The man bent over his guitar,

English 272D
Fall 1998
Wollaeger
The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green

They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon a blue guitar�"

- Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar

Masterpieces of the Self: The Failure of Formalism in Larsen, Lawrence, and Maugham Kyle Brenton

Earlier this semester in my Romantic poetry class, we were discussing Byrons Childe Harolds Pilgrimage Canto III, and the professor asked us all to come to class one day with a discussion question prepared. So I arrived the next meeting, feeling very pleased with myself, with the following question: "Obviously Harold is to some degree an autobiographical character, but what can be learned from considering the points at which Byron and Harold diverge? How is Harold different from Byron, and what do those differences say about the poet himself?" The professors response was to say that over the years many have had the urge to take the autobiographical approach to the poem, and that many books had been written about the subject, but that in the end, such speculation was fruitless and any meaningful consideration of the poem must deal solely with the work itself, rather than the biography of the person who created it.
Now this was obviously not to be taken as a statement of policy regarding all poetry, but was referring to this poem in particular, but it got me thinking about the nature of art itself. Just the other day a friend of mine, referring to a play he had recently completed, said, "This is yet another piece of evidence that I am incapable of writing a main character who is not me." This encouraged the line of thought begun with Byron and led me to some troubling questions. Can you always find the poet in the poem, the painter in the painting, the artist in the art? Should you look? Is there value in examining biographical data to enhance (or even create) your opinion of a work? On the other side of the argument, can the poet divorce himself from his poetry? Is there any way to write or paint or express yourself artistically in any way that is not simply self-portraiture? Can a work ever be divorced from all things but itself, refer only to the world created and expressed there on the page or on the canvas?
The answer to the first set of questions, as far as Im concerned, is yes. Reading Keats Odes is a remarkable experience, but reading them with the knowledge that when he was writing he knew that he was only months away from death transforms the experience into something else entirely. The poems become much more poignant, much more immediate and emotionally charged, when one is armed with that biographical information. Every work of art comes from an artist, and every artist comes from a particular cultural context, and knowledge of that artist and that context almost invariably enhances the experiencing of the art.
The second set of questions, however, are not as easy to answer. Over time, many artists have wanted to delete themselves entirely from their art. Keats himself sought what some have called "negative capability," which is just this sort of separation of poet and poem. With the advent of Mallarmé and the High Formalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, this became a heated topic of aesthetic debate. The Formalists advocated "the notion that a work of art refers only to itself; it is autonomous and stands alone, outside history, society, and culture," (Allaire, 10-1-98) according to Mark Wollaeger, and to that I would append outside the originator, outside the artist himself.
The literature of the Modernist period seems often concerned with this question of Formalism versus its opposite (to again use Keatsian terminology), the "egotistical sublime." Perhaps due in part to the pervasive horror of World War I, many Modernist authors held up abstraction as an ideal towards which their characters could strive. In particular, the characters of Axel Olsen in Nella Larsens Quicksand, Loerke in D. H. Lawrences Women in Love, and Charles Strickland in W. Somerset Maughams The Moon and Sixpence stand out as exemplars of this desire for abstraction from reality, for Formalism. They all seek to capture something essential to the subject that is separate from all externals, to create a world with their art that is complete in and of itself, that refers in no way to the physical world. However, in each of these cases the attempt fails. In the end, their art is really nothing more than self-portraiture passing itself off as divinity.
Before we consider these works, it seems worthwhile to get some basis in Formalism itself. Two of the most important voices of later Formalism were Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot. They both advocated the artists complete separation from the art, Valéry through the metaphor of the scientist, the surgeon, and Eliot through that of the catalyst. These two authors had a great impact on the thinking of their time, and one can see their ideas resonating through much of the literature of the Modernist era.
In his early essay "On Literary Technique," Valéry sets forth much of the théorie de lart poétique that he continued to refine throughout his lifetime. The purpose of poetry, for him, was simply to cause an effect in the mind of a reader. "Given an impression, a dream, a thought, one must express it in such a way as to produce the maximum effect in the mind of a listener- an effect entirely calculated by the Artist," (Collected Works, 315) he says, and then continues to state the way in which this effect should be produced. Poems should be short, no more than a hundred lines, and they should always be leading the reader towards the climax, which should come in the last line. Valéry advocated conscious construction of every aspect of a poem:
And this leads us naturally to a totally new and modern conception of the poet. He is no longer the disheveled madman who writes a whole poem in the course of one feverish night; he is a cool scientist, almost an algebraist, in the service of a subtle dreamer He will take care not to hurl on to paper everything whispered to him in fortunate moments by the Muse of Free Association. On the contrary, everything he has imagined, felt, dreamed, and planned will be passed through a sieve, weighted, filtered, subjected to form, and condensed as much as possible so as to gain in power what it loses in length.
