here in those arts with a fecble and negligible avant-garde: fiction and the drama. Most American novelists and playwrights are really either joumalists or gentlemen socfologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equiv~ alent of program music, And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn't simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, hhancier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and paint- ing and music, don't refect any interesting con- cern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation, But programmatic avant-gardism — which ‘has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interprefations. At Jeast, Ihope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run. {It also perpetu- ates the very distinction between form and con- tent which i, ultimately, an illusion.) Ideally, itis possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unic fied and clean, whose momentum i so rapid, ‘whose address isso direct thatthe workean be... Just what itis, Is this possible now? It does hap- pen in fms, [ believe. This is why cinema is the ‘most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now, Perhaps the way one tells how alive 2 particular artform is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes init, and stil being good, For example, a few of the films of Bergman— though crammed with lame mes- sages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations — still triumph over the preten= tious intentions of their director. In Winter Light and The Silence, the beauty and visual sophistica- tion ofthe images subvert before our eyes the cal- ow pseudo-intellectuaity of the story and some of the dialogue. (The most remarkeble instance of sort of discrepancy is the work of D. W. Griffith.) In good films, there is always a direct- ness that entirely frees us from the itch to inter~ pret, Many old Hollywood films, like those of Cokor, Walsh, Hawks, and countless other direc- tors, have this liberating anti-symbolic quality, no Tess’ than the best work of the new European 144 SUSAN SONTAG. directors, like Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Jules andl Jim, Godard’s Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie, Autonioné's L’Avvenura, end Olmi's The Fiancés. ‘The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters isin part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art. It also owes to the happy acci- dent that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds. Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze. For the cinema, walike the novel, pos- ‘esses a vocabulary of forms — the explicit, com plex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film, ‘What kind of criticism, of commentary on the ats, is desirable today? For I an not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased, They can be. The ques- tion is how. What would criticism look like that ‘would serve the work of art, not usurp its place? ‘What is needed, fist, is more attention to form in art If excessive sttess on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more. extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is vocabulary —a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, voeabulary — for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncom- ‘mon, is ofthis sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. On film, drama, and painting respectively, I can think of Erwin Panofsky's essay, “Style and Medium in the ne ofthe dffites is that our ie of fem spat (he Greek meiphors for form are ll derived fom notions of pace). Tis why we have a more ready vocabulary of forms Terthe spatial than for th temporal as The exception among, the temporal arts, of cours, is the dramas pecbap this 6 becange the drama Is a naraive Ge, tenpra) form tht extends self visually and pictorial, upon a stages... What ‘wecdn’t have yet ish poets ofthe motel, ny elearnodon of the forms of narration, Pthaps fim cic wil et oeae son of breathroagh here, ine ms are praia visa Term, je heya ls a subsivision of erature. [Sontag]Motion Pictures,” Northrop Frye’s essay “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Pierre Francasiel’s essay “The Destruction of a Plastic Space.” Roland Barthes’s book On Racine and his two essays on Robbe-Grillet are examples of Formal analysis applied to the work of a single author. (The best essays in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, like “The Scar of Odysseus,” are also of this type.) An example of formal analysis applied simultaneously to genre and author is Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Story Teller: Reflections ‘on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.” Equally valuable would be acts of criticism ‘which would supply a really accurate, sharp, lov- ing description of the appearance of a work of art. ‘This seams even harder todo than formal analysis. Some of Manny Farber’s film criticism, Dorothy ‘Van Ghent's essay “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers,’” Randall Jarrell’s essay on Walt Whitman are among the rare. examples of what I ‘mean, These are essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it, 9 Transparenceis the highest, most liberating value in art —and in