The Form of the Three Formalisms

To use a Freudian metaphor, literary theories develop in much the same was as adolescents. Each theory begins to develop its own identity when it (or the group that proposes it) becomes aware of the shortcomings of the current theory-in-residence. From the point of view of the three formalisms—that of the New Critics, of the Russian Formalists, and of the Structuralists—the two great theories-in-residence were the various intentionalist and affective schools of thought. All three formalisms, in their own ways and for their own reasons, rebelled against the dominant schools of intent and affect in three major ways: by defining literary criticism as an independent science, by redefining the literary object itself in terms of its internal content or structures, and by proposing methodologies for the interpretation and analysis of the literary. By questioning the "common sense" assumptions of the prevailing modes of thought and by defining themselves as literary sciences, each of the formalisms developed similar attributes while defining literature and its interpretation in increasingly differing manners.

The Subject of Formalist Criticism

While the three schools of formalism all define literature, and therefore the object of literary criticism, differently, all three take steps toward separating the creator from the work and the work from the audience, leaving the work alone as the object of literary study. At the advent of the New Critical approach Wimsatt makes note in The Intentional Fallacy of how fully integrated "intention" is in the realm of literary criticism when he states that "there is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of intention (Wimsatt, 3)." Wimsatt begins to strain the notion of intention from true literary criticism (as opposed to biographical studies) by proposing several problems with the intentionalist method. First, while Wimsatt agrees that poems are conscious and intentional designs, he refutes the idea that the consciousness or intent behind the design can be used to judge the design itself: "to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance (Wimsatt, 4)." They are as separate entities as parent and child, and a child should no more be judged by the intents of the parents that raised him than a poem should be judged by the intents of the poet that wrote it. Second is the question of evidence. The only evidence that should be used in evaluating a poem is the poem itself:

"How is [the intentionalist critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem (Wimsatt, 4)."

Thus, even if the poet is available for questioning in regards to his intentions (realized or failed), it would be as useless to the literary critic evaluating the poem as questioning the parents in regards to their hopes would be for the judge sentencing their child.

Similarly, in his summary of Russian Formalist thought Eichenbaum makes the distinction between the science of literary criticism and the sciences of biography and psychology explicit: "We did not take up questions of the biography and psychology of the artist because we assumed that these questions, in themselves serious and complex, must take their places in other sciences (Eichenbaum, 136)." In application, Shklovsky turns the eye of literary criticism from Symbolism's focus on images (and their affective results) to the Russian Formalists' visualization of technique as content:

"Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is, depending on its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is neither more or less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all of those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of expression (Shklovsky, 9)."

The truly important aspect of literature according to Shklovsky is not the image but the technique, the means by which the literariness of the work is made apparent:

"Images belong to no one: they are "the Lord's." The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought were his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped according to their arrangement and development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them (Shklovsky, 7)."

If, through the ages, the people who read poetry define eras of poetry by the techniques used and not by the imagery used it shows us the relative importance of the two (and makes the particular images used a subset of technique—not a separate entity). Shklovsky points out that images do not change; it is the techniques by which the images are used that change—much how architecture is defined by the forms the buildings take and not the materials used to build them. To attempt to study exclusively the nature and effect of images (and the way one supposedly "thinks in images," as Shklovsky's main target Potebnya proposes) leads to just about any result one would like—to the Formalists, an affective approach that is subjective to the point of uselessness.

This objective analysis on the part of the Russian Formalists runs parallel to later Structuralist thought, where the subjective interpretations of myths and dreams by Freud and his followers are attacked by the Structuralists:

"Structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis, for example, or Marxist explanation, but it exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone structure (Genette, 13)."

The "internal reduction" being the specificity internal to the work in question and not the "transcendent" qualities given to it by the author or reader from outside of it. Indeed, Genette defines Structuralism as that which is not intentionalist:

"Any analysis that confines itself to a work without considering its sources or motives would, therefore, be implicitly Structuralist, and the structural method ought to intervene in order to give to this immanent study a sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of explanation abandoned with the search for causes (Genette, 12)."

