From My Journal:
On Form and Caroline Levine’s Forms
I have
been partly re-tracing the theoretical steps that led towards, into, and out
beyond the writing of my book The Meaning of Form (as I call it, though
the title continues with the keywording essential to modern scholarship) in
Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave 2016). I bought a copy of Caroline
Levine’s Forms (Princeton 2015) and hoped it would provide further
thoughts. It did, but not quite in the way I’d expected, or hoped. This is not
a review of the book, which I have utilised for a different (related)
purpose. In some ways I don’t get beyond the first fence, and keep falling over
it again and again. Before I get to Levine, though, I mulled over a few
exemplary passages in Derek Attridge’s work (principally) that I’d missed in The
Meaning of Form and in The Poetry of Saying, and perhaps in ‘Pulse’.
Some, of course, were published after the completion of those works.
1st November 2024 from Doctor Zhivago:... ‘That art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing’. (p.406)
8th November 2024: Derek Attridge, Singularity of Literature:... ‘The formally innovative work, the one that most estranges itself from its reader, makes the most sharply challenging (which is not to say the most profound) ethical demand. Formal innovation (of this sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experiment.’ And it goes on pp. 130-31.
I
seem to have missed this useful passage which suggests a better term (which I have
used before) than ‘linguistically’ innovative, and (more importantly)
this passage is the link between The Poetry of Saying (LUP, 2005)
and The Meaning of Form. [And sounds a minatory note!]
10th November 2024: I read Attridge’s description of two ways of reading, and thought: that's the distinction between the said of the saying (‘turning the event into an object’ and ‘to preserve the event as an event’). I looked at the footnote. Attridge calls it Levinas’ ‘related distinction’. Another missing link, on p. 40 of J.M. Coetzee…
21st November 2024: ‘autrebiography,’ I now see, I took from Coetzee, from Attridge’s book on same [and used it as a description/subtitle of my autobiographical book Words Out of Time].
24th November 2024: ‘I would also include [under ‘form’] the meanings of the words and sentences, for once we conceive of the work as an event, meaning becomes an occurrence, not a substance or abstraction. Meanings unfold, intertwine, fade, echo, clash... What is called “form” is one aspect of this moving complex, inseparable from what is traditionally called “content”.’
This
seems succinct, more so, than other explanations by Derek Attridge. In this
case from page 29 of Moving Words.
‘Some
literary theorists’ – I’m not one of
those, but I could be implicated here [Attridge did witness and question my
1999 paper on Levinas and Tom Raworth at Salford, later to appear in When
Bad Times Made for Good Poetry] – ‘have tried to employ Levinas’s
distinction between the saying and the said to argue for the non-conceptual,
event-like nature of the artwork – something of a distortion of Levinas’s
thought, but useful in itself.’ (The Work of Literature p. 89.)
‘The
feelings that form part of the peculiarly literary response are not direct
responses to content, but are always mediated by form: they are coloured
by the pleasure we take in the representation itself, in the language whereby
the emotional response is invited. (The Work of Literature p.85)
December 23rd 2024: Reading Creeley’s The Finger at The Handyman yesterday afternoon: ‘Here forms have possibility.’ p 63.
January the 5th 2025: I've been reading Forms and I’m not happy with Caroline Levine’s leap from – first – ‘form’ to ‘forms’ without a sense of what/who does the forming, and then not happy with – second – her leap (of faith?) from ‘forms’ to ‘social formations’, which she claims share the same properties. I'm unconvinced so far.
Also
her sense of ‘form’ as relating to wholes (although I do like her sense of the
collision of ‘forms’ in social interaction; she's good on that). But what about
forms that don't behave in this way?
For
example, in Carruthers’ Stave Sightings we find this about Joan Retallack’s
5uite: ‘If it is formalist ... it enters into form with contingency, boldly
uncertain about form and inquiring of new critical and textual formations.’ p.129
But
in the beginning of the argument, they do work together, when there is still
the jump from an account of form/s that doesn’t take account of the processes
of forming in the readily act/event as posited by Attridge, so it still offers
an analogy between all forms.
