This is the third part of our survey of literary theory based on Paul Fry’s Open Yale course. You can find part two here. This time we’re going to focus on formalism. In particular, we’ll look at Russian Formalism and the New Criticism.
You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory
Before we get started, I want to note that I’m going to change up the format I’m doing these posts in from here on. Thus far, I’ve been following Fry’s course pretty close. For the introduction and discussion of hermeneutics, I think this worked pretty well, but I’m quickly finding as the material becomes more challenging that I don’t really like Fry’s teaching style at all. I’m still finding his sources and some of his lecture material useful, but for lectures five, six, and seven… I really couldn’t follow along without consulting a lot of other sources and jumping around between the lectures. I’ll still work through the material in roughly the same order as Fry’s course, so if you enjoy his style you’ll still be able to treat these posts as an auxiliary resource for the course, but I’m going to lean much harder into writing for an audience who is not following along with the course. This post roughly corresponds to lectures five, six, and seven.
I will continue to pull most readings from The Critical Tradition, so don’t worry if you already bought a copy of the book. The essays in there are really good anyways: I’m certainly not aware of a better collection for what we’re doing here. I’ll include all readings in a section at the end of the post and reference them inline by number to keep things simple. We do have one new book today, but you really don’t need it just to follow along (though I found it fascinating.)
What is formalism?
Alright, with that out of the way, we’re moving on from hermeneutics and stepping a bit more firmly into the 20th century by discussing formalism. This is a pretty big jump, so bear with me here. In our discussion on hermeneutics, we were focused on either finding truth or finding meaning and significance. We discussed Gadamer’s approach and Hirsch’s approach as different ways to relate to text, but in both cases our goal was to find meaning in the content of text. Formalism is, in some ways, the complement or opposite of this: formalism is concerned with the form of art.
Fine, saying that “formalism is concerned with the form of art” might not seem like a great use of screen space (worse for having repeated it!) What I mean by “form” here is the actual structure of the art. For example, what is the significance of things happening in threes in text? In some cases it may be required by the situation, but in most cases it’s just… something we do. If you only have two good examples, how often do you just make up a third or else find a way to cut one in half? If you have more than three, how often do you just pick the best three? Does this trend arise from some specific tradition of folklore that we’re all familiar with, a tradition so broad and common as to be practically ubiquitous? Is it necessitated by some quirk of psychology or of sound? Is it simply the natural way to divide complex topics for some mathematical reason? In any case, it doesn’t appear to have any relation at all to the content it’s applied to. This is the sort of question that formalism is interested in, but once you start seeing some patterns like this, you’ll eventually start to wonder how deep this goes: what fraction of text is simply a rearrangement of forms completely unrelated to the actual meaning of that text? Is this all simply inefficiency in human communication – something we’d be better off without – or does form have value in itself?
We already got a little taste of this sort of thinking when we discussed historicism. Remember when we “bracketed” our modern knowledge to consider the miasma theory of disease? To consider something historically, we had to put everything we know from after that time away and look at the text or concept without that information. We also brushed up against formalism when we discussed how we should think about the role of an author in our interpretation of a text. As we head into formalism, we’re kind of just leaning harder in this direction: bracket our modern knowledge, bracket our knowledge of the author and their intent, bracket the social trends of the time… just keep “bracketing” things until nothing but the text is left.
It’s obvious how this sort of thinking could be useful on occasion. It’s a very useful approach to learning the basic building blocks of poetry and prose in high school. Many of us were instructed to dabble in close reading as well, which is useful not only for enabling students to engage with a text intimately but also for filling up an hour of class without much preparation. Now, of course “form” exists in writing and it makes sense that there’s value in studying some of these forms, but the formalist groups went quite a bit further than this: they didn’t merely put on a formalist hat on occasion, but argued that – in various forms – formalism is the correct method of literary engagement.
This probably sounds a bit… stupid out of context – obviously things from outside of a text can be useful in at least some cases – but a crucial thing to understand formalism is that its appearances were contextual, in response to opposing beliefs at the times. Ah, that’d be the other thing to know: formalism was never a unified movement: it appeared more-or-less independently in Russia in the 1910s and again in the U.S. around the 1950s. In both cases it arose in response to what the formalists saw as too much focus on interpreting art by looking away from the art itself. Both movements were interested in an “autonomous” art that stood on its own. The movements also shared an affinity for applying scientific analysis to literature, though the ways they want about this were quite different. The most interesting shared aspect of the movements to me is that they both employed a notion that good poetry is intentionally inefficient, forcing the reader to stare at the words or mull over the oration until they see something familiar as though they’ve never seen it before. Yet, the lack of unity both within each movement and between the two makes talking about them both together difficult. Basically, they had some very similar ideas, but if we want to keep digging, we should take them one at a time. (Note that Fry’s lectures cover the New Critics first, as their ideas are closer to the discussion of hermeneutics we were just having, but I’m going to start with the Russian Formalists to take things chronologically.)
