Form

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Form is related to story as a crowd is related to the people in that crowd. The crowd is the sum, the shape, the outline of the people in it. Likewise, form is the sum, the shape, the outline of the stories it contains. These elements are necessarily related. A certain group of people creates a certain kind of crowd—there’s an obvious difference between a cocktail party and a violent mob, or between two lovers going for a stroll and thousands of people waiting in Times Square for the New Year. Rules of scope and proportion come into play: you can’t fit twenty thousand people into a sitting room, while just two people standing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve would seem not only a category error but a bit forlorn. In similar ways, story is related to, and to some extent determines, form. And form to some extent determines story, just as crowds or parties can take on a life of their own, and drive the activity and mood of the individuals in that crowd. The form of an epistolary novel clearly controls and limits the kind of story that will be told (it limits the communication available to the characters, for instance). Likewise, every novelist knows that the decision to write in the first person sets off a chain of narrative consequences, a calculus of benefits and losses; a formal choice has a determinative effect on the content.

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Modernism was born out of an understanding that, since reality has changed, the forms of the stories we tell about that reality must also change. If you trust in marriage, God, the progress of history, and the solidity of character, then the fictions you make about that reality may take complementary forms: stories culminate in the solution of marriage; characters examine their consciences, and wrestle with moral dilemmas; and these moral struggles are represented in finished paragraphs and stable language. Plots may be initially opaque but culminate in clarity, and many different plots—as in War and Peace and Middlemarch —prove to be consolingly interrelated: human beings successfully communicate with each other, rather as the plots involving those human beings successfully communicate with each other.

But imagine that these stabilities are crumbling, that they are newly hard to believe in, that faith in them has been shattered by the carnage of the Great War or the calamity of the Holocaust. The form of an artwork may then have to reflect that new uncertainty. Now human beings struggle to communicate with each other; so perhaps a familial proliferation of many plots, warmly interrelated, will suddenly seem inauthentic. History does not seem to be progressing so much as stalling, or self-immolating, so perhaps the fictions set amidst that history must break off, or sliver into fragments, rather than sail on toward marriage and harmony and a spreading consensus. Words no longer seem to connect to their referents, because the surety of meaning has been exploded; words have become like an inflated currency—empty, insultingly worthless. So words must be used differently, with less certainty perhaps, and more self-consciousness: a self-conscious difficulty. Words—as in Beckett, say—may even have to die, to lapse into silence.

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These are just a few of the ways in which form might have to be responsive to new realities, and it is more or less what Ford Madox Ford meant when he talked about feeling the need to write lives backward and forward rather than simply forward, as before; or what Knut Hamsun meant when he said—around the same time as Ford—that “I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic”; or what Virginia Woolf meant when she claimed that her generation of modernist artists had to write in what might seem, to an older generation, fragmentary, spasmodic, “unsuccessful” forms.

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You could say that form becomes newly important in the modern age. For both modernism and postmodernism, form is where contemporary anxieties, preoccupations, and pleasures are inscribed. The frame comes off the painting, or the frame is itself painted over. The found object becomes an artwork, and by implication the artwork becomes a found object. The three-movement musical form is invaded by four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The tidy, “safe” beginnings and endings of Dixieland fray into the ragged, complex improvisations of bebop. A new cultural center in Paris is turned inside out, and wears all its mechanical systems (wiring, air ducts, and the like) on its exterior. Novels are published in loose-leaf form, to be assembled at will by the reader; other fictions dwindle to fragments, are interrupted by silence and a good deal of white space.

Of course, these are the radical, pioneering examples; most art can’t be as magnificently fearless, and must occupy the space most of us live in from day to day, a mixture of obedience and a desire to escape that obedience, of conventional obligation, and a wish to escape that obligation. Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation is a good example of a contemporary novel that is quietly radical rather than titanically experimental—its postmodernism seems to be confidently inherited rather than strenuously seized. It may not be titanic, but it is a distinctively modern book: it belongs to, and is produced by its times—it wouldn’t even resemble a “proper” novel to George Eliot or Balzac or Henry James, as Elliott Carter’s music or a song by Frank Ocean would be almost unrecognizable to Schubert or Brahms.

Canny and original, it offers a nice example of form and content working in complementary relation. And it is narrated by a woman who is herself caught between obligation and the desire to throw over obligation, between convention and grand disobedience. The unnamed narrator is a youngish mother who lives in New York, and who is also an ambitious writer, committed both to her daughter and to her writing. She is struggling to find the energy and ambition for both tasks. She’s happily married (at least, at first), but her plan was never to get married, because of the danger it posed to creative success and fulfilment: “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” She was twenty-nine when she finished her first book, and there has been no successor, and the head of the department where she teaches creative writing has a habit of reminding her of this: “Tick tock. Tick tock.” (The creative clock horridly mimicking the woman’s biological clock.)

