THE FORMALISTIC APPROACH

THE FORMALISTIC APPROACH--Criticism & Theory

[Study material prepared for MPhil students of Annamalai University] Dr. S. Sreekumar

I.    A.     A brief history. Formalistic criticism became popular in the 20^th century. This approach is also called New Criticism. Formalistic criticism is not directly connected with the Russian Formalists though there are some connections between the two. Formalists helped to create the habit of close reading among students, teachers and scholars.

     Formalists taught us to look at a work as an organic form. One of their main concerns was with the form. The new critics did not invent the form. But they helped us to look at form as a vital part of any art. “Art entails form; form takes many forms.”

B.            Backgrounds of Formalistic Theory. 

Aristotle’s Poetics recommends an “orderly arrangement of parts”. Horace admonishes the would- be poet: “ In short, be your subject what it will, let it be simple and unified”. But the Romantic Movement in Europe in the late 18^th century intensified speculations about form. Coleridge said that in a poem the parts “mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement”.

     In America, Edgar Allan Poe, extending Coleridge’s theory asserted that short lyric poems and short tales are excellent because they can maintain and transmit a single unitary effect more successfully than long works like Paradise Lost. He claimed that his poem “The Raven” developed from a single unitary effect. Later in the 19^th century Henry James argued that form is important for fiction also. He said, “Form alone takes, and holds and preserves substance – saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding”.

C.        New Criticism.     A systematic and methodological formalistic approach appeared only with the rise of the 1930s of what came to be called the New Criticism. The New Critics originally came together in Vanderbilt University in the years following the First World War. Their leader was a teacher-scholar-poet, John Crowe Ransom who had several bright students – Allen Tate, R.P. Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. At first they adopted the name Fugitives and published a literary magazine called The Fugitive. They got in T.S.Eliot a strong ally. Their shared ideas were the following:-  i. Literature is an organic tradition, ii. Strict attention to form is important., iii. Conservatism is needed in classical values, iv. The ideal society believes in order and tradition, v. They preferred ritual and vi.  They liked rigorous and analytical reading of texts. By the 1950s, New Criticism became the dominant form of criticism.

      New Critics – Programs and preferences

a.       New Critics sought precision and structural tightness in a literary work.

b.       They favored a style and tone that tended towards irony.

c.        They insisted on the presence within the work of everything necessary for its analysis.

d.       They wanted to end all concerns with matters outside the work itself.

e.        The life of the author, the history of his times, or the social and political implications of the work were not considered important at all.

f.        They insisted that what the work says and how it says   were inseparable issues.

g.       They influenced at least one generation of college students to become more careful and serious readers than they otherwise would have been.

Some of the famous books of New Criticism are given below: -

Understanding Poetry             by      Brooks and Warren.

Understanding Fiction             by      Brooks and Warren.

Understanding Drama             by      Brooks and Heilman.

The House of Fiction                by      Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate.

II. Some Key concepts, Terms and Devices.

A. Form and Organic Form.

     In the past form often meant external form. For example, when we speak about Octave and Sestet of the sonnet we are speaking of external form. The same kind of description takes place when we talk about couplets, blank verse, or even free verse. But the formalist critic is only moderately interested in external form.

     Organic form is a particular concept important to the New Critics. They inherited the idea from the Romantics. In the Romantics we find organicism not just in literary forms but also in philosophical thought. In the formalistic approach, the assumption is that the given literary experience takes a shape proper to itself.

B. Texture, Image, Symbol.

     When we turn to the texture of the poem, we find that imagery and symbol are part of the work. The New Critics took much delight in close analysis of imagery and metaphor. Consistency of imagery created, what Ransom called, the texture. It was for such reasons that there was much interest Metaphysical poetry and in Metaphysical conceit.

