THEORY ISSUE || "IN THE WAKE OF THE FORMAL REVOLUTION ..."

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the Universityof Debrecen CAHS

"IN THE WAKE OF THE FORMAL REVOLUTION ..."Author(s): Heinz IckstadtSource: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 3, No. 1, THEORYISSUE (1997), pp. 29-35Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University ofDebrecen CAHSStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41261593 .

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"IN THE WAKE OF THE FORMAL REVOLUTION . . .ff

Vteutficfatadt HJEAS

After many years of ignoring it, it is perhaps time to once again raise the question of aesthetic value, especially in view of certain dominant trends in contemporary American fiction, although I have more questions to raise than answers to give. Is multiculturalism valid only as a cultural concept, or does it make sense also as a concept of literary history and of aesthetics? Are there different sets of (aesthetic) principles for different kinds of novels? Or is there only the modernist standard of craft that Ralph Ellison so vehemently talked about in defense of his own writing vis-à-vis the more ethnically minded or more politically minded of his younger colleagues? Are their universal criteria for "good" writing even in an age of relativism, with its competing cultures and critical schools? Are aesthetics dead, as has been variously proclaimed in recent years? Have they become merely an aspect of ideology, of undemocratic and therefore unacceptable eliticism, even of "fraudulence"? Or do we have a place for the aesthetic in our discussion of contemporary literature? And if so, what conceptual basis does it, or could it, have - assuming that we cannot simply go back to modernist (or even new critical) positions?

During the last fifteen years or so, the emphasis on culture has crowded out almost all specifically literary questions. Yet if culture becomes the all- encompassing focus of approach, what of the status and function of the literary text? I am of course aware that one raises such a formalist question at one's own risk. Am I beginning to retrace my steps? Am I tottering back into the New Criticism of my youthful days? While this may not be entirely impossible, there are certain signs that it may not be true. No doubt, neither poststructuralism nor the New Historicism have had any use for, or interest in, questions of literariness or fictionality - in short, no interest in aesthetics. The question of aesthetics or of aesthetic standards has been consistently, not to say exclusively, regarded as an exclusionary measure in the interest of an existing literary elite (writers and critics alike). Since text has become a universal category, differences between texts have been levelled, or, perhaps more precisely, differences have been defined in cultural and political but not in aesthetic terms. It was therefore interesting to see Sacvan Bercovitch, in a recent lecture, desperately searching for criteria that would help him define the difference between literary and non-literary texts. What can a literary text do that a non-literary (i.e., a discursive, philosophical, or theoretical ) text cannot do? The idea that all literary (fictional, narrative) texts can or must or should be read culturally, politically, or theoretically was clearly not the answer he was looking for.

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1997. Copyright © by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.



This situation might give rise to the following speculation: if the discourse of New Criticism repressed the social and political (which returned with a vengeance in the theories that followed), may not the aesthetic be considered the repressed aspect of those new (and yet already aging) theories - with some monstrous formalism waiting in the wings? Perhaps we have, too long and too carelessly, linked issues of aesthetic theory exclusively to the New Critics who, as we all know, by repressing the political used aesthetics politically. To exorcise their spirit through an emphasis on the cultural had a great liberating effect: it brought texts into view that had never been seen before, and it brought questions to classic texts that had never been asked before. But this movement has dealt with the aesthetic either by taking it for granted (by reading the accepted masterworks culturally, politically, and theoretically) or by ignoring it with a bad conscience. It is unlikely that the problem of the aesthetic, which has occupied philosophers and critics for centuries, should become obsolete simply because it has been excluded from contemporary theoretical discussioa Aesthetics, after all, are not only a matter of philosophical speculation but also of everyday life. We live by aesthetic experience and we pass aesthetic judgment constantly, whether we care to reflect on it or not. I am not pleading for a return to formalism but for a placement of formalist or aesthetic interest within the context of new cultural studies. I am intrigued by the question of whether it would be possible to write a new Theory of Literature that has incorporated and digested poststructuralism, the new cultural anthropology, and the New Historicism. Wellek's and Warren's old Theory of Literature was based on the certainties of the Enlightenment, on certainties of status and value, and on criteria of objectivity. Those certainties gone, the question of aesthetics and/or literariness can be raised only on highly unstable and constantly shifting ground Such a Theory would have to give account of different, rivaling aesthetics, aesthetics that would vary in purpose, use, and function at different historic moments or for different groups. It would have to be highly inclusive as well as highly inconclusive, since it could, and would want to, provide only preliminary answers and certainly no certainties.

