Author: Brendan Chambers
In “The Brown Stocking,” the final chapter of his seminal work, Mimesis, Eric Auerbach analyzes a short selection from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, the protagonist Mrs. Ramsay measures a stocking intended for the lighthouse keeper’s boy, using her own son, James, as a model. The “action” of the scene is obviously minimal: Mrs. Ramsay holds the stocking up against James, scolds him twice for fidgeting, concludes that it is “ever so much too short,” and bestows a kiss on his forehead as an apology for some over-harshness in her chiding (Auerbach 527). These external occurrences receive Auerbach’s attention only in passing. Instead, the interludes between these actions, composed of internal processes (i.e. reflections and recollections of characters within and without of the scene), as well as the method of their narration, form the basis of his analysis. There are three significant interludes. The first is composed of Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections on the degradation of the summer house’s furniture over time, her children’s contributions to it, and a moment with her homesick Swiss maid; the second, a meditation, delivered in the voice of “people,” on the source and nature of Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty; the third, a recollection, from the point of view of a Mr. Bankes, of a long-ago phone conversation with Mrs. Ramsay during which he too pondered her beauty and character.
Auerbach is fascinated by the manner in which these scenes are narrated: “The essential characteristic of the technique represented by Virginia Woolf is that we are given not merely one person whose consciousness…is rendered, but many persons, with frequent shifts from one to the other” (536). This use of free indirect discourse, says Auerbach, represents a radical shift away from traditional modes of narration for two reasons. First, its point of view; it eschews “unipersonal subjectivism which allows only a single and generally very unusual person to make himself heard and admits only that one person’s way of looking at reality” in favor of multiple experiences and understandings (536). And second, in its manner of plot selection and ordering; whereas traditional narration engages in a largely arbitrary process of identifying those moments it deems important and ordering them in an intelligibly causal sequence, Woolf’s technique mimics “processes of consciousness,” wherein each successive moment is in “perfect continuity” with the one before it, “not objectively”—that is, chronologically—but rather thematically (Auerbach 533-538). The narration of a scene, then, progresses not from one moment to its chronological successor as viewed through the eyes of a single subjective or objective narrator, but rather through the viewpoints of a number of different personages, each one connected to the others by a “theme [that] carries over directly” from one consciousness to the next (Auerbach 534). The effect of this technique is that the passage’s object—its theme (in this scene “Mrs. Ramsay, her beauty, the enigma of her character, [etc.]”)—“is as it were encircled by the content of all the various consciousnesses directed upon [it]…[in] an attempt to approach [it] from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing” (Auerbach 536).
In order to understand the implications of this reading for the concept of “form,” let us turn to another passage that exemplifies Woolf’s narrative technique—the final scene of Mrs. Dalloway. With both the novel and the day coming to a close, Clarissa Dalloway’s soiree is at last coming to fruition. Guests appear slowly, then all at once, arriving in cabs which are “rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge, drawn together,” her old friend Peter says, “because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party” (Woolf 250). The list of attendees is extensive and various. We hear their names announced by Mr. Wilkins, hired specifically for this party and for that purpose: “Sir John and Lady Needham,” “Old Lord Lexham,” “Colonel and Mrs. Garrod,” “Sir Harry” (an artist), “Professor Brierly,” “Sir William” (a psychiatrist), and even “The Prime Minister” (254; 259; 260; 267; 277; 261). Though the party is initially slow to gather momentum, stoking Clarissa’s fears that it will be a failure, with “people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner,” it eventually falls into a rhythm, as guests mingle and chat with one another, satisfying Clarissa that it was indeed a successful event (255).
What materializes during this scene are two networks that operate in parallel—linked by contingency but constructed independently of one another. The first is the social network that Clarissa conceives of and constructs, in the form of the guest list. It is self-consciously contrived so as to be well-rounded and to represent the full diversity of social life. There are politicians (Richard Dalloway and his colleagues, as well as the Prime Minister), artists (Sir Harry, Willie Titcomb, and Herbert Ainsty), aristocrats (the undifferentiated stream of Lords and Ladies), academics (Professor Brierly), and medical professionals (Sir William Bradshaw). Though it is a description originally directed at the Prime Minister, it could just as easily be put to the party’s attendees, that the guest list is representative of “what they all stood for, English society” (Woolf 262). Here I want to attend to the potential dual meaning of “stood for.” While it can indicate their belief in and support of the elite classes of society, we should not overlook their synecdochal relationship to society as a whole, that what the guests may feel is that they represent the larger social order in miniature. Clarissa has attempted to recreate the organic network of society within the arbitrary confines of a dinner party in order to give rise to new and interesting interactions, or, as she says, to allow people, “to say things you couldn’t say anyhow,” or anywhere, “else” (259). She felt that “it mattered, her party,” because it offered the opportunity to generate these new possibilities (255).