One can perceive the beginning of this "rationality of understanding," of Structuralism as a theory, as taking place at the moment Levi-Strauss attacks both the ethnocentrism he finds in French culture and the affective and intentionalist misinterpretations he finds in anthropology:

"Of all the chapters of religious anthropology probably none has tarried to the same extent as studies in the field of mythology. From a theoretical point of view the situation remains very much the same as it was fifty years ago, namely, chaotic. Myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of some sort of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods. Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to idle play or to a crude kind of philosophic speculation (Levi-Strauss, 207)."

The study of religious anthropology was chaotic because it was driven by the subjective concerns of intention and affect—for Levi-Strauss, one can philosophize endlessly as to why a myth was written or how it might affect its reader. Instead of approaching myths from these perspectives, he instead focuses entirely on what takes place within the myths themselves, removing the subjectivity of these other interpretations and discovering instead the objectivity, or logic, within the structures of myths themselves. This objectivity-within-structure is made apparent when Levi-Strauss discusses repetition in myth:

"The function of repetition in myth is to render the structure apparent. For we have seen that the synchronic-diachronic structure of the myth permits us to organize it into diachronic sequences which should be read synchronically (Levi-Strauss, 229)."

In doing so he places the true interpretive values of a work squarely within that work's internal structures of relations and not in the relations between the author and the work or the work and its audience.

The Object of Formalist Criticism

While all three formalisms make an effort to separate the study of literature from history, psychology and biography, each defines the literary object and therefore the literary canon differently. To the New Critics, the literary object is defined as an organic unity—an object defined by paradox and irony which cannot be paraphrased (see Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 1947). Thus their conception of the literary or the poetic is a narrow one comprised primarily of shorter works—lyric poems and certain dramas—crafted by those "who consciously employ paradox" to "gain a compression and a precision otherwise unobtainable (Brooks, 10)."

For the Russian Formalists, literature is that which defamiliarizes the reader. It "exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony (Shklovsky, 12)." Whereas the New Critics found art or literariness only in those works of a concise nature—those works that have, through the use of irony and paradox, maximized the efficiency of their communication to the point that any form of paraphrase would be a distortion—for the Russian Formalists the canon of literature expanded to include any work that engages in the techniques that will defamiliarize the reader. Shklovsky introduces this concept in his reference to Tolstoy's Kholstomer (Shklovsky, 13) and illustrates it fully in his reading of Sterne's Tristam Shandy. At the end of his analysis of Sterne's book he declares it "the most typical novel in world literature" specifically because the entire book is a baring of its own use of technique to expose its literariness; an attempt to defamiliarize its reader and to make the distinction between plot as a compositional arrangement and story as a chronological sequence of logically related events clear. "The story is, in fact, only material for plot formation (Shklovsky, 57)."

This difference in the definition of the literary not only increased the volume of works available for study for the Russian Formalists compared to the New Critics, but also allowed for the study of technique usage over time; a historical, between-subject avenue of study not available to the New Critics whose focus on a given work's unity kept it separate from all other works and any possible historical comparisons. Since each genre of literature, in the Russian Formalist's view, can be defined by its use of technique, and since technique is the defining element of literature, Eichenbaum can explain the Russian Formalist interest in literary history as an interest in "the dialectical change of forms" (Eichenbaum, 136). This historical opening allowed for an even greater volume of works to be examined, as the Russian Formalists "found extremely significant both the question of the formation and changes of genres and the question of how 'second-rate' and 'popular' literature contributed to the formation of genres (Eichenbaum, 136)" which the New Critics would have dismissed.

