“Nobody has ever heard language pure and simple. Instead, we hear utterances that are shrill or sardonic, mournful or nonchalant, mawkish or truculent, irascible or histrionic. And this, as we shall see, is part of what we mean by form.”
As a list of emotional states, this one’s definitely a vocabulary builder. It appears as part of one literary critic’s opening gambit to explain how to read a poem. As we can see, that beginning includes an introduction to the meaning of “form.” For this critic, form finds part of its meaning in being associated with emotion. It also implies tension with reason, at least if we think language implies rational meaning. One might even say that “form” suggests the very idea of an inner tension between reason and emotion.
For Terry Eagleton, reason has associations with pragmatism, that is, calculations about what is useful. He worries that the kind of reason that utilitarianism implies gets hold of readers when they look too hard for meaning. Such readers want to find what the poem communicates as its main ideas, be it through plot summary or explanation of its symbols and images. He calls this content analysis.
Eagleton doesn’t want to abandon reason (or meaning), but he wants to enlarge our understanding of how it works in poetry. He wants to suggest that one of poetry’s gifts is its capacity to move the notion of reason away from the mere communication of ideas to a more holistic experience: a more embodied and sensitive apprehension of the world, as well as a more socially aware and politically responsible sense of what it means to share reality with other people and other creatures.
It’s easy for us to think of language as a tool, a means of communication, as if the content of what we were communicating lay apart from the words themselves. In this view, we communicate abstractions, however much those ideas are meant to be distillations of real things, which are then delivered to the ear, the eye, the mind of the recipient, which reconverts them back into that substantive reality. What else could language be but just such a tool? The way Eagleton puts it is to say that many people think that they need to get behind language, or that language is “a kind of disposable cellophane [Saran Wrap] in which the ideas come ready-wrapped.”
In this way, language can be in cahoots with reason as abstraction and reinforce a modern, scientific understanding of how the world works and of what really matters. There can be a very deep irony here: even those committed to literary arts can find themselves more or less contributing unawares to a view of the world against which they would want to protest, a world of mechanization, industrialization, instrumentalization, depersonalization, bureaucratization. An insufficiently developed understanding of language leaves the student of the arts vulnerable to this kind of own goal.
Eagleton wants to say that the more deeply we understand how poetry works, the more comfortable we will be with its conveying more than disembodied ideas. He wants to say that language – all language, but especially self-aware poetic language – comes bound up with emotional tone, to which the able reader can give sensitive description. Even punctuation in the hands of the poet can convey emotion. Describing the limitations of readers who treat language as a tool, Eagleton writes, “They do not speak the same language as the critic who said of some lines of T.S. Eliot, ‘There is something very sad about the punctuation.’” To think about both together is to think about form in a particular way.
Does form imply something revelatory? Do reason and emotion together make some kind of whole? These are vexing questions. For the Christian, revelatory fullness finds its basis and its telos in the divine self-revelation “in these last days.” Yet perhaps an expanded understanding of reason points to its own transcendence. Eagleton flirts with such possibilities, though somewhat coyly. Less ambitiously, I would have the reader catch an awareness of language as inescapably more than cellophane.
For my summer wish list, I would also have the reader entertain reason-and-emotion-in-tension as a culturally recurrent expression of the recognition (however subconscious) of the inadequacy of a narrowly circumscribed conception of reason and as an expression of the unsatisfactory understanding of language that most of us hold or to which most of us revert even, I’m afraid to say, when we’re reading or writing belles lettres.
In a well-known essay called “Transpositions,” C.S. Lewis once wrote about the moreness of language with reference to symbol and sacrament. In the former, language is treated like Saran Wrap, in the latter as participating in revelatory moreness. I read this essay relatively early in life, and I sensed there was something going on that deserved more than I could offer by way of engagement, curiosity, and need. I wish for readers a restless season of wrestling with why Eagleton would say what he says about no one ever hearing language pure and simple and not concluding that he must be making a complaint. Because he isn’t.
