Russian Formalism

Formalism’s sustained popularity among readers comes primarily from

the fact that it provides them with a way to understand and enjoy a work for
its own inherent value as a piece of literary art. Emphasizing close reading of
the work itself, formalism puts the focus on the text as literature. It does not treat
the text as an expression of social, religious, or political ideas.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The New Criticism was more directly born as a reaction against the attention
that scholars and teachers in the early part of the twentieth century paid to the
biographical and historical context of a work, thereby diminishing the attention
given to the literature itself. Instead of dealing directly with a poem, for example,
the previous generation’s critics were likely to treat it as a sociological or historical
record. When the critics and scholars did directly address the text, they tended to
describe their own impressions of it.

Russian Formalism flourished in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1920s,

and although its principles have some similarity to those of the New Critics, they
are two separate schools. In fact, because the work of the Russian formalists was
based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French linguist, they are
probably more closely related to the structuralists, who were to garner attention in
the 1950s and 1960s. Saussure’s influence is seen, for example, in the Russian
formalists’ argument that literature is a systematic set of linguistic and
structural elements that can be analyzed. They saw literature as a self-
enclosed system that can be studied not for its content but for its form.

Even the Moscow formalists and the St. Petersburg formalists did not agree

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on everything, although they did hold some beliefs in common. For example, both
rejected the nineteenth-century view that literature expresses an author’s
world-view, making biographical criticism the key to understanding a text.
They also agreed that literature could (and should) be studied in a scientific
manner, with the purpose of understanding it for its own sake, not as a medium for
discussing other subjects. Consequently, form was more important to them
than content. Their focus was on poetics—the strategies a writer used—rather
than on history, biography, or subject matter.

The Russian formalists also asserted that everyday language is just that: everyday
or ordinary. Literary language is different. It deviates from the expected, using all
the devices an author has the power to manipulate to make what is familiar seem
strange and unfamiliar. In fact, Victor Shklovsky coined the term defamiliarization
to refer to the literary process that gives vitality to language that might otherwise
be all too predictable. Defamiliarization is the artful aspect of a work that makes
the reader alert and alive; it causes the reader to intensify the attention paid to the
text, to look again at an image in an effort to take in the unexpected.

Another difference between reality and its representation in words is

evident in the Russian formalists’ distinction between story and plot. The
former refers to the actual sequence of events in a narrative; the latter, to the
artistic presentation, which can jumble the sequence, repeat episodes, or include
surprises. The literary treatment defamiliarizes the world and heightens the
reader’s awareness of it.

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READING AS A FORMALIST

The critic who wants to write about literature from a formalist

perspective must first be a close and careful reader who examines all the
elements of a text individually and questions how they come together to create
a work of art. Such a reader, who respects the autonomy of a work, achieves an
understanding of it by looking inside it, not outside it or beyond it. Instead of
examining historical periods, author biographies, or literary styles, for example, he
or she will approach a text with the assumption that it is a self-contained entity and
that he or she is looking for the governing principles that allow the text to reveal
itself. For example, the correspondences between the characters in James Joyce’s
short story “Araby” and the people he knew personally may be interesting, but for
the formalist they are less pertinent to understanding how the story creates
meaning than are other kinds of information that the story contains within itself.

Because formalism calls for a close reading of the text, the first time
through a given work you cannot expect to notice all the subtleties and details
that will ultimately figure in your analysis. It is on subsequent readings that
the formalist perspective begins to take shape. The second time around, you
may begin to notice repetition of words and images, patterns of sound,
multiple meanings, and ambiguous dialogue. You will ultimately investigate
every detail of a work for its contribution to and connection with the whole.
Such observations made by the scrupulous reader are the key to discovering
how all the formal elements of the text work together. Some of the main
elements that call for attention are form, diction, and unity, as well as the
various literary devices they subsume.

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Form
Coleridge’s concept of the organic, innate nature of form in a literary work
is reflected in the formalists’ assumption that although the external, easily noted
ordering of a poem or story (e.g., its rhyme scheme or sequence of events leading
to a climax) may be significant in an analysis, form is actually the whole that is
produced by various structural elements working together. Form grows out of the
work’s recurrences, repetitions, relationships, motifs— all the organizational
devices that create the total effect. Together they are the statement of the
work. Thus, form and content are inseparable.
Because what a poem or prose work means depends on how it is said, to
understand it the formalist reader-writer pays attention to how all the parts affect
each other and how they fit together. In early readings, then, you may find it
helpful to make marginal notations where words and phrases recur. Even if the
wording is not repeated exactly, there may be synonyms that echo important
words. Images, too, can gain significance by appearing more than once. They may
be random or may form a regular pattern; either way, they deserve to be noted,
because they begin to create form and unity.