Ultimately, however, she fails on both counts, in synecdochally representing English society and in engendering new social experiences. Although representatives from various professions and walks of life present within the social network of the party, they hardly form a complete picture of society as a whole. We see this first with the presence of Lucy, a housemaid, and Mrs. Walker, the cook, on the periphery; they are at the party without being in the party. We see it as well with Septimus Smith, not invited but undoubtedly an indispensable piece of British society as a result to his service in World War I; he “intrudes” on the event by way of the Bradshaws who discuss his suicide and thereby provoke Clarissa’s ire that “in the middle of my party, here’s death” (Woolf 279). In the end, though Clarissa feels the event is a success, it does not produce anything new. The attendant coterie have and will continue to do “this sort of thing every night of the season” (256); despite any superficially extraordinary interchange, “as the night grew later, as people went, one found old friends,” leaving behind generative possibilities in favor of a continuity with the status quo (290). The party fails to achieve its ends because any attempt to translate English society to the form of the party would result in an inevitable distortion that is reflective of the translator’s—in this case, Clarissa’s—own subjectivity. Just as none of the “translations” of Mrs. Ramsay manage to reveal her true self or explain the source of her beauty, Clarissa’s transformation of the organic form of society in an artificially constructed and exclusive conception of “English society” produces a network that is neither accurately representative nor generative.
The idea of intrusion or exclusion in an organic society is a contradiction in terms, as every node (in this case, every member of society) is always already incorporated. This is the narrative network that the novel is intent on bringing into being. The technique by means of which Woolf attempts to do so resembles, in this respect, the passage that Auerbach quotes in “The Brown Stocking.” While there is a greater emphasis here on the external trappings of social interaction—who is arriving at the party, how they are mingling, etc.—we nonetheless receive information in the same manner, through rapidly shifting points of view and with a freedom of movement in time. The scene of the party opens with Lucy,
running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped into the drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright, how beautifully cared for, when they saw the beautiful silver, the brass fire-irons, the new chair covers, and the curtains of yellow chintz: she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already coming up from dinner; she must fly! The Prime Minister was coming Agnes said: so she had heard them say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses. Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or less?
And then moves into the consciousness of Mrs. Walker:
It made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs. Walker among the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in the scullery seemed to be all on top of her, on the kitchen table, on chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and supper had to be laid. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of difference. (Woolf 250-251)
From there, on to Mrs. Walker’s concern that the salmon was underdone, to the remembrances of Mrs. Barnet, who maintains the coat check, to Lady Lovejoy and her daughter Alice, to Clarissa and then off into the consciousnesses of the partygoers. While in the party we encounter extended meditations from Peter, Clarissa, and a pitiful cousin named Ellie Henderson all focusing on the theme of change—about both the people around them and the ways of the world. Immediately obvious in comparison to Clarissa’s superimposed social network is Woolf’s greater diversity of participants. Rather than excluding individuals on the grounds of class distinction, this network of interconnected consciousnesses, “comes upon the order and interpretation of life which arise from life itself: that is, those which grow up in the individuals themselves” (Auerbach 549). Instead of attempting to impose an order upon life, Woolf mimics the way in which life organizes itself. The form of the party is not its capricious selection of attendees, nor its arbitrary ordering of those present into guests and servants, “society” and workers. Instead, it is composed of the organically arising interactions between all in attendance which create a network that reaches through and beyond any arbitrarily defined boundaries to form a sprawling, unconstrained plane of relations.
