24 Formalism: Cleanth Brookes

Mr. Umashankar Patra

Formalism

Formalism refers to the school of literary criticism and theory which originated in the second decade of Twentieth century in Russia. Though the roots of Formalism go back to 1880s but it flourished after the 1917 Russian revolution. The Formalists were a group of likeminded Russian scholars: Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik et al. who shared theoretical interests. There were two major schools of Russian Formalism: The Moscow Linguistic Circle led by Roman Jakobson that was formed in 1915; this group also included Osip Brik and Boris Tomashevsky. The second group, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz) was founded in 1916 and its leading figures included Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Yuri Tynyanov. Other important critics associated with this movement were Leo Jakubinsky, the theorist of the novel Mikhail Bakhtin and the folklorist Vladimir Propp. Like many new schools of thought, the Formalists too rebelled against the dominant intellectual tradition. They rejected the “socialist” view of literature that was in vogue at that time in Russia.

Objectives of the Group

“The subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness i.e that which makes a given work a work of literature” argued Roman Jakobson (Eichenbaum 8). Boris Eichenbaum concurring with him added that Formalism is “characterized only by the attempt to create an independent science of literature which studies specifically literary material” (Habib 605). These two excerpts highlight the aims of Formalism: to analyse the elements of literary works and the interrelated concern of charting the role of the literary scholar. The literary scholar was not to fiddle with the contiguous disciplines of psychology or history rather should be devoted towards developing a methodology of literary criticism in its own terms. Instead of dwelling on the meaning of the text, it was about the mechanics and dynamics of the literary work. In other words, the objectives were to study literary work for its component parts and to assert the autonomy of literary criticism. Shlokvsky proclaimed: “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of object: the object is not important” (16). As a result, the author’s mind, “intuition”, “imagination” that formed the backbone of Romantic criticism were relegated to the background, and devices and tropes became the catchwords. The strict focus on form and structure also invited criticism for not taking into account the historicity or the socialness of the text. This stance was in direct opposition to the socialist fervor of Russia at that point. The label of “Formalists” was a term of disparagement used by its opponents to refer to these young scholars rather than one chosen by its exponents.

Formalists focussed their intellectual energy on these questions: what is literature? What is so specific and peculiar about some works to be considered having literary sensibility? In other words, what is the “literariness” of literature? For the Formalists, the “literariness” of literature was located in the language of literature as literature was a specialized way of writing that was markedly different from ordinary speech. Roman Jakobson defined literary language as the “organized violence committed on ordinary speech” (Eagleton 2). Terry Eagleton in his Literary Theory provides an excellent example: If I am at a bus stop and someone murmurs, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, I would recognize that I am in the presence of the literary. Because the sentence deviates sharply from ordinary speech, with a rhythm and rhyme of its own, and the words and the sentence draw attention to itself. According to the Formalists, writers use many such devices to produce the literary effect. Such devices drew the attention of the Formalists. What needs to be underlined here is that instead of thinking of literature as a set of certain texts, the Formalists shifted the discussion of literature into the domain of perception, effect and performance. Literature was about reading practices rather that a given set of texts. Therefore, the knowledge of the strategies of producing such an effect or perception of the literary assumed importance.

Defamiliarization 

Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” investigates such devices that produced literary effects. He introduces “Defamiliarization”, one of the most important terms associated with Russian formalism, in this essay. He gives the example of Tolstoy’s description of flogging in “Shame”: “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and rap on their bottoms with switches…to lash about on their naked bottoms” (16). Citing these lines, he argues that the painful activity of flogging is rendered in an unfamiliar language of Tolstoy’s bland style thereby heightening the perception of the moment. For him, this is the key to literary works and the source of its continuing interest with readers: “defamiliarizing” the familiar. Literariness of a work is dependent upon defamiliarization achieved through various methods, devices and strategies. These acts of “making strange” in literary works differentiates them from ordinary speech. Eagleton’s example of Keats being heard at a bus stop operates on this principle as Keats’ line defamiliarizes the familiar act of looking at an urn.