If I ever should write such a theory of literature (which is highly unlikely), I would make use of the theories of the Prague structuralist Jan Mukarovsky who, in his attempt to reconcile Marxism with Modernism, placed his theory of aesthetic function and aesthetic value firmly within a social context. The text (or object) which he treats as semiotic sign has many functions all competing with each other, of which the aesthetic function is only one. Artistic or literary texts or objects differ from others because, with them, the aesthetic function is by definition dominant - which does not mean, however, that a text's referential or pragmatic functions (e.g., its didactic, communicative, religious, or political functions) are suppressed or non-existent. Rather, the literary text is an ensemble of functions organized by the aesthetic functioa Thus a didactic novel is distinguished from a didactic tract or sermon by the specific manner of its aesthetic organization, but within this organization the functions of the text form a hierarchy in which the pragmatic is more prominant than other functions. There are literary texts in which the didactic or the political are prominent, and others in which the aesthetic itself is especially emphasized. In all these different texts, the various functions would be related within a hierarchy dominated by the aesthetic functioa We might say they create different kinds of aesthetics - the aesthetics of

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the didactic or of the political novel, for example. These different aesthetics suggest the many uses to which literary texts may be put - even to the point of creating an anti-aesthetic which would have to be regarded as another, or as a special kind of, aesthetic.

Are functions qualities of texts/objects, or are they socially and culturally created - that is, attitudes that we bring to texts? Mukarovsky is occasionally ambivalent but overall insists that functions are indeed socially and culturally created, debated, and redefined. When we see a car in the street we define it only via its pragmatic function, but when it is placed in a museum we look at it aesthetically, i.e., we appreciate its color and design and make it an object of wide-ranging contemplation. To phrase it differently: the dominance of the pragmatic fonction has been replaced here by the dominance of the aesthetic fonction. Obviously, such hierarchies of functions are liable to historic change (what was once seen as a religious might now be recognized only as an aesthetic object); or they change through a shift in cultural perspective (e.g., the different functions that objects have in different cultures, as for example the famous African masks that modernists admired for reasons clearly distinct from those of the Africans who made them); or they change through differences in context (e.g., the waste and refuse used in Pop Art or by Beuys in the context of a museum.). We may read theoretical, political, or religious texts aesthetically and will then disregard their specific purpose and fonction; we may read literary texts as a form of theory or politics and would then disregard their aesthetic function.

But what is the aesthetic fonction? According to Mukarovsky, it isolates the object, creates distance by de-pragmatizing it, and turns it into an autonomous or self-referential sign which forces the reader or observer to contemplate the specific manner of its organization and engages the whole range of his or her experience. Since Mukarovsky subsumed the literary text within the much larger field of the aesthetic object, he has comparatively little to say about the specific organization and achievement of the literary text itself (i.e., of texts in which the aesthetic fonction dominates). However, although the aesthetic fonction is historically unstable and its relation to other fonctions varies according to cultural shifts and redefinitions, it nevertheless marks the aesthetic text's or object's fondamental difference: it is not theoretical, political, documentary, etc., but is able, through the specific manner of its organization, to open up the theoretical, political, or documentary for contemplation by putting it to the test of reflection and experience. We cannot escape the conditions created by the dominance of the aesthetic fonction. Even if the text struggled against these conditions (as, for example, many texts of the 1930s did), even if it signaled to the reader its interest in being read, let us say, politically, it would still stage its politics aesthetically.

