“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”
—or, the fates of literary formalism
In Chapter 19 of Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide, the eponymous hero and his companion Cacambo find themselves on the outskirts of the South American town of “Surinam, then belonging to the Dutch.”
As they drew near the town, they saw a negro stretched upon the ground, with only one moiety of his clothes, that is, his blue linen drawers; the poor man had lost his left leg and his right hand.
“Good God!” said Candide in Dutch, “what art thou doing there, friend, in that shocking condition?”
“I am waiting for my master, Mynheer Vanderdendur, the famous merchant,” answered the negro.
“Was it Mynheer Vanderdendur,” said Candide, “that treated thee thus?”
“Yes, sir,” said the negro, “it is the custom. They give us a pair of linen drawers for our whole garment twice a year. When we work at the sugar canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe. (1759/2009: 95–6)
At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has his narrator Marlow matter-of-factly announce that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (1902/1996: 21). The rest of Conrad’s novel—which follows Marlow into the conquered interior of “the dark continent,” into “the horror” of the brutally exploitative ivory business in the Belgian Congo, to the very edge of Mister Kurtz’s murderous abyss, and then safely back to European “civilization” again—can be read, and has been read, as an explicit dramatization of this ostensibly anti-imperialist and anti-racist observation.1 So that at the novel’s end, when Marlow sits in Brussels, in the comfortable and “lofty drawing-room” of Kurtz’s “intended,” and surveys all the “pretty things” that surround him—
The bent gilt legs and back of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. (1902/1996)
—the ugly point is driven “home” yet again: The “pretty things” of a given civilization aren’t all that pretty, are actually riven with “bloody racist” contradictions, if you look into them “too much,” which is why those who get to enjoy the “pretty things” tend not to look into them very much at all.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we don’t have to look too hard at the “things” produced by monumental white civilization to see much that isn’t pretty. Late in the novel, Denver, the surviving daughter of Sethe—a character based, as Morrison relates in her foreword to the novel, on “the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation” (1987/2004: xvii)—notices a particularly un-pretty thing as she is leaving the house of some “good whitefolks” from whom she is seeking employment.
Denver left, but not before she had seen, sitting on a shelf by the back door, a blackboy’s mouth full of money. His head was thrown back farther than a head could go, his hands were shoved in his pockets. Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins needed to pay for a delivery or some other small service, but he could just as well have held buttons, pins or crab-apple jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words “At Yo Service.” (1987/2004: 300)
You’d have to be a pretty callous reader not to be angered, saddened, and repulsed by this figure, which Morrison depicts as being put on shameless display by some of the “good” (i.e., sympathetic, liberal) “whitefolks” of 1873 Ohio. But if you’re the kind of close and unforgetful reader that Morrison wants and warrants, you might let this image of a single “blackboy” on his knees, with his head thrown inhumanly back and his “mouth full of money,” remind you (particularly if you’re acquainted with the properly pornographical meaning of the term “money-shot”) of an earlier scene in the novel, involving Paul D’s memory of being one of 46 black men on a white-controlled chain-gang in Georgia.
Chain-up completed, they knelt down. The dew, more likely than not, was mist by then. Heavy sometimes and if the dogs were quiet and just breathing you could hear doves. Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or three. Or maybe all of them wanted it. Wanted it from one prisoner in particular or none—or all.
“Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?” “Yes, sir.”
“Hungry, nigger?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here you go.”
Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus. Paul D did not know that then. He was looking at his palsied hands, smelling the guard, listening to his soft grunts so like the doves’, as he stood before the man kneeling in the mist on his right. Convinced he was next, Paul D retched—vomiting up nothing at all. An observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle and the engaged one decided to skip the new man for the time being lest his pants and shoes got soiled by nigger puke. (1987/2004: 127)
Now, except for the fact that the not-so-pretty “things” presented in these three great moments in literary history—the sweet sugar, the grand piano, the grotesque figurine—are better described as artifacts or commodities than as “documents” or written texts, we might say that these three great authors—Voltaire, Conrad, Toni Morrison—all do a pretty good job of palpably rendering Walter Benjamin’s famous observation that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968: 256).
But because the three “things” represented here are, strictly speaking, less documents than commodities, objects produced by dint of physical rather than merely imaginative labor, we can productively trace Benjamin’s axiom back to its source in Marx, specifically in the theory of alienated labor that Marx sets forth in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There, and as we began to see in our first lesson, Marx argues that it is human labor and only human labor—“the act of production . . . the producing activity” (1932a/1978: 73)—that creates human reality, that objectively produces “humanity” itself. Marx, being a man of his times, often refers to human reality as “man”—as in “man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, the state, society” (Marx 1844/1978: 53), etc. And given his “historical materialist” assumption of the human creation of “man,” given his “socialist” assumption of the anthropogenetic nature of all human reality, Marx considers labor, the act of production, to be both the actual “origin of the species” and, at least potentially, “the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” (1932a/1978: 88–9).
However, as long as “man” is sufficiently self-benighted and self-impoverished by the world religions “he” has, in fact, created—for “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (Marx 1844/1978: 53)—this “objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” isn’t really going to get “him” very far or make “the human world,” the world that “man” is, particularly rich. For “religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again” (Marx 1844/1978: 53). But upon “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”—as Immanuel Kant puts it in the essay “What is Enlightenment?”—upon, that is, man’s learning to “have the courage to use [his] own understanding” (Kant 1784/1996: 51) and to own his own self-conscious self-awareness, to no longer squander his treasures on deities, “Man, who has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself—a non-human being—where he seeks and must seek his true reality” (Marx 1844/1978: 53).
For Marx, “man,” in seeking “his true reality,” is easily capable of overcoming “his” self-alienation in the “fantastic” sphere of religion or the “idealist” realm of Hegelian philosophy, mainly because these dialectical overcomings can take place in the imaginary, through acts of interpretation. But, “while the philosophers have only interpreted the world,” says Marx, “the point must be to change it” (1845/1978: 145), and changing the world by fully overcoming man’s self-alienation in the actually economic realm is another, much more “down to earth” matter. If under the systems of religion and idealist philosophy the “objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” is “intellectually” misinterpreted by as yet unenlightened “man” himself, under the private property system of commodity production—a.k.a. capitalism—this “objectively unfolded richness” is quite materially transmogrified, becomes an anything-but-imaginary means of enriching, cultivating, and humanizing some men and women at the vital expense of others—at the expense not only of the others’ physical labor but, because for Marx labor is the essentially humanizing activity of all human beings everywhere in history, of their actual humanity.2
Thus, we arrive at what Marx considers the ultimate or global contradiction, the “richest” irony of all time. Instead of the objectively human production of a fully human world, a fully human society (i.e., socialism), what we observe unfolding under capitalism—if we actually do “look into it”—is the human production of an inhuman world, the social production of an utterly reified reality in which “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men,” a reified reality where the world “which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (1932a/1978: 71). In Marx’s analysis, the world of private property, the world objectively produced by alienated labor (the world created by the workers but owned by the capitalists), is a world (and here’s where we start to get back to Benjamin) in which
the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman . . .
It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity . . . It produces intelligence, but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. (1932a/1978: 73, emphasis added)
Now, as an historical materialist, Marx is of course writing here about the entire panoply of production, about all sorts of reified social processes, not just about well-formed and “wonderful things” of “beauty” and “intelligence.” Benjamin, however, while also writing as an historical materialist, is describing what he specifically calls “cultural treasures,” celebrated “things” of beauty and intelligence traditionally thought to possess “intrinsic” literary or aesthetic value—artworks or textual “documents” or literary masterpieces like, say, Candide, or Heart of Darkness, or (even) Morrison’s Beloved. The historical materialist, says Benjamin, views all such beautifully formed literary achievements “with cautious detachment.”
For without exception the cultural treasures [she] surveys have an origin which [she] cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (1950/1968: 256)
II. What’s the matter with formalism?
In his book The Significance of Theory, Terry Eagleton divides “literary critics” into two groups—“those who understand what Walter Benjamin meant” in the passage just quoted “and those who do not.” But Eagleton also suggests that:
you do not need ‘theory’ to understand the meaning of [Benjamin’s] claim; many of those subjected to barbarism, bereft of academic education, understand its meaning perfectly well. You may, however, require theory to work out some of its implications. Benjamin did not presumably mean by his statement that documents of civilization were nothing but records of barbarism. He meant that there is a way of reading—difficult and delicate—[by] which [one] can . . . X-ray the text in order to allow to emerge through its affirmative pronouncements the shadowy lineaments of the toil, misery and wretchedness which made it possible in the first place. (1990: 32–3)
For Eagleton, and indeed for most contemporary theoretical writers, the group of literary critics who basically don’t get Benjamin, who made not getting Benjamin their critical mission in life, who don’t have and who don’t seem to want anyone else to have Benjamin’s “X-ray” vision into literature, who don’t seem to want (anyone) “to look into it too much,” tend to be called (or even to call themselves) formalists (though not all forms of formalism are equally Benjamin-resistant).
In the remainder of this lesson, we’ll consider two versions of literary formalism that actually had very little to do with each other. On the one hand, we’ll examine Anglo-American Formalism, a.k.a. New Criticism, the “mono-disciplinary” version that dominated literary studies in English from just after World War II through the Cold War and Vietnam Eras, but which was eclipsed by theory in the late 1970s and onward. On the other hand, we’ll consider the earlier Russian Formalism—“a lively and important interdisciplinary school that flourished around 1920” (Harmon and Holman 2006: 226, my emphasis)—as a version of formalism that in many ways informs and participates in the later theoretical onslaughts and, unlike New Criticism, remains relatively cognate and compatible with the analytical aims of materialist semiotics, with theoretical writing as writing against reification.
For the Russian formalists, formal study meant “the investigation of the specific properties of literary material, of the properties that distinguish such material from material of any other kind” (Eichenbaum 1978/1998: 8). Russian Formalism assumes that “the object of study in literary science is not literature but ‘literariness,’ that is, what makes a given work a literary work” (Jakobson, in Eichenbaum: 8). The Anglo-American Formalists were also concerned with isolating the specifically “literary” qualities of literature, segregating poetic from ordinary language, separating literary art from other genres, and inoculating literary criticism against infection by other academic disciplines (such as history or, worst of all, sociology). For the New Critics, however, formalism meant not only attention to the literariness of literature but an evaluative description of the literary work as an “organic unity” whose various parts all contribute to the “total” experience of the whole. But unlike the Russians, Anglo-American Formalists distanced themselves from “literary science” and devoted their energies to distinguishing literary study from scientific observation. Indeed, “the New Critics informed the study of literature with a concern for traditional religious and aesthetic values of the kind being displaced by science . . . the values of Christian theology and idealist aesthetics” (Rivkin and Ryan 1998: 7).
We’ll address these “displaced” values later on. First, let’s examine some formal definitions of formalism—and some formal complaints filed against it. The entry for “Formalism” in Harmon and Holman’s Handbook to Literature, for example, begins simply enough with “A term applied to criticism that emphasizes the form of the artwork.” But the entry’s author doesn’t get much further before complaining that “The whole form-formal-formalism family is beset by problems of reference.” The author observes that it is fairly easy to discuss form “with a clearly tangible object of culture, such as a cup,” but that with literary artworks, “it is difficult to specify what the form is because plot may be the form that contains the characters, the characters the form that contains the thoughts and feelings, the thoughts and feelings the form that shapes the diction, the diction the form that shapes the acoustic effects, and so on” (2006: 223–4).
Now, it’s fitting that in pointing out formalism’s problems of reference, the entry’s author distinguishes a cultural object such as a cup from a literary artwork, for to judge from some of their book titles—The Verbal Icon, The Well-Wrought Urn—the American New Critics did seem to want to frame the literary work as a spatial object. And it’s this spatializing and decontextualizing tendency that prompts later, more socially and historically conscientious theorists to howl. Eagleton, for example, complains that in trying “to convert the poem into a self-sufficient object, as solid and material as an urn or icon . . . what New Criticism did, in fact, was to convert the poem in to a fetish” (1983/1996: 42). For the Marxist Eagleton, to defetishize a cultural object is to de-reify it, to convert the product to a process, to reveal the underlying social relations that produced the object before it attained the dignity of the fetish. New Criticism is accused of fetishizing poems because its proponents desired to sever sonnets from any social context, and Eagleton here reads “form” as the very emblem of this ahistoricizing severance. For Eagleton, formalism and fetishism are twin symptoms of reification, and he thus calls formalism “a recipe for political inertia, and . . . submission to the political status quo” (1983/1996: 43).
