Dynamic Form

How Intermediality Made Modernism

Cara L. Lewis

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749186
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

Dynamic Form traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, Cara Lewis examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as Lewis writes, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment.

As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, this book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. Dynamic Form thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

CHAPTER 1

Plastic Form

Henry James’s Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round

In a letter written on August 10, 1904, Henry James professed his terror about a sculptural group of nude figures around a fountain. Their scale, he said, struck him as evidence of “madness (almost),” and he “yearn[ed] too, for the smaller masterpiece; the condensed, consummate, caressed, intensely filled-out thing.”1 James’s intense distaste for artwork executed on such an ambitious scale and his corresponding desire for a smaller masterpiece seem ironic now, since James was mere months away from the publication of The Golden Bowl that autumn. His own immense masterpiece had been at the forefront of his mind, and as he wrote in a letter to Scribner’s that would be incessantly quoted in advertisements for and reviews of the novel, he extolled The Golden Bowl as “the most done of my productions—the most composed and constructed and completed. [. . .] I hold the thing the solidest, as yet, of all my fictions.”2 As James’s assessment of his novel makes clear, despite the curious echo of the earlier letter in his alliteration, his final major work is no small masterpiece. The Golden Bowl may be solid, but it is not at all condensed.

The novel remains tremendous, unwieldy: it is the most difficult and most figure-laden novel of James’s major phase. According to Robert Gale’s count, in fact, it contains 1,092 images, about two hundred more than appear in any other work by James.3 More to the point, perhaps, is the way in which the figurative language of The Golden Bowl makes itself felt. James’s images and figures in The Golden Bowl are many and lengthy, perplexing and persistent, and they—even more than the thematic “substance” of marriage, adultery, and incest—constitute the heart of the novel. As such an elaborately wrought object, so “composed and constructed” and “done,” The Golden Bowl seems nearly to epitomize the “aesthetic principle” famously articulated within its pages: Adam Verver’s “idea [. . .] of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind.”4

In this chapter, I ask what Adam Verver’s “aesthetic principle” might tell us about the novel that contains it, but my concern is not exactly Adam’s notion of visual perfection. As any reader of The Golden Bowl knows, most visually flawless objects (and people and situations) are, like the titular bowl, marred beneath the surface. More provocative instead is his “idea [. . .] of plastic beauty,” which prompts two related lines of inquiry. First, this ideal calls up an art form that remains underexamined in the critical conversation about James’s oeuvre: sculpture, the classic art of plastic beauty and “the solidest” of the fine arts. In fact, despite the convergence of Adam’s principle with James’s early estimation of his own work, there exists no extended examination of sculpture among the many critical considerations of the novel’s images and metaphors.5 This critical oversight is especially surprising given that in the first decade of the twentieth century, James engaged with the medium repeatedly, writing fictions about one sculptor, a biography of a second, and intensely affectionate letters to a third.6 A sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl, I contend, not only provides a necessary reinvigoration of the general conversation about James and the visual arts, but also significantly renovates our understanding of this specific novel’s relationship to visual and material culture, which has been described in terms of collection, connoisseurship, and commodity culture, virtually to the exclusion of other possibilities.7

Second, and more important, a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl illuminates from a new angle one of the longstanding paradigms for understanding form in modernist literature: the spatial-form thesis. According to this influential line of thinking first elaborated by Joseph Frank, modernist novels “require a reader to approach them as a spatial configuration rather than as a temporal continuum” because they so frequently dispense with the ordinary progression of plot in favor of simultaneity or juxtaposition.8 With narrative deemphasized, other kinds of structural patterning dominate, so that the shape of the modernist novel—its mode of being and meaning, which is to say its form—is fundamentally spatial. For Frank, spatial form indexes the intermediality of modernism: he writes that the point at which the spatial elements of the novel “become completely dominant [. . .] is the point at which modernism begins,” and that “spatial form in modern literature [. . .] is the exact complement in literature, on the level of aesthetic form, to the developments that have taken place in the plastic arts. [. . .] Contemporary literature is now striving to rival the spatial apprehension of the plastic arts in a moment of time.”9 Viewed through this theoretical lens, the modernist novel attempts solidity by means of its spatial form, with “all literature,” in Brian Glavey’s phrase, “aspiring to the condition of ceramics”—or all novels aspiring to the condition of golden bowls.10