In other words, the value of a literary text can never be determined by its politics, or by the theoretical or cultural work it does, no matter how much we insist on the irrelevance of the aesthetic, since all its values are aesthetically mediated or staged. For illustration, let us briefly look at a statement of Toni Morrison's. In one of her essays she writes:

The novel should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in his

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sermon . . . And, having at my disposal only the letters of the alphabet and some punctuation, I have to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate. Because it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist and the speaker that is of primary importance. ("Rootedness" 341)

Notice that she is not talking about the novel as a sermon, nor about the subject matter of that sermon, nor of the artist as a preacher, but about a very specific effect to be created by the mere use of the written word. It is all aesthetic strategy, and although that strategy is not all of Morrison's novel, whatever is being communicated cannot be had without it. To phrase it somewhat differently, the social value we recognize in her work can be recognized only because it "works" aesthetically. One could even say that it owes its social value to its aesthetic value.

What constitutes aesthetic value? It is especially interesting to raise this question now because, in much ethnic and neorealistic writing of the last 15 or so years, there is a new emphasis on shared values and experience, on identity- building and communication, on the pragmatic, communal, and communicative over the aesthetic or self-referential functions of the text. This tendency is especially obvious in texts that address themselves to the experience of specific groups (be they defined in terms of ethnicity or gender). The communicative or even therapeutic function of such novels is most striking in Lisa Alther's Other Women (1984). Inverting the strategies of more experimental fiction, the novel does not pursue the deconstruction of all categories of narrative order but seeks their reconstruction, creating meaning out of confusion and identity out of psychic disturbance. The novel is especially interesting because therapeutic conversation - and the plot more or less consists of a series of such conversations - becomes a metaphor about the possibility to explain and thus to reconfirm the real, an explanation based on the gradual consensus of those engaged in communication about "truth." Although reality cannot be made whole through the discovery or reconstruction of personal history, it can nevertheless be healed in those able to communicate about it. This case may be an extreme one, but it is nevertheless indicative of similar tendencies in much ethnic fiction, and not only there. Much of what is frequently called realistic or neorealistic fiction has reintroduced the topic of common values and shared experience, almost in Howellsian fashion- Richard Ford's Independence Day, for instance. Less glaring examples occur with Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. In his essay "On Writing," Carver seems to reach back to earlier concepts of realist writing when he speaks of the "sense of proportion and a sense of the fitness of things" (9) which definitely strikes a Howellsian note, although Carver applies the phrase in his own way. Or let us take DeLillo's White Noise where the family endlessly discusses what is real and what forms the basis or quality of their shared experience. However, although such scenes may seem to evoke similar conversations in the classic realistic novel, DeLillo's "neorealism" is based on a shared experience that no longer provides a clear or firm sense of reality. Perhaps one could say that Carver's and DeLillo's texts, in their different ways, bring out what Richard Brodhead once called the paradox of realism: the staging of communication may be indicative of the desire for successful social interaction

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and a consciousness of shared experience, but in fact arises from the experience of the lack or absence of such consciousness.1