Russian Formalism
The first thing to understand about Russian Formalism (I’ll just say “Formalism” for the rest of this section to refer specifically to Russian Formalism) is that it started around 1914 and continued until the 1930s. For context, the Bolshevik Revolution started in 1917. “Historically, the fact that during the 1920’s a group of Russian critics urged the separation of literature and politics challenges our popular cliches about Soviet control of literary theory, and the fact that the group was “disciplined” about 1930 confirms them.”[4] Towards the end of its run, Formalism was dismantled by the state, but the primary struggles in its early days were against competing theories. It’s actually pretty easy to see this difference when reading Shklovsky and Eichenbaum’s readings: Shklovsky’s 1917 essay is pretty aggressive and confident, whereas Eichenbaum’s 1925 essay is very defensive and is clearly trying to demonstrate how compatible Formalism is with Marxism (mostly be emphasizing that the two theories are mutually irrelevant and by using words like “struggle” and “evolution” to imply a similarity with both Marxism and Darwinism.)
Though Formalism had to change in response to Marxism, its beginnings were in a response to the trends in literary theory at the time. Bear in mind that this isn’t wholly unrelated to our discussion on hermeneutics: with the role of organized religion receding and the role of rational scientific thought increasing, secular critique of secular literature was still finding its footing. Romanticism was being supplanted by realism and some of the Russian authors we still discuss today had already entered the stage. In discussion of literature, there was a focus on authors, social trends, and folklore that the Formalists saw as a trend towards looking away from art while discussing art, which sounds pretty backwards when you phrase it like that. When the discussion wasn’t focused on society or authors, it was focused on connections to the sciences, such as phonetics and psychology: the Formalists wondered why everyone was looking to sciences outside of literature rather than forming a science of literature. The most explicit “enemy” of the early Formalists (at least, in the Formalist’s thinking) were the Symbolists, particularly Potebnja, who Shklovsky attacked directly in “Art as Technique“. Potebnja’s stance was that “art is thinking in images,” which the Formalist vehemently disagreed with. Much of the earliest Formalist argument was grounded in the belief that the aural qualities of verse were not merely a means of conveying “images,” but a uniquely significant part of the experience. “The rhythm of prose is an important automatizing element; the rhythm of poetry is not.”[5]
Eikhenbaum further elaborates on the Formalists’ problem with the Symbolists’ position on verse by attacking the Symbolists’ view that meaningless sounds in verse are always onomatopoeic. In other words, the Symbolists held that any meaningless sounds in verse – sounds that do not directly make up words – are merely present to describe something else. Sounds are merely symbols representing some other thing. The Formalists held that sound holds a unique aspect in verse. “The Formalists began their work with the question of the sounds of verse – at that time the most controversial and most basic question.” “Rhythm was no longer thought of as an abstraction; it was made relevant to the very linguistic fabric of verse – the phrase. Metrics became a kind of background, significant, like the alphabet, for the reading and writing of verse.” “The objective sign of poetic rhythm is the establishment of a rhythmic group whose unity and richness exist side by side with each other.”[6]
It may be a bit hard to see in this discussion of rhythm, but much of the point here is that there are particular qualities to the form that sound takes in verse that is meaningful beyond its ability to merely represent, or symbolize, other meanings.
Let’s go back to that word “automatizing” a couple paragraphs back, as it’s critical here. Shklovsky argued that “habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”[5]
Now this is a pretty compelling argument. The idea is that you inevitably lose passion for things you experience habitually. The essential purpose of poetry, then, is to force you to lose, at least for a moment, that dull sense of familiarity. Shklovsky names this technique “defamiliarization.” He uses examples from some popular authors, like Tolstoy, to demonstrate how good poetry tends to describe things from an alien perspective, such as from that of a horse in Kholstomer.
I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What’s the meaning of “his own,” “his colt”? From these phrases I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection between me and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much later, when they separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me “man’s property.” The words “my horse” referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words “my land,” “my air,” “my water.”
Kholstomer by Leo Tolstoy, taken from [4]
But the words made a strong impression on me. I thought about them constantly, and only after the most diverse experiences with people did I understand, finally, what they meant. They meant this: In life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It’s not so much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the possibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various topics. Such are the words “my” and “mine,” which they apply to different things, creatures, objects, and even to land, people, and horses. They agree that only one may say “mine” about this, that, or the other thing. And the one who says “mine” about the greatest number of things is, according to the game which they’ve agreed to among themselves, the one they consider the most happy. I don’t know the point of all this, but it’s true. For a long time I tried to explain it to myself in terms of some kind of real gain, but I had to reject that explanation because it was wrong.
Many of those, for instance, who called me their own never rode on me—although others did. And so with those who fed me. Then again, the coachman, the veterinarians, and the outsiders in general treated me kindly, yet those who called me their own did not. In due time, having widened the scope of my observations, I satisfied myself that the notion “my,” not only in relation to us horses, has no other basis than a narrow human instinct which is called a sense of or right to private property. A man says “this house is mine” and never lives in it; he only worries about its construction and upkeep. A merchant says “my shop,” “my dry goods shop,” for instance, and does not even wear clothes made from the better cloth he keeps in his own shop.