(Ibid. pp. 315-316)
This emphasis on form and conscious construction is, of course, what gives Formalism its name and, as far as emotional detachment is concerned, the text speaks for itself. There can hardly be a more non-traditional, non-romantic image of the poet than that of a mathematician, carefully calculating his every word and phrase, whose only end is to produce the desired effect in his subject.
For Valéry, the ideal artist was Leonardo da Vinci. In da Vinci, this synthesis of artist and scientist was complete. In da Vincis work, both the artist himself and the original conception of the work vanish in the purifying fire of the act of creation, of composition, and what is left is a work that is essential and completely abstracted from reality. The "perfected consciousness" of an ideal artist like da Vinci denies all things that are not essential and abstract, "com[ing] to suspect all accustomed reality of being only one solution amongst many others of universal problems." (Selected Writings, 90) The ideal artist takes elements drawn from the world around him and, in the supreme act of ordering, of composing, of constructing, creates something that transcends the everyday and takes part in the universal.
The artist of perfected consciousness is completely separate from his work. "It is not his cherished self that he elevates to so high a degree, since by thinking about it he has renounced it, and has substituted for it in the place of subject this ego which is unqualified, which has no name, no history, which is no more sensitive, no less real than the center of gravity of a planetary system or ring, but which is a result of the whole." (Ibid. p. 94) The "ego" Valéry speaks of is the universal, the essential that the ideal poet knows. Furthermore, "astonishment passes all bounds when one realizes that the author himself is unable to give any account of the lines he has followed, that he is the wielder of a power the nature of which he does not understand." (Ibid. p. 102) In sum, the ideal artist is one who can see beyond the everyday to the universal that underlies all things. He is inspired in some quasi-mystical way by this knowledge, and he writes or paints about it. In doing so, he painstakingly chooses particular words, lines, or colors deliberately to convey the desired effect, and thus creates an object that bears no relation to himself or to the particular circumstances around him, but instead reflects this sublime order of the universe, referring to the entire order, not to any particular part.
"If the best of [Valérys] poems are among the masterpieces, the best of his critical essays are among the most remarkable curiosities of French literature," (Collected Works, p. viii) or so says T. S. Eliot in his Introduction to Valérys Collected Works. These words will not appear terribly surprising when we take into account the fact that Eliot himself held almost the exact same opinions and wrote similar essays. Eliot was also one of the foremost voices of Formalism, and articulated some of its doctrines in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
Eliot also holds to the belief that poetry should be impersonal, void of the authors personality, but rather than Valérys heroic superman of perfected consciousness, Eliot places the credit for arts greatness in its participation in a tradition. He holds that every poet must cultivate a consciousness of the past because, "the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence [T]he whole of the literature of Europe from Homer has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." (Eliot, 72) It is the poets responsibility to create art that will both participate in this tradition and reshape it. "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities." (Ibid.) Art must have an awareness of the tradition that precedes it, and it must enter into some sort of dialogue with that past, be it to conform or to rebel.
Eliot believes in "poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." (Ibid. 74) Notice, however, that he makes no mention of poets in that organic whole. Again, the individual has been obliterated in the totality and self-reflexivity of art. Eliots vision of this impersonality goes even farther than Valérys. Rather than an active agent, a scientist, planning and shaping deliberately, for Eliot the metaphor is of a catalyst. "The poets mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." (Ibid.) In Eliots vision the poet becomes almost a passive storage device for the events around him, until finally, like chemical compounds when a catalyst is applied, a poem crystallizes out of all the experiences he has stored up. The poet is unchanged by this experience, and the poem bears nothing of him in it. He is merely the conduit through which the universal human experience chose to express itself. And the better he is, the less of him will be in the poem. "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material," (Ibid.) and the more perfectly will the artist be effaced from the art.
A strong voice against these assumptions of Formalism coming slightly after the Modernist period is that of Wallace Stevens. Stevens views are almost diametrically opposed to those of Eliot and Valéry. Stevens held that the artist was not separate from the art, that the artist was in fact an essential part of the art.
