Still, why do literary critics find it so difficult to focus on form?

A topic I’ve been thinking about off and on for some time, most recently: Once more, and thinking of ring composition: Why aren’t literary critics interested in describing literary form?

A meaning-focused discipline

It’s surely that literary criticism has focused on meaning. But why should that distract from an interest in form, especially since so-called formalism looms large in methodological discussions and in practical criticism? That is, why does formalism have so little to do with actual form? That’s the question.

Of course, form in the sense that I mean, isn’t completely invisible. It’s quite visible in formal verse, where patterns of rhyme, meter, and so forth have been extensively catalogued. This is, however, a relatively peripheral matter for literary critics, though it may be very important to some working poets.

Verse forms are visible because they are forms of sound, and sound is readily objectified. What of ring forms? Well, in the small, they’re known as chiasmus, and are well known and often remarked. But chiasmus often involves symmetrical arrangements of sound. Large-scale ring forms do not. They’re more difficult to identify, and certainly more problematic.

That they are large scale, encompassing the whole work, is one source of difficulty. You have compare features across the whole text, that’s much more difficult than comparing features within a line or a few lines of poetry. Moreover it’s not obvious what features you should be comparing. It’s not sound. And objectifying subject matter is trickier, no?

The road to form

In my own experience, it takes a fair amount of tedious work to identify ring-form structures. I can think of one case where I suspected a ring-form at the outset, Tezuka’s Metropolis, and another where I started with a clue, David Bordwell’s remark about symmetry in King Kong. In both of these cases it took me some hours of work over a day or three to conduct the analysis. And then there’s Gojira, where I’d worked on the film off and on over a couple of years before I suspected it might be a ring composition. And then, again, it was hours of work to verify my suspicion.

I note moreover that I did this work after, long after, I had adopted a computational view of literary texts. Indeed, I did most of this work after my 2006 paper on literary morphology [1]. By that time I had, of course, done the work on “Kubla Khan” and on Tezuka’s Metropolis. But it wasn’t until several years later I ran up a post about “The Nutcracker Suite” and “sorcerer’s Apprentice” episodes of Fantasia [2], though I must have worked on “The Nutcracker Suite” in 2006 or 2007 as I’d written a long email to Mary Douglas about it and she died in May of 2007.

My point is simply that I hadn’t begun this work in a systematic way until I’d found a example or two by the by and until I had a theoretical reason – computational form – to look for them. I’d been driven to computation by “Kubla Khan” years ago, after I found those nested structures that must “smelled” like computation.

Nested structure in “Kubla Khan”, ll. 1-36.

And it was easy and natural enough to extend computation to Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the armature. And finally, having adopted a computational view of language, it followed that literature must have a computational aspect as well. The remaining issue is whether or not literary texts display large-scale computational structures rather than simply being a concatenation of sentence-level structures. The existence of ring-form texts suggests that they do.

More traditional critics, and even those interested in poetics, structuralism, and cognitive science, simply don’t have the theoretical motivation that I have. Nor, would it seem, do have they had the practical experience I got while slogging through “Kubla Khan”. For that was my key experience [3]. When I started my work on “Kubla Khan” I certainly wasn’t looking for those nested structures. I was looking for patterns of binary oppositions. Here’s a piece of a typical worksheet:

Binary oppositions were all over the place – Kubla vs. river Alph, Kubla vs. wailing woman, dome vs. caverns, vision vs. sound, fountain vs. caverns, fountain vs. done, and so forth – but patterns were harder to come by. There were so many. It wasn’t until I decided to treat line-end punctuation like parentheses in LISP than some order appeared, and then the order was that of those nested structures, not of binary oppositions. But there was, of course, a relationship between the two orders; those binary oppositions weren’t just scattered higgledy-piggledy over those nested strings [4]. Perhaps that was it, seeing the relationship between the nesting and the oppositions, that convinced me there was something deeply and fundamentally computationally going on.

