New Formalist Criticism

Theory and Practice

F. Bogel

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137362599
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism Theory

New Formalist Criticism defines and theorizes a mode of formalist criticism that is theoretically compatible with current thinking about literature and theory. New formalism anticipates a move in literary studies back towards the text and, in so doing, establishes itself as one of the most exciting areas of contemporary critical theory.

1

Method, Meaning, New Formalism

i Critical method and the production of literary texts

It is a commonplace of contemporary ideas of knowledge, deriving most directly from Kantian epistemology in the eighteenth century, that what we see or observe or know depends powerfully upon the point of view from which we know it. As one philosopher summarizes Kant’s central insight,

we know about the world insofar as we experience it according to the unchanging and universally shared structure of mind. All rational beings think the world in terms of space, time, and categories such as cause and effect, substance, unity, plurality, necessity, possibility, and reality. That is, whenever we think about anything, we have to think about it in certain ways (for example, as having causes, as existing or not existing, as being one thing or many things, as being real or imaginary, as being something that has to exist or doesn’t have to exist), not because that is the way the world is, but rather because that is the way that our minds order experience. We can be said to know things about the world, then, not because we somehow step outside of our minds to compare what we experience with some reality outside of it, but rather because the world we know is always already organized according to a certain fixed (innate) pattern that is the mind.¹

In our time, Kant’s fundamental argument about human cognition has been metaphorically extended from the mind as such to the structure of various disciplines and subdisciplines. Nelson Goodman describes a trajectory of influence that “began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind … and now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse.” As he tersely summarizes, “The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.”²

Each discipline, then, asks different sorts of questions, is structured by different conceptual conventions and assumptions, and construes its objects of study in different ways. Thus an anthropologist will understand a particular society in a different way than an epidemiologist will; a chemist will have a different understanding of cyanide than a poisoner, and physicians know our bodies in a different fashion than lovers. There may, of course, be overlaps of perspective, or one person may adopt more than a single perspective. An epidemic of infectious disease may alter social organization and thus also count as an anthropological fact. A would-be poisoner may find a chemical understanding of the toxicity of cyanide useful in planning a crime. And a doctor and patient may discover – even act upon – an erotic attraction.

This alertness to disciplinary conventions can take a variety of forms. Most modestly and least disruptively, the shaping power of such conventions is understood on the model of a lens or perspective. To look at an object from a chemical or psychological or neurological perspective is to see the same object from a different angle or with a different emphasis; a single instance of human behavior – say, an act of aggression – would thus display a chemical dimension, or a psychological dimension, or a neurological dimension. To this way of thinking, often understood on a visual model, the world and its objects remain constant; only our viewpoint or perspective changes. In a more radical understanding, however, disciplinary conventions and expectations actually generate one object or kind of object rather than another. Identity here is not stable across disciplines but produced by the very nature of the disciplines themselves.

In literary criticism, to narrow our focus sharply, this is the position of Stanley Fish. After arguing that the meanings of a poem are not stable and intrinsic to the text but the product of “interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce,” Fish goes on to explain “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” Here, he extends his argument that the meanings of a poem are produced by interpretive communities to claim that the very establishment of a written text as a poem (or “work of literature”) is also the product not of the text’s intrinsic features but of a set of interpretive conventions and expectations.³ Thus, we do not “recognize a poem” – recognize that something is a poem – by observing certain distinguishing linguistic features shared by literary but not non-literary texts. Rather, we produce a poetic or literary text by paying a certain kind of attention, bringing certain expectations, to a text so as to make that text function as a poem – indeed, be a poem: “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”⁴ This is a far cry from a merely perspectival understanding of differing points of view on an allegedly unchanging object.