So, let’s look at the key ingredients of this recipe for inertia more closely and consider in greater detail formalism’s alleged complicity with political submission, with ideological containment. In ordinary usage, the word “contain” would seem politically neutral, as for instance when I observe that the red Italian cup that rests beside the laptop on which I write contains coffee. Of course, a Marxist would counter that there’s nothing politically innocent about coffee or anything else a writer consumes, since questions of the forces and relations of production, private ownership of land, alienation and exploitation of labor, etc., all bear down upon the immiserating reality underlying the social fact of my fix of caffeine. In other words, Benjamin’s observation applies even to the not particularly well-wrought cultural object that contains my last remaining addiction. But, Benjamin’s claim notwithstanding, let’s say that “this cup contains coffee” seems politically neutral in a way that a statement such as, say, “the crowd has been contained” does not. For what was this crowd’s desire such that it needed to be contained, and by what “formal” methods? What relations obtain between the formal, seemingly neutral “containment” of coffee in a cup, or characters in a plot, and the more obviously political “containment” of potentially unruly crowds (like, say, those who at the time of this writing have been busy Occupying Wall Street and other avenues of capitalist hegemony)? What links formal exercises in aesthetic control to regimented demonstrations of political force, compelling the aforementioned submission to the status quo?
The New Critics did seem to have some “control issues,” as well as a strong investment in preserving—or resurrecting—a status quo. I. A. Richards, for example, writes that “The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest” (in Bertens 2001: 16). And Cleanth Brooks avers that “the characteristic unity of a poem . . . lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total governing attitude” (1947/2001: 1361). Now, the terms I’ve emphasized here—control, command, unification, hierarchy, subordination, total governance—all sound sufficiently benign when bathed in an “autonomously” aesthetic or poetical light. But the same terms sound more sinister if they are denied their autonomy and reinserted into a historical and political context. For example, this characteristic bit of Brooksian analysis—“The last figure thus seems to me to summarize [Wordsworth’s] poem—to offer to almost every facet of meaning suggested in the earlier lines a concurring and resolving image which meets and accepts and reduces each item to its place in the total unity” (1951/2007: 804)—sounds perfectly lovely and critically compelling until we are apprised of its author’s concurring involvement with the reactionary Vanderbilt Agrarians, or until we associate his rhetoric of resolution with their authoritarian solutions to social problems, their nostalgic desire to return to a traditional hierarchical Southern status quo in which every subordinate knew and obediently accepted his or her “rightful place” (no doubt “At Yo Service”) in the total governing unity.3
Now, Vanderbilt University, where the Agrarians took their stand, is located in Nashville, Tennessee, not that far from Memphis, the historical setting of the photograph documenting military “crowd control” that we examined in the previous lesson on Hegel. As we saw there, we can productively view the content of this striking image of striking black workers confronting an armed white militia in politically Hegelian terms. But we could also consider the shot from a purely aesthetic angle, as a formal composition—an autonomous, self-contained, and delicately balanced arrangement of lines, space, light, and shadow—and we could describe and evaluate everything we see that makes the photograph successful as a photograph without giving two hoots about the “racially charged” historical context. If we judge the photograph as a literary formalist would want us to judge a poem, we would have to demonstrate our “disinterestedness” in such “extrinsic” matters and exclude them from our consideration.4
For formalism depends upon inclusion and exclusion, upon segregating “intrinsic” from “extrinsic” considerations. As David Richter puts it, “All versions of formalism proposed an ‘intrinsic’ criticism that defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the text, and all . . . began in reaction to various forms of ‘extrinsic’ criticism that viewed the text as either the product of social and historical forces or a document making an ethical statement” (2007: 749, emphasis added). But rather like fetishism, formalism also depends upon historical amnesia; just as the fetishist must forget that he actually made the fetish figure in order to endow that figure with magical powers, so the formalist must forget the fact that his own critical activities indeed “began in reaction.” This amnesia allows the essentially “reactionary” distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” to be taken as a positive given and forbids any close scrutiny of the exclusionary manner in which the “intrinsic” as such is produced. In other words, the Anglo-American Formalists assume certain “intrinsically” literary qualities as being simply and independently there. The “intrinsically” and essentially literary is thus allowed to assume the “timeless” contours of a Platonic ideal.
Against such idealist essentialism, contemporary theoretical writers argue that the intrinsic qua intrinsic can be thought only with reference to the extrinsic, that the intrinsic is constituted by exclusion and is thus inescapably dependent on that which it excludes (just as the Hegelian Master’s mastery depends upon the forced recognition of the working slave, just as the capitalist’s private property depends upon the proletariat’s alienated labor, just as the efforts of great minds and talents owe their existence to the anonymous and often immiserating labor of their contemporaries). There can, in other words, be no “intrinsic” as such without referential dependence upon some needed-but-excluded other.
And so the ideal of “intrinsic value” falls prey to the deconstructive principle of constitutive otherness. We can see this principle at work in other dictionary entries on formalism that focus on what formalism self-definingly excludes. Childers and Hentzi define formalism as “the critical practice of focusing on the artistic technique of the text or object under consideration at the expense of the subject matter” and write that the term “has often been applied pejoratively to a number of types of criticism that emphasize a work’s structural design or pattern, or its style and manner—its form—in isolation from its contents” (1995: 116, emphases added); meanwhile Julian Wolfreys informs us that “The formalist approach to literature is one which, allegedly, retreats from any consideration of history, ideology or context, concerning itself only with the formal aspects of the text” (2004: 142, emphasis added).