There are people who call a tract of land their own, but they never set eyes on it and never take a stroll on it. There are people who call others their own, yet never see them. And the whole relationship between them is that the so-called “owners” treat the others unjustly.
There are people who call women their own, or their “wives,” but their women live with other men. And people strive not for the good in life, but for goods they can call their own.
I am now convinced that this is the essential difference between people and ourselves. And therefore, not even considering the other ways in which we are superior, but considering just this one virtue, we can bravely claim to stand higher than men on the ladder of living creatures. The actions of men, at least those with whom I have had dealings, are guided by words—ours, by deeds.
Shklovsky also uses some erotic euphemisms that are probably overkill after that long section above, but I’m going to include one anyways because it was funny. In this passage from the legend of Stavyor, a married man doesn’t recognize his wife because she’s disguised as a warrior, so she tries to jog his memory.
Remember, Stavyor, do you recall
A. E. Gruzinsky, ed., Pesni, sobrannye P[avel] N. Rybnikovym [Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov] (Moscow, 1909–1910), No. 30., taken from [4]
How we little ones walked to and fro in the street?
You and I together sometimes played with a marlinspike—
You had a silver marlinspike,
But I had a gilded ring?
I found myself at it just now and then,
But you fell in with it ever and always.”
Says Stavyor, son of Godinovich,
“What! I didn’t play with you at marlinspikes!”
Then Vasilisa Mikulichna: “So he says.
Do you remember, Stavyor, do you recall,
Now must you know, you and I together learned to
read and write;
Mine was an ink-well of silver,
And yours a pen of gold?
But I just moistened it a little now and then,
And I just moistened it ever and always.
You’re probably with me this far as this idea is pretty intuitive: much of what we call “poetry” is just describing things in an unexpected way. The tricky part of Shklovsky’s argument is that he’s focused solely on the function of defamiliarization. “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”[5]
I’ve mostly been talking about Shklovsky here as he was particularly influential, but it’s important here to note that Formalism was never a unified or singular theory. The first line of Eikhenbaum’s “The Theory of the “Formal Method”” is: “The so-called “formal method” grew out of a struggle for a science of literature that would be both independent and factual; it is not the outgrowth of a particular methodology.”[6] He follows this up shortly with “In principle the question for the Formalist is not how to study literature, but what the subject matter of literary study actually is.”[6]
Quoting Roman Jakobson, who we’ll come back to later, Eikhenbaum further elaborates:
The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness— that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historians used everything— anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines—the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc.—and that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only as defective, secondary documents.
Roman Jakobson, Noveyshaya russkaya pesziya [Modern Russian Poetry] (Prague, 1921) p. 11. [Jakobson, it should be stressed, is not arguing that literature is unrelated to history, psychology, etc. He is, rather, insisting that the study of literature, if it is to be a distinct discipline, must have its own particular subject.], editors notes and translation taken from [4]
So, I just threw a lot at you. As much as I’d like to keep digging into Russian Formalism – I actually find this topic really interesting, not just in the subject matter but in its attempt at approaching it scientifically while defending it from enemies on all sides – I think we have enough here to start moving back to our discussion on formalism as a whole.
To summarize, here are the key takeaway points for Russian Formalism:
- Habit allows us to not notice things. If we habitualize or automatize everything then we may be more efficient, but we also cease to truly live.
- Defamiliarization allows us to truly see things that we’re familiar with as though we aren’t. The point of poetry is to roughen up the language to accomplish defamiliarization. To “make the stone stony.”[5]
- The Russian Formalists were concerned with the form of poetry – with the techniques for writing or orating poetry – rather than the content itself. To them, the object of art wasn’t the point: the art was its own point.
- The Russian Formalists felt that a scientific approach to literariness was feasible and desirable, so they took it upon themselves to build it because nobody else was.
- The Russian Formalists had no particular love or reverence for any specific authors; they turned to examples merely because they needed a corpus of data to perform their method on. Kohlstomer and Stavyor are merely good example: if they were unique, then they wouldn’t be of use to the Formalists.
- Russian Formalism is not a specific theory or set of beliefs: they abhorred definitions of their “theory.” It’s better to think of Russian Formalism as an attempt to construct a scientific method of literariness.
The Formalists’ work was ultimately cut short by Soviet pressure, culminating in the Socialist Writers Conference in 1934 mandating socialist realism, but with several years of increasingly aggressive attacks leading up to that. A full discussion of the political situation at the time is beyond the scope of what I’d like to talk about today, but in short, Formalism didn’t directly clash with Marxism, but it didn’t actively support it either. The Formalists tried various approaches to appeasing Marxism, either explaining that they’re simply mutually irrelevant or arguing that the work of Formalism is a good first step towards a more social approach, but it all ultimately failed. The problem was that looking at literature without considering social issues at all was just kind of a bad look when everyone else was just super hyped for discussing social structures and class. Over time, the insistence on keeping the focus solely on form looked more and more elitist, and the Formalists all scattered either to different work or to exile. In the 30s, discussion of formalism was dropped.
