How both parents and the times make you what you are.
Formalism is the view of aesthetics that only the dynamics of the artwork or the text is to be consulted in garnering what the artwork or text means regardless of the biography or circumstances of the artwork or text. What is important is the work itself and anything else is either unimportant or a mere adjunct of or an inconclusive hunch about the work itself, as when Jane Austen said that she was going to create a heroine in “Emma” who was unappealing. The novel itself shows that whatever Austen meant to do was not necessarily what she did do. She might have gotten her conception of her own character wrong, as happened, critics generally agree, when Shylock got away from Shakespeare and became more trod upon than Shakespeare had originally thought him to be. A work is itself superior to the intentions of the work. This is a very radical view of art and literature in that it applies high standards, gleaming meaning from the work rather than from the commentaries written about it. That puts Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as inferior to, let us say, “Henry V” because Dante’s stories can’t be understood without the footnotes, however succinct and profound is his poetry, while “Henry V” makes sense in itself, the machinations of international relations, whether or not the play is accurate to its time and is not foreshadows the fact, after all, that Henry V died soon afterwards and did not take over France for very long. Very different from commentaries are T. S. Eliot’s footnotes in “The Wasteland”, which are part of the text and so allow a reader to wonder what Eliot was doing with poetry by including footnotes. Is a text restrained or expanded as poetry by including within it its own footnotes?
An easy entrance to formalism is observed in landscape and portraiture. That shows the irrelevance of even the titles given by painters to their paintings. Not everyone goes so far as Abstract Expressionists such as Rothko and Pollock entitling their canvases as numbers so as not to distract from the fields of color and spaces between, which are the objects of true investigation, discovered rather than proclaimed, as if Pollack’s “One: Number 31, 1950 were renamed “Infinite Depths”. Similarly, it is to flatter the person who paid for the commission if Sargent’s “Mrs.George Swinton” is named for the person who is the sitter rather than focuses on the particular person who seems to come to life. Similarly, Holbien was portraying particular people so as to see what they looked like for a possible marriage, but what is worthwhile are the portraits themselves, no matter their use. History can say Holbien was trying for accuracy, but the test of that is whether they seem to be accurate rather than brushed up to make them attractive. That question can be answered by looking at the painting. Even named landscapes do not cut very deep. Church’s “The Heart of the Andes” is a landscape about South America but what it portrays are distances between disruptions of distance, which is about itself and not just a photo of a visit.
Strictly adhering to a text can explain things far away from the text. “Pride and Prejudice” often goes wrong in its movie versions. In the 1940 version, Greer Garson is charming and Darcey is sophisticated when in the novel Elizabeth is outspoken and difficult to manage and Darcy is a bit tongue tied. Also, the end of the movie is changed so that Lady is used as a test to show Elizabeth was worthy of Darcy when in the novel Lady was all against her. In a later version, Elizabeth is charming and pretty and companionable and Colin Firth is a decent guy even though, in the novel, both are unapproachable because she is outspoken and he is so secretive. Why do filmmakers get it wrong? Because, I suggest, Austen books are very demanding in being unsparing of their participants. They will be misled, made softer than life, so as to become palatable, however much, in tube text, the characters are so trying and yet still the major protagonists. The text requires a reader to engage a more elevated view of humanity, which is that people are always problematic.
Dickens’ novels, however troubling may be the social context, present protagonists as heroes whatever their quirks and so there is no need to simplify when rendering them, as was clear in the 1946 David Lean version of “Great Expectations” where the drama of the youthful Pip captured by the escaped criminal is vivid and explains his good fortune but where it is understandable that he neglected his benefactor until he shows up. A Dickens protagonist is understandable, needing no greater understanding of character than one ordinarily has, while Austen creates challenges rather than adventures for her protagonists. These are two different kettles of fish, Austen looking to drama, where character unravels, while Dickens is himself a movie where people proceed in their lives. So the very structure of the things makes them different and so explain alternative reader and viewer responses.
A novel would seem to be a genre of literature that would require a great deal of commentary to be understood because it is, in Dickens fashion, so embedded in the circumstances of the unraveling of a character, while Austen is more like drama in that a character is discovered from their talk rather than from the circumstances, a stage that could be as bare as Hamlet played in a greatcoat on a bare stage, however rich is the times of Austen’s Regency England. There could be dissertations on Bloomsday or, in “Middlemarch”, about that point in time when biblical scholars had discovered the historical Jesus. Novels, after all, consistently remind the reader of their facticity. But, in fact, novels can be read on their own, even as a cheap way of learning history, because what they create is a facsimile of history, a rendering of what is imagined to have been to be treated as true, and has been so ever since Defoe peddled far off rumors as truthful, and so akin to Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not”.
A good example of the way novelists recast current events for their own aesthetic purposes is available in John Updike’s “In the Beauty of the Lilies”, a saga of four generations as they transmogrify themselves from their parents, each one both lost and transformed by their ordeals and so as to hint that people can achieve, as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” claims, blessed by and in Christ. The title of the novel is not just a name. It is the author’s statement of what the whole story is about. This despite the fact that Updike is so taken with current events that he takes a cult tragedy like that of Jim Jones as a major setting for one of his generations, that having become independent of what actually happened and even though some critics when the novel first came out in 1996 as not having gotten quite right the street plan of Paterson, New Jersey in the early Twentieth Century, as if this was not an imagined Paterson, as much as Chambon’s Sitka, Alaska in his alternative history “The Jewish Policeman’s Union” or the imagined place however parallel to Eastern Long Island in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.