I
must say I approve of her account of social forms, of dealing with conflicting ‘institutions’
that collide and re-form in various ways. What that has to do with enjambement
in Robert Creeley really isn't clear (she rejects what she says the ‘new
formalism’ does which is to suggest fractured form = fractured society, though
her reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is near to this, though redeemed by
her conclusion as quoted above).
(She
confuses ‘rhythm’ with ‘metre’. Don’t they all? See ‘Pulse’.)
I’m
being promised to be shown ‘how unlike forms encounter one another’, on page
93, so perhaps I'll read more before accounting for her argument any further.
Gender,
we’re told, ‘is more like a literary form’. p. 94. It’s that ‘like’!
January 7th 2025: I’m asking for a smaller but deeper account of ‘form’, more or less that of Attridge which is not – note – the formalism of the new formalists. The theory is very good (I’ve already realised how her chapter ‘Network’ provides some focus for talking about Twentieth Century Blues, which I had to (I’ve been up making notes this morning) [This was for the Jerome Rothenberg celebration at which I introduced and read a poetics piece about that particularly networky poem.]). But, suddenly, in the final chapter we find reference to ‘formalist cultural studies’ p. 132 (already a contradiction in terms) and remarks like ‘it is constructed and stylized, and it is hardly free of ideology or narrative artifice.’ p. 133 That’s FORM, as I understand it: limited but deep (which is not to negate social forms, but are they the same? Even Levine says they’re not, however ‘like’ they are). The form she does look at – in that final chapter – is the much maligned, overlooked form: plot, which she relates (as how could you not?) to social forms. (And she does use Russian Formalist terms at one point!) What about ‘construction’ or ‘stylization’? Whatever the case, I expect an excellent reading (of The Wire which I saw some episodes of, partially).
If,
in networking, ‘kinship is not the same as the city streets’ p. 144, then
surely racism is not the same – or even like – metre?
For
Levine, ‘Knowing Forms’ (p. 147-50) means ‘social forms’. And her readings,
particularly of Bleak House and The Wire are brilliant. It’s just
that the use of ‘form’ or more often ‘forms’ doesn't allow for real plasticity,
for ‘forming’. Indeed her sense of the ‘crisscrossing forms that produce social
experience’ p.148 is a.) excellent, and b.) more flexible than her ‘formalist’ (in
my sense) readings. She rushes to the social, realises (to quote Jagoda) that ‘Every
political ecology... is a precarious, tottering structure’ p. 148 of ‘the
unexpected effects of clashes among wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks’
p.149 and leave form and forming behind in forms and formations.
18th May 2025: Back to Levine, after having used her chapter ‘Network’ for my description of the forms and forming of Twentieth Century Blues for my Glasgow lecture, and back to her preface, to find the point where she originally collects an area of critical attention for herself in the ‘organisations and arrangements which were the main means by which power worked: politics was a matter of imposing order on the world’. p. x She then adds, ‘It never occurred to me not to call these ordering principles forms,’ p. x, though she confesses ‘It took me a long while to realise that this use of the term was not intuitive to other literary critics,’ – indeed! –‘who typically equated form with genre, also form as an exclusive domain of aesthetics.’ p. xi. The simplifying notion of ‘equating’, the narrowing of ‘exclusive’, the blunt use of ‘genre’, and the suggestion of rarified specialisation in ‘aesthetics’, leads one away from the notion of form-as-forming in the act-event of encounter, (to reduce Attridge to a few buzzwords). There are other ways of conceiving form, perhaps no less counter-intuitive than her own, for she equates form with societal forces which is my continual argument with her otherwise brilliant book, which, after a gap of some months, I am rereading.
(There is a parallel in her treatment of history. She opposes views that treasure the otherness of the past. I’m reminded of a half-forgotten quotation from Jerome McGann about how the alien perspectives of the past in a past work of art operate as kinds of critique on the present world. Levine’s view is that – crudely put – a feminist might be responding to past oppressions to learn lessons for the present. I actually favour both views: at different times in different ways either approach might yield insight. My recent readings and rewritings of Dante have furnished me with many a perspective so different from our common present day morality, the punishments of what William Empson calls the ‘torture monster’, for example, yet there are other times when it feels as though the punishment of a hypocrite, for example, makes perfect modern sense and one would wish for something of the justice dealt out across the cornices for our modern world. Both perspectives guard against one another in my resultant text of Stars.)