In a narrative, the point of view from which a story is told is a significant

shaping force. Because the reader is given only the information that the narrator
knows, as he or she understands it and chooses to share it, the storyteller controls
the reader’s perception of the fictive world and thereby determines how the reader
grasps the integral and meaningful relationship of all its parts. Of course, the
omniscient narrator, who speaks with a third-person voice, is assumed to see all,
but if a major or minor character in the narrative recounts the narrative, the reader
must question how that teller’s part in the story affects his or her understanding
and presentation of it. Is the narrator reliable? Biased? Does the narrator have a

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reason to leave out events or reshape them? What is the teller’s ethical stance?

You can also use your reading log to address a number of issues regarding
the formal qualities of a text. Some relevant questions, such as the following, can
help you start to think about these qualities.
• Does this work follow a traditional form, such as the Petrarchan sonnet,
or does it chart its own development?
• How are the events of the plot recounted—for example, in sequential
fashion or as a flashback?
• How does the work’s organization affect its meaning?
• Does the denouement in a plot surprise or satisfy you?
• Does the denouement provide closure to the narrative or leave it open?
• What is the effect of using a particular meter—say, anapestic
tetrameter?
• What is the effect of telling a story from this point of view?
• What sounds are especially important in developing this piece? (In
poems, be sure to look for more than end rhyme.)
• What recurrences of words, images, and sounds do you notice? Do the
recurrences make a pattern, or do they appear randomly?
• What rhythms are in the words? (This question is applicable to prose as
well as poetry.)
• Where do images foreshadow later events?
• How does the narrator’s point of view shape the meaning?
• What visual patterns do you find in this text?

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 Sometimes, particularly in works written in the past few decades, form
is hard to determine. Conventions that serve as guideposts for the reader may be
few. Theater of the absurd, for instance, delights in a lack of traditional elements
that an audience would look to for help. However, no form is also form. Notice
how the seeming absence of form suggests a chaotic world in which there is no
meaning.

As a formalist, then, you will look for meaning in all the organizational
elements at hand, even those that seem distorted or “absurd.” But simply listing
them is not enough. You must then determine how their interaction creates
meaning. What is the effect of the whole? How do the parts of the poem that give it
order come together to assume a unique shape that presents readers with a unique
experience? How does structure become meaning?

Looking at “Araby,” for example, the reader easily recognizes that the
narrative unfolds chronologically, but he or she also perceives that more is taking
place here than a simple sequence of events involving a romantic desire to go to a
bazaar. On the surface of the story, little seems to happen, but beneath it, more
subtle conflicts and changes are transpiring. With that recognition, it is possible to
see “Araby” as an initiation story in which the protagonist begins with childish
dreams, moves through a test of will and commitment, and arrives at a new, adult
sense of the world. The boy’s maturation could be described as a down-ward
emotional spiral as he moves from a sense of the holiness of the world to
frustration with its obstacles and then rage at its emptiness. The bottom of the
spiral is marked by his recognition of the futility of his efforts to make it other-
wise. Though the journey begins as he listens to the sounds of innocent child’s
play, it ends with a recognition of humankind’s aloneness in a darkened world.

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 The form of “Araby” can also be described in other ways. You could, for
example, compare it with other stories of quest, in which the protagonist searches
for a holy relic, traveling from place to place (in this case making the train journey,
which he must take alone) and enduring ordeals in the service of his mission. You
could also describe it as circular, for it begins with physical death (a priest had died
in the back room, where the air is still musty, and the garden is yellowed and
“straggling”) and ends with the death of innocence and belief, which those earlier
images foreshadowed. You could even say that it is a mythic pattern, as it recounts
a single episode from childhood to suggest the larger pattern of human experience
in which innocence is succeeded by knowledge, dreams by reality, childhood by
adulthood.

Diction
Words hold the keys to meaning. A formalist will look at words closely,
questioning all of their denotations (explicit dictionary meanings) and
connotations (implied but not directly indicated meanings). As Brooks posited,
the reader must consider how a word or phrase creates meaning that no other
word or phrase could. Etymology (the history of a word) becomes significant,
and allusions to other works may import surprising meanings. Tracing allusions is
a sticky point for formalists, because it means going outside the text to find
meaning. Nevertheless, if the reader is to explore all facets of the text, it is
important to discover everything that a given reference suggests.
Locution that has more than a single possibility for interpretation is valued
for the richness it brings to the whole. Unlike the scientist, who strives for
directness and singularity of meaning, the poet, who speaks of experience, uses
ambiguity to reach for meaning through language that is suggestive, compressed,
and multi-leveled. The poet may, for example, choose words that can bear the load

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 of several, sometimes divergent meanings, as Gerard Manley Hopkins did in “The
Windhover.” In that poem, he used the word buckle, which can mean “crumple”
but also suggests “join” or “bend” and perhaps other possibilities.