He provides many other examples “defamiliarization” including Tolstoy’s use of the horse as a narrator in the place of a human’s point of view to shock the audience; use of strikingly disharmonious imagery and psychological parallelism etc. Shklovsky’s further attempts at discovering acts of defamiliarization resulted in the categories of plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula). He observed that the narrative appeared in a certain way in a book with arrangement of chronology and point of view (the plot) and it appeared in a different chronology and temporal duration outside the narrative time (the story). For instance, the story of Heart of Darkness  would begin with the life of Kurtz but the novel opens with Marlow who deliberates on Kurtz’s life in a flashback. What is we encounter in Heart of Darkness is Plot not the story as they inhabit different temporal orders. Plot and story formed the bedrock of the Formalists’ argument of literature “making it strange”. Once this distinction was made, the Formalists went on to analyse other aspects of narratives that set the process of estrangement in motion.

What Shklovsky and others suggest is that by indulging in such defamiliarizing practices, the author wished to create a special perception, a vision of the object. The meaning of the object was not important but the perception of it was. Thereby, he is waging a war against the hermeneutic school of thought which insisted on the meaning of the work. He is gradually moving towards the idea of the work being an autonomous object and Kantian view of art for art’s sake. One of the major charges against the Formalists was their conception of the “ordinary” speech. Many critics have argued that the Formalist idea of the ordinary speech is reductive and would add that, what we consider as ordinary speech in one era might not be the same in another. The Shakespearean ordinary speech may sound “strange” to the Romantic one. Here Shklovsky would argue that “defamiliarization” is based on a differential equation. In other words, literature is engaged in the process of “making strange” in relation to the ordinary speech of that era. Literary works keep reinventing these modes of defamiliarization by challenging the existing norms. A good example would Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads where he complains that the Augustan poetic forms and style were obsolete and he would rejuvenate interest in poetry by writing in the language of the commonplace. Introduction of the speech of the ordinary man becomes the defamiliarizing act in Nineteenth Century England whereas in Twentieth Century attempts were made to consciously write in a register which was not used by the masses. So the acts of defamiliarization keep altering according to what is considered the normal or ordinary speech.

The language of Poetry 

Shkolvsky discerns such “defamiliarizing” practices in poetic works too, as the poet deliberately tries to construct an “artistic” piece, to draw attention to the contrivedness of emotion in them. The poetic language is itself strange as it abides by certain artistic concerns. For example, a sonnet is written in fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme describing certain emotions. What the poet wishes to convey is the artistic quality of the poem as the emotions are portrayed in a certain way, markedly different from how they are expressed in daily life. The rhythm, diction, rhyme scheme, patterns render the poetic language strange and beautiful. In these act of “defamiliarization” resides the poeticness or literariness of poetry.

The basic difference between practical language and poetic language had its origins in the study of Russian linguist Leo Jakubinsky. According to him, practical language is used  for means of communication and has no independent value whereas the poetic language “acquire(s) independence” (Habib 606). For example, a sentence like “You are beautiful” would communicate certain emotions depending on the context and the people involved. But a line  from a poem “O my Luve is like a red, red rose” does not only communicate, it also assumes a certain independent existence for its sound patterns and simile. We do not value the line for its contribution to meaning but for its sound quality, ingenuity and beauty.

This for the formalists was the key to understand poetic language. For them form was not only an envelope but had an independent existence and it was possible to examine the form. Boris Eichenbaum in his essay “The Formal Method” argues that form was “a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, substantive in itself” (9). Making a departure from the Symbolist who argued that form only clothed the content, they argued that form itself was content. For example, the simile of red rose is imperative to drive home the poet’s impression of his lover. And the emphasis arrived by the repetition of the word “red” suggests the depth of the emotion as well as underlines the beauty of the lover. The exaggeration is fitting as the poem ends on a note of melodrama by use of exaggeration in the phrase “ten thousand mile”. The use of “red” twice also allows the possibility of the ballad meter which bestows the poem with lyrical qualities.