What Woolf demonstrates, by way of these dual networks, is a clearly defined understanding of the nature of form. The reason that Woolf herself is able to give form to these objects—her characters—in a way that Clarissa cannot is as a result of her privileged position outside of the text as its author. The objects to which she gives form do not preexist her manifestation of them. Clarissa, by contrast, is attempting to impose form on an object that exists alongside her within the text; by virtue of their simultaneous existence, it necessarily preexists her formal imposition—thus she translates the object rather than manifesting it. This failure is as representative of Woolf’s grasp of form as the success of its narration. Clarissa’s aims are doomed by this understanding as much as the network of free indirect discourse is bound to succeed. However, Clarissa’s misconception of the nature of form and subsequent failures as a hostess are relatively harmless, given their containment within the text. To see the logical quagmires and dangerous political potentialities inherent in Clarissa’s understanding when brought into the real world, I suggest that we turn to Caroline Levine’s most recent work, Form: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, and Network.
Levine’s monograph lays out a revised methodology and case for a return to formalist analysis. “New Formalism,” she argues, sidesteps the pitfalls of its predecessors by incorporating contexts outside of the “overarching artistic whole”—in other words, bringing in sociopolitical influences that fall beyond the boundaries of the text per se (1). By doing so, she claims, critics will be able to collapse the distinction between “the formal” and “the social,” thereby engaging in more holistic analysis. Her justification for the elimination of this distinction rests on a broadening of the meaning of the word “form.” Whereas a traditional formalism, like that of the New Critics, attends to “formal elements”—that is, constituent pieces of the formal whole—Levine proposes conceiving of forms more broadly as “ways of organizing heterogeneous materials” (56). Under this conception she can then propose a method of analysis that envisions its object as this form or that form; if forms are generalized and iterable across contexts, then they are capable of being imposed on objects. For example, one “form” that she proposes is “rhythm.” The rhythm form organizes its materials in terms of temporality and repetition. In her chapter devoted to it, she suggests we think of institutions as rhythms, thereby illustrating how they “organize social time,” and perpetuate themselves “because participants actively reproduce their rules and practices” (57-58). The stakes of this reconceptualization are high, from both an aesthetic and political perspective. By bringing together the social and the literary under the broad umbrella of form, formalist analysis of texts can now engage the interactions between the two, for example, imagining how the form of the Bildungsroman collides with the form of the gender binary (15-16). By engaging in “this analysis of forms,” she says, we can construct “a new understanding of how power works” (8).
While this approach offers what appears to be an exciting and progressive reconceptualization of the form in formalism, a closer inspection raises the question of whether it obfuscates more than it generates in the way of bases for alternative readings. The weakness in the claims that Levine puts forth—that her theory produces new information and political possibilities—become crystallized when viewed in conjunction with the networks I have sketched out above. Levine’s New Formalist methodology uncannily mirrors Woolf’s narrative technique as described by Auerbach. Like Woolf’s free indirect discourse, first of all, Levine’s theory constitutes a series of “attempts to fathom a more genuine, a deeper, and indeed a more real reality” (Auerbach 540). By bringing different forms to bear on an object—say, the form of rhythm and then the equally abstract form of hierarchy on the object of the institution as—Levine engages in an attempt at “a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions” (Auerbach 536). Under this new formalist regime, such objects of study as the hierarchical order of British society as constituted by Clarissa, “are not seen directly,” as Auerbach maintains, “but by reflection” (541). What Levine’s theory fails to take into account is the inherent a priori existence of objects as forms, the fact that, by their very existence, objects are forms prior to their reconceptualization as a rhythm (or hierarchy, or whole, or network). This being the case, then the concept of an object as a form necessarily involves a translation from one form to another. This translation, in turn, constitutes a transformation of the object of study insofar as different aspects of the object of study are emphasized, deemphasized, excluded, or reshaped in order to position it within another order of things. These transformations of the object do not bring us closer to some objective truth about its character, but simply generate a plurality of equally subjective reflections, what Roland Barthes means by connotations, each one necessarily shaped by the character of its reader. So much for the striking similarities between Levine’s New Formalism and Woolf’s technique.
