Narrative and Style Author(s): Arthur C.

Danto Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer, 1991), pp. 201209 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431474 . Accessed: 20/06/2012 18:01
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Blackwell Publishing and The American Society for Aesthetics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

http://www.jstor.org

ARTHUR C. DANTO

Narrativeand Style

In an entertainingessay on recurrentefforts to standardize and stabilize the mother tongue, Hugh Kenner offers a spectacularexample of what I once termed narrative sentences-sentences by which an earlier event is described with reference to a later one, yielding thereby descriptions under which events cannot have been witnessed at the time of their occurrence, for whatever reason it is that their future was hiddento those who might have witnessedthem. Wehave no difficulty with them, however,since their future is our past, which the narrativesentence serves to organize under narrativestructure. No observer,stationedin the Romanprovince of Gallia, say some time after the Franks, underClovis, had infused with a largishGerman vocabulary and a characteristic diphthongization of vowels, the Latinspokenthereas a lingua franca, could have asserted, in that demotic idiom, what Kennerretrospectivelyand in literary English, writes about their language: "The Gauls were preparingthe tongue of Racine and Cocteau"-not even if this was in truthwhat was happeningbefore their eyes, insidiously, gradually, irresistibly. Nor, moving forward about three centuries, can a populist chancellor have remonstrated with Charlemagne, when that Holy Roman Emperor sought, suitably to his imperialstation, to reviveclassical Latinagainst what he perceivedas a badly degeneratedLatin, which we of course perceive as perfectly respectableOld French, thatwere he to succeed in this ill-advised reform, Phedre will never be written nor Les enfants terribles see actuality. For reasons at once too obvious to have to work out for a non-philosophicalaudience, and fartoo difficult to work out to the satisfaction of a philosophicalone, such descriptions would not have been intelligible to those of whom they

were true, nor can they figure among descriptions under which whateverthey did counts as among their intentionalactions. The Academie francais was established in 1635 precisely to drive a stake throughthe heartof linguistic evolution, and though its success was limitedtwentieth century French differs not only in vocabulary from that of the seventeenth century-it is, alas, unavailable to us to cite the masterpiecesof twenty-third century Frenchliteratureabortedin consequenceof its regimentations. What great works of Afro-anglafiolo-6, the lingua-francaof the western hemisphereof the early years of the FourthMillennium,are at this very moment being preparedthrough the departuresfrom standardEnglish of Madonna, Dan Quayle, the rap group Public Enemy, and Japanese writers of users' manuals for minisatellites, not to mentionthe Russiansettlers of BrightonBeach? There is in my view no betterway to experience the vividness of what Martin Heidegger would certainly have called the historiness of history,thanto feel the almostviolent comedy of puttingintothe presenttense sentenceswhich do not wrench the imagination at all in the past tense, like that of Hugh Kenner's, and then endeavoring to imagine what they could have conveyed at the time of which they were true. Someone at the Merovingian court certainly could have formedas soundsLefils de Minos et de Pasiphae but would have been speaking in tongues. And how would he have described Racine withoutsaying what he was to writejust under a thousandyears ahead? Indeed, a good test for the iongue duree of humanlife consists in seeing whether a narrative sentence could have been accepted without conceptual perturbationsat the time of its truth. "I boughtmy first