criticism — today. Transparence ‘means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they ace, This isthe szeatness of, for example, the filras of Bresson and Ozu and Renoit’s The Rules of the Game. ‘Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revoiutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experi- enced on several levels. Now it is not. It rein forces the principle of redundancy that is the principal afftction of modern life. Once upon a time (@ time when high art wes scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art, Now itis not. What we decidedly do not need now is fur ther to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) At into Culture, Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. ‘Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our seases. Ours, is a culture based on excess, on overproductior the result isa sterdy loss of sharpness in our sen sory experience, AUl the conditions of modem life —its material plenitude, its sheer crowded- ness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it isin the light of the condition of our seases, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed. ‘What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. ‘Our task is notto find the maximum amount of content ia a work of art, much less to squeeze ‘more content out of the work than is already there, Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. ‘The aim of all commentary on art now shold be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience — more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what iti, even that fis what i is, rather than to show what i¢ means. 10 In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. AGAINST INTERPRETATION 745Part Two CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISMI FORMALISMS: RUSSIAN FORMALISM, NEW CRITICISM, NEO-ARISTOTELIANISM. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war... «And art ‘exists that one may recover the sensation of ie: it exits ro make one fel things, 0 make the stone stony. The purpose of artis to inpart the sensation af things as they are perceived and rot as they are known. — VICTOR SHKLOVSKY Fiuding ts proper symbol defined and refined bythe pantelpaiig metaphors, he theme be- comes part ofthe reality tn which we live —aninsll, rooted in and growing out of con crete experience, manyrsided, threevilmensional. = CLBaNTH BROOKS ‘There are many guestions that Aristotle's approach wil! not answer: questions about the spiric of tragedy throughout the ages, questions about how 10 rise from despatr to faith ques- tions about how t0 use art to attack your enemies... But you know there is no better eure Jor despoir than rousing yourself ard jolning « great artist in kis particular creative acts: there is wo better proof of nobility than seeing « bit oft really work ina great plece of art there is no more saisfectory proof ofthe existence ofthe good. the true and the beautfel than experiencing ther flsion inthe uiique, particular achievement of story —WaYne.C. BooTe ‘The three movements discussed here cover a vast amount of geographical ground (Centered in Moscow, in London and Nashville, and in Chicago), and they have flourished over a long stretch of the present century, from just after World Wat Ito the present day. Whether the theoretical tenitories inhabited by the formalists are ‘seen as vast or confined depends on whether one looks atthe positive idens they have, ‘espoused or at their oppositions. All three versions of formalism proposed an “intrin- sic” criticism that defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities inthe text, and all three began in reaction to various forms of “extrinsic” criticism that viewed the text as either the product of social and historical forces or a document making an cthical statement, But no two of the three agreed on precisely what made a text “it~ rary,” what qualities of form, language, or content differentiated it from nonliterary FORMALISMS 749750 discourse, or what the significance of literature was for humanity. There are major discrepancies among these three movements, as one might expect, but the diver- sgences within each movement arc almost as stiking. RUSSIAN FORMALISM Of the three movements, Russian formalism had the briefest flowering. It originated in Moseow in 1915 with (Society forthe Stody of Poctic Language), grew for about a decade in postrevolu- tionary Russia, and as « movement was finally eliminated for political reasons by Joseph Stalin and his henchman Andcey Zhdanov around 1930, Most ofits members either formally recanted (as did Victor Shklovsky) or emigrated (like Roman Jakobson). Their publications, suppressed in the USSR, were lost to the West until Victor Evich's pioneering study Russian Formalism: History — Doctrine (1955) and Tzvetan Todorov’s 1965 translation of the formalists into French. Nevertheless, the ultimate influence of the formalists was considerable, Roman Jakobson carted their ideas west, first to the Prague Linguistic Circle (which included Jan ‘Mukaovsk), and then to Pais, where he nnd Claude LEvi-Strauss helped create the structuralist movement that flouristed from the early 19605. ‘The origins of Russian formalism and the New Criticism show some interesting