In his essay "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," Stevens examines the differences between the poet and the philosopher. He defines poetry as "unofficial truth" as opposed to the "official truth" of philosophy. The key to the difference between poetry and philosophy is, according to Stevens, the interplay between reason and imagination.
Since we expect rational ideas to satisfy the reason and imaginative ideas to satisfy the imagination, it follows that if we are sceptical of rational ideas it is because they do not satisfy the imagination If an imaginative idea does not satisfy the reason, we regard the fact as in the nature of things On the other hand, if an imaginative idea satisfies the imagination, we are indifferent to the fact that it does not satisfy the reason, although we concede that it would be complete, as an idea, if, in addition to satisfying the imagination, it also satisfied the reason. From this analysis, we deduce that an idea that satisfies both the reason and the imagination, if it happened, for instance, to be an idea of God, would establish a divine beginning and end for us which, at the moment, the reason, singly, at best proposes and on which, at the moment, the imagination, single, merely meditates It seems elementary, from this point of view, that the poet, in order to fulfill himself, must accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the imagination.
(Stevens, 42)
The difference here articulated between philosophy and poetry is that, while philosophy has only the tools of reason at its disposal to attain the complete and eternal truth, poetry has both the tools of reason and those of the creative imagination of the artist. Both of these, the imagination and the reason, must be satisfied if we are to come to any understanding of the true nature of the universe. Only poetry has the ability to do that.
And what is it about poetry that gives it this unique faculty? Simply put, it is the personality of the artist. After musing on the poetry/philosophy question, Stevens moves on to trying to codify an exact definition of poetry. After considering both Aristotle and Shelley, he decides that we all know what poetry is, but we cant define it until we take into account that it is "a process of the personality of the poet." (Ibid. 45) It is the personality of the poet that forms the vital force of poetry, that forges the bond between reason and imagination. "This is the element, the force, that keeps poetry a living thing, the modernizing and ever-modern influence." (Ibid. 45)
This is not to say, however, that the poet needs always be the subject. He is not talking about direct egotism, about autobiography. But, "without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none." (Ibid. 46) The way in which the personality of the artist comes into it, according to Stevens, is through the inescapable fact that the poet composes to please his own sensibilities. Presumably he is writing verse that he likes, and therefore his own sensibility is inescapable in his art. In addition, he is (or at least should be) writing for his own satisfaction, and so he writes the things that will satisfy him. "The way a poet feels when he is writing, or after he has written, a poem that completely accomplishes his purpose is evidence of the personal nature of his activity. To describe it by exaggerating it, he shares the transformation, not to say apotheosis, accomplished by the poem." (Ibid. 49) So, according to Stevens, the artists sensibility, as an outgrowth of the entire individual/cultural matrix from which the artist is creating, is what determines the content and form of the art. Therefore, to consider the work of art to be separate from the artist borders on pointlessness.
Before delving into the actual artistic works of the period, it is perhaps appropriate to take a break here to consider the larger implications involved. I began this treatment with a series of questions that have been troubling me about the nature of biography in art, and we have begun to answer some of those questions, but one overarching question that remains is whether or not any of this really matters. Regardless of whether the artist is present in the artwork or not, does it really make a difference whether or not you know that particular biography? Is an experience of a work of art somehow invalidated if you dont? I used the example of Keats Odes, and that may merit further examination. Should the person who knows nothing of the details of Keats life even bother reading the poems? Is his experience of a lesser value than that of the person who is in the know? Can that person not simply enjoy the poems as poems, appreciating their "universal" attributes without worrying over associated biography?
Just in case my critical bias has not yet shown through, I will now put it forth baldly. I am most definitely on the side of Stevens in this particular argument. I think that the artist cannot avoid being present in his art, and that knowledge of biography and context always leads to a richer understanding of a work. I believe in works of art as cultural documents, illustrating the biases and assumptions of the culture and of the individual who created them. This is not to say, however, that an experience of a work of art without knowledge of context and biography is an invalid experience. I most certainly do not believe that. As I said, that added information leads to a richer and more complete understanding of a work, but not in any way a better one. To me, the concept of better has no place in an argument of this nature. No aesthetic experience is invalid, and none is better than any other. What I value, however, is the most complete possible understanding of a work of art, and, for me, no understanding is complete without the knowledge of biography and context.