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49:3 Summer 1991

202 etching in 1957," said in 1990, rotatessmoothly into the present tense as something the speaker might have said in 1957 when he bought an etching, even if in 1957 it makes a special claim on the future that the boughtetching will not be the last or only etching bought. And so with "We started our family in 1952," when there remainedthe possibility, had it been said in 1952, thatthe child referredto was to be an only child. Or even, said with callow confidence, "I go forth to forge the uncreatedconscience of my race" as markingan ambition, even though that conscience stood at that moment sufficiently unforgedthat no one has a clue as to the form in which it will leave the anvil-and anyway the poet can say he went forth to thatend thoughhe failed, without quite being able to say what it was he failed to forge, for then he wouldnot have failed. All these make claims on the future, but not historical claims on the future. It is, on the other hand, an historical such claim when Elizabeth, the wife of Zacharias,carrying him who is to be the Baptist, cries out "Whence is this to me, that the motherof my Lord should come to me?" when Mary, merely pregnant, wanting perhapsonly to exchange female confidences, makes her visitation. Elizabeth is able to make this startling identificationonly because she is filled, as Saint Luke tells us, with the Holy Ghost and the knowledge is revealedwhich otherwise only in the fullness of time would be understoodby the vernacular. requiresnothing It like revelationto explain the claims on the future in the durnedefined throughjust thatfact, which are underwrittenby the routine causal beliefs which define a world in which people start collections by buying etchings, begin families by having a child, go forthto forge a conscience by purchasingtwo thirdclass tickets to Calais. It is an historical claim on the future when even forming the intention to do what will be narratively redescribed in terms of what happens later, requiresknowledge of a sort which might as well be thoughtof as revelation,inasmuchas throughno extension of ordinarycognitive processes can we explain how the agent should have known what was necessary to formthe intention in question. There is, I think, a powerful difference to registerbetweenthe futurethatthe causalbeliefs of the iongue duree will not enable us to grasp, but which is compatible with those beliefs, and

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism the future they will not enable us to know because they no longeroperate, and things happen incompatiblywith them. Michael Ignatieff has writtenvery movingly,in discussingthe Russian Revolution, of "The sight of an immemorial ordercollapsing-the new vision of historyas an irrational torrentrather thanan orderlystream[which] seemed to rob its defendersof any capacity to resist." Ignatieffcites the memoirof a cavalryofficer's daughter:"Itjust seemed to me that one day the soldiers changed, their shirts were hanging out, their belts were aroundtheir necks and they were eating sunflower seeds: everythingwas dirty-all of a sudden, from one day to another."Ignatieff writes that "The will to resist vanished with the recognitionthat history had turned against them." This moment marks a sort of caesura, at least of the iongue duree of the ruling class, and in some degree anyone of a certain age will have experienced something like it in the form of a chaos: there were professorsat Columbiain 1968 for whom a form of life regardedas immemorialcollapsed under their feet; there were men and women for whom the feminist movementof the 1970s seemed to dissolve the naturalorder; certainly there were blacks and whites for whom a world ended in the 1950s because of political upheavals no one appearedto be directingor knew how to direct; the emblematiccrumplingof the Berlin Wall in 1989 went contraryto the expectations of everyone who thought in terms of a history which could change only externallyand through war. A less agonized example is the vignette, I am uncertainif fact or imagination, of Willem de Kooning and BarnettNewman in an art gallery in the mid-sixties, shaking their heads in paineddisbelief at a paintingof Mickey Mouse, or perhapsDonald Duck, which critics and collectors were actually taking seriously. It too was the end of a world. My sense is thatthe point of Braudel'smasterpiecewas that the history of the narrative sentencewenton in the long period he covers, without penetratingthe life where the causal beliefs of the iongue duree he defined through them went on. If true, this meantthat those who lived aroundthe Mediterraneanthroughthatepoch led by andlargefortunate lives. But if someone caresto arguethatthe difference between compatible and incompatible futures only defines two levels of historical change, one level being just slower and more