But there was also the work of going back and forth over that text over a period of months. That likely built up some cognitive structures that made me more sensitive to, well, you know, those sorts of patterns. And so when I went off to graduate school I found patterns in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [5], in relationships over some Shakespeare plays [6], and a Yeats’ “The Cat and the Moon” [7] – note that while I published the Gawain paper at the time, it was years before I published the Shakespeare work and I’ve never formally published the Yeats analysis. While the Yeats text is a lyric, the other texts are narratives, so I’d during my graduate work I’d extended my formal sense, my ability to “sniff out” form if you will, to narrative. That’s work I did between, say, 1969 and 1975, a period of roughly six years. And during that time I never really thought of myself as exploring the formal features of texts. It would take another two decades to reach that explicit realization. I was just looking at things I found interesting.

Decoding hidden meanings

And THAT’s how I arrived at the intuitions I would start systematically exploiting in this century. And all of it driven by “Kubla Khan”.

Returning to standard literary criticism, it has been driven by interpretive hunger, the search for meaning. And of course that’s what language is about, meaning. That’s what we’re aware of when we speak and listen. It’s only when things break down that we become aware of and attend to the substance (sound, graphic sign) and form (syntax) of language. So it’s natural, if you will, for critics to search for meaning. And while it’s not exactly unnatural to attend to form, form is secondary as an object of critical attention.

That is to say, it doesn’t take special motivation for critics to attend to meaning. Form is different. There motivation is required, and existing bodies of theory simply don’t provide that motivation.

Finally, I note that it is also natural to look for “hidden” meanings, to think of texts as being written in a code which thus required decoding. This doesn’t really require getting meta to the text; it doesn’t require that we treat the text as an object. Quite the contrary, it only requires that we treat the text as the most tricky of subjects.

As for objectification, as I’ve said, objectifying linguistic sound is relatively easy. For literary sounds are, after all, sounds like any other sound. We can hear them qua sound if we have to. Objectifying syntax is more difficult, and doesn’t seem to happen until writing evolves. Objectifying semantics (meaning) is the most difficult. Depending on what you mean by objectify, it’s only in the last half century or so that we’ve been able to do this. And the deepest kind of objectifications, computational models, are still little more than toys.

But note what those toys do. They simulate/imitate a language system. That’s what you have to do to objectify meaning, you have to model the system that uses language. Where does meaning reside? In the whole system.

Addendum: What kind of problem is this?

While thinking through this business (what’s so difficult about describing form?) I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of a problem is it. Is it something that requires a bunch of fairly specific prior knowledge, like, e.g. quantum mechanics? No, though that’s an extreme example. But whatever it is that I’m doing when I searching out form in texts (whether literary or film), it isn’t based on specific prior knowledge.

It is true that I believe a computational view of literary texts can motivate this kind of analysis and description. But I don’t see how adopting such a view gives you any tools for conducting the analysis, not in any direct way. That is, you can read and more or less agree with my 2006 paper on literary morphology [1], but that’s not going to give you much help in analyzing texts. For that, the best thing to do is look at examples of such analysis. For that’s how literary analysis of any kind, of any kind, is learned, but reading examples and trying to imitate them.

Thus the formal analysis and description of literary texts seems to be a base-level skill, albeit one of a sophisticated kind. It is base-level in the sense that it isn’t directly built on specific underling knowledge. And it is sophisticated in that it does require some kind of prior experience and training.

But, you know, I think high school students could learn to do it. I wonder if doing it with films would be easier?

References

[1] William Benzon, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form”, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 2006, article 060608. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-literary_morphology_nine_propositions_in. A downloadable version, with additions, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.

[2] William Benzon, “Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice”, New Savanna, December 28, 2010, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/12/two-rings-in-fantasia-nutcracker-and.html.

[3] I tell the story in William Benzon, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, Working Paper, February 2015, https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_Lévi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition.

[4] William Benzon, Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, Language and Style, Vol. 8. 1985, pp. 3-29, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_.

[5] William Benzon, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Semiotics of Ontology”, Semiotica, 3/4, 1977, 267-293, https://www.academia.edu/238607/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight_and_the_Semiotics_of_Ontology.

[6] William Benzon, At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3): 259-279, 1998, https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation.

[7] William Benzon, “A New Dance Turn: ‘The Cat and the Moon. All up in One Another”, Working Paper, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/7995865/A_New_Dance_Turn_The_Cat_and_the_Moon_All_up_in_One_Another.