Expense, isolation, reaction, retreat—such are the impoverishing terms of formalism’s self-enrichment and self-fortification. But the more serious problem with formalism involves the way its “literary” exclusions mirror and abet other, more literal forms of exclusion and containment. In this sense, we could say that Virginia Woolf pretty much nails the main ethical and political problem with Anglo-American Formalism a few decades before its full development as a critical school. At the end of the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own, after describing being shut out of the library and shooed off the greens of the all-male enclave she archly calls “Oxbridge” University, Woolf, effectively demolishing New Criticism before the fact of its advent, writes that she “thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and . . . how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and . . . of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer” (1929/1989: 24). Woolf also preemptively tears formalism a new one when she writes that:
Shakespeare’s plays . . . seem to hang there complete by themselves [which is of course how the New Critics will want the bard’s plays to hang]. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (1929/1989: 41–2)
With Woolf’s “preposterous” assistance, “one remembers” in advance the expense both of excluding others and of isolating the literary work from any concern with the actual social conditions that produced it, “the toil, misery and wretchedness which made it possible in the first place” (Eagleton 1990: 33). The New Critics essentially wanted to segregate literary works from their various contexts in order to talk about literature as literature. They invested in “the drawing of distinctions” and assumed not merely the utility but the inevitability of the distinctions they themselves drew. As Brooks puts it, “Man’s experience is indeed a seamless garment, no part of which can be separated from the rest. Yet if we urge this fact of inseparability against the drawing of distinctions, then there is no point in talking about criticism at all. I am assuming that distinctions are necessary and useful and indeed inevitable” (1952/2007: 798–9). As Wimsatt and Beardsley reiterate:
There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context—or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about. (1954/2007: 815)
But most contemporary theoretical writers hold to the conviction that it is only by radically considering contexts, unveiling occluded political desires, that we have anything critically engaging to discuss. More to the point, most contemporary theorists suspect that the New Critical effort to jettison context arose not simply from the desire to talk brightly about literature “for literature’s sake” but, more darkly, from the desire to silence or exclude other questions, and that this desire was part and parcel of the need to muzzle other questioners—interlocutors and interlopers who didn’t physically or psychically resemble the straight, white, upper middle-class, right-wing Christian men who were the New Critics themselves. As Robert Dale Parker points out:
The new critics’ effort to exile social meaning carries (ironically) a social meaning, for it suggests their fear of the changing social world, of conflicts across [the lines of] race, gender, and class. Their vision of unity has no place, literarily or socially, for most of the rest of us. (2008: 25)
The problem with formalism, then, is that it attempts to forget what materialist semiotics and “writing against reification” can never afford not to remember—“the work of [the rest of us] suffering human beings.”
Repeating Virginia Woolf’s phrase with a twist, I’m conflating her specifically literary “work” with Eagleton’s generally materialist “toil” in order to underscore Benjamin’s point that these two forms of labor—the sublimely civilized work located in the cultural superstructure, the barbarically wretched toil located in the socioeconomic base—are inextricably related.5 But I also employ Woolf’s phrase, and change an adjective to a verb, in order to suggest that “the work of suffering human beings” can be very hard work indeed, given how insufferable some of them prove themselves to be. And I confess that what I find most insufferable in Anglo-American Formalism is its obvious indenture to “religious dogma” (Eagleton 1983/1996: 42). As Eagleton points out, “several of the leading American New Critics were Christians” (1983/1996: 42), and as I will argue in what follows, Cleanth Brooks was particularly invested in transubstantiating “new” literary criticism into a quite traditional form of Christian devotion.
In “The Rise of English,” Eagleton suggests that “If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse that reply ‘the failure of religion’ ” (1983/1996: 20). What he means here is that “English studies,” in picking up the ball that “organized religion” in late Victorian society supposedly dropped, assumed religion’s function of maintaining “ideological control” through acting as a sort of “social ‘cement’ ”—providing critical crowd containment, engaging and binding readers at the level of “deep-seated a-rational fears and needs”, “fostering” in the effectively pacified flock not revolution but “meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner life” (1983/1996: 20). In other words, says Eagleton, English studies were originally complicit with, not a liberatory break from, the ideological functions of “failed” religion. Like religion, English studies were basically invented to help ensure “political inertia and submission to the political status quo” (1983/1996: 43). And one upshot of this mass-opiating complicity of English studies with religion was that some English professors set themselves up as displaced priests whose classrooms became dens of religious genuflection.6
As for Cleanth Brooks, he begins his 1952 treatise entitled “My Credo” with a list of so-called articles of faith. In one of these, however, he explicitly dismisses the idea that literature is “a surrogate for religion” (1952/2007: 798). This dismissal would seem to contradict my assertion that Brooks wanted to turn criticism into formal worship. But, if we look more closely at Brooks’ articles of high fidelity (there are, for some reason, 10), we’ll see how that contradiction is resolved, if not what for Brooks constitutes the ultimate resolution of all contradiction. To use his own words, “I do not think we can quite shut out the theological overtones” (1951/2007: 802) of Brooks’ articles of faith.
The first two of these are “That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object” and that “the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity—the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.” The third and fourth articles—“In a successful work, form and content cannot be separated” because “form is meaning” (1952/2007: 798)—will receive no further commentary here. For it’s with the next two axioms that things start to take their theological turn. Brooks believes “that literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic” and “that the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the concrete and the particular” (1952/2007: 798). He elaborates on these two articles elsewhere, in an essay called “Irony as a Principle of Structure”:
One can sum up modern poetic technique by calling it the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor. The poet can legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular. The poet does not select an abstract theme and then embellish it with concrete details. On the contrary, he must establish the details, must abide by the details, and through his realization of the details attain to whatever general meaning he can . . . Thus, our conventional habits of language have to be reversed when we come to deal with poetry. For here it is the tail that wags the dog. Better still, here it is the tail of the kite . . . that makes the kite fly.
The tail . . . seems to negate the kite’s function: it weights down something made to rise; and in the same way, the concrete particulars with which the poet loads himself seem to deny the universal to which he aspires. The poet wants to “say” something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and forthrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks not saying it at all. But the risk must be taken for direct statement leads to abstraction that threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.
The commitment to metaphor thus implies, with respect to general theme, a principle of indirection. (1951/2007: 799)
Now, with this principle of indirection in mind, let’s wander back to those last two “articles of faith.” How and why do articles six and seven lead up to the startling article number eight—“that literature is not a surrogate for religion” (1952/2007: 798)? Religion hasn’t been explicitly mentioned thus far, so why would Brooks feel the need at this particular moment to disavow the idea that literature surrogates faith? Of course, the idea that poetry would “replace” religion had been in the belletristic air ever since Matthew Arnold, and perhaps Brooks simply wanted to dispel it. Basic psychoanalytic interpretation, however, alerts us to the ways in which a disavowal might indicate an unconscious affirmation, and so here Brooks’ overt statement that literature does not surrogate religion may indicate his covert desire that it in some way actually does or should. And the placement of this disavowal suggests that the terms of the surrogacy might be embedded in the immediately preceding assertions about metaphor and symbol, the universal and the particular.
What are Brooks’ major critical keywords, and how might they indicate the theological overtones of his operative critical principles? The most prominent terms are metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension, and unity.7 To take the first two, we might agree with Brooks that a sense of metaphor and irony are indispensable if one is to read or write literature, that without them we’d be stuck with only literal or denotative language and “literature” just wouldn’t be happening. However, we need to examine closely what irony and metaphor ultimately amount to in Brooks’ close readings.