Danto Narrative and Style gradualthanthe other, I would put up very little resistance. The difference between a future we feel we have a right to expect and a future we have no right to expect and cannot even formulate, may merelybe indexedto differentlevels of ignorancerather thandifferentordersof change. It was still naturalfor Michael Ignatieffto speak of it as having been history which had turned againstthe Russianancien regime. When Macbeth returns to Inverness, he is forthwith hailedby his ladyas "Great Glamis!" which he is-but also, in the spirit of Saint Elizabeth, as "WorthyCawdor!!"-which he is not, any more than he is "Greaterthan both, by the all-hail hereafter!".Lady Macbethhas been rotatedout of the iongue duree of causal expectations by what Macbeth had communicatedas "The more than human knowledge" possessed by the spirits who had addressed him both as "Thane of Cawdor" and "King that shalt be." "Thy letters have transportedme beyond/This ignorantpresent," Lady Macbethexults, "AndI feel now the future in the instant."Knowingthe future, the only task is to lend the helping hand, and her resolution is to weaken "All that impedes thee from the golden round,/Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have thee crowned withal." Thereis a certain reckless improprietyin having bracketedtogether the mother of John The Baptist (a fine narrativedescription) with she whom Malcolm came to call a "fiend-like Queen," but I wantthe narrative sentence "Saint Elizabeth, like Lady Macbeth, believed herself possessed of more than human knowledge." I want this because it qualifies as a narrativesentence by the criteria advanced, and could have been asserted of Saint Elizabeth when she sat gravid with the Baptistonly if the asserter were possessed of morethanhumanknowledge-who knew, at the thresholdof the Christianera, of events and persons to be in Scotlandcirca 1050 AD, and perhapstheir representation London in circa 1606 AD? But it fails to do whatone would ordinarily expect a narrative sentence to do, namely yield a narrative,since the two events in question-Elizabeth's pious and Lady Macbeth's gloating salutationscannot easily be thoughtof as forming parts of one. The two events have been unitedthroughan act of philosophicalwill primarilyin order that they should fall asunder throughnarrativeunconnectedness.One could,

203 I suppose, write the history of beliefs in the existence of more than humanknowledge, with both women figuring in it as exemplars. But the book would in effect be a chronicle, listing examples in chronologicalorder. The same information could be presented in an encyclopedia of such beliefs, where entries are alphabetical, under the names of their holders. My cobbled narrativesentence is a trivial fallout from the circumstancethat makes a doctrine of internal relationsseem initially plausible-that anything can be redescribedwith reference to anything else, which incidentallyunderlies a lot of narrativetheory at the moment. What is missing, obviously, is an explanatory connection: it is a narrativewhen the earlier event referredto throughthe narrativesentence enters into the explanationof the later one. No doubt this raises more problems than it solves: explanationsentailgenerallaws, butlaws define a duree, andyet one wantsthe narrative sentence to meet the constraint that its assertion at the time of the earlierevent would appearto require "more than human knowledge" since it makes an historicalclaim on the futurebeyondwhatthe duree-defininglaws can license, which after all is what "the historiness of history" seemed to require.In its heyday,the CoveringLaw Model of explanationwas supposedto supportpredictions-explanation and predication merely reflected where one stood in the temporalorderin regardto the eventcoveredby the law. This easy symmetrywas heavily criticizedin thatera, with cleverexamples inventedto show thatthaton the basis of which we predict goes no distance toward explaining the events predicted. Still, the kinds of historicalclaims on the futuremade by SaintElizabethand Lady Macbeth,which could at best be revealedthrough "more than human knowledge," markeda futurewhich was impenetrably blank without it, standingas we otherwise would in "the ignorantpresent."So how do we build into the narrativesentence an explanatory constraint? A fair makeshift response might be this: if there are threeevents, A, B, and C, then A may explain B and B explain C, so there are laws covering AB and BC, but no historical law covering AC. We might then have a tiny narrative, with ABC in thatorderas beginningmiddle and end, and even say thatA enters into the explanation of C since without A not B and without B

204 not C. Thus in Oscar Hijuelgo's novel, Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, it is Cesar wantingto fool around with Vannain the back seat of the Desoto thatexplains why Nestor is driving, it is Nestor's depression that explains the skid that kills him, enabling the novelist to display the "more than human knowledge" of things his characters could not haveknownat the time they weretrue:thatNestor "Hadtakenhis last piss ...
played his last trumpet line ... taken his last swallow of rum ... had tasted his last sweet."