Well, until it was picked back up by the New Critics in the U.S. some decades later.
New Criticism
Whew, we got through Russian Formalism, let’s get into the New Critics. It’s kind of hard to pick a specific time for when New Criticism began as a theory, as some of the relevant texts date back quite a bit, but the movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941 and was active up until the 70s; you can think of it as being mostly a product of the 50s through the 70s.
Coming out of our discussion on Russian Formalism, the first thing to know about the New Critics is that, although they had a lot of similarities with Russian Formalism, it’s not the same movement and they weren’t intentionally picking anything up directly. Even where they overlap, things are never quite the same. Moreover, the New Critics weren’t nearly as pure in their focus on form. Sure, they focused on form – they’re formalists – but they were also concerned with meaning. To them, form was just the right way to approach meaning. This is a pretty big break from the Russian Formalists! That said, they had a very similar notion of “defamiliarization” which they called “irony” or “tension.”
Hmm, so, before we really get into it, I need to decide how to explain all of this. See, I’m torn: the New Critics’ theory was rooted in some pretty thick, academic material. Following Fry’s course, I jumped into this starting from the academic reading assignments (and a bunch of lines from Kant’s Critique of Judgement) that I found overwhelming. To make this easier to digest, I’m going to explain it in terms of the basic concepts, then provide an outline of some of the more challenging sources afterwards.
Basics
Remember when we were talking about ignoring the author? Or about ignoring modern knowledge? Well, now try to ignore everything that isn’t in the text. Alright, think you have that figured out? Now read Lapis Lazuli by Yeats.
Well, Yeats sure had a lot to say about gay people.
I mean, I’m pretty sure that the term actually had already begun to take on its current meaning in the 30s, but it’s also clearly not what Yeats meant: he means “joyful” or “lively.” But, we don’t care what Yeats meant here, right? We don’t even care when the poem was written. So, reading it today, without looking outside the poem, the meaning is purely within the text: it just means what it means.
The New Critics emerged from a point in time when most literary critics were focused on looking for connections outside of literature in order to explain it (you should see a similarity here with the situation that the Russian Formalists emerged from.) The notion of the Western Canon for literature was more-or-less established by the 30s and 40s, so there was a sense that all of the important works were already collected and examined. The purpose of further study then wasn’t to interpret these texts directly or to add new texts to the canon, but to continue building layers of meaning on top of the existing canon via connections to things outside of the canon. You’re probably familiar with this from your own time in school: didn’t it occasionally feel silly that we’re still talking about the same “important” books that everyone has been discussing for decades and decades? We can’t even just read the books either, we need to be instructed on what they mean. Why should I care what a bunch of academics in the fucking 30s thought about books that are just ridiculously boring to me today? One way to deal with this problem is to start looking at more text outside of the canon and to question how legitimate the canon is in the first place. It certainly isn’t very diverse, after all. Have you ever really considered that the word “classic” literally refers to class? Maybe being bored with the Western canon is a good excuse to start looking at more text from outside the canon: let’s get some new material and form some fresh interpretations of that.
The other solution is to look at the Western canon even harder and come up with some fresh interpretations of the existing material. It certainly makes discussing books in a social setting much easier when we’re all working from the same set of examples. If those examples are getting stale, maybe the problem isn’t the text itself, but the established interpretations based on connections to things outside the text: things that become more dated with each passing year. The text, if it’s well-written, should be somewhat timeless, right? Only the historical factors outside of the text truly become dated. As we were just discussing, Lapis Lazuli might actually be more interesting today than when it was written. This is the solution the New Critics came up with: in response to boredom with the Western canon and the established scholarship surrounding it, they endeavored to read much closer and to better appreciate the aesthetic value of the text itself.
The New Critics had several terms that all referred in various ways to the same general concept that the language of poetry intentionally obfuscates meaning, giving it more weight and forcing the reader to look at it harder and from a different angle than if it’d been stated more directly. It’s very similar to the “rough language” and “defamiliarization” that the Russian Formalists were into.
Oh, I should probably clarify: I’m using the words “poem” and “poetry” here, but the New Critics were pretty broad in their definition of “poetry.” I’ll mostly look at examples from things that are definitely poems, but the New Critics often lumped in a lot of what we’d consider to be prose into the category of poetry: most of this stuff applies to fiction novels and just rhetoric in general as well.
- Irony: Defined as “the obvious warping of meaning by context”[3]. Consider how often poems state things that, from the context of the text, are are clearly not meant to be taken literally… or are meant to be taken literally in order to express something other than this literal description. If you belief that the King of Terrors himself literally stopped for Emily Dickinson so they could share a carriage ride, with no other meaning, then you might want to give that poem another read.