As we’ve already read, Brooks sums up modern poetic technique by calling it “the rediscovery of metaphor and the full commitment to metaphor.” And yet the rest of the paragraph concerning this rediscovery harps on the difference between universal and particular, abstract theme and concrete detail. If this harping doesn’t seem particularly relevant to metaphor, remember that the word “metaphor” stems from the expression “to carry” and that metaphor operates as a form of verbal transportation—the basic components of metaphor are tenor and vehicle, with the former representing the general substance of the metaphor and the latter that which conveys the tenor. Thus, in the example provided by Aristotle in The Poetics—“He was in the evening of his life”—old age is the tenor and “evening” is the vehicle. “He was in the evening of his life” is thus an indirect way of saying he’s old as hell, a geezer getting close to being a goner.
Brooks thus rightly asserts that the “commitment to metaphor” implies a “principle of indirection.” As per Emily Dickinson’s instructions to “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the poet cannot say anything directly and forthrightly but must employ metaphorical indirection, and this imperative allows us to see how the universal/particular distinction involves metaphor—the universal is the tenor of the metaphor and the particular is the vehicle.
But why, in an essay the title of which promises a discussion of irony, would Brooks begin with the question of metaphor? Is metaphor in some way a form of irony? Ironically, yes, it seems as if it is, because if we define irony as does Brooks—“irony is our most general term for indicating [the] recognition of incongruities” (1947/2001: 1363), that is, the recognition of a discrepancy between what seems and what is—then we can indeed read metaphor as a potential field of irony. A particular word may seem to mean one thing, but the word can be qualified, contextualized, or “warped and bent” (1947/2001: 1363) to mean something altogether different. Brooks writes that “irony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualifications which the various elements in a context receive from the context” (1947/2001: 1363). Literally, or denotatively, then, the word “evening” signifies only the later hours of the day; metaphorically, or connotatively, it can mean the latest or last years of a life. But Brooks is right to suggest that there must be a context for any single word to assume metaphorical dimensions. The word “evening” cannot be metaphorical “all by itself.” Framed in the simple sentence “It was evening,” the word still hasn’t been sufficiently contextualized to work metaphorically, and if we say only “He was in the evening” it just sounds stupid, as if a word were missing (OK, he was what in the evening?). But with the complete sentence—“He was in the evening of his life”—we can grasp the qualification or context that makes the sentence metaphorical, and hence ironical.
For Brooks, both irony and metaphor concern the discrepancy between denotation and connotation, between the literal and the figurative. For him, then, the relationship between the universal and the particular is both ironic and metaphorical. The particular, concrete detail carries the universal meaning, and is thus metaphorical, but the particular can only metaphorize the universal if its denotative meaning gets bent, warped, contextualized, qualified. In a successful work, the particular only seems to be only particular, literal; ironically, it also signifies something else, something greater—the universal meaning.
OK, but what does all this terminological monkey business have to do with religion, with “theological overtones,” and with Brooks’ seemingly pat disavowal of literature’s surrogacy for religious faith?
Let me alert you to the fact that when Cleanth Brooks reads a specific poem, he typically focuses on particular instances of irony and metaphor in order to move toward a dominant metaphor or irony that he believes controls or resolves or even becomes the poem itself. For example, in Brooks’ reading, the “well-wrought urn” that appears in Donne’s poem “The Canonization” becomes a containing figure for all the poem’s tensions and ambiguities. This movement toward the dominant metaphor in the poem reflects Brooks’ desire to arrive at a resolution to the poem’s ironies, the resolution that Brooks is happy to call the poem’s unity—its “total meaning” or “total situation” (1947/2001: 1362). For every little irony in the formally accomplished poem, Brooks decrees, there shall be the dominant irony of the poem, the “principle of structure” that situates the poem as a unified, resolved, aesthetic totality.
But what if there were for Brooks a single dominant irony that resolved or unified all the others—a sort of meta-metaphor that ultimately abides outside of poetry but which poetry itself metaphorizes? I think that there is such a metaphor and that Brooks states it fairly directly. I, however, will proceed to it indirectly and hark back to the ironic tension between the universal and the particular. Brooks, as you’ll recall, announces that the poet can only legitimately “step out into the universal by first going through the narrow door of the particular.” Can one not note the structural similarity between that assertion and another, more overtly theological one, which maintains that one can only get to the Father, indirectly, by way of the Son? I believe that this structural similarity is in fact a structurating one for Brooks; I believe that any metaphor or irony that Brooks brings to our attention is itself a metaphor for the dominant metaphor, irony, and paradox of Christianity itself—God is the universal and Christ is the particular; God is the tenor and Christ is the vehicle. Christ seems to be just a man, just a slob like one of us, but ironically, he’s also God. God would seem to be almighty and all-powerful, but paradoxically, there he is, ecce homo, hanging, suffering, dying on the cross. Christ seems to be dead, but, lo, he is risen, etc. And through that resurrection, the tension between the human and the divine is resolved, the soul does not perish but is unified with God, etc. But in Christianity this holy harmony is possible only through spiritual indirection, through irony, metaphor, and paradox. Like poets, who can “step out into the universal” only by way of the particular, believers can climb the stairway to the heavenly Father only “by way” of the loving self-sacrifice of the Son.
I would thus hazard to say that Brooks is lying, or at least being ironic, when he says that literature is not a surrogate for religion, because the experience of poetry so evidently metaphorizes the experience of Christian faith for him that the two would seem to be as one. Compare two “crucial” paragraphs in “The Language of Paradox”:
For us today, Donne’s imagination seems obsessed with the problem of unity; the sense in which the soul is united with God. Frequently, as we have seen, one type of union becomes a metaphor for the other. It may not be too far-fetched to see both as instances of, and metaphors for, the union which the creative imagination itself effects. (1947/1998: 67)
The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne’s “Canonization” which holds the phoenix-lovers’ ashes: it is the poem itself . . . But there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain the ashes of a Phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only, though that often seems to be their chief significance to [historicist or non-formalist] professors of literature. The phoenix rises from its ashes; or ought to rise, but it will not arise for all our mere sifting and measuring the ashes, or testing them for their chemical content. We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the imagination itself; else “Beautie, Truth, and Raritie” remain enclosed in their cinders and we shall end with essential cinders, for all our pains. (1947/1998: 69)
For Brooks, I believe, the paradox of the creative imagination is the paradoxical unity offered through the body of Christ: God as man as metaphor for the reunion of the lost soul with its Creator. And though Christ himself is never directly mentioned, he certainly seems figured into the phoenix, that great honking symbol of death and resurrection, and even into the kite mentioned in “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” that holy flying kite which “rises steadily against the thrust of the wind.” The kite, you’ll recall, is structurally ironic and paradoxical because it has to be weighted down by some tail in order to rise. Likewise, to pin the tail on the Deity, Christ is ironical and paradoxical because, even though God, he must assume a human form, must load himself down with the particularity of human flesh and blood in order to shed that blood for us, in order to die “for all our pains” and get himself resurrected. And we, Brooks preaches, “must be prepared to accept” that paradox or we will all have died and gone to a hell in which words have only denotative meanings, poems fail to add up to organic unities, sociologists blind us with science, students or (worse) tenured colleagues “who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” ask annoying questions about race, sex, gender, history, politics, imperialism, colonialism, etc.