parallels, largely because the two movements developed in opposition to the same {wo mainstream forms of contemporary criticism. On the one hand they rejected the historicism of academic criticism, which was seen as a tedious investigation of the circumstances of poetic creation pursued in the absence of any coherent notion of poetics itself. On the other, they despised the liberal “social criticism” of reformers who wished to use literature as a means of cultural progress. What the moralist Paul Elmer More was to the New Critics, nineteenth-century socialist critics like Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolay Chemyshevsky, and! Nikolay Dobrolyubov were to the Russian formalist. ~ Serious divergences occurred, however. The New Critis were essentially allied with the imagist poets (including T. B. Hulme, ‘. S. Btiot, and Ezra Pound), who ‘viewed poetry as a means of communicating, through image and symbol, what could ‘not be ssid in prose. The poetics of the New Critics centered in semantics, and set the critic the task of decoding the text by explicating its tropes. The systems of indi- vidual New Crities largely differed over which of the principal figures of speech or thought —such as metaphor, irony, and ambiguity — was chosen as the master trope. ‘The Russian formalists began by refining but ultimately rejecting the work of a nineteenth-century philologist who might be seen as a prototype New Critic. ‘Alexander Potebnya viewed imagery as the master trope distinguishing poetry from prose, which he regarded as two distinct ways of knowing the world. This theory ‘was embraced by the symbolist poets (like Andrey Bely and Dmitry Merezhkovsky), who looked to art to produce a mystical form of knowledge. Potebnya was as much an exemplar as he was an opponent of the formalists; he had been concerned about the line dividing the literary from the nonliterary (an issue about which the social FORMALISMScritics cared litte), and he had defined literariness as a function of language, a point of view the formalists were also to embrace. Potebaya is chiefly known today, however, through the attack on his ideas in ‘Victor Shiklovsky's manifesto of formalism, “Art as Technique,” which takes issue ‘with the narrowness of Potebnya’s conception of actin elevating metaphor and sym botism, imagery, or any single trope to master status. From Shklovsky’s perspective, the central difficulty with Potebnya’s conception of poetry was its obsession with semantics, with the notion thatthe things poetry had to express were mystically dif- ferent from those of prose, For Shklovsky, the chief function of at is not to lead us to 2 knowledge above and beyond the world but to restore our capacity to see a ‘world to which use and habit have blinded us. “As perception becomes habitual, it ‘becomes automatic,” says Shklovsky, “ond art exists that one may recaver the sen sation of life... of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” By its use of unaccustomed language, art makes the world strange again, so that we can see it with the freshness of a child, Ostranente (Gefemiliarization), the concept at the center of Shklovsky's poetics, is an inversion of Samuel Johnson's notion that art “approximates the remote and fanniliarizes the wonderful.” “The concept of defamiliatization is central to the formalist project, but the term. can be used in different ways at different levels of approach to the literary object. At the most basic level of discourse, the formalists analyzed sentences taken from lit- rary texts to see how they estranged reality as a purely aesthetic end in itself. But atthe higher level where discourse becomes social, the formalists saw texts’ repre- sontations of reality as @ technique for defamiliarizing the social ideas of the domi- nant culture, and thus for challenging our automatic acceptance of these ideas. ‘They would say, for example, that an apparently naive and incoherent narrative voice that of Gogol’s The Nose) functions so as to expose the emuelty and hypocrisy of the social ideas of the time, ‘Ata still higher and more abstract level, the formalists, as ‘Tony Bennett has put it, “were concemed with the formal mechanisms whereby literary works tended to reveal or make strange the systems of coherence imposed on reality by the codes and ‘conventions of other, usually earlier literary forms.” For example, Shklovsky's ‘essay on Tristram Shandy (1921) distinguishes between fabuia (or story), that is, the temporal-causal sequence of narrated events that comprise the raw materials of the work, and sjuzet (or plot) the way in which these raw materials re formally manip- ulated, in order to argue that Tristram Shandy, as Bennett puts it, ‘way as to limit and reveal the narrative conventions of the time. ‘The distinction between fabula and sjuzet owes a great dal to another nineteenth~ century forebear of the formalists, the academic literary historian Alexander Vesclovsky. Around 1906, Veselovsky evolved a poctics of “motifs,” in which the literary work is dissected into its smallest irreducible components, and plot is seen as a complex cluster of story-motifs, ordered, altered, and rearranged by arts ‘Veselovsky thought that shifting motifs correlated with changes in cultural attitudes. Tony