Having moved from Kant on human consciousness to the array of investigative disciplines, and then to a single one of those disciplines, literary criticism, we can go a step further within the field of criticism itself: to the notion that our particular critical orientations are also forms of attention that generate particular kinds of textual features, different kinds of literary text. Though, again, there can be overlaps of assumption and attention, it is obvious that a psychoanalytic reading of a literary text produces a different kind of textual object than a formalist reading produces, or a prosodic reading, or a postcolonial reading, and so on. Moreover, unlike the forms of consciousness as described by Kant – “the unchanging and universally shared structure of mind,” as Daniel puts it – the conventions and procedures of various disciplines (history, psychology, linguistics) and subdisciplines (deconstructive criticism, New Historicism, feminist and gender criticism), though defined and legitimized by what Fish terms “interpretive communities,” can change in the course of time, and can be to some extent both freely chosen and freely modified by practitioners. Too great a modification, of course, may not count as a legitimate move in the particular disciplinary game being played and may be marginalized or rejected as wayward. But if the new interpretive strategy proves productive and compelling enough, it will gradually and quietly enter – and thus expand – the repertoire of that discipline’s canonical procedures, what Thomas Kuhn calls its “normal science.”⁵

While it may be difficult, then, for an individual critic to alter an established practice, just as it is difficult for an individual speaker to alter a given language, it is not difficult to choose a critical practice or mode or school based on what it makes of the texts it takes up for analysis – the kind of thing that the analysis, and we, want those texts to be. Do we want them to tell us about their authors’ lives and thus count as biographical documents, or about the society in which they were produced and thus serve as cultural and historical documents? Do we want them to disclose a system of gender relations and gender politics, whether biographical, historical, or fictional – one thematic element in relation to other elements of the texts? Do we want texts to be unified wholes, in which every element is expected to (and thus does) connect meaningfully with the other elements, and in which tensions and dramatic conflicts finally compose into “a pattern of resolved stresses”?⁶ Do we want the poem to be the fully realized intention of its author? Or do we want the text to differ from itself, harboring a discourse that counters or subverts its ostensible thrust? Do we want texts to tell or show us how to live, or how things are, or how they should be? Do we want them to offer historically specific representations of reality, or general truths adaptable to particular circumstances? Or do we want texts to supply occasions for us to note their limitations, mystifications, and blindnesses?

Whenever we give an answer to questions like these, we are also implicitly designating a mode of analysis. While choices of critical method, then, are frequently thought to be determined by ideas about how language works, about what literature intrinsically is, about what we conceive authors’ intentions to be, and so on, these considerations are finally subordinate to the question of what we want the texts we interpret to emerge as, to do for us, to be. We may say – and say truthfully – that we find a Marxist approach most satisfying because literary texts are inescapably products of material and political forces that shape their form and meaning. But this choice of method based on what a text is rests on a prior, perhaps tacit or unconscious, choice of what we most need a text to be – in general, or in a given instance. It is in this sense that the choice of a critical method is prior to the constitution of a literary text, and the need for a text to be a certain kind of text is prior to the choice of critical method. We denominate the text a certain kind of text in order to get from it a certain something in preference to other somethings.⁷

ii The text as language (1)

New Formalism, the array of critical practices that I want to describe and argue for in this essay, derives from the need – mine, but certainly not mine alone – for a text to be principally a linguistic object, a piece of language: language that is rewardingly susceptible to various strategies of detailed formalist analysis or interpretation – what is often called “close reading.” Whatever else the text is – a play of themes, a historical document or symptom, a certain kind of readerly experience, a meditation on or transformation of a genre, a production of a particular author or school or era, a real-world political manifesto or tract – it is also a linguistic construct. Further, the text is those other things only as they are embodied in or performed by the text’s language. In consequence, a properly formalist analysis must engage with that language no matter what it also takes the text to be – must show how it is the text’s language that makes it any of those other things. To do otherwise is to stray into a kind of logocentric fallacy in which a text’s content or meaning or identity is fantasized to be separable from its medium. As David Lodge puts it in discussing elements of fictional narrative:

All good criticism is … necessarily a response to the creative use of language, whether it is talking explicitly of “plot” or “character” or any other of the categories of narrative literature. These terms are useful – indeed essential – but the closer we get to defining the unique identity and interest of this plot, of that character, the closer we are brought to a consideration of the language in which we encounter these things.⁸

