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WYATT MASON-Wanted to Swap |
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Contributed by Wyatt Mason
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"Feeling that a style is natural and inevitable," wrote Guy Davenport in his The Geography of the Imagination, "is like being among people with whom we share tradition and prejudices." The sentence is allegedly about what literary style is like, but ends up, in the Davenportean way, being equally a thumbnail of how human societies make themselves at home, through unthinking inheritances of behavior and thought. "Style can therefore be invisible," Davenport continues, "blending with our ignorance." That is to say: if as readers we find ourselves at home in a style, we are less likely to find ourselves able to question the choices the writer has made. Such choices are coherent to us readers, in the way a dialect would be comprehensible to a particular group of natives. . . .
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