Roman Jakobson and the Structure of Language 

One of the repercussions of the focus on the language was to investigate the structure of language that was evident in Jakubinsky’s efforts. Roman Jakobson’s work with the Prague Linguistic circle, furthered Jakubinsky’s scheme and served as the basis of Structural Linguistics. Jakobson interrogating the structure of language elaborates on the bipolar nature of it in “Two Aspects of Language”. According to him, language works on the principle of similarity and contiguity. He termed them metaphor and metonymy respectively. He argues that any discourse operates on both levels: one topic leading to another on the basis of similarity or substitution (metaphor) and one topic suggesting another via contiguity of space, time etc. The example he cites is of the word “hut” which might be substituted for “hovel”, “cabin” etc. The word “hut” also brings in association with it “thatch”, “poverty” etc. These are the two basic forms of operation in language: similarity (metaphor) and association (metonymy). Though both of them are always in operation, yet cultural and social factors of certain eras favour one of them. He cites the example of primacy of metaphor and symbolism in Romantic age. He applies these two categories to poetry and prose and stipulates that general poetry is influenced by metaphoric exercises as evident in the similarity of meter in lines, use of similar or contrasting words and semantic parallelism. However, prose works through metonymic explorations. He gives the examples of “hair on the upper lip”, “bare shoulders” in War and Peace that suggest masculinity of the characters and nudity by terms of association.

Insistence on the general nature of language at work and focus on strategies of literariness like defamiliarization, resulted in the deliberation on the mechanism of works of art in general. Vladimir Propp in Morphology of Folktales examined the folktales to find out seven kinds of tropes in operation. Mikhail Bakhtin argued for a theory of novel by delving into the generic convention, style and close examination of language. These works provided fertile grounds for new perspectives on genres and literary history. Roman Jakobson’s categories of “synchronic” and “diachronic” informed Formalist debates on literary history and criticism. According to him, synchronic analysis examines various elements of a literary tradition at a given point of time whereas the diachronic description takes into account the changes in a given tradition that have occurred over a period of time. For example, a synchronic analysis of Dickens’ use of the Bildungsroman focusses on his novels like David Copperfield, Great Expectations etc. In a diachronic examination, history of the Bildungsroman genre is traced and its various shifts over the centuries are outlined with Dickens occupying one of the key nodes of the tradition. What the Formalists underlined with these interventions was that it was possible to construct a history of literary forms, thereby, writing a history of literature, free from history. The break from history was complete. In this way, the different literary tradition could be imagined and it anticipates theorists of tradition such as Eliot, Pound and Leavis. This literary history was to take into account the formation of new genres and themes rather than focussing on the biography of the writer. As a result of this kind of a literary history many forgotten writers and works were to find their place resulting in the revision of tradition. A classic example of this is Eliot’s revival of the Metaphysical Poets.

As evident vis-à-vis the above instances the formalists had two major objectives: first, to describe the general characteristics of literariness and secondly, a closer analysis of specific literary tropes and strategies. The Formalists were seeking to understand the general nature of literature and literary devices, as well as the historical evolution of literary techniques. However, in their preoccupation with form and structure, history was relegated to the backdrop and their interpretations were labelled as ahistorical. Their penchant for systematization resulted in reductive readings of literary works as it operated via a certain set of terms. Their structural analysis model was followed closely by another school of thought New Criticism, which appeared in the Anglo-American world in the 1950s and 1960s.

The New Critics and Cleanth Brooks 

The New Critics shared the Formalists’ tenor of argument that literary language was different from ordinary language and the formal analysis of works could convey the meaning of the work of art. Cleanth Brooks, one of the major New Critics, argued in his essay “The Formalist Critic”, “That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated. That form is meaning” (22). Both schools attempted to create a system or methodology of appreciation of literary works by examining their formal properties. Importantly, the New Critics came from the “South” which was undergoing massive industrialization. Yet, New Critics like J.C. Ransom were able to find in the traditional south an aesthetic alternative to the scientific rationalism of the industrialization identified traditionally with the North. In Terry Eagleton’s words:

The ideology of New Criticism began to crystallize: scientific rationalism was ravaging the ‘aesthetic life’ of the old South, human experience was being stripped of its sensuous particularity, and poetry was a possible solution. The poetic response, unlike the scientific, respected the sensuous integrity of its object: it was not a matter of rational cognition but an affective affair which linked us to the ‘world’s body’ in an essentially religious bond. Through art, an alienated world could be restored to us in all its rich variousness.

