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well. And his style is the way both to convey and to endure this complexity. Finally, then, the style of proliferation and the content of love and concern are blended in Sturgeon's work. It is a truism in literary studies that style and content are related, but with Sturgeon the relationship goes beyond the truism and becomes intriguingly almost incestuous. His changes and his virtuosity are both his way of loving and his way of avoiding loneliness. |
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Obviously, Sturgeon the stylist and literary form-changer is the same Sturgeon who is the lover. Form and content in the overall effects of his work are one, and his continual interest in the nature of change and newness is closely related to his interest in style. (. ..) a high ideal for Sturgeon as a writer is that he works "assiduously," not at ideas, but at writing images. The result is, as in some theories of Renaissance art, a richly proliferating aping of nature that conveys finally the most valuable idea from nature: its complexity and continually changing newness. As James Blish comments in The Seedling Stars about various species changes of a lively nature: "But why should any of them think of form-changing as something extraordinary, and to be striven for? It's one of the commonplaces of their lives, after all." The commonplace of at least a major portion of Sturgeon's literary life is that style and loving concern are counterparts of one another because it is the comprehension of all the complexity, done through style, that allows the most genuine love. Perhaps in a simpler, more anthropocentric universe love could be more single minded; and we might prefer that. But the comic tension of our complex universe arms us to love things as they are, and Sturgeon's complex literary fabrications contribute to the expression of this comic tension. |
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Donald M. Hassler, "Images for an Ethos, Images for Change and Style," Extrapolation 20, No. 2 (Summer 1979): 18687 |
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Sturgeon, like (D. H.) Lawrence, believes in the sanctity of desire, in the life-giving, rippling act of loving, in transmitting the palpable and potent stream of desire which exists in everybody to flow preternaturally from person to person, creature to creature, growing thing to growing thing, ever outward, ever ongoing. |
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Sturgeon's style changes with each story. The idea and characters determine and generate his whole mode from diction and imagery to syntax. Thus each work has its own attributes as prose, based on what he once |
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