When an incident, object, or person is used both literally (as itself) and
figuratively (as something else), it becomes a symbol. In other words, a symbol
refers simultaneously to itself and to something beyond the self in order to
expand the meaning of the text and provide additional possibilities for the
discovery of meaning. The U.S. flag is a flag, for instance, but it may also make a
viewer think of freedom and country. Symbols are often recognizable because they
grow out of images or phrases that recur with higher-than-expected frequency or
that receive an inordinate amount of attention by the narrator. Such is the case with
the train trip the boy in “Araby” must take to reach the fair. As he travels alone
through the dark night, the journey becomes more than a physical one; he is also
moving psychologically from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to
adulthood. Because it is meaningful in the context of the images, plot structure,
and other elements of the story, the symbol contributes to the story’s unity.

In your reading log, you will find it helpful to note the quality of language in
a selection:
• Record any words you do not know.
• Find words that appear more than once. Do their meanings change with
subsequent use? Or do they grow more powerful?
• Look for words that suggest meanings they do not explicitly state.
• Identify terms (titles of books, quotations, paraphrases) that point to
other works that would add meaning to the one you are reading.
• Look up the history of words that appear at important points of a story

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 or poem. Do other, older meanings suggest anything about their use
here?
• Where did you find ambiguity? How does it suggest additional
meanings?
• What are the important symbols, and how do they create unity?

When applied to “Araby,” these approaches reveal that its language is

particularly rich and subtle, with connotations radiating out of words that initially
seem to be merely literal or factual. The opening paragraph alone—with its use of
blind (twice), its reference to the school as a prison (at the end of the day setting
the boys “free”), and its description of the uninhabited, detached house in a
neighborhood of “brown imperturbable faces”—suggests a society in which
something important has been lost, a world in which dreams will not survive. It
stands in contrast to the language used to describe the boy’s private, inner world,
where he worships the sister of his friend Mangan, whom he thinks of as a holy
figure surrounded by an aura of light. Describing his devotion, he stresses its
sacred nature by using Christian language. He says, “I imagined that I bore my
chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in
strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.” The ambiguity in
“Araby,” its use of words that suggest more than a single meaning, creates a sense
of mystery that is part of both the boy’s devotion to holy mysteries and the mystery
of human life. For instance, the descriptions of Mangan’s sister, who does little and
says only a few words, imply that she is both human and holy. When the boy
recounts his vision of her, he says, “The light from the lamp opposite our door
caught the white curve of her neck, lit up the hair that rested there and, falling, lit
up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white
border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.” In his words, she is both a

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sexual and a sacred being. He is attracted by her sensuality but also sees her as a
holy icon surrounded by light.

Obviously, the diction of “Araby” suggests more than a first reading might
indicate. The formalist critic will push on the story’s language to reveal meanings
that are not readily noticed in an effort to find suggested meanings rather than
explicit ones. The result is an enriched understanding of the experiences of the
boy, his world, and his understanding of it.

Unity
If a work has unity, all of its aspects fit together in significant ways that
create a whole. Each element, through its relationship to the others, contributes to
the totality of the work, its meaning. Patterns that inform and give relevance to the
rest often appear as verbal motifs, images, symbols, figurative language, meter,
rhyme, or sound. The narrator’s point of view can also be an important unifying
element.
Unity is created, for example, when a single image or figure of speech is
extended throughout a work or when several images or figures form a pattern. The
appearance may be a relatively simple repeated reference to a color or sound or the
more complicated use of figurative language, an intentional departure from normal
word meaning, such as a metaphor. For example, when a word or phrase is used to
refer to a person or object to which it is not logically applicable, as in Emily
Dickinson’s assertion that “hope is the thing with feathers,” the metaphorical
statement is an imaginative way of identifying one thing with another. Stretched
and elaborated, images and figures grow rich and complex, as is easily noticed in
the poems of the metaphysical poets, whose works the New Critics celebrated. To
see how the protracted, embellished use of an image or figure can enhance and

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complicate meaning, read John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” or
shorter poems, such as “The Silken Tent,” by Robert Frost, or Emily Dickinson’s
“I Like to See It Lap the Miles.”