The hero in the first generation is a preacher who loses his faith and, unlike other lapsed believers, requires himself to announce it and lose his congregation and makes it as an encyclopedia salesman and as a church benefactor who appreciates him as a man of principle. But the ex-believer, so noble in thinking he had to be true to his beliefs, that the important thigh in a soul, is overwrought by his condition and dies, apparently of despair. The second generation is the son so unnerved by his father’s fate that he spends his life avoiding stress, becoming a postman who refuses to become more than a mail carrier and marries a woman from the other side of the tracks but is somewhat redeemed by he and his wife have a very successful sexual relationship. The third generation is the postman’s daughter who seems to have early gleaned the possibilities of sex and becomes a movie star and makes bad marriages but has a touch of genius at physical comedy and so seems to redeem her otherwise tawdry life. Her son, the last of the four generations, has been poorly raised and falls into despair, plagued by his incestuous feelings, undone from his grandparents honest love, but a cult group attracts him and this hero decides that the cult leader is “the real deal” not because the cult leader is not brutal or man ipu,lative or evin evil but because of the cult leader’s certainty that he is on the true path rather than a phony who apes religion so as to get his way. Sincerity is the test of true religiosity and so the painfully shortsighted new convert has redeemed his great grandfather by finding a way back to religion even if it is a distorted one, and that may be the truth Updike offers in the late Twentieth Century.
Updike’s novel, his best, I think, is quite a distance from what Updike offered early on in his life in the short story “Pigeon Feathers” in which a vision of those seemed to be sublime and holy. So Updike is placed in time but the book itself is sufficient to generate its thoughts and feelings and so does not require an analysis of Jonestown, Guyana, even if Updike had read up on it to help prepare his own vision of cult rise and destruction and so can be read as a commentary on contemporary events rather than on a very long cycle of forms of death and transfiguration. The novel is what counts and Updike not to be dismissed as a lightweight because he deals with contemporary images and situations: the postman, tube movie star, the cult follower. Nor is Updike to be dismissed because he comes around tried and true to sex and religion, which are palatable cliches most of the time. Updike is neither Austen, who reveals aspects of character still unwilling for readers to accept, or, for that matter, Nabakov, who goes even more deeply than Updike into perversity.
Formalism, which is fidelity to a text, does not eliminate comparison even if it does regard research into what surrounds a text as superfluous, incidental, and not to the point. Whether, in fact, Updike had two wives does not explain his view of adultery any more than that Austen had no children does not explain her disregard of small children. She had nieces and nephews. But “formalism”, as the after all, refers to the forms in art and literature. That is the essence of the matter. A work is an example of a kind of work. It can be a genre, like tragedy and comedy or horror, or superhero, or a topic, like contemporary politics or a travel to the South Seas or outer space, and one of each, like “2001”. Formalism tells what of a work lasts as part of the limited but not all enumerated of the forms that have been created over the course of the human imagination.
Given the Icelandic sagas, which chronicle feats of valor across the generations, and even indicate some internality for the successive characters, it is surprising that there are such few sagas, those defined as stories of at least three generations. The most notable one comes from “Genesis”, where Abraham is followed by the generation of Isaac and then by the generation of Esau and Jacob and then bg the generation of Joseph. But those stories are independent of one another in that they do not reflect on one another, and so parents and their children and so offer might have been strung together by the editor of “Genesis” rather than conceived of as a whole. Nineteenth century novels do not go beyond parents and children and so Dickens and Austen offer biographies of their protagonists, as has been the case since Fielding in “Tom Jones”. So Updike is audacious in offering four generations where the last three reverberate against their each prior parentage as well as the first generation in that all children reap what their parents and ultimate parent sows, perhaps a reflection on Updike’s Christian sense that children are not fresh or are born with a tabula rasa but partake of the givens of their ancestors, as is posited by the notion of original sin, which is that all the generations are in full, because Adam and Eve had sinned. Moreover, “In the Beauty of the Lilies” is not an opportunity to provide what unfolds over time across the past generations, a travelog through the periods the generations cover, though it does include a generation of belief followed by a generation of obscurity for the protagonists, to a generation of the movies and finally a generation of cultishness, refusing to say whether this is progress or decline, only the vicissitudes of history. That is because Updike works out the inner dynamics of these people, as they play out within the trappings of history, their personal histories not identical with public history, as is the case in the Icelandic sagas. Quite an achievement is Updike’s, to make a saga a form of thinking and writing long unexploited and to be recognized as such by its formalism.
Formalism concentrates on genre even though it can pick apart character structure or the life of cities, as in Dreiser and Dickens. A major genre like tragedy deals with an existential situation, that of fate and free will, while the major form, comedy, deals with the equally existential issues of social life and human fallibility. Minor genres also have their distinctive and existential themes. Mystery and spy movies deal with the unfolding of secrets and science-fiction deals with how the future will be different and the same as the past, while fantasy engages mythological transformations akin to Ovid. Updike reawakens a dormant theme when he writes a saga because it explores how the intersection between personal and historical matters occur, that theme dominating so much of Updike’s entire work.