The marriage deteriorates. Our narrator discovers that her husband has been having an affair. She suffers all the usual emotions—rage, shock, shame—but is determined to keep the marriage intact. She is near collapse, under terrible mental strain. She wants to check herself into a hospital but is afraid that if she does, she might not come back.

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The plot I have described could belong to almost any conventional novel, new or older—marriage, adultery, bourgeois life, unhappiness, thwarted ambition. But the book’s form is unconventional, and perfectly supports and shapes those elements of the book’s content that are also somewhat unconventional. Offill’s narrator speaks to us in extremely short, double-spaced paragraphs. There’s a great deal of terrain between these paragraphs, and though they do ultimately create a continuous narrative, they often hang in isolation, like Lydia Davis’s very short, single-paragraph stories. Some of the entries are peculiar, a little whimsical or opaque or sardonic; the narrator uses humor as a buttress against painful emotion. So the narrative is a kind of interrupted stream of consciousness, allowing, like any cleverly paced interior monologue, for a managed ratio of randomized coherence: we witness a mobile, and sometimes eccentric, mind composing a narrative before our eyes. Because the book presents itself as a kind of haphazard dispatch, we have an uncanny—quite possibly fallacious—sense of autobiography, of some kind of personal authorial “truth” being disclosed, of fiction appeasing our need for “reality hunger”—an atmosphere encouraged by our knowledge that the author, like her narrator, is a writer who has taught creative writing, that she is a mother, and that like her narrator she spent a long time working on this, her second novel (fifteen years elapsed between first and second books).

More interestingly, the novel’s prismatic and discontinuous form allows Offill to dart around, and thereby to build a sense of her narrator as self-divided, full of appealing contradictions; she is the more vital because she is so many things at once. She’s thin-skinned, sensitive, but also tough and very funny. She feels strongly, but she blocks feeling with sarcasm and satire. She doesn’t quite know herself, but also seems to know herself perfectly:

Three things no one has ever said about me:

You make it look so easy .

You are very mysterious.

You need to take yourself more seriously .

So the book, like its narrator, faces in many directions at once, and shows different colors to the light. It’s an account of a marriage in distress but also a song in praise of marriage. It’s tartly honest about the frequent boredom and fatigue of being a parent, yet it also understands all the joys and consolations of being a parent. If it laments the work that has not been done—this woman who could have been a great “art monster”—it also embodies the work that has been finely done, for Dept. of Speculation is that archetypal modernist and postmodernist document: a successful novel about the difficulty of writing a successful novel.

And it is the novel’s form that allows for this lovely, complex variety of elements. 1

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Plot is really just practical form —the form the writer creates, as he or she is creating a work of fiction (working through authorial choices having to do with who is narrating the story, how to arrange all the elements, pacing, and so on). Moral form is the finished outline, the significant shape we can discern of a plot, the sense we make of something once we are able to hold that plot in our minds. Plot is reading Pride and Prejudice , excited to know who will marry whom, turning each page with happy surrender, led by the knowing brilliance of the author. Moral form is closing that novel and seeing that it is a story about a woman getting a man wrong and then getting him right—a story about error and correction; or, a story about two good marriages (Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley) and three much less good ones (Charlotte and Mr. Collins; Lydia and Wickham; Mr. and Mrs. Bennet).

Plot is reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend , in the excited ignorance, subtly manipulated by Ferrante, of discovering how two intelligent girls will escape the limitations of their impoverished Neapolitan life, sure that the book’s title refers to the narrator’s friend. Moral form is understanding, after the fact, that My Brilliant Friend is in fact a singular bildungsroman, that only Elena the narrator will escape, and that the “brilliant friend” is not Elena’s friend Lila, but in fact Lila’s friend Elena, our narrator.

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Put it another way: plot is reading, form is literary criticism. Form is what we are left with when plot is no longer manipulating us, but when we—as readers, as critics—are manipulating plot. The plot of Anna Karenina is all the events and occurrences that lead to Anna’s eventual death. The form of Anna Karenina is the finished story about a woman who committed adultery and who is finally punished—sacrificed—for that mistake. This is the punitively judgmental form of all the major nineteenth-century novels of adultery: the woman errs, the woman must die. (Until lovely Chekhov, toward the end of that moralizing tradition, compassionately unravels the terminality of this deadly cultural fable in “The Lady and the Little Dog.”) When the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova complained to Isaiah Berlin about the murderous morality of Anna Karenina , she was complaining about the significance of its moral form: “Why should Anna have to be killed?… The morality of Anna Karenina is the morality of Tolstoy’s wife, of his Moscow aunts.” 2

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In these cases, we modify our immediate experience of plot (our reading experience) by our later experiences of form (our post hoc literary-critical experience): reading for significance is always a negotiation between our excited discovery of the work and our comprehension of the work after the excitements of discovery have faded a bit. A sign of the modernity, or postmo dernity, of a novel like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is that plot (in the sense of reading to find out “what happens next”) has been so subsumed by form. Plot has become the form the book takes. Crudely put, there is more literary criticism and less discovery involved in reading a novel like Offill’s.