Let us return to Toni Morrison. In an interview she gave to Thomas LeClair in the early 1980s, she said, "I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people ..." She claims to see her role as related to that of the griot, "the traditional African guardian of personal, familial and tribal history."2 It is hard to take this statement seriously, and it is hard to believe that Toni Morrison herself took it seriously. It is perhaps best understood as a gesture of desire - a desire that a group she could call "my people" would exist, and a desire to be accepted by "her people" as their voice, their memory, their conscience. The very self-consciousness of this claim is an indication of her uncertainty - of the very paradox Brodhead talked about. What she in fact practices in her fiction (for which this statement should be taken as a metaphor) is her acceptance of an oral culture translated into writing to form a tradition of orality in literature - a tradition, however, that is not Afro-American alone. In fact, in her fictions community is not only a resource but a problem that goes beyond the easiness suggested by the term "my people." In Beloved, the reconstruction of the repressed experience of slavery is enacted as a ritual exorcism through memory and storytelling (communication) which makes new beginnings possible. Yet the category of "community" - as crucial for Morrison as it is for Hurston - is a highly ambivalent one. To be sure, Sethe, the heroine of Beloved, needs the community in order to overcome her shame, guilt, and self-destructive isolation, which finds symbolic expression in her symbiotic relationship with Beloved. But whatever happiness she may owe to the "black community" ("days of healing, ease and real-talk, days of company"), it is also the source ofthat isolation insofar as it punishes Sethe for her aloofness and her "self-sufficiency." The community supports and helps, but it also ostracizes those who refuse to comply. It helps one to forget, but it also forgets why there was any reason to help in the first place. In the last section of the novel, the voice of the narrator (which, as was Hurston's, is a collective voice) evokes against the community, yet also for its benefit, the ghost of Beloved, from which Sethe has just been freed. Beloved represents the trauma of a collective history that has to be remembered, made present, and at the same time overcome in the very act of remembering.

In other words, we may accept collective grounding as a condition or a postulate of ethnic writing, as the specific basis of a different aesthetics. But we may also expect, with the writers themselves, an awareness of the problematics of such grounding. Toni Morrison, in her theoretical statements, may come dangerously close to a false claim of origin, loyalty, and community, but in her fiction she gives evidence of the tensions and contradictions that Brodhead talked about.

One could argue that in choosing Morrison I have privileged what has been already affirmed as aesthetically valuable, masterful, and complex - claiming, at least by implication, that the complexity of the masterwork ensured its cultural as well as its aesthetic relevance. But complexity is not the point. There are aesthetics of complexity, aesthetics of simplicity, and a host of others. The only criteria which could answer the question of whether a text aesthetically "works" or not are those, first, of craft (since, within limits, it applies to all the

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aforementioned aesthetics) and, next, of awareness, which is a matter of stylistic and intellectual honesty. Are "craft" and honesty then universal categories? Yes and no. Yes, because they are applicable to all aesthetic concepts of fiction where they constitute success and failure on various grounds; and no, because what is "honest" or "well-made" is open to much controversy and debate (which does not, however, preclude the possibility of an eventual consensus).

The house of fiction certainly has many windows, or, to phrase it less in the Jamesian manner, it has room (or rooms) for many different functional models of fictioa These models may compete with each other, may be of use to certain groups at certain times, or may - depending on whether there will ever again be a critical consensus - be brought into hierarchical relation with each other. They answer, in any case, to the communicative, referential, pragmatic, or aesthetic needs of author and/or audience; they represent, in short, the different uses to which fiction can be put and has been put at all times. If we accept the different functions fiction may have and the different aesthetics of these fimctions, we could do away with a number of false oppositions that have marred the debate about canon and curriculum. The functional view would acknowledge the culture- work of the women writers Jane Tompkins wrote about several years ago without having to make extravagant claims for the aesthetic value of such texts. Nor would we have to deny the aesthetic as a viable category in order to accept the cultural work these texts are doing. In short, the functional view could recognize the identity-creating function of much ethnic fiction, without having a bad conscience or having to claim aesthetic value for texts that respond to specific needs or that "work" under different aesthetics. It would also take into consideration that for some writers, regardless of their ethnic origin or gender, writing implies not only a commitment to communication, to cultural assertion, or to social change, but also to the craft of writing itself. For them, the sense of difference not only defines itself through opposition against the power of dominant cultural assumptions (important as such opposition may be), but also through one's radical dedication to the self-referential power of the word.

NOTES

1 Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), esp. the chapter on Howells, 81-103.

Thomas LeClair, "An Interview with Toni Morrison," Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Thomas LeClair and Larry MacCaffery (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1983) 252-61.

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WORKS CITED

Carver, Raymond "On Writing." Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1988. - . "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation. " Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A

Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984.

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THEORY ISSUE || "IN THE WAKE OF THE FORMAL REVOLUTION ..."