19th May
2025: When Levine puts it like this, I concur: ‘How should we understand the
relationship between the literary and political forms?’ she asks, thus keeping
the two distinct. And I agree that ‘I consider ways in which literary and
social forms come into contact and affect one another, without presuming one is
the ground or cause of the other,’ is a good strategy for avoiding a simplistic
equation and false consequentiality between the two, which is helped by her
awareness of the general instability of social organisations and
disorganisations – but why they are called forms – amid a discussion of form –
still eludes me. p. 22. An awareness of ‘the many different shapes and patterns
that constitute political, cultural, and social experience’ seems exemplary. p.
17. ‘The interaction of forms’ seems a stronger and more useful focus than her
focus on form itself. I should follow its arguments again but realise their
detachment from where I am (starting (out) again).
Pause to read it, here, perhaps, gentle reader.
What I have fumbled over, above, he glides over. I think the review is a dry-run for at least part of his introduction to the book Montgomery quotes from, Speculative Formalism, which I have on order, is somewhere in the post, and which I shall absorb, perhaps at leisure. (After all, this theoretical twitching is carried out between work as a poet.) But I do note that Eyers, in the review, questions Levine’s thesis, in more theoretically-astute ways than my own. ‘This apparent commensurability between literary and social forms’ – it’s that Faultline again – ‘may well be the result of a prior incommensurability, one that exists as a condition of possibility for the very distinctiveness of the forms in question, no matter how much they be said to intertwine all the way down… It is these latter, knotty, theoretical problems that the book under review doesn’t quite get to grips with, as deeply impressive as it otherwise is.’ Again: ‘how, precisely, one specific class of forms – literary forms – gain purchase on those other forms that jostle for attention?’
‘ “Forms are at work everywhere,” Levine declares, not quite an answer to that question, a declaration questioned by Eyers: ‘But hasn’t a crucial question been elided here? Even as Levine celebrates the ‘dissolving’ of the barrier between text and context, she presumably wouldn’t wish to claim that there is, as a result, absolutely no distinction to be made between the words that make up Brontë’s narrative, and the arrangements of space that are her referent. Presuming this much, we are still to learn how it is that these two very different things are to be explained according to the same, now highly capacious, perhaps too capacious, definition of ‘form’. Even more importantly, how do these different forms come to relate to one another at all? To use a now unfashionable parlance, what is the theory of reference that underpins Levine’s account?’
Is his answer to concentrate on form? we might ask. Yes and No. ‘The temptation to be avoided … is a retreat into form, the foregrounding of reassuringly abstract figures or techniques at the expense of political salience and social relevance. But equally troublesome would be the assumption that abstraction and formality are inherently apolitical and ahistorical.’ But a concentration on form, as the act-event of forming , need not retreat in this way, as Attridge is very clear to make out, and the thinking of Adorno, for one, which Eyers mentions, and which I attempt to use in the last chapter of The Meaning of Form, on the poetry of Barry McSweeney, is a powerful way of approaching history and form. And the theory of Veronica Forrest-Thomson always comes rushing back at such times.
For now, I must leave alone Eyers’ thinking. I am at the edge of knowing.
*
I write
about the related theses of The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of
Form here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Poetry
of Saying: The Point of Poetry: Ethics, Dialogue and Form, and here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning
of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and
Weblinks). There
are some updates on my encounters with Attridge here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning
of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature. I tangle with, tango with,
Adorno’s aesthetics here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Form, Forms
and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry
‘Pulse’ is to be found in my recent The Necessity of Poetics: here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!
My use of
Levine’s ‘Network’ chapter partly resulted in this ‘Introduction’, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard Looking Back
at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at,
and beyond the millennium.
My ‘Dante’ project Stars, is written about here: Pages: On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts. I didn’t abandon it, as the first posting of this piece suggested.
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