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism approachedthe year 1000 AD with acute trepidations, expecting the Day of Judgment, and that, in gratitudefor its deferral,they erectedthe of cathedrals gratitude acrossthe face of Europe. The alleged sourceof the fearwas some claim in the Book of Revelationsconcerninga reign of a thousandyears under Christ. But in truth, even among those who readthe Book of Revelations, there was hardlyany sense of what year it was. Calendars were not household objects. People lived underthe duree of sun and season, and the fateful date in fact went unnoticed, like the preanniversariesof each of our deaths, a day like every other. There could even be a historyof art underthe iongue duree. Therecould be a practiceof making pots, or religiousicons, or funerarystatuary, or masks, which to those who participated the in practicewould appearas unchangingas the rest of the practicesthatdefine the dureeof ordinary life, and only someone who archeologized the practicemight notice changes occurringat rates slow in comparisonwith that at which artisans died out and new ones moved into their places. There could be a narrative of such changes whose explanatory principle would be variations in the Darwinian manner,a kind of aesthetic evolution and adaptationlittle different otherwise from changes in flora and fauna. One could, in the mannerof Hugh Kenner,describe the pottersof stratumalpha preparingthe forms on stratum alpha 1000. Eva Brann, when an archeologist, was always puzzled why pots changed and styles ended, after a lapse of centuries. In any case, artisans could live in these historieswith a sense of living only in a duree: it would be as though the forms had an historical life of theirown. Still, narrativechange-the sort of change represented in narratives-requires something in excess of the conditionsI have been working with thus far. I ratherrecklessly identified the three events in my ABC as "beginning, middle, and end" when in fact we may have had only a causal chain, linked by explanatoryties which allow redescription which fall shortof a true but narrative. It was an artifact of having chosen three events, when in truth causal chains can stretch on and on, and so A in ABC must link with events which go back and back and C with events which go on and on, so thatABC is but a fragmentsnippedout, withoutthe unity it strikes

EverythingNestor does in these two wonderful paragraphs,commonplacenoneventsin this unhappy person's life, take on a tragic dimension in the retrospectivelight of the death the Narratorhas in store for him. It is like the spiritual light in a great Flemish paintingthat gives definition to everything bathed in it, down to the least pebble, anda certainnearlysacredidentity. It is a light of course to which we are blind in "the ignorant present," and what makes it
ignorant.

Historical knowledge always seems more thanhumanknowledge, just because it is always inaccessible to those who are its objects, though themselves cognitive beings, since the historian knows the outcomes of the narrativesthey are living, where these outcomes define boundaries on the durees, knowledgeof whichjust is human knowledge. The boundariesof the durees are the boundaries of human knowledge, and to live with the sense of doing so historicallyis to know how narrowthose boundariesreally are. But, as partisans of the iongue duree and of a noneventival historiography appreciate, much of life is lived unhistorically, which explains the agony described by Michael Ignatieff. In his great essay on the use and abuse of history, Nietzsche contrasts human beings with beasts who, as he puts it, see "Every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished forever." But Braudel'spoint is that humanlife too is, much of it, lived that way. It is quite consistent with such a formof life thathumanpractices shouldhavea narrative structure, with the French of Racine and Cocteau evolving out of Latin, since the changes were insidious, and took place at a ratenegligibly slow in relationto the average life-spans of speakers who perhaps noticed no .greaterchange in vernacularspeech than in vernacular costume or cottage architecture. For some centuries it was believed that Christians

Danto Narrative and Style me a narrativerequires: there has to be a difference, one feels, between the end of a narrativeandthe latest link in a causal chain, even if the causal chain terminateswith it. More to the point, the chain can go on when the narrativeis ended, as they live happily ever after though theirstory has come to its end. I thinkthis rather escaped me when, bent upon assimilating narrativeto the covering law model of explanation, I did not perceive, in Analytical Philosophy of History, that somethingmore was required.My sense is thatDarwin wantedTheDescent of Man to be a narrative which ends, gloriously,the way an operaor a symphonyends, with Man-capitalM. But the standingcriticism is that the mechanisms of adaptation and survival point to no finally privileged form, and that evolution shouldgo on though Man becomes extinct. This would of course allow Darwin the option of sayingthatthe story of evolutionends with Man, thoughevolutiongoes on and on, after the story is over. But the question would be what, in addition to being the latest link in the causal chain, would make the emergence of Man the end of a story?Whatdoes a story require? The answer is reasonablyclear in the case of as Darwin:he thoughtof Man-capital-M the end not merely in the sense of the latest and last, but in the sense of a telos or goal-as that for the sake of whose emergence all that had happened had happened,the crown and glory of evolution. Had Darwin been seriously an Hegelian, he might have thoughtthat the theory of evolution as articulatedby himself were the end of evolution, the process coming to consciousness of itself in his own great books. But many of us wouldbalkat the promotionof ends as terminito ends as goals, towardwhich the entiresequences was driven, and at least one school of thought will subscribeto the view that narratives but are ways of presenting, or organizingfacts, without having objective anchorage in the facts themselves. To ask what makes the end of a causal chain the end of a narrative,on this view, is to expose oneself to a possibly deep criticism, that one has allowed certain features that belong to ourmodes of representation be takenas objecto tive featuresof the world. Ends of stories belong to stories, not to reality. There is nothing, then, beyond the explanatory factors that we have to add to the truthconditionsof narrativesentences in order for them to yield narratives. On the