Now let us apply this understanding of Formalism to actual works of literary and fictitious art. First let us look at Axel Olsen, the Dutch portrait artist who paints Helga Crane in Nella Larsens Quicksand. The most significant work of art in this section of the book is certainly Olsens portrait of Helga. The portrait itself is never described in detail, so we must rely on the scant second-hand evidence to get a mental image of it. Helga says that "It wasnt, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her featuresAnyone with half an eye could see that it wasnt, at all, like her." (Larsen, 89) Marie, the Dahl house maid, says of it that "It looks bad, wicked." (Ibid. 89)
Olsen, however, says just the opposite. When Helga and Olsen are parting for the final time, he says that it is a tragedy "that though I dont entirely understand you, yet in a way I do too. And I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore- a tragedy. For someone. For me? Perhaps." (Ibid. 88) Olsen believes in the power of his own art. He believes that he has seen through her layers of social masks to the sensual, primitive creature underneath. He has captured that which is essential about her and put it to canvas; it is an independent, autonomous work that will stand forever. And perhaps this is true. Perhaps what disturbs Helga about the picture is not in fact its inaccuracy, but its accuracy. Perhaps she sees that Olsen has found in her something that she herself would rather be put down and forgotten- her primitive African roots.
Or perhaps not. A more complete look at Olsens character should shed some light on this "true" portrait. The first time the two of them meet, Olsen cannot be bothered with anything beyond his own art as it could be expressed through her. "Superb eyes color neck column yellow hair alive wonderful" (Ibid. 71) She is not a person to him, she is merely a potential painting. Later when he is preparing for her to sit, he buys clothes for her, the kind of clothes that he wants her to be wearing. He never once in the novel appears to be concerned with "the true Helga Crane," only with what he wants her to be.
So what does he want her to be? That is revealed in the trip to the Circus. Helga and Olsen go to see a vaudevillian-style black minstrel show, and his reaction to it completes our story. The black performers are described from Helgas point of view almost animalistically. "And how the singers danced, pounding their thighs, slapping their hands together, twisting their legs, waving their abnormally long arms, throwing their bodies about with a loose ease!" (Ibid. 83) Helga is repulsed, but "she was shocked at the avidity at which Olsen beside her drank it in." (Ibid. 83)
Here we have the crux of the matter, and the explanation of where Olsens portrait of Helga came from. He didnt paint "the true Helga Crane," he painted himself. He had a preconceived notion of "the primitive," of "the black woman," fed through these minstrel shows and probably reading the books of authors like Conrad, and thats what he painted. He didnt extract some essential of her, some deep-seated primitive within her, he merely took his own notions of blackness and the primitive and pasted them onto her features.
Next, lets move on to a more canonical Modernist author, D. H. Lawrence. The character of Loerke in Women in Love is more explicitly Formalist than Olsen, but in the end his Formalism proves to be just as hollow. Gudrun says of him:
There was in [him] the rock-bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself, in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing, he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work. (Lawrence, 427) This description seems like it could have been lifted verbatim from Valérys description of the artist of perfected consciousness. Loerke is obviously being set up as the prototypical exemplar of High Formalism in this passage. He is not troubled by particulars, he sees the essential, the universal, that with which poetry should be concerned. And he is a sculptor- the art that demands perhaps the most rigorous construction and conscious manipulation of them all.
Loerkes Formalism is undercut, however, by the incident concerning the "horse statue." At Gudruns prompting, Loerke shows Ursula and Gudrun a photograph of one of his smaller sculptures, a young girl on the back of a horse. After a page of Gudruns artistic questioning and pondering of the sculpture, Ursula asks a seemingly simple question:
"Why," said Ursula, "did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block."
"Wissen Sie," he said, with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice, "that horse is a certain form, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see- it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art."
(Ibid. 430)
Ursula continues her questioning, however, saying, "I know it is a picture of himself, really- "
Loerke snorted with rage.
"A picture of myself!" he repeated, in derision. "Wissen Sie, gnädige Frau, that is a Kunstwerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and the other, there is no connection between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative world of action, with the absolute world of art. That you must not do."
(Ibid. 431)
Loerke has apparently quite effectively stifled her silly realistic objection with his Formalist rhetoric, demonstrating the triumph of the strength of his ideals. The argument should be over at this point.
