"Show, Don't Tell" and the Triumph of the Art of Beauty Over the Art of Power

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair draws a distinction between the "Art of Beauty" and the "Art of Power." The former is distinguished by its stress on form, reflecting its being made for people who are established and safe and comfortable--a secure, dominant class desirous of entertainment, whose patronized artists have time for technique (the more in as their Establishment messages are apt to be banal)--the latter its stress on content, reflecting its being made by a rising class challenging the status quo and concerned above all with what it has to say.

Looking back at the birth of the modern novel in Western literature as discussed by Ian Watt it seems to me that one can see this distinctly "bourgeois" form passing over from an Art of Power to an Art of Beauty. Distinguished by the plainness and directness of its writing in the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie was a rising class--consider, for instance, the writing of a Daniel Defoe--in the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie was established and safe and conservative one started to see the preoccupation with "style" in the ascendant, as reflected in that banality of the ill-trained and unimaginative writing instructor, "Show, don't tell." As James Wood (who sees the career of Gustave Flaubert as a watershed for the ascent of style) explained, "[s]tyle" turned fiction into "a vessel defined by what it could not hold"--all as reputable opinion required the writer to present their work within that vessel, or not present it as literature at all.

Of course, as rebels against that orthodoxy have declared again and again over the years--H.G. Wells, for example--for anyone really serious about getting what they have to say across clearly rather than saying it gracefully and risking not being understood at all, indeed never really saying it at all, the worship of style of this kind can be a very dangerous trap--which is exactly why the orthodox thinker here tends to be so insistent upon the import of style. Indeed, reading "Technique as Discovery" one sees Mark Schorer, who holds that technique is ultimately everything, attack Defoe and Wells for technical crudity. Defoe's place in literary history was too established to suffer very much from Schorer's attack, but Wells was vulnerable, and the damage Schorer did to his reputation remains with us today.