- Ambiguity: How literally are we meant to take the words of The Raven? Should we interpret it realistically: “nevermore” is just how the character hears the natural sounds of a raven in his disturbed mental state, or should we imagine the raven as a supernatural being imparting some real harsh truths? How much weaker would the poem be if, as in a clumsy film, this were spelled out explicitly from some other character’s perspective?
- Paradox: I’m nobody! Who are you? gives us an example right in the title: how can “nobody” be a unique individual?
These forces, all very similar, all work to create “tension” and “unity,” which themselves can be considered as different angles on the same idea. These techniques create an imbalance in the meaning of a poem which results in tension as the reader wants to collapse the different potential meanings into one resolution. You can see this in music as well: a song with no sense of dissonance would be very boring, much of the pleasure comes from how tension is built and then resolved. In both poetry and music, so long as this tension is held there’s a sense of “unity” built up as everything fits together until its resolved. Imagine getting an ad right before the last note of a song: you can’t just split it up like that! At the extreme, the New Critics held that poems “never contain abstract statements”[3]. In other words, everything in poetry is meant to be read and understood in context, no matter how abstract it appears.
Let’s look at a couple of examples in more detail.
Those gifts you left
Ono no Komachi, via The Ink Dark Moon
have become my enemies:
without them
there might have been
a moment’s forgetting.
Looking at a Japanese poem seems fitting here, as it’s far removed from the context of the New Critics and Japanese poetry is notoriously filled with layers of arbitrary meaning that are almost impossible to decipher fully without intimate knowledge of the field, yet we can still see “irony,” “paradox,” “ambiguity,” and “tension” here. This is a very short poem (which was the style at the time,) and we can clearly understand the prose version of this: “I miss you so bad that I hate how your gifts remind me of you” or even simply “I miss you.” The beauty of the poem is that it specifically doesn’t say this. Take note of the sense of unity brought on by the tension here: how would you even begin to break down this poem in terms of the words its comprised of? How would we define the tension at play here other than to just point at the entire poem and say “there it is!” I actually tried to break it down in my first draft of this paragraph by explaining how gifts should be good so it’s ironic that they’re enemies, but enemies should be bad and yet they’re only enemies because they’re a sign of missing… and I think this proves the point, I’d basically just need to restate the entire poem with some useless framing that only gets in the way of what you already knew the moment you read the poem. What we could do here, though, is a close reading, and we could do that forever. Who is the person the author misses? Will they ever come back or are they gone forever? Did they leave by choice or were they pulled away by duty – or death? Is it even a person, or a pet or a favorite fruit tree? The poem is built out of irony, paradox, ambiguity, and tension: without them, it’s just a thousand-year-old note that some rich girl missed someone.
Let’s look at one more, if only because I haven’t opened this book in a long time and I forgot how much I like these poems.
Love-soaked, rain-soaked-
Izumi Shikibu, via The Ink Dark Moon
if people ask
which drenched
your sleeves,
what will you say?
Ah, so here’s one where the poem’s historical, authorial, and genre-specific context definitely changes the meaning, but let’s take a look at it first without assistance. What does this poem make you feel or think? Does it conjure up an image for you? What does “love-soaked” even mean? See, I know a very little about this sort of poetry, so I’m not thinking anything gross there, but maybe you are and maybe it’s really scandalous. Maybe you focus on the sound of the words, even knowing that it’s a translation. “Love-soaked, rain-soaked” has a great lyrical quality to it: I can feel it in my tongue without even making a sound. The question at the end seems accusing. We could add some context, but would it even improve on the poem? Well, first off, the poem comes with a note: “A man came secretly and left in heavy rain. In the poem he sent the next morning, he mentioned having gotten wet. I replied:” Adding in this note probably helps to create an image, but does it add more images than it kills? Perhaps you had a really interesting, mysterious feeling from it that’s now been killed by the extra context. Or, perhaps the vague tone of the comment keeps it going for you: after all, this note was deliberately included with the poem, so perhaps we should consider the note to be part of it? How about one more layer of context? Wet sleeves in Waka poetry is a well-known motif: it generally means “wet with tears”, and is often used to evoke seasonal imagery either of rain or thaw. Does this add anything for you?
I mean, it might. Layers of meaning can absolutely be valuable. The New Critics aren’t generally regarded as having “nailed it” with their theory: there are some serious flaws in it. Nonetheless, they were also on to something: really focusing on a poem, digging as deep as you can and finding that if you don’t want to stop digging then you never have to – there’s an infinity of meaning to be found in the simplest of poems if you’re willing to look for it – can be beautiful, and doing so without consulting the author or some team of experts to interpret it for you or tell you what it means can add a real sense of freedom and imaginative power.
So, going back to Lapis Lazuli, we don’t need to use the “correct” definition for “gay” here if we don’t want to! It’s not hard to imagine a queer interpretation of the poem that would actually seem to have a good sense of unity and tension. It might actually seem more powerful than Yeats’ intended interpretation! Maybe we don’t even need to consider which reading is “better”, but can instead focus on how we read it, finding something valuable in the process itself.