Bennet, Formalism and Marsism (London: Metiuen, 1979) P23. FORMALISMS 7st152 ‘The formalists predictably disagreed with his version of historical determinism but aclopted Veselovsky’s techniques of thematic analysis, as exemplified by Boris ‘Tomashevsky's “Thematics” (1925) and Viadimir Propp's The Morphology of the Folke-Tale (1928). In effect, the formalists viewed literature as 2 mode of construction. Poetry was, defined by its use of poetic Janguage, fiction as the craft of manipulating story mate- rials by narrative technique. What was not a matter of construction, such as the ori= ‘gins and the cultural meaning of a literary work, was not specifically literary, and ‘was therefore dismissed as not a true part of poetics. The difficulty with such a view, 1s one historian of formalism has suggested, is that “it does not permit us to evalu- ate” individual texts. “But the OPOYAZ, members never introduced the problems of evaluation into their system.” ‘Shkdovsky established the principal issues governing the literary qualities of tex, ‘Roman Jakobson most succinctly defined the poetic in what would today be called semi= otic fashion: asa special use of language, Poetry was “an utterance oriented toward the mode of expression”; in poetry “a word is perceived asa word and not merely as 2 proxy forthe denoted objector an outburst of emotion, ... Words and their arrangement... their outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own.” At the outset, the Russian formalists talked as though it were the emotive quality ‘of poetry that differentiated it from common language, but a semantic feature of that sort was bound to seem unsatisfactory in the long run; obviously some expressions of feeling are poetic and some are noi, while a great deal of what is cleariy poetry is not primarily emotional expression. Besides, emotion was a sort of content, and with such a discriminant, the formalists would have been entrapped in the notion of an ‘extemal form enclosing a crade content. Jakobson’s idea made it possible to drop entirely the notion ofa separable content and to view poet form as that which inte~ ‘grates the raw material of language into a shaped structure. Jakobson’s sense of form ‘sa dynamic shaping process thus resembles the Atistotelian eis; as we shall see, ithas more in common with the Chicago neo-Aristotelians’ notions of form than that of the New Crities. ‘The work of Vladimir Propp on folklore (represented here by “Fairy Tale “Transformations,” p. 785) exemplifies this notion of literature as a system, Previous ways of analyzing folktales had operated a the level of the plot as a whole: the clas sification system of Antti Aame (begun 1907, codified by Stith Thompson in 1932)* was designed to allow folklorsts to compare tales from different cultures, to allow us to show the similarities of a “Cinderella” story from China and one told by the Lakota, The defect ofthe system is that it groups tales together in terms ofthe whole pilot, and the factors by which ales are grouped together or separated can sometimes seem arbitrary. For example, the story most of us know as Bluebeard focuses on a pperson who marries an ogre, violates a condition the ogre imposes, and is about to scgyiyna Pomorska, “Russian Formalism in Retrospect" in Readings in Russlan Poets, ed, ‘Ladisi Mateja und Keystya Pomorska (Cambeidge: MIT Press, 1971), 275+ Victor lic, Ruslan Formalism: History — Doctrine (The Hague: Maui, 1963). 183- “Ant Aarne, Verglelchonte mirchenforscinng (Helsinki, 1307) Folk Literate Bloomington IN, 1932-30). ith Thompson, Botjindes of FORMALISMSbe Killed when he or she is saved by a rescuer. Aame-Thompson classifies the story as Type 312 ifthe rescuer is male, ‘Type 311 if female, but whether the ogre is male or female does not make any difference. ‘Trying to bring greater system to the understanding of folklore and fictional plots in general, Propp analyzed a group of 100 fairy tales collected by Afanase’ev, break- ing each of them down into individual plot elements, then generalizing those ele~ ‘ments. For example, in one tale Baba Jaga (a demonic female figure in Russian folklore) gives Ivan a horse. Within one “function” (Gift), the donor is Baba Jaga, the recipient is Ivan, and the gif is the horse. Propp found 31 functions, usually related to the verbs in his plot clement, and 120 other “components,” which may cor- respond to nouns, to adjectives, orto phrases indicating where an action takes place. opps system seems protostracturalist; in this we can see how structuralistanthro~ pologisis like Claude Lévi-Strauss used Propp in devising their classifications of myth, But Propp is not primarily interested in creating a purely theoretical system with static symmetry; his principal object is to understand how folklore develops historically. Russia was Christianized fairy late in its history, so Propp understands tales where the hero's helpers are apostles and the villain is the devil as more recent than those where the helpers are friendly animals and the villain is a forest demon. Other historical connections may be less clear because they can move in both ditec- tions, Normally we think of romances as developing out of pre-existing Folk materi- als, but a romance can be recited and