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Article Excerpt
Virtually every discussion of the new formalism, whether remonstration or encomium, mentions some variant or synonym of the word "return," which should cause us to wonder what the "new" in the "new formalism" is. Advocates of the new formalism scrutinize the language, genre, structure, and aesthetic nature of the literary text, and they encourage readers to discern textual patterns and repetitions, as well as to acknowledge the aesthetic pleasure that form can induce. Many proponents of the new formalism champion the autonomy of the work of art. Some of them have always devoted the greater portion of their critical energies to these issues; still others have joined ranks with the new formalists because they believe either that literary criticism has overstepped the bounds of its discipline, that it has become too politicized, and/or that it has simply lost use of some of the most fundamental tools at its disposal for the analysis of literary works.
Two questions arise in conjunction with the new formalism, and both are somewhat polemical. The first is whether one can make abstraction of a work's formal features. Doing that would depend not only on knowing in advance or in a manner peripheral to the work what those features are; it would also depend on a form of structural and semantic immutability, that is, on the supposition that form and meaning remain in a fixed and constant relationship. The formal features of a work, by virtue of the simple fact that we can distinguish them in the first place, express difference from and opposition to a field that is either implicitly or explicitly named in the work itself. Moreover, identifiable formal features link the work in which they appear--the work they constitute--to the histories of those features. That means that works that deploy recognizable formal or generic conventions necessarily enter into dialog with literary and cultural history by virtue of their resemblances to and differences from convention. Difference and opposition in a work of art are expressive of meaning, of something that matters. To attempt to remove meaning from difference and opposition--say, for example, to devote one's critical attention only to meter or rhyme without regard to how or why those things signify--is tantamount to arguing that red is simply better than blue.
The second question that arises when we consider the new formalism is one of ownership: what criteria determine whether a given critical camp is formalist enough, and what sorts of methodologies go too far beyond structural, generic, and textual considerations? In short, are some readers "reading too much into" the text? And are others insufficiently critical? If the new formalism is asking us to pay attention to the formal details of a text, then it is not new. If, however, the new formalism is calling for a return to a time when critics did not interrogate how or why texts mattered to people, then it is advocating an extirpation, a strategic ignoring, or even outright rejection of the critical work that has developed since the heyday of formalism. In that case, despite claims for a disinterested investment in art for art's sake, what we have is a politicized claim passing itself off as natural common sense.
I will be looking at the means by which a text's formal features encode the social circumstances surrounding the systematization of those features into convention or genre, and I will argue that any formal investigation of a work or genre necessarily invokes a set of social circumstances implicitly associated with form. To do that, I will examine an earlier new formalism, one never explicitly identified as such, but one which is nevertheless marked by a similar call for a return to traditional literary forms as well as by a politics that many tried either to refute or to obfuscate. The new formalism I will be analyzing was an aesthetic movement begun in seventeenth-century France, and it arose specifically in response to the burgeoning literary form of the novel. This earlier new formalism shares with the modern manifestation of the phenomenon attention to the formal features of the literary work, the call for a return to a more traditional aesthetics, and an ideological subtext that some either ignored or tried to deny. My principal concern will be to demonstrate that in the novel, to borrow some familiar phrasing, the formal is political. That is, the form the novel took--its particular use of prose to narrate mostly stories of love while claiming either to be true or at least plausible or ordinary--cannot be separated from the social and political conditions obtaining in the early years of the form's tremendous popularity. The form the novel assumed in the early years of its popularity marks its vexed relationship to official high culture both in its truth claims and in the specific means of achieving mimesis it adopted. To attempt to abstract the novel's form from its politics is to misunderstand the structure and function of the genre.
FORM AND FUNCTION
The new formalism emerged in the 1980s as a movement advocating the return to traditional forms of verse and meter, and it is often linked to a dissatisfaction on the part of poets and critics alike with the distressed state of contemporary poetic aesthetics and the politics associated with literary criticism. One of the early advocates of new formalism, Dana Gioia, who was named Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts in 2002 by George W. Bush, penned his "Notes on the new formalism" in 1987, and one passage in particular is often cited by both opponents and defenders of the movement: "the real issues presented by American poetry in the 'Eighties will become clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative; and the denial of musical texture in the contemporary poem." (1) Gioia laments the elevation of free verse to an unquestioned poetic status quo, and he mocks critics whose condemnations of the traditional poetic forms include claims that they are "artificial, elitist, retrogressive, right-wing, and (my favorite) un-American." At the same time, however, he points out that "formal verse, like free verse, is neither bad nor good" (159). Gioia calls for formal innovation in poetry, and he advocates adopting a new formalism in order to answer the questions: "How does a poet best shape words, images, and ideas into meaning? How much compression is needed to transform versified lines--be they metrical or free--into genuine poetry?" (174).
These are fundamental questions about form: they concern embodiment, convention, tradition, and the production of meaning. As posed, especially with Gioia's allowance that free verse can be as complex and expressive as traditional meter, they constitute a dispassionate interrogation of the formation of meaning through the manipulation of language. Yet, whenever the new formalism is invoked (with or without the capital letters), a passionate polemic typically joins the question of how literary meaning is produced: can one discuss form without acknowledging the social context in which it appears? Gioia himself tries to eschew the debate, but suggests that while no one today can determine the social or cultural forces behind the new formalism, "one day cultural historians will elucidate the connections between the current revival of formal and narrative poetry with the broader shift of sensibility in the arts. The return to tonality in serious music, to representation in painting, to decorative detail and nonfunctional design in architecture will link with poetry's reaffirmation of song and story ..." (168). Language associating return, revival, and reaffirmation with traditional literary forms has contributed in part to the debate concerning politics and the new formalism, leading some critics to suggest that when adherents to the movement claim they want to divest literature of politics...
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