The key here, and this is getting close to the point where we’ll need to jump into some harder details if we want to go deeper, is that poetry is fiction. It doesn’t have to be true. What’s more, the New Critics thought this was fine. With the role of the church receding and science taking over academic discussion, people are left with a gaping hole that scientific facts and truth simply can’t fill. We need fiction to fill that hole. We really just need to be careful that we know whether something is fact or fiction so we know whether to cram it in our fact-hole or our fiction-hole (skull or chest, I suppose?)
This point is actually something I’ve occasionally pondered myself when reading novels with a strong message. Isn’t the whole point of writing a fiction novel that it’s not real? It’s a great way to explore ideas, but if you’re actually trying to send a message… isn’t this just propaganda? Since it is fiction, it’s also pretty easy to twist it towards whatever agenda you want. How many political groups think that 1984 is a warning about their political enemies? Maybe we would be better off treating fiction solely as spiritual sustenance? I wouldn’t go as far as the New Critics, but it’s an interesting idea to mull over.
Principles of Literary Criticism
Alright, we got through the basics, let’s dig into the nitty-gritty. Actually, it’s 2:00 AM, I’m gonna turn in for the night and pick this section up tomorrow.
Alright, I’m back.
So, you probably could stop here if you wanted: I already laid out a decent summary of the New Critics: you really don’t need more if you just want to understand formalism. That said, the New Critics were similar to the Russian Formalists in their regard for scientific rigor. In particular, we’ll want to look at I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (reading #2.) This book is actually from 1924 – well before the New Critics – but it was critically influential to their theory. This book is pretty hard to understand, so we’re just going to look at the section contained in The Critical Tradition: “Chapter XXXIV The Two Uses of Language” and “Chapter XXXV Poetry and Beliefs.” Note that Richards is responsible for a lot of really interesting work that I’m only now becoming familiar with and am definitely not prepared to discuss in depth: I’m just going to lightly touch on some concepts here that are relevant for the New Critics
The Two Uses of Language
So, why is it that nearly every person that exists is using the word “home” incorrectly? Most people don’t even know who I am, much less where “home” is. Is everyone aware that “home” changed when I moved last year?
Alright, as adults, we all understand that the word “home” is a “reference” that has a different meaning based on the context of the subject that speaks it, when they speak it, and what context they’re speaking it in. Not only is your “home” different from mine, but even my “home” changes depending on how I’m using the word: do I mean my apartment, or do I mean my city or state? Do I mean the place I live right now or do I mean where I grew up or where I feel most “at home”? The notion of “reference” is pretty intuitive on this level, but it can get pretty tricky if we try to put it to work. I was a software engineer for most of my career, and in that context we used the notion of “reference” very precisely to build code where a variable name can point to a specific region of memory in much the same way as the variable “home” can point to different physical locations depending on the specific incarnation of the variable as its used.
However, not every word is a reference in this way. “Home” is vague, but my full address is very specific: you could plug it into something like Apple Maps or Google Maps to find an exact location that would mean the same thing to everyone. We have this notion in software as well, you can build some pretty complex structures out of references and various abstract grouping constructs, but at some point you just need a literal value that means one specific thing, such as “5” or “true” or “A specific sequence of characters.” Significantly, we cannot perform science without a way to specify certain things in text in a fixed and abstract way that is interpreted in the same way regardless of who the reader is. Just as significantly, there is no way to force all of language to be like this.
Seriously, humans really do need references and symbols to reason about things. We don’t just need it for a few specific notions, such as “home,” but for most of our thinking. We need meaning to be flexible in our language and thinking on many levels and with very loose rules. Just think of political and social issues for some examples of how even things that really seem very specific can be interpreted very differently based on the internal belief systems of the individuals involved. What does the slogan “All Lives Matter” mean? Is it productive to even attempt to interpret it literally? The fact that I capitalized all three words indicates that it refers to a specific… well, a specific what? It’s not a unified movement or political party. I suppose that it’s a specific criticism of “Black Lives Matter,” but how do we interpret that? Is BLM a subset of ALM… or are they diametrically opposed? What does it mean that I just added “BLM” to my spell checker but I’m not adding “ALM”? Consider just how many layers of abstraction and reference are at play here. Trying to spell it all out in text – to explain it without ambiguity – is really goddamn hard, but as humans we’re actually pretty comfortable with reasoning about all of this in our own minds. I don’t feel like I’m doing complex work when I ask myself which group I’d rather support. Even for political topics that I do need to really agonize over, the problem is never that I need to determine the logical meaning of the text, but that I need to decide what I believe in.