This expansion of the literary from the New Critic's definition to the Russian Formalists' conception reached manifest destiny in the application of the Structuralists, who redefined literature to include any object which could be conceived as a text and, therefore, as a language which can be approached linguistically. By visualizing Disneyland as a text Marin is able to treat the visitor's tour of Disneyland as a narrative and therefore approach it in a way that allows him to compare it to More's novel Utopia (See Marin, Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia, 1977). On a very different subject but using a similar method, Todorov approaches the entire genre of detective fiction as a text with variations—

"one might say that every great book establishes the existence of two genres, the reality of two norms: that of the genre it transgresses, which dominated the preceding literature, and that of the genre it creates (Todorov, 43)."

—and in so doing he establishes a relation between works and develops the realm of popular fiction as a subject worthy of scholarly interest and as a generator for theories and structures applicable to other texts.

Structuralism treats the world as language in much the same way that physics treats the world as numbers and by doing so makes the world its canon:

"By considering language as a system of signs and of signification rather than as an established pattern of meanings, one displaces or even suspends the traditional barriers between literary and presumably non-literary uses of language and liberates the corpus from the secular weight of textual canonization (Paul de Man, 9)."

By opening the world of objects to interpretation as texts, the Structuralist school opens the door to the critical study of all things: anything perceived as a text becomes literature, a discourse. Criticism, then, is a "discourse upon a discourse, it is a second language, a metalanguage, which operates on a first language (Barthes, 198)." Thus, criticism's "task is not at all to discover 'truths,' but only 'validities.' In itself, a language is not true or false, it is or it is not valid: valid; i.e., constitutes a coherent system of signs (Barthes, 198)." As a metalanguage and a logic, criticism becomes a "formal activity, not in the esthetic sense but in the logical sense," a logic that seeks

"not decipherment of the work's meaning but the reconstruction of the rules and constraints of that meaning's elaboration; provided we admit at once that a literary work is a very special semantic system, whose goal is to put 'meaning' in the world, but not 'a meaning.' (Barthes, 199)"

This perspective expands the realm of literary study that the New Critics set out to narrow. The abstraction of objects which the Structuralists engage in allows for objects to be seen not as individual "experiences" (to use Brooks' term) but as systemic processes (such as Greimas's Elementary Structure of Signification) which not only "put meaning in the world" but which can be systematically compared. Thus, to the Structuralists, all "texts" are like anthills: systems which can be understood, abstracted, and expressed algebraically; that do not put "meaning" into the world in of themselves, they are meaning in the sense that they are systems which can be deconstructed, analyzed, and reconstructed.

The Objective of Formalist Criticism

The formalisms are also similar and different in their ideological precipitates. From his New Critical viewpoint, Brooks views poetry as an equation in balance: "the nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material (Brooks, 194)."

"We do not ask a poet to bring his poem into line with our personal beliefs—still less to flatter our personal beliefs. What we do ask is that the poem dramatize the situation so accurately, so honestly, with such fidelity to the total situation that it is no longer a question of our beliefs, but of our participation in the poetic experience (Brooks, 740)."

This view, while removing the power from the intentionalist approach (and therefore making the author equivalent to any other reader once his work is "out in the world") and the affective approach (taking the focus of the poem off of the reader and placing it back on the work), makes the New Critical approach, and the poetry it reads, inherently democratic. As Brooks says of Jarrell's Eighth Air Force:

"At his best, Jarrell manages to bring us, by an act of the imagination, to the most penetrating insight. Participating in this insight, we doubtless become better citizens. (One of the "uses" of poetry, I should agree, is to make us better citizens.) But poetry is not the eloquent expression of the citizen's creed. It is not even the accurate rendition of his creed. Poetry must carry us beyond the abstract creed into the very matrix out of which, and from which, our creeds are abstracted (Brooks, 740)."

By making all readers equal participants, and by giving them all equal access to the tools (techniques, irony, paradox) needed to appraise and interpret works, the dictatorial totalitarian-through-eminent-authority of the intentionalist approach and the anarchistic totalitarian-through-emergent-authority of the affective approach are invalidated.