He clarifies the rationale behind conceptualizing poetry as an alternative to the scientific rationalism and in poetry the New Critics saw a theological equivalence. Poems constructed a world of its own, “mysteriously intact in its own being”, embodying universal ideas in them. To underline the autonomy of poetry and its being as a self-enclosed object, its study had to sever the reliance on the author and the social reality. This is where their interests colluded with the Formalists but unlike them the New Critics were not so interested in the general workings of literature. They were rather preoccupied with the analysis of individual texts that stressed on the internal unity of the poem which was highlighted in the formal analysis of the poem. It is therefore, obvious that the New Critics focused on the poem not on prose narratives as they yielded to their ideological and aesthetic disposition.

Cleanth Brooks, one of the major figures of New Criticism, illustrated these facets of the school in his works like The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and Understanding Poetry (1938). He has been acknowledged by many as the forbearer of New Criticism. In The Well Wrought Urn, he differentiated between the poetic language and the ordinary speech. He argues that in ordinary speech a word stood for its denotative meaning (one word for one thing) whereas in poetry a word was used connotatively. For example, in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the “urn” could be an ordinary object but is also suggestive of artistic truth and the durability of art in the face of earthly change. The urn even though lifeless, captures eternal life and is a reminder of the vivacity of life in the face of death. Thus, the poem stages the binaries of life and death, art and life, stasis and dynamic and works through the literary devices of metaphor, irony and paradox. He emphasizes that scientific rationalism was limited to positivist empirical data and is found in the denotative use of language whereas the universal ideas like life and death, art and life could only be reflected upon in the language of poetry. Therefore, the language of poetry that includes devices like metaphors, paradoxes, irony etc. required deliberation and hence the New Critics emphasis on them.

The Heresy of Paraphrase

Reiterating his views on poetic language being non-reductive, Brooks in “The heresy of paraphrase” argues against paraphrasing. He stipulates that a poem cannot be reduced to a summary by paraphrasing as it is not the objective of the poem to convey as a message or produce a statement or a proposition. It inhabits a world of its own dovetailing contradictory perspectives as evident in Keats’ poem. The purpose of his analysis is to comprehend the poem in its wholeness by analysing how each element of it contributes to its experience in totality. This totality or the unity achieved in a poem is a reconciliation of different, disparate ideas, “an equilibrium of forces”. By paraphrasing, a grave injustice is done to these facets of poetry as it focuses only on the denotative value of language and attempts to stabilize the poem by not highlighting the creative tension inherent in it.

Brooks in his famous essay “The Language of Paradox” uncovers this tension as he argues that the language of poetry is the language of paradox. By paradox he means the capacity of the language to portray contradictory emotions simultaneously. With examples ranging from Romantic poetry to Eighteenth century poetry, Brooks explains the workings of paradox in poetic language. Paradox in its access to emotions putatively contradictory, weaves a world where different emotions coexist to give the impression of completeness. He cites the preface to Lyrical Ballads where Wordsworth discerns the possibility of the extraordinary in the commonplace and the poetic in the ordinary speech. He argues that such use of paradox presents new perspective, a novel view of the world and hence a sense of wonder. He traces similar use of paradox in Alexander Pope that presents us with a penetrating perception of man:

Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great

Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all; Sole

Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d; The

Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the world!

However, he does not restrict his analysis only to the employment of paradox in poetry but also to show how the basic nature of poetic language is paradoxical. In other words, his aim is far more fundamental: to delineate how paradox is itself the language of poetry. He argues that poetic language engages in sudden and disruptive combinations that display the fresh perspective of the poet.