I propose to use a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl to question and then revise the spatial-form account of modernism, more or less at the moment when spatial form might seem to dominate and modernism might be said to begin. As I will demonstrate, we can learn how to read the form of the novel from the sculptures that we encounter within it, including the titular bowl and the statues and sculptural objects that constitute the vehicles for James’s elaborate metaphors, like the descriptions of Charlotte Stant as an “old bronze” Florentine sculpture (35), of Maggie Verver as a “slight, slim draped ‘antique’ ” statue (138), and of Maggie’s problematic “situation” as a decorative ivory pagoda (299). Reading these art objects, which seem at first like stable, spatially apprehended forms, we discover that no art object can be “grasped as a unity” or apprehended in “one moment of time”—and not just because The Golden Bowl has no interest in the moment.11

James instead calls our attention to the long, repetitive, unstable process of viewing in the round, the standard mode of appreciating sculpture in the modern museum era. As Herbert Read notes, art appreciation manuals recommend that viewers “walk round a piece of sculpture,” and we are then supposed “to allow all the various points of view to coalesce in our imagination. This difficult feat, if successful, might conceivably give us a ghostlike version of the solid object.”12 Read’s emphasis on the difficulty of these instructions and the ghostliness of our ultimate understanding proves particularly apt for describing the challenges presented by James’s sculptures. As we walk around a sculpted object, a form in space, our impressions change depending upon our point of view, so that any sense we might have of a singular form seems tenuous at best. With this in mind, I place James’s golden bowl in a long line of rounded literary sculptures that have served critics as examples of form at its most totalizing—formalist topoi such as John Keats’s Grecian urn and Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee.13 Examined closely, these isomorphic containers are less autotelic—less self-contained—than they seem.

Expanding outward from the golden bowl to The Golden Bowl, from sculptural object to “solidest” novel, this chapter also shows how a sculptural reading that recognizes the power of viewing in the round—that reads the novel in the round—can likewise challenge the insistence upon bounded, whole forms that lies at the heart of the spatial-form thesis. Frank repeatedly invokes a conception of the novel as a “totality”: “A knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part,” he writes, and “such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been read, when all the references are fitted into their proper places and grasped as a unity.”14 In this account, a “unified, spatial” arrangement is displayed before us, laid out like the map of James Joyce’s Dublin or, perhaps, the composition of Lily Briscoe’s painting (though I shall trouble this latter example of spatial form in the next chapter).15 We apprehend this arrangement all at once, and it proves fully explanatory, rounding the novel into a bounded, whole form. Such ideas have often shaped the discussion of The Golden Bowl as a self-contained totality—“James’s static bowl of a novel,” as Angela Leighton puts it.16 Mark McGurl, too, has argued for a correspondence between the bowl as a “well-wrought urn” and the “novel-as-art-object,” an ideal toward which James strives with his “efforts to find a ‘perfect’ structure and ‘rounded’ shape for the novel as a whole.”17 But acknowledging the roundedness of The Golden Bowl, like acknowledging the roundedness of the bowl it contains, requires us to reckon with the dynamism of the novel. Because the form of the artwork continually alters as the viewer circumambulates it, viewing and reading in the round cannot really create an impression of the object’s spatial form characterized by totality, unity, and simultaneity.

Instead, viewing and reading in the round communicate a clear sense of what I will call plastic form. Of course, sculpture has long been referred to as a plastic art because it includes “shaping or modelling” and emphasizes “three-dimensional forms.”18 The term plastic form thus reminds us of sculpture’s connection to that which is “able to be moulded,” to substances and ideas that are “impressionable, pliable; susceptible to influence; fluid, flexible,” to contents that “that readily take a new form.”19 Plastic form underscores the changeability of sculptural forms as we circulate around them; unlike spatial form, its attendant sense of dynamism recalls to us the temporality of experiencing art. Indeed, because walking around a sculpture is “a process unfolding over time,” viewing in the round necessarily arouses “a heightened sense of temporality” that can undercut the notion of sculpture as a predominantly spatial rather than temporal form.20