205 other hand, there is perhaps a rhetoricto narrative accounts that correspondsto nothing in the world. I take this to be the view of HaydenWhite, as it is of David Carrier, whose views, as a relativist, are explained throughhis having studied with White, thoughWhite did not write in order that Carriershould be a relativist. "Youcan tell a story ending where you choose aboutwhatever you wish," Carrierrecentlywrote "... Thereare endings in texts but not in history as such." Let me say that in my own essay, "Narrationand Knowledge," I offered a view not remarkably different from that, offering it as a criticism of Hegel's philosophy of history which exports into the domain of historical change features which insteadbelong to the domainof historical I representation. shall call this position de dictu narrativism,and it is very compelling. Lately, however,I have been speakingof the end of art, of which narrativismde dictu would be a deep criticism unless there is room for narrativism de re. Carrierwrites: "Whetherwe see the history of art as continuingor ending dependsupon our goals." So I suppose if it was Vasari'sgoal to glorify him, he mighthavesaid the historyof art endedwith Michelangelo,and if his goal wereto diminish the achievementof Michelangelo, he insteadmighthavesaidthatpaintinggoes on and on. But in truth, Vasaribelieved the history of art culminated in Michelangelo, which made him a narrativistde re. And what I want to say, too, is that if one thinks that art ends, one is committed-or I am-to narrativism re-the de belief that the history of art itself is narratively structured.Its having an end depends then not upon my goal but upon its. Carrieris anxious thatnarratives true. But if narrativism re is be de true, there in order of fact beyond whatever makes de dictu narrativestrue, mainly, I suppose, that the events all happenedand that they stand in the right temporaland explanatoryorder, everythingelse being Menschenwerk.The dark question is what this furtherorder of fact shouldbe, if a realistview of narrative to have is a chance at truth. What we want, as I see it-viewing causation in strictly Humean terms as an external relation-is some credible internalrelationshipbetween beginning and end. Hume'sdeep thought was that until experience inscribes a habit of expectation, we would have no way of knowing,

206 on the basis of what gets redescribedas cause, what if anythingto expect when it first happens, so that relative to this state of innocence, all causal knowledge is more than human knowledge: it becomes human knowledge when it forms part of the longue dure'eof our lives. My sense is that if this is true, it really is true, as much for Shakespearianwitches, as much for mothers of saints-to-be, as it is for the rest of humanity which it helps define. Since human knowledge, on this view, requiresthat the effect is uninscribed in the cause, to which it is then externally adjoined through experience, what we requireis that an end should be that kind of effect which is inscribed in its cause. Even if illegible to mortals, those possessed of the Holy Spiritas cognitive prostheticcan have said, with the Narrator East Coker, "In my beginning is of my end," not in the trivial analytical sense that whateverbegins ends, but in the somewhat organic sense that it is not a real beginning that does not have the end inscribed or coded in it. Or, to use a less fashionablemetaphorthan that of writing to convey that the end is containedin the beginning, one can look to the way the predicate was said to have been contained in the subject in Kant's intuitive first formulation of the analyticaljudgement.Or, one can look to the way in which it was thought that the theorems but make explicit what already is there in the axioms, so that a being with more than human knowledge can discern, as Galileo wrote, with "a single sudden intuition," all the logical consequenceswhile the rest of us haveto drawthem out with deductivechains. What I want, among other things, is a sense of beginning and ending in which we can see, afterward,the later works of an artist already visible in his or her earlier workthoughthey would not havebeen visible to us were we contemporary with these works. Among other things: for I clearly also want the end of the movement inscribed in the movement's beginning, the end of a period inscribed in its beginning. We are embarked,after all, on some metaphysicalhigh road, and it would be provincial to suppose it leads only throughthe territoryof the theory and criticism of art. But let us, just for now, think of the implications for the criticismof art, where, in looking at work we are blind to features which will only become visible in the retroscopic light of later work, so that though these features were there,