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Plot is what is happening; form is what happened.

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There’s an obvious philosophical or metaphysical dimension to this idea. Many of us find it hard to see or think about the shape of our life stories. We live caught up in plot—the rush of day-to-day instances, the full calendar of appointments and obligations, the coincidences and events that are sprung on us by chance. We live in an eternal discovery phase. Perhaps once or twice a year, on some significant day like New Year’s Eve or a birthday, we try to reflect on the form of our lives, about what has been and what is to come. At those moments, we try to turn plot (chance) into form (fate, destiny, providence, shape). Something similar occurs at a funeral or memorial service: we gain a reflective sense of an entire life, now finished, we get to think about the shape of a life. We can do so because death has stopped that life: death has imposed its stern type of form, a metaphysical meaning and shape. That is what Walter Benjamin says about fiction in his essay “The Storyteller” (1936). He argues that classic storytelling (he means oral tales, old fables, and suchlike) has always been structured around death. Death guarantees the authority of the storyteller’s tale; death makes a story transmissible. In modern life, he continues, where death has dropped out of daily lives and become almost invisible, and where “information” from the newspapers has crowded out mortal storytelling, it becomes harder and harder to tell gravely meaningful stories.

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So fiction—here I’m extrapolating from Walter Benjamin—ideally offers us a power we tend to lack in our own lives: to reflect on the form and direction of our existence; to see the birth, development, and end of a completed life. The novel provides us with the religious power to see beginnings and endings. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in,” goes a verse in Psalm 121. Godlike readers of other people’s fictional lives, we can see their going out and their coming in, their beginnings and endings, their expansions and withdrawals. Fiction allows this in different ways. Sometimes by scope and size—the long, populous novel, full of many different lives, births, and deaths. Or by compression and concentration: the novella that depicts a single life from start to finish, as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich , John Williams’s Stoner, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams , Alice Munro’s long story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and the work of W. G. Sebald. Yes, even though Sebald thought that Godlike omniscience was impossible or unpalatable in narration, one of the most generous gifts of his fiction (I am thinking especially of The Emigrants and Austerlitz ) is the way it allows us to regard whole lives, to think about the shape and fate of a finished life.

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And form does something else, too. Recall Benjamin’s uncannily prescient complaint from 1936, that true storytelling is being supplanted by a superabundance of “information.” Karl Ove Knausgaard says much the same in the first volume of My Struggle, when he alleges that death now plays a “strangely ambiguous” role in our lives: “On the one hand, it is all around us, we are inundated by news of deaths, pictures of dead people; for death, in that respect, there are no limits, it is massive, ubiquitous, inexhaustible. But this is death as an idea, death without a body, death as thought and image, death as an intellectual concept.” In a world in which the screen has replaced the window, we know more than Benjamin could possibly have foreseen about the terrible unseriousness of existence amidst futile distractions of information, the too-persuasive authority of data, the allure of rival and generally inferior forms of narrative (TV, YouTube, video games, GIFs).

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When literature competes directly with such attractions, it tends to lose.

But think instead of literature as a site of concentration, critique, surplus—concentration as critique: literature as the stillness at the eye of the storm, a kind of prayerful attention. Think of fictional form as something closer to the poem than to the diary. Art insists on concentration by virtue of having form. Life, as I suggested, strikes us as essentially formless; and technology, though full of cute, discrete objects, is essentially formless too. It’s protean. It’s about the process of endlessly becoming, proud of its built-in obsolescence. 6S is always becoming 7, 7 is becoming 8, 9, X, and so on. Technology dreams of infinity. When video games are extolled for being like novels—for their “fiction-making qualities”—the emphasis is generally on the multiplicity of options and choices, not on the determinism of form. The game player can choose many possibilities from endlessly tempting menus. In the same way, the best TV dramas are likened to the novel because their ever-unfolding serialism—episode after episode, season after season—is thought to resemble the serial novels of the nineteenth century.

Yet literary form, while of course expansive and multifarious, can also possess a certain negative power. It shows us where things stop . It places an almost sacred border around the artwork and says, “This is not identical with the claims of the world. This is different from the world. This is a space that demands a certain degree of strangeness, apartness, submission, significance.” Form absorbs but can finally resist the world, is superbly autonomous. Really, universally, human relations stop nowhere, said Henry James. And, he went on, “the eternal problem of the artist is to draw a circle within which such relations merely appear to stop.” 3 The stopping of an endless prolongation may be one of form’s most important virtues, the artifice by which everything earns its own perfect justification, the artifice which charges everything inside the charmed circle with chosen meaning.