The impoverished condition of our literature, its incapacity to attract readers, has produced a superstition about style, an inattentive reading that favors certain affectations. Those who condone this superstition reckon that style is not the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a certain page but rather the writer’s apparent skills: his analogies, acoustics, the rhythm of his syntax or punctuation. [...] They subordinate feelings to ethics, or rather to an irrefutable etiquette. This inhibition has become so widespread that, strictly speaking, there are no more readers left, only potential literary critics.
This superstition is so established that no one dares to admit to an absence of style in compelling works, especially in the classics. There is no good book without its own style, which no one can deny—except its writer. Let us take the example of Don Quixote. Confronted with the proven excellence of this novel, Spanish literary critics have suppressed the thought that its greatest (and perhaps only irrefutable) worth may be its psychological acumen, and they ascribe to it a stylistic brilliance which many readers find mysterious. One need only review a few paragraphs of the Quixote to realize that Cervantes was not a stylist (at least in the current acoustical or decorative sense of the word) and that he was too interested in the destinies of Don Quixote and Sancho to allow himself to be distracted by his own voice. [...] Leopoldo Lugones has criticized Cervantes explicitly: “Style is his weakness, and the damage caused by his influence has been severe. [...]”
This vanity about style is couched in an even more pathetic conceit: perfection. There is not a single poet who, as minor as he may be, hasn’t sculpted the perfect sonnet, a miniscule monument that safeguards his possible immortality, and which the novelties and effacements of time will be obligated to respect. It is usually a sonnet without curlicues, though the whole thing is a curlicue, that is, a shred of futility. [...] The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the “perfect” page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Góngora (according to those who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version. Heine, who never heard it read in Spanish, acclaimed it for eternity. The German, Scandinavian, or Hindu ghost of the Quixote is more alive than the stylist’s anxious verbal artifices.