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism

an ascription of them to the work is not the ordinary narrative redescription because the future only makes them legible. If the work of Masaccio were contained already in the work of Giotto, we can see this, after Masaccio-but what we see will have been there when Giotto painted at Assisi and at Padua. Let me hasten to add that the artist will be blind to these features, as much as the critic, for just the reason that the artist does not know his future work. From this, I think it must follow that these are not features to be explained with reference to the intentions of the artist, though-when they do become known-they may explain the intentions. Finally, let me propose that these features fall under what Barthes would have considered "readerly reading"-they really are inscribed in the work and not drapes across it like the swags and tinsel of "writerly reading." They belong to the substance of art and the sinews of art history. It will be instructive to have an example. Here is a pair of descriptions from the 1980s of a body of work from the late 1960s by the American artist, Jennifer Bartlett: Early on she began using steel squaressurfacedwith bakedenamel in lieu of canvas(subwaysigns gave her the idea), silk-screening them with graphlike grids and filling the squares with seemingly random arrangementsof colored dots. Though at the time they seemed like parts of the Minimalistmainstream,one can now see how unorthodoxthey actuallywere. That was John Ashbery writing in Newsweek, 1985, and here is Calvin Tomkins at about the same time in The New Yorker: Late in 1968, she hit on the notionof using steel plates as the basic module for her paintings.The minimalist artistoften used modularunits, but Bartlett'sidea had nothing to do with minimalist sculpture, or with philosophicalmeditationson 'the object' ... Whatshe was doing soundedlike conceptualart; she was using mathematicalsystems that determinedthe placement of her dots.But the results, all those bright, astringently colored dots, bouncing around and forming into clusterson the grid, neverlooked conceptual. "Seemed minimalist," "sounded like conceptual art" are retrospective characterizations of work by which critics at the time did the best with that they could, applying what they knew.

Danto Narrativeand Style The first of Bartlett'sshows to attractattention was at the Reese Palley Gallery in 1972, and it was reviewed by some impressivepeople: Laurie Anderson, Carter Radcliff, and Douglas Crimp, unanimous in perceiving the work as mathematical: "She uses colors forthe most part as signs, as abstractdifferentiationsin illustrating the Fibonacci series" (Radcliff); "Binary systems, descriptions of parabolasand mathematical combinations"(Anderson), "Due to an undoubtedlycomplex mathematicalsystem for progression and limits, the result is that blank grid spaces define horizontally situated parabolic curves" (Crimp). These are heroic efforts to respondto work in which curves seem plotted by dots, so the work seems Cartesian or even Platonic, rigorous, and austere. "Color is used not as color," Radcliff wrote. Anderson's review is dense with terms like "co-efficient," "permutations," "group." Each is practicing what Michael Baxandall calls "inferential art criticism," inferring to an explanation of the arrayeddots which then licenses a set of critical predicates, and defines a response to a body of work. Anderson writes "Often their inherent logic supersedes the visual, which can seem prosaicbeside it." In fact the visual was prettyimportant Bartto lett, who selected from the twenty-five colors offered as Testor enamel, red, yellow, blue, black, and white-Mondrian colors, one might say, indeed the primary colors, as one would expect from Platonistic work. It would have takena shrewdcritical eye to havedealt with the fact that she also used green. Later she told Tomkins"It always made me nervousjust to use primarycolors. I felt a need for green! I felt no need whatever for orange or violet, but I did need green." That need for green is the key to Bartlett'swork, which was also less mathematical than it looked. There were people, among them Paula Cooper, who were genuinely distressed by Bartlett's"following a mathematical system until it became inconvenient, and then bendingor droppingit altogether.Coopercalled her a nihilist. The nihilism was not especially visible: Crimp speaks of her "straightforward approachto serial systems." Tomkins, in 1985, speaks of the dots "bouncingaround."Had you said that in the Paula Cooper gallery in 1972, you woulddrawscornfulglances. Andersonwas in the spirit of the times in suggesting that the