What I consider the most important different becomes apparent when one considers the relative positions of these observer and their respective objects of study. Woolf operates both within the discourse of literary history and criticism, as well as the privileged space of fiction, and she brings the novelist’s talent for imagining subjective perspectives other than her own to both. Despite her ability to convince us that each character harbors a distinctive inner life partly unknown even to him or herself, and regardless of the fact that inner life shapes that character’s perspective on the world of objects, the fact remains that no such form of subjectivity can pre-exist its objectification in her novels. In creating these forms of subjectivity, even those she calls her own, she is not translating into linguistic form a pre-existing subject, much less some fluctuation of its inner life. Like Proust, she makes use of free indirect discourse to foreground the subjective work of self-reflection, whereby any encounter with an object generates multiple points of view that yield “overlapping, complementing, and contradict[ory]” concepts of the object, but not the object itself. Rather than a coherent objective rendering of the world-as-it-is, Woolf and Proust offer something more on the order of “a synthesized cosmic view,” which serves as “a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis” (Auerbach 549). Levine’s proposed formalism, by contrast, aims at generating objective information about the character of objects that pre-exist her engagement with them. By viewing objects in the guise of different forms, they question is, do we actually, as she contends, get to know their objective nature? To presume that we can do so, it seems to me, one must occult his or her own subjectivity as it materializes through the work of translation and transformation that it performs. What I am suggesting is that Levine has assumed the position of Clarissa Dalloway rather than Virginia Woolf’s and given form to an object of study (in this case the novel) that, by its very existence prior to the act of reading, already has a form. On this basis, her proposed act of discovering or understanding a novel’s form is clearly a translation.
It is not difficult to see Levine’s work as a reactionary response to developments in materialist thought exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, thus as a return to an Aristotelian approach, that Deleuze and Guattari would consider a new species of hylomorphism. Aristotelian hylomorphism (hylo- meaning wood/form, and -morph meaning matter) takes as given that the replacement of one object with another is an act of destruction rather than the production of knowledge. John Protevi offers a succinct definition of hylomorphism as “the doctrine that production is the imposition of formal order on chaotic or passive matter”—as the guest list in relation to society or rhythm in relation to the institution (8). This view assumes that there must be continuity between one form of an object and another, and that the two must share some common element. To account for the sameness in difference, Aristotle postulated that objects have two separate constitutive elements: matter and form. In that matter is what undergoes change, matter must be what the object and its changed form have in common. Form is the actualizing principle that shapes the matter in its changed state.
As demonstrated by both Clarissa Dalloway and Caroline Levine, the belief that an individual can impose form on matter rather quickly encounters a logical impasse. Gilbert Simondon offers a useful analogy between the hylomorphic conception and the process of producing a brick. While it is true that the plastic clay (matter) and the brick mold (form) come together to produce a brick, Simondon notes, this is a far from a complete accounting of what has occurred. The analogy mischaracterizes the clay as passive and ignores the part played by its resistance to form and the pressure that must be brought to bear on it in order to produce a brick:
the clay fills the mold, it is not enough that it is plastic: it is necessary that it transmits the pressure that the workman presses on it…clay is pushed in the mold which it fills; it propagates with…the energy of the workman…It is necessary that the energy that pushes the clay exists.
The process is also affected by the wood of the mold, the skill of the workers, how tired they are, and so on. What Simondon is getting at is both the intrinsic heterogeneity of the matter and the mutability of form. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that hylomorphism “assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed homogeneous” and “thereby leaves many things, active and affective, by the wayside” (408). The fact that it does so demonstrates the insufficiency of the model to account for the fact that objects are not simply made of “form” and “matter.” This analogy is insufficient to the task of describing the process of translation by which one discovers form. As they say, “it is always possible to ‘translate’ into a model that which escapes the model.” In the case at hand, we cannot translate the production process into the interaction of matter and form “without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations” (Deleuze and Guattari 408-409).