Now, if, after having sat through this sermon, we return to Brooks’ sixth “article of faith”—“that literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic”—we might behold that we can warp and bend its language so as finally to stop shutting out the theological overtones—we might say that Brooks’ ultimate faith is that literature metaphorizes and symbolizes the Ultimate, the Absolute, that if for Brooks literature doesn’t surrogate religion it’s only because for him literature literally is religion, and that perhaps the final irony about Brooks is that there is, in the end, for his money, absolutely no irony left at all. In the end, that is, Brooks absolves irony of the sin of having been ironic, for what seems to be the dominant sense of irony in Brooks’ criticism turns out to be the critical domination of irony itself, “the labor of controlling incongruities” (Leitch 2001: 1352). In Brooks’ work, openness to irony noticeably transubstantiates into a stony invulnerability to irony:
Irony, then . . . is not only an acknowledgment of the pressures of context. Invulnerability to irony is the stability of a context in which the internal pressures balance and mutually support each other. The stability is like that of the arch: the very forces which are calculated to drag the stone [of castle or cathedral] to the ground actually provide the principle of support—a principle in which thrust and counterthrust become the means of stability. (1952/2007: 801)
I believe, then, that what makes Brooks literarily formalist is inseparable from what makes him credulously Christian—ultimately, he is not fully committed to metaphor, tension, irony, ambiguity, or any of that other jazz but rather to what resolves, contains, controls, dominates, stabilizes, and unifies them. For Brooks, the ultimate principle of structure is always organic unity, never corrosive irony. He is thus closer in spirit to the preacher than to the poet or the scientist. He would seem to side with the poet against the scientist in “The Language of Paradox,” where he writes that “The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings” (1947/1998: 62). There would seem to be something “proto-deconstructive” about the way Brooks privileges poetry’s disruptions and violations over science’s tendency to terminological stabilization. Brooks would seem eligible for membership in that theoretical club whose charter is to “de-reify the language of thought” (Jameson 2009: 9). And yet, if my reading of Brooks as a reactionary religious acolyte wearing literary critic’s clothing is at all persuasive, we can say that Brooks’ proto-deconstructive tendencies finally run up against the bulwark of his faith in aesthetic unity, which itself metaphorizes divine unity, and which Brooks hoped would finally ensure sexual, political, racial, and academic unity. In other words, Brooks’ faithful formalism is anything but deconstructive and anything but Benjaminian. This formalism ultimately seeks to restabilize whatever disruptions and violations might be effected by poetic language—or by writing about “writing as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646).
IV. Strategies of estrangement
Russian Formalism, however, got along quite well without New Criticism’s idealist, theological, and segregationist baggage, which is one reason why Victor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization, or ostranenie, as developed in the 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” can be considered compatible with the work of contemporary theoretical writing.
Shklovsky begins his essay by taking issue with Alexander Potebnya’s assertion that “art is thinking in images” (1917/2007: 775). Shklovsky doesn’t really mind Potebnya’s effort to specify an activity that would define the essential “artiness” of verbal art; he just doesn’t think that “thinking in images” quite fits the bill. In particular, Shklovsky objects to Potebnya’s assertion that “the purpose of imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known” (1917/2007: 775)—or at least, he objects to the idea that epistemological clarification amounts to a specifically aesthetic use or experience of language. Another objection involves the problem of literary history—if imagery is the defining characteristic of poetry, as Potebnya asserts, then a history of poetics would have to account for changes in imagery, whereas poetic images, in Shklovsky’s opinion, change very little. Poets, he writes, “are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them” (1917/2007: 776); verbal artistry, for Shklovsky, thus essentially concerns strategy or technique, not creation or clarification.
Furthermore, since imagery is an aspect of both poetry and prose, one can hardly allow imagery to define poetry. Potebnya, says Shklovsky, “ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetry, as a means of reinforcing an impression.” He clarifies the distinction as follows:
I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, “butterfingers” is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric.) (1917/2007: 776)
Now, this distinction between metaphor and metonymy will assume a certain importance in the later adventures of literary theory, so let’s linger with it for a while. Why, let’s ask, does Shklovsky label the first use of “butterfingers” metonymic and the second metaphoric? Why would he consider metaphor (a figure of speech based on similarity or analogy) poetic and call metonymy (a figure of speech based on association or contiguity) prosaic?
We might say that the first instance of “butterfingers” is metonymic because prosaic or “realistic.” In the first example, that is, the child really does have butter on her fingers, and the physical contiguity of the real matter with the actual fingers is mirrored and affirmed by the physical combination of “butter” with “fingers” in the trope “butterfingers.” In the second example, the child does not really have butter on her fingers, but in the metaphor “butterfingers” it’s as if she did, as if the slippery substance had caused her to drop Shklovsky’s glasses. Thus, the difference between metonymy and metaphor can be read as the difference between, on the one hand, the prosaic and realistic and, on the other, the imaginative (the as if) and the negative (the not really). Both instances involve imagery, if you like, but while the first, metonymic usage is prosaic, “journalistic,” mere sensory reportage that allows us to “see” what’s actually there (butter on fingers), the second, metaphorical usage is poetic, more verbally and cognitively “artistic,” an imaginative leap that invites us to envision what’s not really there (again, butter on fingers).