207 works were like "framescut from a film about atomic interaction," in which case the atoms might bounce but not the dots, which would, contrary to Radcliff, be signs. Tomkins sees them on the surface, Anderson saw them as within pictorial space, out of the question if really minimalist. Bartlettsaid to me, not long ago, that she felt as though she ought to be a minimalist,but that she could not live with that. And her work, early and late, was by way of an impulsivesubversionof its own premisses. This would have been as much true of the early, seemingly austere squares, as of Rhapsody in 1975, which madeher famous, or the Fire Paintings of the past two years. The worksin fact are by way of a battlefield in which the severe imperatives of Minimalism wars with something warm, human, possibly feminine, certainly romantic, rebellious, playful. The worksare allegories of the artistic spirit in the age of mechanical reproduction,or a wild collision between
the esprit de geometrie and the esprit definesse.

That is not a readingthat could be given when the workwas first shown, thoughwhat it claims was there when the work was shown, like a resident contradiction, a destiny, a Proustian essence accessible to memory having been screened from perception. I observe parenthetically that as there cannot be better critics, closer to the work of their time, than Radcliff, Anderson, and Crimp, the objectivity of currentlyvisible featuresseverelylimits the usefulness for certain purposes of the Institutional Theory of Art.
In Painting as an Art, Richard Wollheim of-

fers a thesis on individual style first as an explanatory concept and secondly as something that is psychologically real. It is the psychological reality of the style that explains those characteristics we speak of as the characteristics through which the artist is classed. What this psychological reality is is somethingon which, Wollheim contends, I believe rightly, we are almost totally ignorant.We are as ignorantof it as we are of whateverpsychological reality it is through which a personality is explained. Indeed, style and personalityare stronglyenough connected that we might as well invertBuffon's
astute thought and claim L'homme, c'est le style

meme. It is this thatI am appealingto in the case of Jennifer Bartlett: an artistic style which is essentially her, which emergesthroughher work

208 as the work develops, and which we finally can discern in the earlierworkwhere it was occluded by surroundingnoises in the artworld. "At a certainpoint in the artist'scareer,certain important advances, once made, are banked," Wollheim writes, going on to suggest an analogy with the way a language is "banked,"in thatthe style generates works as a language does sentences. Now insofar as we explain a work througha banked individual style, construed as having psychological reality, intentionsdo not have explanatorypower: or the style explains the intentions. When a workis explainedthrougha style I shall say it expressesthatstyle or, since style and artist are one, that it expresses the artist. Bartlett's intentionsvary from workto work, but the style itself remainsconstantor, if you like, it is the same artistic personalitythroughout.It is as if the style were the Platonicessence of the artist in which, as such forms "participate" individual things, participatein individualworks, in varying degrees and intensities. Construeddiachronically, however, the style is a history, and a narrative of that history is a kind of artistic biography in which we trace not so much the emergence but the increasing perspicuity with which the style becomes visible in the work. Now it seems to me thereis a naturallimit to a style, as there is to a personality,a limit which cannot be gone beyond, and it would be with respect to such a limit that I would speak of an end in a narrative sense, where we wantto say of an artist that she or he has gone as far as it is possible to have gone, within the limits of the style, after which furtherdevelopmentis not to be expected or hoped for, unless there is as it were, a new style or a new personality, and hence a kind of rebirth. This idiom becomes more dramaticwhen we talk of styles in a wider reference than that of individual styles, where the developmentof the style is a collaborative undertaking, in which several artists engage over a period of time. Wollheim, oddly for a socialist, stops shortwhen it comes to grantinga general style explanatorypower or psychological reality, but I see no reason why information cannot be banked by those who form a movement, where their interactionsconstitutediscoveries in a sharedlanguage. In any case the idea of a naturallimit has special applicationshere. Cubism was a shared style, certainly between