Richards defines three different definitions for the word “truth”:
- “The scientific sense that, namely, in which references, and derivatively statements symbolising references, are true, need not delay us. A reference is true when the things to which it refers are actually together in the way in which it refers to them. Otherwise it is false. This sense is one very little involved by any of the arts.”[2]
- “Acceptability,” “internal necessity,” or “convincingness.” We all run up against this sort of “truth” when we’re discussing bad adaptations or sequels to fictional media. The “elder wand” bullshit in Harry Potter did not fit with the established world we were all familiar with: to force the idea to be consistent with the established world would either require retcons or immense new systems of magic that are mostly invisible and serve only to excuse the new rules. We see this with characters as well: Superman gains new powers whenever the authors choose with almost no sense of control, but this has always been the case and it’s easy to hand-wave it all by him being an alien: it’s “true” in the context of Superman’s world. Nobody would mind if Superman gained some crazy new powers or even a new weakness in a new film. But, make Superman cruel or apathetic towards human life (without some sort of mind-control or clone device) and it immediately feels “false.” I’m using examples from fantasy here because it’s easy to point to, but this applies much more broadly to literature.
- “Sincerity.” “It may perhaps be most easily defined from the critic’s point of view negatively, as the absence of any apparent attempt on the part of the artist to work effects upon the reader which do not work for himself”[2]. This is similar to the notion of “verisimilitude” in literature. You can kind of pick up on it when it’s clear than an author really had no idea what they were talking about, and you can also be delighted by how “real” something feels when the author includes notes that feel true. I praised The Eye of the World for this in how Robert Jordan actually treats horses like horses. I don’t even know much about horses, but I know that they’re not motorcycles, despite how they’re often portrayed in fantasy novels. That Jordan takes note of caring for the horses, worrying over how tired they are, and fearing that they could become injured made the book feel more “true” in a way that’s hardly related to scientific, object truth or even to internal consistency, but is instead rooted in “sincerity.”
Poetry and Beliefs
It is evident that the bulk of poetry consists of statements which only the very foolish would think of attempting to verify. They are not the kind of things which can be verified…. Only references which are brought into certain highly complex and very special combinations, so as to correspond to the ways in which things actually hang together, can be either true or false, and most references in poetry are not knit together in this way. But even when they are, on examination, frankly false, this is no defect, unless, indeed, the obviousness of the falsity forces the reader to reactions which are incongruent or disturbing to the poem. And equally, a point more often misunderstood, their truth, when they are true, is no merit. The people who say “How True!” at intervals while reading Shakespeare are misusing his work, and, comparatively speaking, wasting their time. For all that matters in either case is acceptance, that is to say, the initiation and development of the further response.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
Richards is talking about the value of emotive language here. With the benefit of a modern education, we often think of language as having strict rules and we’ve spent years practicing scientific and factual communication. It’s a critical life skill in the modern world to be capable of reasoning about things objectively and communicating in a professional and, at times, scientific manner. However, that’s not how language began. Language is, as both its historical root and at its continuing heart, emotive. It’s subjective and it’s more concerned with conveying feelings and beliefs than it is with precisely and objectively encoding facts into words. The extreme importance of scientific communication in the modern world isn’t necessary bad or wrong: it enables us to to absolutely amazing things that would not be possible otherwise! However, we mustn’t assume that the new scientific language can replace emotive language.
In particular, Richards calls out the diminishing role of religion in society and the gap that this leaves. He notes that recent generations (bear in mind that he’s talking from the 1920s) suffer more from nervousness, and from changing types of nervous diseases, than people in the past. Richards attributes this, at least in part, to the loss of religion.
In the prescientific era, the devout adherent to the Catholic account of the world, for example, found a sufficient basis for nearly all his main attitudes in what he took to be scientific truth. It would be fairer to say that the difference between ascertained fact and acceptable fiction did not obtrude itself for him. Today this is changed, and if he believes such an account, he does not do so, if intelligent, without considerable difficulty or without a fairly persistent strain. The complete skeptic, of course, is a new phenomenon, dissenters in the past having commonly disbelieved only because they held a different belief of the same kind.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
The hard-headed positivist and the convinced adherent of a religion from opposite sides encounter the same difficulty. The first at the best suffers from an insufficient material for the development of his attitudes; the second from intellectual bondage and unconscious insincerity. The one starves himself; the other is like the little pig in the fable who chose to have his house built of cabbages and ate it, and so the grim wolf with privy paw devoured him. For clear and impartial awareness of the nature of the world in which we live and the development of attitudes which will enable us to live in it finely are both necessities, and neither can be subordinated to the other.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
Sorry to throw so many quotes at you, but Richards’ writing here is really good, and I find it fascinating to see this stance expressed nearly a century ago.
So, we have multiple roles of speech and even of “truth,” and they are both essential. Richards final point here is that although both scientific and emotive language are important, we need to take care of which is which.
To excite a serious and reverent attitude is one thing. To set forth an explanation is another. To confuse the two and mistake the incitement of an attitude for a statement of fact is a practice which should be discouraged. For intellectual dishonesty is an evil which is the more dangerous the more it is hedged about with emotional sanctities.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
Beauty and Purposiveness
I hope that the bits from Principles of Literary Criticism made sense there. I should also note that Fry’s course covered a bunch of material from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Now, I found both Fry’s lecture on this topic and Kant’s text to be almost completely incomprehensible, but I do want to briefly touch on this, as I get the impression that this will come up again in the forms of literary theory that we’ll touch on in future posts.