What Deleuze and Guattari offer here is a generalized criticism of the reading method both Clarissa Dalloway and Carolyn Levine bring to bear on their respective social and literary texts. For Clarissa, the instability of the interwar period drives her to “extract…fixed points and constant relations” from a rapidly changing cultural order in an attempt to retrieve an already nonexistent past. For Levine, a slide into epistemological relativism provides the vantage point for gaining and affixing objective knowledge. Whatever their reasoning, the method through which they attempt this extraction is simply not up to the task, which leaves the literary critic in the position of one of Woolf’s protagonists, i.e. bereft of a sociopolitical and epistemological foundation. It is important to note, however, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that the criticism of hylomorphism is not strictly academic inasmuch as the implications of the worldview it supports extend beyond the limits of the academy. In a fascinating article, Trevor Parfitt correctly points out that hylomorphism is “an intrinsically authoritarian formulation” (423). Returning briefly to Protevi’s argument, it is not difficult to see how the “imposition of formal order on chaotic…matter” might offer a fascistic political perspective on one’s subject matter. The introduction of a strongman who offers to bring order from chaos through the imposition of a top-down regime is the political manifestation of hylomorphism, which Protevi compares to a “master-slave” dynamic whereby form tells matter what to do, and matter complies.
So, what is to be done? Is there an understanding of form and network that might offer more promising political possibilities that apply outside as well as inside the experimental limits of fiction? Deleuze and Guattari offer a possible solution. In opposition to the hylomorphic view, which they describe as a “plane of transcendence” from which difference, and thus form, emerges to impose itself on inert matter, the pair proposes a “plane of immanence.” As they imagine it, the plane of immanence is “the totality of existence (including the conceptual and the material)” present in a “monadic or singular plane” (Parfitt 422). The plane consists of ongoing processes “of continual creation where forces act on each other to create new agents and phenomena in an unceasing flux of becoming” (Parfitt 423). Deleuze and Guattari liken this conception, as well as the attitude that it produces, to that of the artisan (as opposed to the architect). Whereas the architect tends to impose his or her plan on “unformed” matter, the artisan “takes account of the characteristics of the matter” in the process of production, such as when “a carpenter works with the grain of the wood in making a piece of furniture” (Parfitt 424). In other words, the artisan recognizes that matter is heterogeneous within itself and always already possessing a form. Where the architectural process will attempt to organize beings and concepts into hierarchies by authoritarian means, the artisanal process is self- ordering and suggests a democratic, pluralist ethos. By flattening and combining the hierarchical binary of form and matter, one moves from a reactionary, conservative approach to one that offers what Parfitt calls “emancipatory possibility” (424).
To conclude, I suggest that we examine the concrete model of this concept provided by Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome in conjunction with Levine’s hylomorphic notion of the network form that bears resemblance to a tree. The model of the rhizome requires us to rethink traditional structures of knowledge as manifestations of the plane of immanence. Traditional structures are arborescent structures that organize concepts like trees; like the architectural model, trees are hierarchical, proceeding upwards from roots to trunk to branches. This is the structure of genealogical progression in the domain of ideas (e.g. “the great chain of being”) or of human beings (e.g. the “family tree”). The tree structure is also severely limiting, by virtue of its linearity, singular direction of movement, and process of development (wherein one branch becomes two, two branches become four, and so forth). The rhizome, by contrast, models a network that “connects any point to any other point,” with “neither a beginning nor end, but always a middle” and is “neither subject nor object” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). To understand the rhizome as a plane of immanence is to imagine an interconnected totality engaged “in an unceasing flux of becoming” (Parfitt 423).
This conception—the plane of immanence manifested as a rhizome—consists not simply of abstract philosophical propositions, but of potential concrete implementation as well. With this in mind, we can begin to move beyond what Deleuze and Guattari call the Enlightenment-era “root-book”, which is arborescent and proceeds from (chapter/idea/plot point) one to three only by way of two. We can begin to imagine a rhizomatic book, which could be entered and exited at any point, viewed in its totality, and connected from any one moment in it to any other. To formulate such a book, they explain, “would be to lay everything out on a plane…on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations, [etc.]” (Deleuze and Guattari 9). A Thousand Plateaus is itself such a book, as each chapter can be connected to any other, all of its concepts being deeply and inextricably tied to one another and capable of generating infinitely more. Returning now to Levine’s more arborescent notion of form, we can see that the emancipatory possibilities toward which she gestures would require us to flatten out the very difference between form and content on which that notion of form depends.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. “The Brown Stocking,” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard B. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953: 525-553.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Protevi, John. Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic. London: Athlone, 2001.
Parfitt, Trevor. “Hylomorphism, Complexity and Development: Planner, Artisan, or Modern Prince?” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2006): 421-441.
Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa Genese Physico-Biologique. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Modern Library, 1928.