The early formalism of the New Criticism, in the 1930s and 1940s, assumed that the aspects of a text emphasized by New Critical techniques – paradox, irony, a unity composed of “resolved stresses,” to name only a prominent few – were by and large peculiar to literary texts – indeed, intrinsic to them. My representation of formalist criticism and the attendant techniques of close reading assumes no such thing: neither the distinctiveness of literary language nor the intrinsic character of the textual features disclosed by formalist analysis.⁹ Instead, my advocacy of formalism and close reading is tied to a particular idea of the meaning, significance, and purposes of literary criticism. Nor am I advocating formalist criticism exclusively. What I am contending is, first, that formalist analysis should be a vital part of any interpretive method that cares to be called “literary critical,” and, second, that it produces or discovers or discloses dimensions of textual meaning and textual performance that are of the greatest readerly, cultural, and social significance. Such a formalist commitment is in part an attempt to recover the specificity of the literary obscured by a number of contemporary modes of reading and interpretation, not by insisting on an allegedly literary or poetic language specific to what we designate as literary artworks but by attempting to counter a prevalent surrender of attention to the verbal and textual as such. This emphasis recalls, in certain ways, Susan Sontag’s 1961 affirmation of formal analysis in “Against Interpretation”:

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary – a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary – for forms.¹⁰

This effort to recover the verbal specificity of texts is not simply a matter of using close reading to support or supply evidence for points made discursively – as if one were to claim in a critical essay that “Charles regularly infantilizes Susan,” and then cite a bit of Charles’s dialogue: “You’re a child, Susan.” Such citational use of the text’s language is important in an evidentiary way but it is often interpretively trivial. Rather, I am speaking of the possibility of taking the work with adequate seriousness, regarding every feature of it as potentially meaningful, and of attending to what its language is and does – not just what it “says” – in order to move beyond the twilit half-knowing of paraphrase and other crude (if at times necessary or useful) reductions toward something like the reality of the text itself. Close reading, that is to say, is not simply the marshaling of verbal evidence; it’s what allows us to pass beyond superficial acquaintance, paraphrase, a fixation on theme, content, and semantic import in order to discover dimensions of meaning that inflect, complicate, exceed, perhaps even contradict what attention to content tells us.

To attempt to read this way is somewhat like attempting to move beyond the point at which we think of an acquaintance as a middleaged Catholic female who enjoys softball, learns languages easily, has a good sense of humor, is fascinated by Chomskyan linguistics, and is lactose intolerant – to move beyond the accurate yet estranging generality of such categories and approach more closely to an actual understanding of the particularity, the thisness, the complexity and meaningfulness enacted by this person’s way of being in the world. The comparison may seem fanciful, but, as Walter J. Ong says in the course of making a very different argument, “Anything that bids for attention in an act of contemplation is a surrogate for a person. In proportion as the work of art is capable of being taken in full seriousness, it moves further and further along an asymptote to the curve of personality.”¹¹ Jane Gallop draws out the ethical implications of this position:

I believe it is ethical to respect other people, by which I mean: listen to them, try and understand what they are actually saying, rather than just confirming our preconceptions about them, our prejudices. I believe it is our ethical obligation to fight against our tendency to project our preconceptions, that it is our ethical duty to attempt to hear what someone else is really saying. Ultimately, close reading is not just a way of reading but a way of listening. It can help us not just to read what is on the page, but to hear what a person really said. Close reading can train us to hear other people.¹²

As I see it, close reading – patient, inventive, detailed attention to how language works in a text – represents our best hope of getting beyond the clichés of superficial acquaintance, taking responsibility for the being and interpretation of the full text, and allowing ourselves to be surprised both by what it is and by how much it differs from what we had thought it was. I’ll add that I take this to be as much an ethical as a hermeneutic and intellectual imperative.

One of the things implied by that perhaps ponderous-sounding claim is that close reading is not just a skill or tool or interpretive implement – the hermeneutic equivalent of a high-powered microscope – though even at that instrumental level, close reading has been recognized as a central and powerful technique: even “the single defining skill of our discipline.”¹³ Beyond that, close reading has been recognized as a technique for mounting a regular and salutary resistance to the surmises and projections of the interpreter and the more or less fantasmatic coalescences of meaning that can obscure the text’s linguistic actuality. “The authority of language,” as Geoffrey Hartman has said,

can only be tested by close reading and resides in language itself as used and used again. Explanation gives way to explication, and explication becomes a genre that maintains the art work itself, the peculiar authority of its diction, amid the figuration or the chaos of suppositions com...