      When an image takes on meaning beyond itself, it moves into the realm of the symbol. It was a problem for some of the formalistic critics because symbols used to move out of the poem into the world outside. Meaning and values outside the work become the concern of symbols. The formalist saw this as a problem though they had no satisfactory solutions for it.

C. Fallacies

v  Intentional Fallacy

     In this fallacy the critic or the reader makes the mistake of not separating a work from any intention the author might have had for the work. Wimsatt and Beardsley in their work The Verbal Icon says that a work must give its intentions from within and we must not go to the author for his or her intention. They also say that the author may not be a reliable witness.

v  The affective fallacy

In this fallacy, a work is judged by its effects on the reader or viewer, particularly its emotional effect.  Aristotle also has spoken about the effect of a work on the audience. The term ‘Catharsis’ used by Aristotle indicates the effect only. But the formalists want us to exert caution.

D. Point of View.

     The formalists considered consistency of point of view in a work or art as a merit. Lack of a specific point of view is thought to be a flaw in the work. Fragmentation in point of view can be avoided if we give the narrator the privilege of knowing all, seeing all, from a viewpoint that in theological terms can be called divine. In the great epics and in most traditional novels, the point of view is omniscient.

     In some works, the very form of the work is conditioned by the point of view to which the author limits the narrator. As Wayne Booth has reminded us, narrators may be either reliable or unreliable. Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises is a completely reliable narrator, whereas the lawyer in Melville’s Bartley the Scrivener is unreliable.

      In a first person point of view the form even more. Huck Finn is an example of such a narrator whose point of view is that of a child. In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury the point of view is multiple. Sometimes the author has to shift the point of view when telling the story. This happens in Chaucer. Still another point of view is that of total objectivity. Here we read only the dialogue of characters, with no hints from the narrator to guide us.

     Thus the point of view conditions the way in which we look at literature. A formalistic approach studies the point of view carefully.

E. The Speaker’s Voice.

     In lyric poetry the tone is equal to point of view in a novel. In a lyric too there is a speaker. Possibly there is also a hearer. In Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” it is clear that Andrea is addressing a woman during a particular time of the day. Andrea feels his inadequacy as a man and as a painter. In traditional love poetry we trust the voice of the speaker. But how does one explain the voice in Donne’s “Go and catch a Falling Star”? What is the mixture of genial satire, sardonicism, and mere playfulness? The way the reader hears the speaker will condition the poem. So the formalist ends with a problem. There are as many poems as there are readers. Perhaps, there is only one poem that is a super form that contains all the other forms.

F. Tension, Irony, Paradox.

     In an arch the way to go up is also the way to come down. An arch stands because the force of gravity pulls all the stones down while at the same time pushing them against the keystone. Gravity counteracts itself to keep the entire arch standing. The arch can carry great weight – just as a piece of literature might.

      This aspect of formalistic criticism may be called tension. It is the resolution of opposites, often in irony and paradox. The basic terms tension, irony and paradox are often indistinguishable. Hugh Holman and William Harmon summarize tension as “A term introduced by Allen Tate, meaning the integral unity that results from the successful resolution of the conflicts of abstraction and concreteness, of general and particular, of denotation and connotation…” Holman and Harmon further note that the concept has been used by the New Critics, particularly poetry as a pattern of paradox or as a form of irony.

            Robert Pen Warren gives a demonstration of the relationship between tension, irony, and paradox in “Pure and impure poetry”. He says that the nature of the poetic structure involves “resistance and various levels. There is a tension between the rhythm of the poem and the rhythm of speech… between the formality of the rhythm and the informality of the language; between the particular and the general, the concrete and the abstract; between the elements of even the simplest metaphor; between the beautiful and the ugly; between ideas…”. He further says that “this list is not intended to be exhaustive; it is intended to be merely suggestive”.

[Dr. S. Sree Kumar, Reader, Postgraduate and Research Department of English, Government Arts College, Coimbatore-641018. kumarbpc@yahoo.co.uk  cell no. 94430 53250]

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