But there’s an irony here, involving ostranenie, even if Shklovsky himself doesn’t put his finger on it. If I mumble “butterfingers!” at some fumbler whose fingers aren’t literally buttered, I have indeed employed metaphor rather than metonymy. But my metaphorical usage isn’t, simply by virtue of being metaphorical, necessarily more “poetic” than my metonymically calling a really butterfingered person “butterfingers.” Why not? Well, perhaps the metaphor was fresh in 1917, but today, this facile figure is so well-worn and overly lubricated that it’s practically become what automatically slips out of the average person’s hole in response to seeing another lose her grip. However, it takes a special sort of idiot to be so obvious as to dub the really butterfingered person a “butterfingers.” Either our idiot is ignorant of the metaphor and is simply using the metonym to register exactly what he sees, or the idiot is more adroitly referring to and negating the clichéd metaphorical negation, as if to say “Your attention, please. Ordinarily, the average person uses the metaphor butterfingers to refer not to someone with literally buttered fingers but to a fumbler—but look, here I’m with a sort of ostentatious mock-stupidity doing just the opposite, inserting the obviously prosaic metonym in the place of the more familiarly ‘poetic’ metaphor.” In either case, this idiotically “real” use of the metonym “butterfingers” is rather extraordinary compared to the average/automatic utterance of the clichéd metaphor. Through over-use and over-familiarity, the metaphor has lost its edge, become practically literal, and so now the metonym—by virtue of a hyper-literal foregrounding of the obvious that disturbs or displaces the familiar—actually creates the stronger impression. And since for Shklovsky “poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression” (1917/2007: 776), here the realistic metonym could be considered more poetic, more a “work of art,” than the standard metaphor.
Shklovsky writes that “by ‘works of art’ . . . we mean works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible” and thus to create “the strongest possible impression.” He writes that “poetic imagery” is one such impressive technique, but that “as a method it is, depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques” (1917/2007: 776). His adversary Potebnya’s “law of the economy of creative effort” (1917/2007: 777) pertains to modes of perception that involve the least possible mental exertion and to modes of discourse that communicate the most expediently. Again, Shklovsky doesn’t mind the application of this law to practical language, but he objects to its being extended to poetry. He writes that “If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic” and that “all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic” (1917/2007: 778). Such unconscious automatism leads us into a sort of perceptual “algebra,” by means of which we do not see objects “in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics.”
We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten . . . The process of “algebrization,” the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. (1917/2007: 778, emphases added)
The purpose of art, however, is for Shklovsky precisely to disrupt this “habitualization” and “algebrization” of perceived objects. The purpose of art is to de-automatize, to dis-habituate, to discomfort, to defamiliarize. Shklovsky cites a passage from Tolstoy’s diary registering the extent to which our habituation of so much of our daily lives has the effect of erasing our lives’ real substance. He writes that in accord with this dismal algebra, “life is reckoned as nothing” because “habitualization devours” just about everything. As Tolstoy complains, “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” For Shklovsky, however, “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (1917/2007: 778, emphasis added)
These passages establish Shklovsky’s “formalist” bona fides—because only a formalist would ever privilege technique over content. For Shklovsky, however, a “form” is not an “organic unity,” a “self-sufficient object,” a “spatial figure,” a reified “fetish” or article of faith, but rather a “temporal process” (Eagleton 1983/1996: 42)—“A work is created ‘artistically’ so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its [temporal] continuity” (1917/2007: 783). Form, then, is not a perceived thing but a “difficult” perceptual event. Thus, for Shklovsky, form is not a means of “containment,” but rather engages our perceptual resistance to containment, particularly epistemological containment. Art, for Shklovsky, is a struggle against our habitual attempt to “clarify the unknown by means of the known” (1917/2007: 775). What “difficult” forms resist is our normal, ordinary, routine, automatic ways of understanding, of taking the world in. And given the extent to which we’ve been “taken in” by “normal understanding”—trained to revere “understanding” or “knowledge” (or “faith” in “truth”) above everything else—perhaps the most “difficult” aspect of Shklovsky’s “formalism” is the provocative way he pits art against “understanding,” the way he distinguishes between the “event” of seeing and the “uneventful” act of knowing, between enlivening aesthetic perception and mortifyingly familiar knowledge.
Nietzsche, as you’ll recall, diagnosed the epistemological drive in terms of the anxious desire to reduce “the strange” to “the familiar.” For Nietzsche, the familiar is “what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, . . . anything at all in which we feel at home,” and so, “our need for knowledge [is] precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us.” For Nietzsche, it is “the instinct of fear that bids us to know” and “the jubilation of those who attain knowledge . . . [is] jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security” (1887/2006: 368).
Following Nietzsche, Shklovsky cautions us against the habituating aspects of “secure” knowledge and offers art’s strategies of estrangement as a means of recovering sensations and perceptions that we lose or miss through ease, habit, faith, or fear. For Shklovsky, artistic defamiliarization and epistemological clarification are in tension each other, and the former—or perhaps the formal—is actively hostile to the latter.
I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found. In other words, . . . an image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object—it creates a “vision” of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it. (1917/2007: 781)
In studying art, then, and particularly “poetic speech,” what we find, writes Shklovsky, is “the artistic trademark . . . We find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception” (1917/2007: 783). Positing “form” as defamiliarization allows Shklovsky to privilege the temporal aspects of poetry as “formed speech” (1917/2007: 784) over the spatial aspects, which in turn allows us to distinguish Shklovsky’s formalism from New Critical fetishism.
But defamiliarization also opens up a way of reading the history of poetic perception, and this opening also sets Shklovsky’s formalism apart from New Criticism’s closed and ahistoricizing “idealist aesthetics.” Shklovsky calls poetry “a difficult, roughened, impeded language” (1917/2007: 783) and defines poetry as “attenuated, tortuous speech” (1917/2007: 784). Given this definition, we might posit that one aspect of poetry’s rough trade would involve “promoting the palpability of signs,” deepening “the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects,” as Roman Jakobson will later put it (1960/2007: 856). But another aspect of “torturous” defamiliarization involves what Shklovsky calls “disordering the rhythm” of poetic speech. “The rhythm of prose is an important automatizing element; the rhythm of poetry is not” (1917/2007: 784). And yet Shklovsky quickly points out that rhythmic disordering “cannot be predicted” or systematized—“Should the disordering of rhythm become a convention, it would be ineffective as a device for the roughening of language” (1917/2007: 784).