retold in the form of stories that can break ddovn into folktales (as many of us know Greek and Roman “myths” without know- ing the specific poems and romances in which they originat If the idea ofthe literary was the founding feature of Russian formalism, literary history rapidly became one of its primary concems. For the formalists, the older modes of literary history were essentially inaclequate because they had never established any strong sense of what made a particular text into liternture ina given age. Without any systematic notion of the literary, the only causal mechanisms available were what ‘Boris Bikhenbaum called “the naive theory of ‘inheritance’ and ‘influence’ and hence naive biographism based on individual psychology.” The formalist believed that at any moment a national literature was not juste collection of individual works but a system of genres. This system is hierarchical: one genre is dominant at any given time, ‘And the genres fall into dialectical relations with each other, epic against romance, comedy against wragedy, pastoral poetty agtinst the poetic satire. As cultures change, the literary system changes, bat the dominance of genres coes not follow in aclear and predictable Tine of succession, Shklovsky put it this way: “When literary sehools change, the succession passes not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.” Applying this to early modem England, epic clearly seems the dominant genre (the Faerie Queene, Paradise Last). In the cighteenth century, the philosophical poem dominates (Essay on Men), while epic isa depressed, even despised genre. Narrative poetry resumes its primacy in the eaty nineteenth century, butts form is personal and autobiographical rather than epic (The Prelude, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). *Soris Mikhailovich Eikheatoum, “Lteraure and Literary Life" In Mo! Veannnit (Leningred, gags. FORMALISMS 753184 ‘The Russian formalists held that this generic change within literery systems happens primarily by reason of formal exhaustion, A dominant genre attracts lesser talents, becomes less and less creative, more and more imitative, becomes coarse as strong sensations need to be delivered to provide literary impact. Held together by conventions, the gente becomes automatized (the mark of the non-lterary, as Shklovsiy says), and topples from its position. A new genre takes its place at the top, and the process repeats itself with the new dominant. This motor for literary history stands in compelling contrast with the Macxists’ view that literature responds pri- marily to exterior social and economic change. ‘THE NEW CRITICISM. ‘The Russian formalists were Underground Men, whose ideas were absent from the critical dialogue of the West until the 1960s, The New Criticism, to the contrary, is one of the more conspicuous success stores of the century, and ifthe movement is centered somewhat less coherently than the others, that may have been one of the incipal reasons for its popularity, because the New Criticism is associated less with a body of theoretieal doctrine about the nature of language and poetry than with 4 method of critical exegesis and explication, ‘The name “New Criticism” seems to have been bestowed by John Crowe Ransom {in a T941 book of that ttle, which examines the work of I. A. Richards and William Empson, T.S, Eliot, Yvor Winters, andthe philosopher Charles W. Moris. The most important New Critics include this group, Ransom himself, and his fellow Southern “fugitive” writers Allen ate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robest Penn Warren, Other im portant theorists associated with the movement inchude René Wellek, R.P. Blackmur, Robert B. Heilman, Austin Warren, and Murray Krieger. After this point itis hard to {ell where to stop, since by the 1950s the New Critical method of poetic explication had come to dominate the teaching of literature in England and America, and most work- {ng literary critics had been touched by it in one way or another. One should look to 1A. Richards and. S. Eliotas the primary founders ofthis method, the former throug his philosophical theories and the latter through his critical practice and tastes. Like the Russian formatists, Richacls was maialy concerned with what differen- tiated poetry from common language. For him the issue was principally referen- tislity. Richards held that in common language we make statements that refer to ‘matters of fact, whereas in poetry we make pseudostatements that may appear to be referential but in fact are not, Statements made in poetry cannot be verified; their function is affective rather than cognitive. A poem arouses and allays fectings through the dance of conflicting attitudes stimulated by its complex language. Such an aesthetic moment shakes up the reader's established responses to real life by stim- ‘lating the reader's experience of a sense of harmony established among opposing impulses. ‘The form of the poem consists of these stimuli and responses within an ideal reader. (Richards's notion of poetry is at bottom a more behavioristic version of Coleridge, who held thet the imagination operates by reconciling opposing qualities into an ideal unity of form.) Richards was primarily a theorist; the critical FORMALISMS