Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

Form and Meaning: The Essay's Immanent Purposiveness

for m and meaning the essay’s immanent pur posiveness The critic of forms . . . conceives purpose as an immanent or indwelling rather than transcendent cause. He holds the connection between purpose and structure to be direct and continuous: rather than locating purpose in a disembodied realm of general artistic ends or abstract intentions, he strives to find it at work in the dynamic progression of the text. Walter A. Davis, The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason - This page intentionally left blank Immanent Form For m is not meaning. To say so is tempting, and perhaps understandable, but it is also to elide difference and enter a dangerous collapse. By the same token, we can say that form is not “not meaning.” Further, we can say this: without form meaning does not exist. In, through, and by means of form meaning is realized. If we take form as like a transcendent power, existing beyond and apart from the work of art, an abstract, Gnostic-like category, we commit an injustice no less serious than when we ignore, dismiss, or minimize the importance of form, impatient with the concrete. Impatience rules in any case, from the hasty, even rapacious shift from concrete details to meaning, to the equally quick and reckless refusal to be bothered with meaning. The truth is, we cannot do without either form or meaning; one without the other is an impoverishment, and more, a distortion as well as a failure of imagination and understanding . I say “truth” because incarnation reveals the pattern that opens understanding: embodied truth. Form is something notoriously difficult to grasp. I can never seem to get hold of it, let alone pin it down. Perhaps Plato is to blame, locating it far from us in some ideal realm and thus promoting error. It is better—not just easier, but truer—to regard form as inseparable from purpose and purposiveness, as Walter A. Davis argues in The Act of Interpretation: Put in the simplest and most exacting terms, the task of interpretation is to apprehend the purposive principle immanent in the 125 structure of a literary work which determines the mutual interfunctioning of its component parts. . . . Function, structure, and purpose, in that order, become the primary categories of interpretation : for parts function only by serving a purpose and structure is the process through which purpose is actualized. . . . Purpose coincides with structure because it gives birth to it. It is the most concrete category in criticism because its embodiment is constant and comprehensive: the purpose that shapes a work of art is realized by no more and no less than that entire work of art. Such an understanding brings form down from the ethereal and the ideal and places it, surprisingly enough, within the ordinary and the concrete—for the student of literature, in the text rather than outside, above, and beyond it, hovering, untouchable, and controlling. To think of form as immanent is by no means to equate it with meaning, but rather with purpose and purposiveness—which is to leave meaning alone altogether. No less than form, meaning, too, appears susceptible to the same sort of disembodiment whereby we conceive of it as existing apart or at least separable from the work itself, lying, for instance, in the author’s abstract intention.This tendency accounts, I imagine, for the not-so-sophomoric drive to yank meaning from the work of literature and place it, somehow summarized, encapsulated, and rendered free of all the writer’s fripperies and the reader’s window dressing, in a simple paraphrased unit, boiled down, we say, put in a nutshell, thus reduced to and presented as content. The essay is neither shapeless nor formless, although it resists our vaunted attempts to describe or define that form. We talk as if the essay is at once a form and without one. The species 126 for m and meaning “essay” may, in other words, be a form, but individual instances of that form lack form. Various inconsistencies and contradictions thus attach to this resistant, defiant thing to which we keep returning and that we apparently love unconditionally. It has been described, crudely enough, as “a greased pig” and as “a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.”1 Authors of such descriptions intend not to demean the writing to which they themselves are given—and with which they...