what it was that wasbeingcarriedforwarda notch,and that it shouldthusterminate n its own philosophy.Somethinghas to explainwhy the historyof art in the westhasa differenthistory,and yields suchdifferentproducts, from art in India, or China, or evenJapan.So I am proposingthatwe see our historyasthe workingout of a commonstyle to its logicallimit. Thathistoryis over with now, as the limithas become visible to us, but of course art hasnot stoppedin the West. Still, if you think nar-rativesare simply things we tell, try to imagine

at this pointsomeone succeedingin makingthenext breakthrough.True, artiststry. Styles canbe killed but they do not easily die. I expect wearein fora long period in whichartistswill hurlthemselves against limits, urgedon by critics,which infactcannotbe broken.I lookforward oanartworld n which, this being recognized,theanimatingstyle of the west wanes, leaving justtheindividual tyles andthe lives of the artistsasa pluralbiography.As a philosophermeanwhile, stammering nthis ignorantpresent, I am chiefly concernedwith what the chances are for the theory of aqualifiednarrative ealism ust sketched.*ARTHUR C. DANTODepartmentof Philosophy710 PhilosophyHallColumbiaUniversityNew York,NY 10027

*Deliveredas the PresidentialAddressatthe 48th AnnualMeeting of the AmericanSociety for Aesthetics in Austin.Texas.October26, 1990.

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