Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine (review)

In her review essay on the New Formalism for PMLA some years back, Marjorie Levinson divided New Formalists into those who wanted to return historicist reading from its concentration on context to a renewed attention to its formal reading of culture and those who, in backlash, wanted to turn away from historicism to a renewed attention to literary form. Caroline Levine’s important new work, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, doesn’t fall squarely into either camp. It describes the ways in which literary formalism may be used as a form of cultural analysis, while it simultaneously finds New Historicism wanting for not having seen this possibility. I don’t think the book quite achieves either end as stated in this polemical way, but, despite that, I think it will be an important contribution both to the reading of form in literature and to the kinds of cultural and political debates literary critics engage in.

I will begin by addressing a flaw in the book that should not get in the way of its reception: its querulous and reductive dismissals of much historicist reading. Levine states her aim clearly at the opening of the book in one of her five claims about form (“Forms do political work in particular historical contexts”), and she regularly criticizes historicist reading for not recognizing this and for only seeing the historical causes of literary forms (5, original emphasis). One would have thought it evident from reading not only Michel Foucault but also the various programmatic statements of New Historicists that they consciously meant to treat literary, cultural, political, and scientific forms (though they often used different terms such as discursive formations) as equivalent in order to find what made them work together. And indeed Levine quotes Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher to that effect, though in doing so she criticizes them for being insufficiently responsive to temporal change in their periodic formulations (they really just can’t win) (54–55). I think the critique misreads much historicist criticism and dismisses it prematurely. But even if the critique angers some readers, I think it should be ignored. If the book had posed itself as a new direction in historicist and cultural critique or perhaps as a course correction, its argument could have been precisely the same, and it would be equally important.

As either new direction or course correction, this book still demands attention. Its two greatest contributions are first, the concept of affordance, and second, the related argument that forms can have conflicting consequences, making them more politically ambiguous in their results than we are used to thinking. An affordance, according to Levine, is a potential use or action “latent in materials and designs” (6). As such it is related to but distinct from purpose. A fork, in Levine’s example, offers the affordances of stabbing and scooping. These uses are obviously tied to the fork’s purpose of picking up food in order to eat. But, as Levine points out, these same affordances entail that forks can be used as can openers, just as door-knobs can be used to hang things. Precisely because the affordances of form can have many potential uses, the forms Levine discusses—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—all become pointedly multivocal.

The multivocal quality of form receives its clearest illumination when Levine discusses wholes and hierarchies, since political and historical critics have tended to see these concepts as essentially oppressive: wholes always entailing exclusion, hierarchies always entailing a raising of one category (men, whites, Europeans) over another (women, blacks, non-Europeans). But, Levine points out, wholes, for instance, in addition to excluding what does not belong to them, also can pick up within them disparate elements. Thus when a whole that may capture and enclose—say the private sphere in which John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) encloses women—is symbolically expanded (as Ruskin does expand it) to give women caretaking responsibilities within the public sphere of the state, the...