For Shklovsky, the goal of literature was not the promotion of "good citizenship" but the reestablishment of the intimacy of perception. Automation (or habituation) is the destroyer of consciousness; literature is the force that makes the reader reevaluate the social reality itself:

"Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. 'If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they have never been.' The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known (Shklovsky, 12)."

For Shklovsky and his associates writing during the Russian Revolution, nothing could be more risky than losing "the fear of war." Shklovsky's argument is that life, the "feeling of performing the action for the ten thousandth time," robs the person of truly perceiving the world around him—much like some would argue that exposure to filmed portrayals of death habituate the young to the act of killing; it loses its meaning and therefore so does life. Literature, by presenting reality in a way that defamiliarizes it, forces the reader to perceive it as if for the first time, undoing the habit of automation that repetitive action and exposure has inoculated in him.

New Critical thought generates a democratic environment of participation and opens the doors for equal participation in debate. Russian Formalism, on the other hand, forces the individual to question his assumptions and challenge his habituation. Structuralism, however, questions societies as a whole, showing that the "systems" or "structures" underlying modern societies are no different from those of "primitive" cultures, for example, or that an experience as benign as a trip to Disneyland can be a reinforcement of American social programming. Genette expresses the possibility of Structuralism acting as a catalyst for social reevaluation and change:

"The inappropriateness that Ricoeur finds in the possible application of structuralism to the Judeo-Christian mythologies, a Melanesian philosopher would no doubt find in the structural analysis of his own mythical tradition, which he interiorizes just as a Christian interiorizes the biblical message; but conversely this Melanesian might find a structural analysis of the Bible quite appropriate. What Merleau-Ponty wrote of ethnology as a discipline can be applied to structuralism as a method: 'It is not a specialty defined by a particular object, primitive societies. It is a way of thinking, the way which imposes itself when the object is different, and requires us to transform ourselves. We also become the ethnologists of our own society if we set ourselves at a distance from it' (Genette, 15)."

Whereas the New Critics saw their approach to literature as a democratizing element, a means by which the potential equality of all readers (and therefore all citizens) would become apparent, and the Russian Formalists as a defamiliarizing element that forces people to perceive, and therefore act, as if being exposed to their circumstances for the first time, the Structuralists saw their method as a means by which individuals would distance themselves from the assumptions and ethnocentrisms of their cultures. As made explicit by Levi-Strauss:

"If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely different view—namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is a rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied." (Levi-Strauss, 230)

Once this paradigm shift is made, it is impossible to persecute alien cultures, because the transformation has taken place to make us perceive those "other" cultures' "alien" status not as an inferiority but simply as a difference that does not speak to the "quality" of the other culture. More so, if the term "mythical thought" is expanded to include all thought, we can begin to alienate ourselves from our personal, political, religious, and other assumptions, begin to recognize them as the subjective prejudices that they are, and reevaluate all reality, not on terms of our own assigning, but on its own terms.

Structuralism, though its algorithm of rereading as text and of deconstruction and reconstruction, threatens to uncover the weaknesses inherent in ideology:

"What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literature is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence (Paul De Man, 11)."

To De Man, what makes Structuralism powerful is how it abstracts all constructs and objects. This power of abstraction is how it allows us to view everything, even our own preconceptions, as alien; how it

"upsets rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanisms of their workings; it goes against a powerful philosophical tradition of which aesthetics is a prominent part; it upsets the established canon of literary works and blurs the borderlines between literary and non-literary discourse. By implementation, it may also reveal the links between ideologies and philosophy (Paul De Man, 11)."

This "something new," the "generally intelligible" that takes place in what Barthes calls the Structuralist Activity, is not the implementation or creation of limitations and barriers of the psychoanalysts and the bibliographers, but the re-creation of the human frontier at the edges of every human object in existence.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
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