Here, we can recall Dr. Johnson’s charge about the Metaphysical poets that they yoked distinct ideas by violence. We can also see parallels with Jakobson’s remark about poetic language being an organized violence committed on language. Consider for example Donne’s metaphysical conceits or Keats’ famous “unravished bride” in “Ode to a Grecian Urn”. Brooks argues that the poetic medium urges for indirect locution unlike the scientific vocabulary which only stresses on denotation. This indirect disposition of the poem finds its fulfilment in paradox. To prove his point, Brooks provides a close reading of Donne’s poem “Canonization” where he demonstrates the balance created by contradictory emotions with the help of metaphors and similes. This balance for Brooks is reflective of the balance to be found in nature where opposites or discordant elements are reconciled. The poem, therefore, becomes a unified whole of discordant, diverse, different sets of elements held together in the language of paradox. Hence, the poem assumes the status of a world and an autonomous existence and the poetic language becomes the language of paradox.

Criticism of the Brooksian Model 

Even though Brooks finds a creative tension in poems that is underlined by the use of ambiguity, irony and paradox, his penchant for establishing unity and harmony did not curry favours with the Post-structuralists who argued that the yoking of disparate ideas in poetry leads to a destabilized zone of interacting forces. They believed, contrary to Brooks and his fellow New Critics, that the poem does not produce a whole rather its rhetorical devices such as irony and paradox enable the poem to work against itself to deconstruct itself. Ironically, these Post- structuralists were trained in the New Critical methods.

Later theoreticians also lambasted the New Critics ahistorical approach in their  preoccupation with structural analysis. Critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Edward Said have severely criticized the New Critics for developing such a form of criticism which did not take into account the socio-cultural context and argued for the autotelic status of a work of art. Donne’s poems as well as Wordsworth’s are analysed via the same tropes that informed Milton and Brooks tends to reach similar kinds of conclusions regarding the construction of harmonious wholes. Ironically, the New Critics who emphasized on the wholesomeness of approach were accused of “critical monism”. However, Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn and later in his essay.

“The New Criticism” (1979) defends himself by underlining that his efforts were experimental in nature and were to further a new type of literary criticism different from the prevalent impressionistic criticism of the age.

In his defence Brooks argues that contrary to the dominant perception, the New Critics are not against intentionality or the use of historical evidence but these should inform the analysis of the “meaning” of the text. The critic has to be discerning in using extra-textual material such as the intention of the author or his biographical details and use them only if they offer something in terms of the interpretation of the text. He adds the caveat that forfeiture of biographicality of the author is, “of course, (not) permanent” to highlight that the charges of being doctrinaire is misplaced.

To summarize, the Formalists sought a value free mode of criticism whereas the New Critics brought back the religious and aesthetic preoccupations that came with their conservative southern background. This tied in with their conception of the world of poetry on the lines of religion: poetry being a vehicle of universal ideas and thus replacing scientific rationalism. However, against the conventional accounts on the New Critics of being doctrinaire and belonging to the cult of art for art’s sake, it could be argued that they were experimentalists and wanted to cut against the grain of literary history. To their credit, it could be argued that they taught the art of “close reading” which revolutionized literary criticism and informed later schools of criticism which eventually denounced them. Formalism and New Criticism should be lauded for their bold overtures against the prevalent schools of impressionistic and biographical school of criticism. Their efforts at systematizing literary criticism opened new avenues for literary studies and led to the rise of various kinds of schools of thought that aimed to read literature in different ways. In certain ways, Formalism and New Criticism laid foundation for the later theoretical investigations into literature such as Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism etc.

Reference

• Brooks Cleanth. “The Formalist Critic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 22-27.
• —. “The Language of Paradox.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 28-39.
• Eichenbaum, Boris. “The Formal Method.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 7-14.
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. U of Minnesota P, 2008.
• Habib, M.A.R. A History of Literary Criticism: from Plato to Present. Blackwell, 2005.
• Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 76-80.
• Shkolvsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 15-21.