Having gone through Russian Formalism and The New Criticism, I'm finally at the third of the three contemporary formalist schools: Neo-Aristotelianism (aka The Chicago School).
This essay has, I think, the best description of what form means, and why it's the basis on which the quality of a work should be assessed that I've yet encountered.
The materials of a story, the plot and characters and events, are like clay. They can be shaped--formed--in many ways. They can be shaped skillfully, or poorly. He demonstrates this by recounting the story told in The Duke of Benevento badly. I can't really say how badly, since I'm not familiar with that poem, but the point is well made all the same. It's easy to imagine any story one is familiar with, no matter how emotionally impacting and artful it is, and recount its events without any of the form that gives them weight. Hell, "describe the plot of your favorite movie badly" was a twitter meme.
These two aspects or poetry (and again, poetry really seems like synechdoche for all literary art and beyond) apparently have names going back to Aristotle: Res (subject matter), and Verba (the language used to express the subject matter).
Yet one shouldn't lose sight of the fact that every element of a work of art can interact with every other part to construct a more perfect whole. The paramount importance of Verba must be considered, because it is important (obviously) and also because it is unintuitive. But in focusing on verba, don't lose sight of the impact res can have. The two aspects interact with each other and support each other.
From here the essay moves on to its central argument: that Aristotle's poetics remains a useful framework for criticism, BUT there has been a great deal of artistic formal evolution, which cannot be described in Aristotle's framework as he stated it. Thus it would be useful to criticism to expand the toolbox of poetics rather than force new forms to fit into it, or to abandon the framework entirely in favor of new critical tools. On this note:
"It is [...] the task of making formal sense out of any poetic work before us on the assumption that it may in fact be a work for whose peculiar principles of structure there are nowhere any usable parallels either in literary theory or in our experience of other works. The hypotheses we have to make, therefore, will not be of the fixed and accredited kind which scientists employ only when their problem is not to find out something still unknown but to "demonstrate" a classic experiment to beginners, but rather of the tentative kind—to be modified or rejected altogether at the dictation of the facts."
In pursuing this goal, Crane proposes that we start by accepting the impact of a work which has struck us as good and valuable. Then we identify what artistic problems the author would have faced in constructing this work. Then we assess how those problems were solved.
He notes particularly that we're not trying to psychoanalyze the artist here. Our inquiry isn't about the author's intentions. We're looking first at what the text accomplishes, then at how the text accomplishes that feat.
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There were parts of this essay that were a nearly impossible struggle for me to get through, and I realize it's because that section was building directly on concepts from Aristotle's Poetics, which I've never read. I always figured I would read it someday, I just am so much less interested in the ancients than I am in contemporary criticism. Yet I suppose a foundation is necessary, so I may as well get to it. I'm going to pause my reading of The Critical Tradition here so I can read Poetics.
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner seems to be such a pivotal work within the western canon that I figured it was worth a diversion from Eliot. It is strikingly straightforward in comparison, with a clear narrative that needs no particular unpacking, when compared to everything I've read for this blog up to now. It's too long to reproduce in full here, but Wikimedia has it hosted nicely without a bunch of ads around it. I read the 1817 version for this post.
In the spirit of appreciating form, here is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner described badly:
An old man grabs the arm of a young man at a wedding and tells him a long story. It's about how a long time ago he was a sailor, he shot a bird, his ship was unable to move due to lack of wind, and his shipmates got angry at him for causing them bad luck. They made him wear the dead bird around his neck. He sees a ship and thinks they're getting rescued, but death is on the ship. Death gambles with a woman called 'death in life,' and Death wins the crew, while the woman wins the protagonist. The crew all die. The protagonist is deeply ashamed, and learns to appreciate nature. The bodies of the dead crew are possessed to steer the ship back home. It sinks as soon as he's off the boat. He goes to confession, then spends the rest of his days wandering the world. Sometimes he sees someone, and he knows he must tell them his story, then he wanders on. The story ends, and the moral is to love all of god's creation. The next day the young man wakes up sadder, but wiser.
Obviously the story is not nearly so stirring when described this way.
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