The new formalism, as it has been called, has gotten much less flack than the old one (Michael Wood writes of this in his new book). Perhaps because there is a realization going around that, well, we're smarter now, we've done the theory, now we can look at all those small formal things in the text with less rigidity (or however you want to characterize the crimes of the formalists). In particular our attention can wander to historical issues, political issues, but we'll always have the right object in view: form.
Maybe. What I find odd, however, is not so much the people who would identify with the new formalism (they're often trying to work out just what this might mean), as those who take comfort in it, and assume something else: that it was not formalism which lent a problematic basis for literary studies, but close reading. Saying we're new formalists, for these people, just means we can look at form and close read only really when we need to, when it is advantageous and sensible--not all the time.
This tendency here--and I don't mean to describe anything as clear cut as a position, and I'll probably be much too hard-and-fast as it is in trying to just to give some accentuating weight to a pull we might find in contemporary criticism--the tendency, I think, is more than reasonable. What's particularly good is its utter rejection of facile claims made in the 80's and 90's about "the ethics of reading," which assumed that close reading is something we do everywhere (just as the world can be understood as a text), and that to distantly read something amounted to being unethical (by which they really meant, immoral). In another context, Peter Brooks has said it was clear this position was bankrupt when it came time to explain how people like John Yoo could willfully misread statutes in the law to justify torture with something that looked a lot like what these ethical readers did constantly: it was clear just from the abandonment of poetics in anything like this form of ethics that reading and ethics had to be brought together in a less mashed-up, less defensive (in that this "ethics" was essentially something only the humanities could give you, since it couldn't really give you knowledge, like the sciences), less immediately politicized way (which is just to say that it actually had to be thought through).
The inclination I'm describing involves thinking something similar, but also involves a willingness to go, sometimes, much further in the formalist direction than the new formalists themselves. Indeed, it reworks the basic components that constitute form, rethinks the matter of form and what the literary object can be made up of. Instead of the poetics of Brooks (which I might recommend to a , it claims the territory of aesthetics, and there is something exciting about that. At the same time, I'm not sure it brings us any further towards answering questions about the knowledge the literary object can contain, and in fact may block certain ways into asking questions in this area. For it is knowledge which is ultimately the reason for close reading--why it was invented, and why we do it--and to celebrate the death of the close reader at the same time as you find comfort in form is to assume that there is no urgency to the question of whether the literary object can know something, and that we can better address our reading problems by attending instead to the nature of its sensuousness.
For close reading is much more about construing messages in the act of communication than about paying attention to form. It is about meaning, ambiguity, parables, plots: rhythms, to encapsulate things, and use a more small-scale example, more than meters (or, maybe, meters more as beats, since I don't mean to say at all that prosody only goes in the formalist direction--indeed, it becomes a tool in going the opposite way). So to align it with formalism in order to bash it, which is what has been going on at least since the 60's in the US (and actually earlier), is actually a strange move. Form was the first thing I.A. Richards actually attacked in his litany of aesthetic bogeys (Angela Leighton is the only person who I've seen actually figure this out, in a recent book On Form--perhaps because she actually went back to read Richards). It was because of the prominence of formal (if not exactly formalist) approaches that he thought we needed close reading in order to to eradicate. It only really became a formalist practice in the way we know it now after people like Wimsatt, Brooks, and the Yale people turned it into explication (or "explicitation," as Wimsatt nicely put it), and Modernists like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters gave the object itself that hard minimalist, sculptural edge to it. To accelerate the narrative, we might just say that PoMo poetry people, for all their bashing of formalism, actually only got more excited about that minimalism (the people into novels tended to do much better, as they recognized getting rid of form opened up logics of desire which really had a different texture than what verse form broke down into). We've been stuck in the formalist jam ever since, really, so to blame close reading makes little sense, since it never was close reading's fault. The English I think have a richer sense of why close reading can't go away, I think, because they never had such a stringent formalism there (though not having one leaves them with fewer moves to make ultimately with readings--it's pretty much always towards history).
In short, not unlike the hyper-political-theory people this position wants to move away from, it is an approach that seems to suppose we can always make sense of what poetry is about if we want to, if we look hard enough. Close reading is precisely asking whether we can make such a supposition, or at least in its real practice--which I think people do less often than we think--complicates such an assumption. Which is why we keep reading Christopher Ricks and Helen Vendler (not that there's no other reason to read them, of course).
I don't mean to be dualistic about knowledge and sense. I mean only to note that there is another aspect to poesis besides or rather beside making, which this tendency I'm describing occasionally recognizes often only to forget it: namely, the the vatic, possessed, oracular, inspirational aspect. And that close reading attends to this.