In the most powerful works, the elements do not come together easily or
comfortably. In fact, the formalist critic looks for these elements to resist one
another, creating what Tate called tension, or the push of conflicting elements
against each other. Tension often appears in the form of irony (the use of a word or
a statement that is the opposite of what is intended), paradox (a contradiction that
is actually true), and ambiguity (a word, statement, or situation that has more than
one possible meaning). For example, a piece of fiction’s point of view becomes
more complicated, and more interesting to a formalist, if the narrator is not aware
of the whole story but must tell it from limited knowledge or understanding. The
possibilities for paradox, irony, and ambiguity grow when the storyteller operates
without fully comprehending the dimensions of the events and characters of the
narrative.
In your reading journal, you may want to ask some questions about the
unity of the selection you are studying:
• What images are extended or elaborated? Where do several images
work together to create meaning?
• What is paradoxical in the work? How is it both contradictory and
true? What is ironic in the work?
• Do all the elements cohere in ways that generate meaning?
• Are the verbal motifs, images, figures of speech, symbols, meter, rhyme,
and sound consistent? If not, what did you have to reconcile?

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 “Araby” is rich in paradox, ambiguity, and irony, though it is the last one
that most clearly creates tension in this story. For example, when the boy finally
arrives at the bazaar, the hall is in darkness and silence, “like that which pervades a
church after a service.” He recognizes that despite his devotion, his fidelity, and his
desire to serve his dream, he has come too late. What he has expected, indeed what
the reader feels he has deserved, has not come to pass. His situation is an ironic
one in which he finds the opposite of what he made his journey to reach. Araby,
the place of romance and enchantment, is as mundane as his own neighborhood.
His holy quest has led to darkness.
Paradox often occurs along with irony, and many elements in Joyce’s story
are paradoxical. The boys’ school, for example, is called the Christian Brothers’
School, but it is described as a prison. In fact, the references to Christian objects
and symbols, which abound in the story, are mostly paradoxes. The boy’s gar- den,
for example, has a central (dying) apple tree, he prays in the back room (where the
priest died), and at the end of the story, a voice calls out, in an inversion to God’s
command “Let there be light,” that the light has gone out. There is paradox, too, in
the boy’s devotion; it is simultaneously sad (because it is doomed) and laughable
(because it is childish). And Mangan’s sister, both holy and profane, is perhaps not
simply ambiguous but paradoxical.
As with irony and ambiguity, such paradoxes require the reader to reconcile
them to resolve the tension they create so that the text becomes a unified whole.
The opposition of formal elements, which must be overcome if the work is to
achieve wholeness, gives it the complexity one finds in life itself. As Warren
pointed out in his essay “Pure and Impure Poetry,” the poet “wins by utilizing the
resistance of his opponent—the ambiguity, irony, and paradox, which, since
everything in the work has to be accounted for, the reader must resolve to discover
meaning.”

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 What Doesn’t Appear in Formalist Criticism
Just as the formalist critic must approach a work with a heightened
awareness of form, diction, and unity (including finding and examining the
significance of ambiguity, paradox, and irony), some other analytical techniques
are to be avoided strenuously. They include the heresy of paraphrase, the
intentional fallacy, biographical examination, and the affective fallacy.
Because these techniques lead the reader away from the poem, instead of into
it, formalist critics do not consider them valid critical tools.
Paraphrase: If a reader accepts the principles of formalism, any change to a
text— whether it be in form, diction, or unifying devices—makes the work no
longer itself. To restate a poem or summarize a story is to lose it. Its uniqueness
disappears. Any alteration of wording or structure or point of view changes the
meaning of the original and cannot, therefore, be valid.

Intention: What an author intended to do is not important, argue the

formalists. What the author actually did is the reader’s concern. To indulge
concern about what he or she had planned to do is to commit the intentional
fallacy. In The Verbal Icon, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley question
whether an author’s intentions can ever be known, as those intentions often lie
below the conscious level. Even if the author’s intentions are overtly stated, they
may not have been carried out. Authors, they observe, are not necessarily reliable
witnesses of such matters. One can add that neither are they necessarily good
critics of their own work. Sometimes they don’t even recognize how good it
actually is.

Biography: Studying the details of an author’s life, and by extension the

social and historical conditions in which a text was produced, may be interesting,
but it does little to reveal how a poem creates meaning. The work is not the writer,

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nor is the writer the work. To confuse the two is to be led away from what happens
in the work.

Affect: Just as readers digress by paying attention to the writer’s biography,

they also go astray by paying attention to their own reactions to the work. By
asking about its effect on an audience, particularly the emotional effect, the
critic shifts attention to results rather than means, from the literary text to the
responses of someone outside it. Such an approach will lead to no single
meaning. It can impose no standards. It results, say the formalists, in pure
subjectivism.

