“Form,” “Ideology,” etc.
I’ve been meaning to throw two or three cents into Michael Robbins’s interesting recent post on form and ideology. But the post is old now, and I think I might ramble on too long for a comment stream. Here’s a new post instead.
I’m not as familiar with the traditions of Marxist intellectualism (especially of the current variety) as are some around DE, so I’m happy to think of this as a set of questions as much as a set of claims. Still I think even I’m safe in saying that “form” and “ideology” are two words that one ought to be careful with. They are bloated and multi-purposed and, well, mostly empty. While I’m interested in Michael’s question about the connection between form and ideology, I think we ought to be cleaner in posing it. (Not a criticism, Michael, just clarification: I know you were posing it in a bloggy way.)
Ask a room full of graduate students in hip glasses what form is and you will get a mess. This is because most people (not just graduate students in hip glasses) have a sense that “form” refers not only to literature, and not only to art more broadly, but to objects both concrete and Platonic. It is a noun, it is a verb, it is an idea. So when we say “form” we should specify immediately what we mean. (I recommend the first chapter of Angela Leighton’s On Form, which is very good on this topic.)
Now, literary critics in particular have added further problems by larding the poor abstract noun with imprecise formulations (see?) attached to separate discourses that don’t talk much to each other. (Were this not the case, the people pushing New Formalism in the major scholarly venues right now would have come up with something better. So, just to make things more manageable: for the purposes of continuing the conversation that Michael started, I distinguish FORM from formal attributes—prosody and the like—that we associate with poems. Let’s call that verse-form.
What about ideology? Michael suggests a handy definition that is pretty faithful, I think, to the way that ideology is conceived of (certainly by my peers): “They don’t know it, but they do it.” The problem is that when we turn to literature a definition like this one invites speculation about intentionality in a particularly mysterious way. It also makes grand narratives tempting. We see the results all around us, in the sloppy thought and cosmic claims of literary criticism in current practice. I tend to think that we accept the prevailing, well, ideology about ideology too easily: the “they” above is telling, and it’s remarkable how completely unaware many thinkers are of the contradiction there. But this will get me off the base I’m already on. So more to the point, and regardless of what one thinks about subject formation, I want to suggest that the attempt to unlock the secrets of the grand, blind system we choose to call “ideology” in a poem’s prosodic structures is a fool’s errand. (No, I don’t find Adorno convincing here.) It’s difficult enough to distinguish among the different kinds of choices a poet makes (and thank you, Oren, for pointing out that these are acts of will)—ones that are semantically motivated, ones that are texturally motivated, ones that are musical or “on the nerves”—and to do justice to the workings of an individual poem and to its place among other poems. Note that even J.H. Prynne’s exceptional (and perplexing) argument (“Mental Ears,” forthcoming in CHICAGO REVIEW in a couple of weeks) about the poet’s heightened, subconscious sense and application of language in historical flux argues strongly against the sort of approach I’m taking issue with. In paraphrase, the fact that we make instruments of words we don’t entirely own does not mean that words make instruments of us.
So in answer to your question, Michael, I’d just say that I think it might not be very productive because it trades in a mystified version of consciousness that we don’t really have any way of investigating. If we replace “ideology” with something like “historical norm” we are more likely to get someplace. (Thanks to Josh A, who suggested this in conversation recently.)
So, to what I hope is the main force of my post: the original question of verse-form (not form broadly) and visible historical structures (norms, identifiable historical events and ways of thought, etc.). Isn’t this basically what Williams is after? If I understand his work correctly, and I may not, I think he’s interested in establishing with relative confidence how individuals make choices given the material that history leaves to them. For poets, this includes verse-form, and renovations and innovations of verse-form.
Of course, verse-form is only a beginning. The lucky thing about poetry, though, is that it is not as tempting as other genres to read as anything but artifice and representation. When we ask about “form” and history in the novel right now, for example, we tend to get discouraging answers about the magical advent of subjectivity in 1740 or 1780 or 1810 or 1850 (or add your own narrative). I don’t think this is interesting, responsible, or even (the goal) provocative. It’s certainly not open to investigation.
A better project for literary scholars at this point would be to offer more rigorous categories from which to pose and explore questions (this goes for novel theorists, too). Hard as it is to define, poetry is clearly not “normal” language. That’s a good place to begin: there’s a monumental history of this not-normal language that remains estranging in itself, a language webbed together that demands seriousness in reading. History is always a part of that reading. The problem comes when you know exactly what you are looking for—some version of an ideology, say—before you start.
I know I’m not saying anything new here, and I know it may sound conventional or conservative to some. But here’s my best insight after two years of graduate school: most literary scholars are not sociologists or political theorists or linguists or anthropologists; they play these characters on TV. There’s nothing wrong with using literature to do more than read literature, but if literary professionals (teaching poets, teaching scholars) don’t take reading seriously as a starting point, who will?
Michael,
An important text on this subject would be Jameson’s early work, Marxism and Form. Not that his neo-Lukacsianism (or is that neo-Lukacism) is the last word…
Thanks, Kent. It’s already on my list of things I’m supposed to read. Does he do any real thinking about poetry? (I ask especially because you reference Lukacs, who doesn’t seem interested in poems.) Here’s that problem, again, with “form” . . .