I'm less sure whether I don't mean to (that's certainly a phrase that hedges your bets) champion close reading over formalism. It remains a more open question to me whether the part formalism should play involves breaking down whatever dualism there is between knowledge and sense, and pushing sense (via their fates, as Susan Stewart might say, their own kind of knowing) towards questions of knowledge. Even if the tendency I'm describing often forgets knowledge it can occasionally break things down precisely by its focus on the sensuous side of things--maybe sometimes better than a smartly directed new formalism could. I think when it gets polemical, though, the dualism can't help but be deepened, and most of the time anyway such a mode sinks knowledge too far in sense to allow any jumping of the gap. In this case, it might be smart to see more of what we can accomplish by close reading without the formalist crutch.
5 comments:
I think interpreting basic messages includes some sort of unconscious attention-paying to form, even if we can't articulate the form afterward. Context seems to always play a larger role than we assume in communication, so I wouldn't rule out noticing form. We tend to think people don't notice form because they lack the ability to describe it, but they can still "read" pretty accurately; that is, they have passive interpretive competency.
"For it is knowledge which is ultimately the reason for close reading--why it was invented, and why we do it."
Who do you have in mind as the "inventors"? I've always taken the close reading of New Criticism (especially in someone like Brooks) to be precisely directed against the idea that reading a poem produces "knowledge."
To the first comment, I'd say yes: I particularly like the way you bring together form and context, which is actually something of a strange move, if you think about it. It's not so strange, if, like Fredric Jameson, say, you think of forms as historical, or, like Susan Stewart, as having various fates, which is what I allude to in the last, closing bit. It's not a question of whether we choose form or message that I'm outlining here, though, but whether form is a better vehicle for turning the sensuality of the text (what your competent reader notes) towards knowledge, than the sort of aestheticism that would a) dissociate itself from formalism and yet b) pay attention to that sensuality in a purer way. Obviously form doesn't have to be dissociated from aestheticism, as someone like Leighton shows, but that's precisely the legacy of the formalist agenda, or what we think of as the formalist agenda.
Which brings me to the second comment. The inventor of close reading in the form we adopt it I take to be I.A. Richards, though in America you can't quite narrow it down to a figure like that, and it involves all sorts of negotiation, different places and schools (Yale, Amherst, Chicago, Harvard, etc.) which adopted the technique in their own way. Regardless, my point is that all of these inventors are concerned with knowledge, if we think about what they are saying. To put it differently, I'm not entirely sure that Brooks is against the idea that reading produces knowledge. He's against the idea that poems have paraphrasable ideas, or knowledge reduced to the form of something like propositions which are true or false, jammed into a "core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase" (something I remind my students constantly about). I might just be defining knowledge differently, perhaps, but Brooks himself is the one who often switches terms: "surely there is a sense in which all true poetry must be original..." he says in the Well-Wrought Urn. Truth here is obviously something different than what he rejects, and according to this, a poem can not just have knowledge, but be true, in a real sense that is not the limited prose-sense of the proposition. But it's not really just semantics. At some point, Brooks joins even the scientist in looking at the message of the thing more than its form: the whole problem is how to do it well, which requires something different, and presupposes something different about the object--on the level of its ability to communicate, more than on the level of its form, sensuousness, etc. (that's my only point, really).
Another way to put the point about Brooks is just that he is saying poems can be true, but not true or false. They don't respect the law of contradiction like that, but this doesn't make them untrue or irrational things just because that's the case. In fact, it is in order to forestall this rash conclusion, which Brooks sees as the conclusion of science etc., that we have to figure out how the poem knows what it knows, has things true about it which are true in this way. Ultimately, yes, he will at some point say this truth is different than scientific truth or knowledge in this sense, and even should be precisely what we don't read a poem for, but--again here's my point--not before he rejects formalism, sense, etc. Which makes him more committed to knowledge, in my book.
I should add on one last level that again the issue isn't whether we pick knowledge or sense. At some point, Brooks goes precisely wrong in saying that rejecting sense and form means that you get knowledge: no, the two are not so opposed as this, or rather knowledge is precisely not so diffuse and experiential and pure as this. We might think of knowledge precisely as a message, in other words, a fable or narrative or parable or lesson, and this is what Brooks at some point doesn't want to think about, which is why I put him in the stack with the formalists, rather than the close readers (even though he's not really a formalist but someone interested in the structure of the poetic message, a slightly different sort of thing, which ends up taking many positions close to the formalists in the end in opposing knowledge in the lesson-form).
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