Weaknesses of Formalist Approach

Obviously, the formalist approach is not without its weaknesses and,
needless to say, those who would point them out. Chief among the complaints is
that the formalists have elevated the study of technique to the exclusion of the
human dimension—that they have turned reading into the solving of clever
puzzles and have lost the connections literature has with people and their lives.
Other objections come from those who find formalism too restrictive.
David Daiches, for example, argued against such a narrow focus on a piece of
literature as a work of art. Literature is, he asserted, many things at once: a
social document, a record of a writer’s thoughts and experiences, a
commentary on life. To narrow the range of its possibilities is to diminish it.

Finally, critics have charged that formalism works less well with some
works, perhaps even certain genres, than with others. It has proved to be
especially helpful with lyric poetry but less effective in understanding the essay or
long, philosophical poems. (Obviously, it is easier to deal with the formal elements
of short texts than with those of long ones.) That formalism has not worked

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particularly well for analyzing contemporary poetry suggests that, for the time
being, it is more likely to be found as part of other critical approaches than in
essays that are purely formalist in their techniques. Certainly formalism is alive
and well in classrooms, where students still learn to read closely and analytically
and to support their interpretations with examples drawn from the text under
consideration.

WRITING A FORMALIST ANALYSIS

Prewriting
When you approach the actual writing of your analysis, you may find that
your reading log is mostly filled with definitions of words or lists of images. It is
now time to see how those words and images are woven together, even those that
do not naturally fit. You may want to revisit the text, looking for patterns
(recurrences that appear with such regularity that they are eventually anticipated),
visual motifs, and repeated words and phrases; for significant connotations,
multiple denotations, allusions, and etymological ramifications to meaning; for
unity, as expressed by the meaningful coherence of all elements of the work; and
for the tension produced by paradox and irony.
Another approach to prewriting is to spend some time freewriting about
what you have read. You can begin with a symbol or a strong image and see where
it takes you. If the text has the unity a formalist looks for, any single observation is
likely to lead you to an understanding of the other aspects of the text to which it is
connected.

Drafting and Revising

The Introduction A common way to begin a formalist analysis is to present
a summary statement about how the various elements of the work come together to

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make meaning. Such an opening announces the core of the analysis that the rest of
your paper will explain in more detail. Of course, if you choose this approach, you
will need to write at least a draft of your discussion before working on the
introduction, because you have to know what you are going to say before you can
summarize it. An introduction that follows this pattern will undoubtedly clarify
your topic and intentions for your readers, but it may not be the most attractive or
interesting way to address them. A more colorful alter- native is to begin by
directly referencing the text itself. For example, if you are working with a short
story, you can recount a particularly meaningful incident from it, or if you are
writing about a poem, you can quote a few lines, followed by an explanatory
comment of why the excerpt is important to understanding the work as a whole.

The Body
The main part of your paper will be devoted to showing how the various
elements of the text work together to create meaning. You will want to touch on
the form, diction, and unity, citing examples of how they operate together and
reinforce one another to develop a theme—a meaning that has some universal
human significance. Your job is to describe what you find in the work, then to
assess its effect on the whole. Where you find conflicts, or aspects of the work that
do not seem to lead to the same ends, you must work to resolve the tension they
create.
If a repeated image is dominant in a story, or a repeated phrase particularly
insistent, you may want to give it first place in your discussion. That is, you can
choose to begin with the most significant element in the work, letting it subsume
the other aspects that formalists consider important. On the other hand, you may
decide to treat form, diction, and unity as equally significant, giving roughly the
same amount of consideration to each.

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 You will also want to give a good bit of attention to any instances of para-
dox and irony, explaining how their presence in the work creates tension and how
their resolution provides satisfaction. This is a good opportunity to draw examples
from the text or to quote significant passages. As in all critical essays, references to
the work that illustrate your discussion will both strengthen and clarify what you
are saying.
Keep in mind that it is more effective to organize your discussion around the
literary elements you have examined rather than follow the sequence of events in a
narrative or the stanzaic progression of a poem. For the writer who tries to move
sequentially through the text as the author has constructed it, making analytical
comments along the way, the temptation to forsake analysis and simply summarize
the work is hard to resist.
The Conclusion
The end of your paper is an appropriate place to state (or reiterate) the
connection between form and content. Up to this point, you have been describing
how the text operates in particular ways and explaining the meaning that emerges
from those ways. Now you have the opportunity to make some generalizations
about the overall relationship of form and content. You can decide whether you
have explored a text that has its own laws of being and operates successfully
within them, or whether it is a work in which the formal elements, not easily
reconciled, are eventually harmonized to make meaning.

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