The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present by Richard Kopley (review)

The Formal Center in Literature is a lively read that returns a consideration of form to the center of the reader's attention. At the outset of his book, Kopley imagines a number of possible criticisms of his approach, from the intentional fallacy to the limitations of logocentrism, but he argues that the study of literature calls for a myriad of diverse perspectives. As he aptly puts it in the introduction, "A blend of approaches is altogether possible, fitting, and desirable. Literature is sufficiently rich and complicated that multiple methodologies may work together" (5). The Formal Center in Literature contributes just one such methodology to our analytical toolkit and reminds us of the critical importance of studying the formal properties of literary works of art. The author's prevailing preoccupation in his latest book is what he calls the "framed centers" of a variety of literary texts selected from a wide range of traditions.

The book is divided into fifteen succinct chapters and leads with Kopley's treatment of the authors of the American Renaissance: the first three chapters are devoted to Poe, after which, Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau are each given a chapter of their own. Kopley does not limit his analyses to American Renaissance authors, however. The rest of his book covers a wide range of writers, including chapters on Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, and Zadie Smith. What binds Kopley's investigations is his concentration on locating the framed center of each text he analyzes, by employing an analytical methodology of tracing the verbal symmetries between the first and second halves of each work. Along the way, Kopley offers numerous studied insights, which makes his book a pleasure to read. Most important, he reminds his readers of the importance of concentrating on the formal properties of texts in order to discern how form informs the material content of works of art.

Kopley's fascination with framed centers began with his early work on Poe's Pym. In his first chapter, he locates the center of Poe's novel, appropriately enough, in the middle of the text, when Pym's friend, Augustus, dies at sea. Kopley proceeds to read Poe's novel as a personally inflected allegory for the fall and rise of Jerusalem, and connects the mysterious ending of the book with Poe's desire to be reunited with his lost loved ones—namely, his brother and his mother, who are both silently invoked in the novel. In his next two chapters, he applies a similar methodology to Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and "The Gold-Bug," respectively. The center of Hawthorne's gem of a tale, "Earth's Holocaust," according to Kopley, lies in the passage wherein the gallows are consumed by the bonfire (and the critic is correct when he asserts that Hawthorne here alludes to John O'Sullivan's opposition to capital punishment). Kopley's chapter on Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is of exceptional quality and stands out in the collection. The critic locates the narrator's recognition of Bartleby's profound loneliness as the point of anchorage for his reading. His analysis focuses on how Bartleby occupies the center of the text, just as the soul may be said to occupy the body (and the spirit to animate the letter), and he reads the tale as Melville's parable of the second coming of Christ. Kopley's brief reading of "The Ponds" as the central chapter in Walden wonderfully exemplifies the interpretive model he employs. In the final eight chapters of his book, Kopley applies his method in a more standardized fashion than in his earlier seven chapters, beginning with his identification of the framed center of each text, followed by a tabular representation of the symmetrical language that he marshals into twin columns to support his interpretations.

Kopley's formalist approach...