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Article Excerpt
CONSTRUCTIVISM AND FORMALISM
For at least a generation, most critics of the eighteenth-century novel have argued or assumed that canonical texts do not passively reflect a pre-existent reality but help to shape or construct what readers perceive as reality. Although "construct" is susceptible to various qualifications and inflections, a consensus definition might read something like this: we study the complex negotiations among competing idioms, expectations, and poetic and discursive strategies that characterize literary texts while (in theory) remaining alert to our own epistemological investments, analytical methods, and socioeconomic, gendered, national, and ethnic positions. Critics of the novel, such as Michael McKeon and Helen Thompson, have adapted broadly constructivist principles in order to modify or challenge the metanarrative of "the Enlightenment" that describes the "rise" of the novel, the advent of the Habermasian public sphere, the rise of the nation-state, the "rise" of the modern bourgeois subject, and the rise of modern science in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms. (1) If the novel has become the pre-eminent form that shapes and reflects these mutually constitutive narratives of eighteenth-century culture, the constructivism that scholars find or read into the period remains an impure art, tinged by principles of formalist literary analysis. (2) Put simply, the works that critics argue or assume help to construct notions of individual and cultural identity almost invariably are canonical texts--works such as Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Emma--that previous generations of critics already have determined are aesthetically superior to Adventures of a Banknote, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and Lady Audley's Secret.
In this regard, the constructivist consensus among critics of the eighteenth-century novel masks crucial problems--often displaced or ignored--that result from the institutionalization of what I will call heuristically aesthetico-constructivism. I use this term to describe the formalist values and assumptions that underlie the tendency to bend historicist, feminist, and materialist approaches to the task of reasserting the stability of a literary canon that, even though it now includes women writers and writers of color, still seemingly represents what Matthew Arnold called "the best that was thought or said." (3) In this essay, I want to focus on unpacking the circular logic of aesthetico-constructivism by examining an intriguing case study in the history of the novel: the disappearance from the canon, after World War I, of Daniel Defoe's Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. This example is hardly chosen at random; it forces us to explore the problems that underlie formalism as both an interpretive practice and a disciplinary metaphysic. By disregarding the publishing history of the Crusoe trilogy, many neo-formalist approaches have treated Robinson Crusoe as a coherent, stand-alone novel, elevating ahistorical notions of aesthetic value over Defoe's own comments on the work, the practice of fiction-writing, and a two-hundred year history of publishing The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures together? To unpack the values and assumptions that have allowed critics to severe Crusoe's two-part Adventures, though, requires examining briefly the principles of formalist analysis that downplay more historically oriented approaches.
My purpose in offering a critique of some aspects of new formalism is to make three points. First, I want to counter the argument that new historicism, feminism, and cultural studies depend on the aesthetic principles that these approaches, according to some formalists, either unthinkingly or disingenuously reject. (5) This "unmasking" of the formalist bases of "ideological criticism," I suggest, assumes a simplistic model of cause and effect that makes it difficult to develop a sophisticated understanding of the complex activities that underlie literary interpretation. Second, I want to challenge the idea that the formalist reading of an individual literary text mirrors or reproduces the original act of artistic creation, even affectively: there is no such thing as an ur-formalist analysis that establishes the timeless brilliance, aesthetic coherence, or canonicity of Robinson Crusoe or any other text independently of the complex networks that produce, qualify, and adjudicate evaluative judgments over and in time. Consequently, aesthetic judgment, history, and ideology are never distinct approaches or incommensurable ways of seeing; and, in this respect, the endless meta-debates about approaches within literary studies tell us more about the dynamics of the discipline than they do about eighteenth-century texts. AIM finally, the values and assumptions of aesthetic organicism that I explore in the next section are so deeply embedded in the institution of criticism that the real debates in eighteenth-century studies are not between formalism and "ideological criticism" but between different versions of constructivist values and assumptions--that is, different reconstructions of our own intellectual investments and allegiances.
"A CAREFUL ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY OF FORMALISM"
The great strength of recent work on the eighteenth-century novel is that its constructivist projects--understanding the gendered and politicized emergence of modern conceptions of self-identity--have pushed to the side formalist efforts that tend to treat eighteenth-century novels as though they were structured by the same principles of aesthetic coherence attributed to lyric poems. In her trenchant critique of formalism's debts to "the trope of the organic whole," Mary Poovey argues that both ontologically and epistemologically formalism "treats its analytic objects as if they were lyrics" and makes "features that perform lyric functions" central to critical interpretation. In its emphasis on the imagination, formalism depends on what she calls the "objectification of the poet/poem/reader complex," a feedback loop that exists in "isolation from other kinds of social and political experience." This allegiance to the impoverished metaphor of the organic whole within even politically astute modes of literary criticism, Poovey argues, displaces the material histories of literary texts into the atemporal present of formalism. Consequently, narrative becomes less a movement through time than a lyricized reconfiguration of spatial or geometrical relations because the critic's purpose remains to bring "hidden truths and patterns to light" and thereby "reanimate the literary text" by (re-)producing in her analysis its organic unity. (6)
Poovey's critique of new formalism suggests six linked corollaries that offer a means to examine the logic behind a widespread, yet often vague dissatisfaction with formalist modes of criticism and to suggest why certain modes of new formalism seem content to resurrect caricatures of the Enlightenment at the expense of the sophisticated sociocuhural analyses of eighteenth-century literature that have emerged over the last two decades. (7) The idea of a poem or novel as an organic entity is, after all, a metaphor drawn from biology, and yet the implications of this constitutive metaphor are seldom acknowledged or explored. (8)
1. The "organic whole" is an abstraction that bears no relation to actual biology or physiology. Because formalist critics are always in the process of forgetting that the idea of holistic form is a metaphor, they risk a kind of historical myopia by remaining committed to pre-Darwinian misapprehensions of organic unity--the fiction that individual elements are integrated into an overarching principle of design. This concept has its origins in the theocentric "argument from design" that surfaced in the seventeenth century in, among other treatises, John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, 1693). In this respect, it does not matter whether formalists locate aesthetic coherence in the writer's intention or in the work as a self-consistent system: organic wholes do not exist in contemporary biological and life sciences. "In biology," says Richard Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Emeritus at Harvard, "there may be general statements, but there are no universals, and ... actual events are the nexus of multiple causal pathways and chance perturbations." By suggesting that in the physical universe there are only "events" that have multiple causes and nondeterministic origins, Lewontin emphasizes that disciplinary practices of biological science shape conceptions of life and the physical universe: "facts in science," he argues, "do not present themselves in a preexistent shape. Rather it is experimental or observational protocol that constructs facts out of an undifferentiated nature." (9) In taking "general statements" for time-independent truths and recasting "multiple causal pathways" as artistic intention or genius, formalist approaches construct works of art as self-coherent systems and mystify their own practices in imagining an organic unity for art that resists the ravages of time.
2. In placing its fictions of the organic whole beyond history and biology, formalism mystifies its difficulties in defining what "form" is. Because aesthetic unity is produced as an abstraction that can be...
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