Emphasizing the time-sense of the sculptural encounter also helps to renovate our understanding of the narrative temporality and progression of The Golden Bowl. Sculpture displayed in the round encourages the viewer to change vantage points and experience the work from different positions over a period of time; sometimes such viewing includes retracing one’s steps. In this manner, The Golden Bowl builds a narrative rhythm on the practice of reflection as its characters often circle back to describe an object or event or to reconsider a scene. Such re-viewings indicate that James hardly dispenses with narrative momentum, or with plot, even though his novel is not strictly linear. (Neither is it as innovative in its temporal structure as, say, the work of Virginia Woolf, which occupies the next chapter of this book.) To insist that the novel is a time-dependent form may seem obvious; to challenge the spatial-form thesis may seem to return the arts to the territories demarcated by Gotthold Lessing, who argued in his Laocoön (1766) that sculpture is a spatial art, while literature is not, that the former is processed in space and the latter over time.21 But what I am suggesting is something else. This chapter shows how the modernist novel does take its formal cues from the fine arts, but this influence does not necessarily indicate that the novel is striving toward these art forms’ spatiality. Examining the small art objects in the novel with an art historical and art theoretical lens allows us to encounter them as sculptures instead of as emblems of sculpture’s spatiality. In so doing, we can see how they are always already, pace Lessing and Frank, temporally changeable objects. Their plasticity informs the plasticity of the novel that houses them, even as no object as small as the golden bowl can fully account for one as massive and unmanageable as The Golden Bowl.

In the absence of any expectation that we might discover a totality, form can emerge less stably as we read, not least because reading The Golden Bowl remains a difficult enterprise. The sculptural images and metaphors that abound in The Golden Bowl are partly responsible for the impenetrable surface texture of the late style, and such a style requires us to reread and revise, much as James did as he worked on the New York Edition of his novels and their attendant prefaces. Rereading seems like a practice that should be compatible with the formalist practice of Frank and the New Critics, but as I show, when we read very closely for form and then reread, we discover that form is less unified and enduring than we thought. To reread is to read in the round, to revisit prior views and viewpoints, to reestablish a series of shifting, limited perspectives on the artwork. Demanded by James’s late style and especially by the sculptural aesthetics of The Golden Bowl, this critical practice demonstrates that we can most accurately approach and account for modernism’s dynamic forms—for the plastic form of the modernist novel—with a dynamic formalism: one that acknowledges partiality and incompleteness, that admits the need for revision.

There is one additional benefit to a sculptural reading that emphasizes viewing in the round. Such viewing acknowledges that sculpture “intrudes on the surrounding space, and has to be walked round rather than just looked at,” for, unlike painting, it does not face the viewer “as a surface hung flat against the wall.”22 Whether we encounter it in the gallery or in the pages of The Golden Bowl, sculpture activates not only “a disembodied gazing, but a process involving the viewer spatially and kinaesthetically and intellectually, as well as visually.”23 In this way, a sculptural reading of The Golden Bowl reminds us that the world of fine art, and its influence on literature, cannot be reduced to mere visuality. As “an art of palpation—an art that gives satisfaction in the touching and handling of objects,” sculpture shows how sight is often haunted by touch, and both senses prove vital to this plastic novel and the formal revolutions that it prompts the reader to take.24

Peter Brooks has suggested that the management of knowledge constitutes the central matter of James’s fiction, which offers “a nearly epistemological drama, where what we think we know is always open to contest and reversal, without any sure principle for finding a firm, immovable optic.”25 With its sculptural aesthetics, The Golden Bowl suggests that “optic” might be the wrong word here. In James’s oeuvre, and especially in his late novels, epistemology is tied to two frequent turns of phrase—“I see” and “I feel,” which characters use to declare and describe their knowledge. These phrases are dead metaphors that James brings back to life by repetition and vibration. In some ways, they suggest competing epistemological modes: “I see” gives us the evidence of the visual fact, whereas “I feel” offers an assertion of certainty in the absence of evidence.26 “I feel” is usually what James’s characters say when they are attempting to predict future actions: “There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, [. . .] when I feel that I’d do it again” (273), asserts Fanny Assingham in the long conversation that concludes the first volume, in contrast to the alternative connotations of her earlier declaration, “I di...