In particular, I want to mention Kant’s teleology. Basically, this is an idea that separates out the purpose some natural phenomena serves as opposed to the circumstances of its creation. Kant defines the notions of “purposefulness” and “purposiveness.” “Purposeful” is practical purpose: what does it do for someone. Purposive is the inner purpose. In Fry’s words, “It is a form.” You can see the echo of this in what we’ve been talking about here: do we look at text from the perspective of the author’s purpose for it, or do we look at it for its own inner beauty of form: it’s purposiveness?
In Kant’s view, judging something as beautiful requires looking at it dispassionately. That’s not to say that we’re not interested in it or find something pleasing in it, only that judgement of it must not be related to a purpose we find in it. Fry has a pretty good example here in discussing art nudes. There’s clearly a difference in appraising an artistic nude or enjoying some erotic pornography. The line can get pretty blurry and we might disagree at places, but we can sense that however fuzzy the line gets, there is a line somewhere. Well, one way to define this line is to ask what we find in it. If we’re judging a painting as beautiful without any designs on it: we’re not fantasizing about owning it, fucking it, or putting it to any other ends other than itself. This notion of “means” and “ends” is important to Kant and it’s important to both of our groups of formalists. Is it really judgement of the beauty of art, including literature, if we’re talking about the intent of the author or spinning our interpretation for some purpose outside of the art itself? If I love a text because it props up my worldview, do I really love the text or do I just love what it does for me?
“Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.” “Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose.” (Both taken from Kant’s Critique of Judgement via Fry’s lecture notes.)
Wrapping Up
PHEW, alright, that was a lot. I think we managed to get through it all though. Do you feel like you understand formalism now?
I haven’t started on the material for the next post yet, so I’m not exactly sure what it will cover yet, but it looks like we’re going to be talking about semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction. Semiotics is actually how I first started digging into this content in the first place, so I’m pretty excited!
Readings
- Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1946.
- The title of this essay seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, he’s referring to the fallacy that we must look at art through the lens of the author’s intention, which he sees as a flaw of romanticism. “Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.” He defines two kinds of inquiry about a work of art: A) Whether the artist achieved their intentions and B) Whether the work should have been undertaken at all or is worth preserving. In contrast to other critics, who saw A as the most important of the two, he sees B as the essential form of artistic criticism. Wimsatt ponders the difference between a skillful poem and a skillful murder: whether the “author” accomplished their intent is not sufficient to differentiate between the two, but whether it should have been done and whether we should preserve the results demonstrates the difference easily. Seems like a clumsy example that only tangentially applies to me, but it was interesting.
- Richards, I. A. “Principles of Literary Criticism.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1924.
- This essay is kind of a chore to read, but still quite interesting. Richards is very interested in psychology, particularly Pavlovian psychology. Describes the ambiguity in terms like “belief” and “truth” for scientific and non-scientific contexts. Discusses how “reference” is interfered with by needs and desires, stating “poetry affords the clearest examples of this subordination of reference to attitude.” Richards sees non-scientific literature as “fiction” – things that are not true – but also sees this as filling a critical role for humanity, filling a void left by the decreasing role of religion. Much of his argument here is that fiction and science can coexist just fine so long as we’re clear about which is which.
- Brooks, Cleanth. “Irony as a Principle of Structure.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1951.
- “The obvious warping of a statement by the context we characterize as “ironical.”” Brooks talks about irony a lot, he essentially sees this notion of context dominating meaning as core to all poetry, going as far as to state that poems (and his definition of “poems” is also quite broad, including much of “literature”) “never contain abstract statements,” as all statements in “poetry” are meant to be read in context. Interesting idea, though I think he goes a bit too far.
- Lemon, Lee T., Reis, Marion K., Morson, Gary Saul. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Published 1965, Introduction by Morson added 2012.
- The introductions provide an extremely useful explanation of Russian Formalism! Probably the most important reading on this list. It’s not necessary to follow along with this post, but if my description of Russian Formalism feels insufficient, this is the first source I’d recommend to dig deeper.
- Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism. Published 1917.
- Great essay laying out one of the most important statements of Russian Formalism. Shklovsky attacks Potebnya and the Symbolists for their notion that “art is thinking in images”. The main point in this essay is the concept of “defamiliarization” to combat habitualization, which “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” Surprisingly entertaining reading.
- Eichenbaum, Boris. “The Theory of the “Formal Method.”” In Russian Formalist Criticism. Published 1925.
- This reading is fantastic for getting a “quick” overview of the entirety of Russian Formalism and the editors notes helped greatly with understanding the political context. Eichenbaum exaggerates a bit in how cleanly he summarizes Formalism and is definitely writing defensively, in response to critics and mounting political pressure to be more Marxist, but seeing everything laid out as a simple narrative helps to understand the movement. Also surprisingly entertaining reading.