And here’s where history, of a sort, enters the picture. Shklovsky insists that artworks are “works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible.” But specific techniques or devices don’t always or eternally work to make artworks artworks. In the fourteenth century, for Giotto, the specifically new technique that made the painting obviously artistic was perspective; in the nineteenth century, for Gauguin, the device that made the painting obviously artistic was the abolition of perspective.8 Or, to go back to “butterfingers”—in a specific historical context, a roughly “prosaic” metonym might be more “artistic” than a smoothly “poetical” metaphor. Some coarse prose might be more palpably “attenuated” than some fluent poetry. One can never predict or permanently decide in advance exactly what it will take for an artist in any genre to make us feel or see, to make the stone stony, to make the painting painterly, to form (or torture) practical language into poetry.
And here’s where history of another sort enters the picture. Shklovsky writes that “According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and in fact, it is often actually foreign” (1917/2007: 784). He goes on to cite examples of linguistic, historical, and geographical “foreignnesses” embedded within various poetical practices. For Shklovsky, then, poetic language, by appearing strange and wonderful, allows “foreignness” itself to appear strange and wonderful—rather than, say, bewildering and terrifying. Impeding the reactionary and paranoid habit of “clarifying the unknown by means of the known,” poetry—the language of defamiliarization—can serve an ethical political purpose in promoting openness to “the foreign,” teaching its readers not to be afraid of “the other” (not, e.g., to automatically assume the “foreigner” to be a “terrorist”). Not that any form of “attenuated, tortuous speech” possesses some inherently ethical power to keep reactionaries from torturing foreigners or to prevent literal exterminations of the unfamiliar. There is no necessary or “intrinsic” relation between aesthetic defamiliarization and a progressive or liberatory ethics of alterity. There is no “specific technique” that can both make our artwork “as obviously artistic as possible” and permanently keep the documents of our civilization from becoming the registers of our barbarity.
And yet, for some writers, the hope remains that art, in some rough form or another, can still make at least a few stones stony. Or, in other words, the hope remains that an interventional art of the sentence can remain “a crucial element of critical subversion, a political mode [of writing] that is designed to produce a sense of alienation and discomfort in the reader so that newness may enter and alter a defamiliarized world” (Salih 2004: 4).
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Seven:
alienated labor, formalism, aesthetics, Agrarians, disinterestedness, base/superstructure, metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity, tension, unity, tenor/vehicle, metonymy, perspective
Notes
1 The novel has also been read as a displacement or evasion of Marlow’s observation, as a justification for Anglo-Europeans’ not looking “too much” into the imperialism and colonialism with which Conrad himself—whom Chinua Achebe famously called “a bloody racist” (1978/1989: 9)—is held to be fully complicit. See Rabinowitz (1996).
2 In Marx’s analysis, workers—that is, those who have no capital, no means of living other than selling their labor power to the capitalists—are alienated in four interrelated ways: They are alienated (1) from the product of their labor (think of laborers in sweat-shops who could not possibly afford to buy the high-end sneakers that they make; (2) from the activity of production (think of the miserable, repetitive, dehumanizing, soul-killing toil of sweat-shop and factory labor, which doesn’t seem to resemble the “objectively unfolded richness” of anybody’s “essential being”); (3) from other human beings (from the owners and managers, who are always trying to extort more labor out of the worker for less money, and from other workers in a competitive and non-unionized “labor market”); and (4) from their own humanity or “species being,” as Marx puts it (since labor is the essentially humanizing activity, alienated labor is essentially dehumanizing).
3 For my money, Eagleton is historically accurate when he associates New Criticism with “irrationalism . . . religious dogma . . . and with the right-wing ‘blood and soil’ politics of the Agrarian movement” (1983/1996: 42). The Agrarians were “a group of Southern American writers in Nashville, Tennessee, who published The Fugitive (1922–1925), a little magazine . . . championing agrarian regionalism . . . Most of its contributors were associated with Vanderbilt University; among them were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate . . . [and] Robert Penn Warren . . . In the 1930s, championing an agrarian economy as opposed to that of industrial capitalism, they issued a collective manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand . . . The Agrarians were among the founders of the New Criticism” (Holman and Harmon 2006: 11). Some of the Agrarians were also proudly racist—Allen Tate, author of the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” is known to have haughtily declined to attend a Vanderbilt social event honoring visiting poet Langston Hughes on the grounds that Hughes was, well, after all, “a Negro” (Baker 1988: 144). Some Agrarians, including Tate, were also open admirers of European fascism—see Brinkmeyer (2009).
4 The term disinterestedness can be said to originate from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, but “is perhaps most familiarly associated with the criticism of Matthew Arnold,” who used the word “to mean a state of ideal objectivity and neutrality, an impartiality that allows the critic to see an object ‘as in itself it really is.’ ” Disinterestedness is “the cornerstone of an objectivist theory of poetry, which invokes timeless standards of quality.” Contemporary theory dismisses the possibility of disinterestedness or objectivity and “emphasizes the imbrications of individuals in language, history, and culture” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 85–6).
5 “Base and superstructure are Marxist terms referring to the interdependent and reflexive relationship between the economic foundations of society (base) and the forms of state and social consciousness which inevitably follow that structure” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 27).
6 For Eagleton, “the key figure here is Matthew Arnold” (1983/2001: 21), who in 1880, expressed the belief that “we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” and that “most of what now passes with us for religion . . . will be replaced by poetry (in Bertens 2001: 2). Consider also the language of the British Board of Education’s 1921 “Newbolt Report”: “Literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human spirit, in which all should worship” (in Bertens 2001: 10). And consider I. A. Richards, who like Arnold “saw in poetry an antidote to . . . spiritual malaise,” who believed that verse is a means of “overcoming chaos” and that literature “is capable of saving us” (in Bertens 2001: 16). Small wonder, then, that the New Critics, influenced by Arnold and Richards, saw themselves as “disappointed priests seeking in literature for a new Word to replace the one the world had lost” (Richter 2007: 760).
7 Metaphor is a verbal comparison or analogy based upon similarity. Irony “refers to an expression or event that means something different connotatively from what it means denotatively”; paradox “refers to an expression that combines opposite ideas”; ambiguity, “similar to paradox, refers to suggestively multiple and unsettled meanings”; and tension “refers to connected ideas that pull away from each other without reaching resolution” (Parker 2008: 16–17). Unity, at least for Brooks, is that which finally stabilizes, contains, resolves, and controls irony, paradox, ambiguity, and tension.
8 In painting, perspective is the “method of representing spatial extension into depth on a flat or shallow surface, utilizing such optical phenomena as the apparent diminution in size of objects and the convergence of parallel lines as they recede from the spectator” (Chilvers 1988: 379). Perspective is a technique that gives the illusion of three-dimensional depth to a two-dimensional canvas.