THE FIX OF FORM: AN OPEN LETTER

Abstract

Charlottesville Fin de siècle XX

O thou that after toil and storm Mayst seem to have reached a purer air, Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form, or — as the undersigned trusts to find you still —

Dear Reader,

THERE WAS A TIME when the New Criticism taught you to pay attention to literary form as the embodied elaboration of meaning. You knew that authors had a design on you, but you learned to bracket questions of intention and affect so as to concentrate on the design itself, where creative purpose got built out in verbal deed. You dealt, by and large, with the concrete particular, anatomizing complexities for the sake of an analytically earned appreciation of distinct instances of formal unity. While every instance was unique, what you found to say about the unity of this poem or that novel did evince a family resemblance among literary works, and among critical interpretations, that linked them to each other and, presumably, to a family of wholesome universals. Or did it just seem to? If you couldn’t be sure then, and can’t be sure now either, that’s because these larger issues were somehow off in the background and beside the point, which was to practice criticism as a cognition of integral form.