The Boat in the Bottle; The Ancient Tree

Initially, the formalist studies from the first half of the course excited my intellect a great deal. I saw poetry as a linguistic form of music, carrying its own unique flavor of resonance. This is how I thought...

As the written composition or the digital recording leads to certain resonances in a specific and unique pattern, so the words on the page leads to a specific imaginative experience. The poetic experience is neither higher nor lower than the musical experience; it just uses different materials and excites different cerebral components. We might assume that no one person experiences a recording in exactly the same way; likewise, we can say that no recording/composition is ever heard the same way twice because it always resonates in a different environment. So the poem probably affects each person differently, and these differences are probably related to the setting of experience. Musicians who listen to other compositions will here the different elements clearer and will have a deeper appreciation along with the more immediate emotional resonances; likewise the poet/student of poetry will have his poetic experience enhanced by paying close attention to the individual elements working in concert.

So the formalist would say that with music and poetry, these materials were used together in this way/in this pattern, and afterwards, this work was the result. Poets, given that they must work with a language bound by time and space, mean to make timeless works, and so they use their time-bound language in a struggle against itself. This is not so different from music: musicians struggle to draw forth beautiful sounds from an otherwise chaotic array of physical vibrations.

Looking back on 2nd-half-of-the-semester dive into historicist criticism, I see no coincidence that our studies shifted from the poem to the novel. The novelist does something different than the poet: he plants a seed in the soil of his culture, and from this original act of creation, a tree grows forth. If the novelist worked closely with the rigorous exigencies of his cultural clime, and if critics continually cultivate the trees growth through canonization and criticism, then the tree will break nature's threshold and live into sustenance. Every harvest will then bring new seeds that resemble the first seed, and so the original intent is preserved paradoxically as the tree grows and transforms in real time. A valuable novel will thus give readers a window into another time. Readers must put forth much effort in order to draw out the novel's reward, because, like with a tree, the novel's conception is hidden behind countless layers of opacity.
However, if readers have the right tools, they can peel back the layers and gain a view upon a world that is not their own. This is why continual criticism is so important for the novel: the novel was planted using different instruments than the ones available today, and so we have to keep re-inventing new interpretive instruments in order to receive the novel's ever-expanding meaning.

While the poem carries a timeless experience forward in the formalist vessel--maybe like a miniature boat in a bottle--the good novel preserves the feeling of an age by working its materials into fruition. This is to say that the intentions of a poem or a novel--represented by the boat and the seed, respectively--are protected by materials that are durable and fragile at the same time. Glass is hard but breaks if abused; trees stand tall but are susceptible to fire.

According to this model, then, I posit four types of artistic works:

The Good Poem: provides the raw materials for a super-rational experience by juxtaposing otherwise disparate mental shades and timbres. The project of superseding rationality coordinates with the desire to step outside cultural limits. Incredible attention is payed to making "the boat" so that future generations will be careful with its glass case.

The Bad Poem: pines for a state of affairs without making it explicit that its language of pining is exactly the thing to be shirked. The glass will break from neglect.

The Good Novel: planted in fertile cultural soil; tilled by the author in his final stages of editing; continually protected, expanded, and altered by critics of the future who preserve the tree in order to look into the past.

The Bad Novel: planted in rocky, culture-less soil. Either overly-schematic to the point of cultural blind faith, or else so explicitly satirical that critics had no desire to protect the tree using constructive/deconstructive criticism. It gets cut down; either forgotten or chopped to pieces by evil super-intendents with a capitalist agenda.