Also, I appreciate tips on what I should read, from Kent or anyone else, but as much I’m interested in what people think about my complaint. Isn’t anyone else bothered by the careless way these words are used? (Jameson has propagated a lot of this stuff, it seems to me. If I hear “late capitalism” again in a seminar I may abandon everything here and go start a farm. Not a factory farm, of course.)
As for poetic form, Michael - I think RS Crane, Elder Olson & the Chicago School of 50 yrs ago were onto something basic. For them, the New Critical equating of form with diction, syntax, the verbal surface, & what you are calling “verse-form(s)”, got it exactly lopsided. For the Chi School (good Aristotelians), “form” in poetry is not reducible to the verbal texture (to be chilled & dissected). A poem’s form is the whole cognitive-emotive-sensitive action or gesture it performs, of which the language is only one part.
This is rather counter-intuitive now, in the context of the language-obsessed criticism since Saussure. One has to think of form more in terms of an effect like sculpture. The representational whole - its conceptual and affectual ramifications & reverberations, the shape it makes in the intellectual-ethical air - is more than the sum of its parts. This is how I distinguish (& maybe you do too) between “form” per se and “verse-forms”.
p.s. the Chi School was basically a meditation on Aristotle. For Aristotle too these words (ie. “form”) are bandied about too loosely. For A., plot - in the profoundest sense of the term - is the life of poetic form.
I don’t think I disagree with you, exactly, Henry. At least not about the scope of form. I think I’d want to add other things, but you probably would too.
The advantage of locating something like verse-form and tracking it as a pattern *in relation* to other elements of poems, as well as in relation to history, is that the results will be locatable. It’s harder to do this with “the whole cognitive-emotive-sensitive action or gesture” performed by poems over a long period of time. (Not that I think this sort of question or approach lacks merit.)
Yeah, I have the CRITICS AND CRITICISM volume on my shelf. It’s good.
I have to disagree a little with what you say about Aristotle, since he doesn’t say enough about non-dramatic poetry to infer that he finds plot to be the most meaty formal aspect of poems.
I have to go see Moxley read! More later.
Hey Michael,
Well, that book is about Marxist theorists, most of them little known here at the time he published the book, and via his introduction and analyses of them, the issues of literary form get taken up.
Jameson usually deals with the novel when he’s talking about literature. He famously dismembered a poem by Bob Perelman called “China,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. That reading is very much a discussion of form as refracted ideology. Not the “ideology” of Perelman’s then Marxism, that is, but the bigger kind Perelman didn’t know was there, really making the poem for him. According to Jameson, that is…
yes, re: non-dramatic poetry : that is the big gap in the theoretical infantry line. But it might also be the most productive. Just as a rough idea : say what is the plot-trajectory of Berryman’s life-work, as a whole? Well, first of all, you could say (with Aristotle on “individuals”) it’s unique : you can abstract classes & categories from it, but they don’t simply add up to the unclassifiable individual thing-as-itself. But, 2ndly, you could APPROXIMATE some rough ANALOGIES to that life-plot in (non-dramatic) poetry… as illustrations…
so what is the underlying “plot” of Berryman’s oeuvre? I would liken it to a tragickal-comical-tragi-comical elaboration - but mostly tragical - on the Prodigal Son story. With shadings of Faust, Everyman, & a lot of Shakespeare (Macbeth? Lear). & this plot informs the verse-forms.
As for your other point, on historically-trackable or analyzable verse-forms - well… my guess is that verse-forms are sort of like inherited traits. You go with what you grew up with, & what you have, & what you happen upon. It’s what you MAKE of all that (plot, theme) which is far more important, as well as unpredictable. That indeed is the personal dimension, the X factor.
So I could imagine a herd of theorists making hay out of the technical dimensions of verse-form… when in fact these are the least important element of the work of art.
p.s. Michael, I realize my 2nd response there was a garish over-simplification of what you were saying, about the “advantage of locating something like verse-form and tracking it as a pattern *in relation* to other elements of poems, as well as in relation to history”.
I guess I just wonder whether the various elements of poems actually could add up to trackable patterns & socio-historical meanings. Because their coalescence as integral works of art usually entails a sort of over-determination, or super-organization - a breaking of all previous patterns, a new bump in the tradition (in Eliot’s terms), an inimitable originality. No? This is what we mean by “creative”?
Well I hope not everyone’s life is as transparently evident in their poems as Berryman’s. I mean, I love the dream songs, but nobody really cares much about a sad professor who drinks too much and is by mornings incontinent, do they?
I prefer Huffy Henry in costume.
Good point. But part of JB’s trajectory or polemic was against the New Critical dogma which equated verse-form with impersonality : as if impersonality & detachment were literary techniques, rather than hard-won dimensions of personal (close to inarticulate) experience.
I’m much more interested in DS as a revision of the sonnet and sonnet sequence; in particular, the ventriloquy Berryman employs brings back something about sonnets, their vocal dramatics, that had been missing for some time, and in a totally new, totally bewildering fashion.
I admit, tho, that I’m one of those people who could take or leave most of the massive second volume.
Interesting. Yes, there’s no denying that verse forms, genres, modes are the royal road, maybe the only road, TOWARD impersonality & shared speech, out of solipsism, the suburbs…. but there’s a difference between seeing technique as (teachable) method, pure & simple, and technique as something that has to be completely absorbed & transformed by the exigencies of characteristic expression. The modes as echoes of mood; the genres as means of articulating powerful themes.