The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism Picasso, Braque, and Gris, though my sense is that it truly was an individualstyle for Braque but only a momemenatry mannerism for Picasso. Is it a limit on Cubism that it never departed standardgenres like still life, landscape, andthe figure?And thatneitherartistneverwent abstract?Everyone can see the differences between the different Abstract Expressionistsfar more easily than they can see the general style exemplified in Pollock, Kline, De Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell, Gorky, and the rest, yet the best critics of thattime soughtto articulatea general style which each internalizedin his own way. Motherwelland De Kooningwenton painting after the movement stopped, but it did not last long enough to come to an end, so we shall never know what its naturallimits were. It was ended by Pop, whose end was inscribed in its beginnings, though of course the masters, on a kind of tenure system were allowed to continue to paintas Pop artistslong after it stoppedbeing possible to enterthe movement:Warhol's former assistant,RonnyCutrone,has by thatfact a right to go on paintingDonald Duck amid soup cans, but the movementis otherwise over and ended. Impressionism reachedits limitsearly,but ended with the death of Monet in 1926, since no serious Impressionist careerwas any longeropen by then. So we have cases of movementsstopping but not ending, ending but not stopping, ending and stopping, though there is nothing that appears to be neither ending nor stopping. The importantconsiderationis that art is killed by art, and the interestingconsiderationis why this
iS SO.

Suppose all these movements were but moments in a very long lived style which began some time in the thirteenthcentury but became widely bankedby the sixteenth, in which artists perceived themselves as part of a narrative which advancedby continualrevolutionizing of the way to paint?We get rathera vivid pictureof this from someone outside the tradition it defines, Gaeve Patel, an Indian, artist who writes of his own traditionthis way: "[There] is the absence here of successive schools, movements, and manifestos, each attempting progressbeto yond the last." Patel, cynically, attributesthis "quickturnover... largely to the demandsof an aggressive market," leaving unexplained why there is this market ratherthan another kind, perhapsthe kind in which he sells his own paint-

Danto Narrativeand Style ings. Then this narrative,the consciousness of belongingto which is partof the style of western art which has Impressionism,AbstractExpressionism, Pop, and the like as but momentsmight come to an end when the imperatives entailedby thatnarrative become conscious, and artists should ask themselves if being artists requiresthem to carry art history forwardanother notch. Here it may have been inscribedin the beginning that the style would end when it was understoodthat it called for a deeper and deeper understandingof what it was that was being carriedforwarda notch, and that it should thus terminatein its own philosophy.Something has to explain why the history of art in the west has a differenthistory, and yields such different products, from art in India, or China, or even Japan. So I am proposing that we see our history as the workingout of a common style to its logical limit. That history is over with now, as the limit has become visible to us, but of course art has not stopped in the West. Still, if you think narrativesare simply things we tell, try to imagine

209 at this point someone succeeding in making the next breakthrough.True, artists try. Styles can be killed but they do not easily die. I expect we are in for a long period in which artistswill hurl themselves against limits, urged on by critics, which in fact cannotbe broken.I look forwardto an artworldin which, this being recognized, the animatingstyle of the west wanes, leaving just the individualstyles andthe lives of the artistsas a pluralbiography. As a philosophermeanwhile, stammeringin this ignorant present, I am chiefly concerned with what the chances are for the theory of a qualifiednarrative realismjust sketched.*
ARTHUR C. DANTO

Departmentof Philosophy 710 PhilosophyHall ColumbiaUniversity New York,NY 10027

*Deliveredas the PresidentialAddressat the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Austin. Texas. October26, 1990.