However, even in the face of his scorn and that of Gerald and Gudrun, Ursula perseveres. "It isnt a word of it true, of all this harangue you have made me The horse is a pircure of your own stock stupid brutality, and the girl was a girl you loved and tortured and then ignored As for your world of art and your world of reality you have to separate the two, because you cant bear to know what you are. You cant bear to realise what a stock, stiff, hide-bound brutality you are really, so you say its the world of art. The world of art is only the truth about the real world, thats all- but you are too far gone to see it." (Ibid. 431) This could merely be a temper tantrum. Loerke has defeated her arguments, essentially put her down like a little girl, and just keeps on kowtowing to her sister. Ursula, it seems, has had her say, and in the face of all this scorn shes going to be quiet.
But she is vindicated on the next page when Gudrun innocently asks about the model. It turns out that the girl was a student of Loerkes who he asked to sit for him. When she wouldnt sit still, Loerke savagely beat her until she did. Then, when the sculpture was finished, Loerke abandoned her completely. "She will be twenty-three years old, no more good," (Ibid. 432) he says, thus driving the final nail into his own argument. Ursula was dead-on right about him, about his brutality. This in itself doesnt undermine his argument, but the fact that Ursula got it all from the sculpture itself (not even the original- a photograph!) is what takes care of his Formalism. That entire story was somehow encoded into the sculpture, there for Ursula to read. Loerke was in his art; the sculpture was indeed, just as Ursula claimed, a picture of himself.
Finally, let us move to W. Somerset Maughams The Moon and Sixpence. If Formalism in character is to survive anywhere, it should be in the works of Maugham. As the most popular dramatist of his time, he most certainly understood the mechanics of creating characters who lived up to the ideals they professed, but in Charles Strickland we are again faced with the failure of the concept of purely self-reflexive art in literary characters.
Strickland, like the other artist figures we have encountered, also has underpinnings of Formalism (beyond his reading of Mallarmé during his convalescence). When confronted by the narrator with the absurdity of his actions in leaving his wife and family, he has only one response, "Ive got to paint." (Maugham, 48) He is not concerned with what people think, he wont show anyone his pictures, he wont sell them, he is concerned only with his own need to paint, with the act of creation itself. The narrator says of Strickland:
The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express some state of the soul, and in this effect, I fancied, must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that colours and forms had a significance for Strckland that was peculiar to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to himself. It was a though he had become aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled to express it.
(Ibid. 150)
He is, indeed, Valérys artist of perfected consciousness. He sees beyond the particular to the essential, the universal, and he struggles to express that through his painting. He wishes to be Eliots catalyst through which universal truth passes and is expressed, leaving him unchanged.
This is especially evident in his treatment of Blanche Stroeve. When he agrees to let her stay with him in Stroeves studio, he later tells the narrator, "I told her that when Id had enough of her shed have to go, and she said shes risk that She had a wonderful body, and I wanted to paint a nude. When Id finished my picture I took no more interest in her." (Ibid. 143) In this relationship Strickland has apparently achieved Eliots ideal of Formalism; he has absorbed the experience of Blanche, he has allowed himself to be the catalyst for that experience and has recorded it in the painting, and then he moves on, unchanged, to do it all over again.
But, as with Loerke and Olsen before him, in the larger view this attempt at Formalism was a failure. The reasons in this case are not as clear as in the other works. Here there is no "onstage audience" to show us the reaction to the painting, there is no Helga or Ursula to react for us. Even the narrator and Stroeve himself admit that the painting is a masterpiece, having full knowledge of Blanches suicide that followed. In this case, the reader must determine the effectiveness of Stricklands attempt. In the absence of an onstage audience, the reader is implicitly invited to imagine seeing this painting with full knowledge of the events and personalities that surround it.
Looked at in this way, there is no way that the nude of Blanche can be seen as "just a picture." When we are aware of the associated biographies, we must look at the portrait as exemplary of Stricklands own personality and opinions toward women. In the same way that Loerkes sculpture illuminated his brutality and Olsens portrait reflected his conceptions of the primitive, Stricklands painting delineates his misanthropy and misogyny. Once again, from a lofty beginning in the ideals of Formalism we are left with nothing but a self-portrait.
So in the end, we are brought back to the questions. Can an artist create a work of art that is not a self-portrait? Can the artist stand separate from his work, aloft and alone, above all concerns of biography and context, and produce the essential, universal work of art that transcends the ages? Frankly speaking, I dont know. My gut instinct is to say no. As I said earlier, I believe in art as cultural documents, not universal truths. What did the Modernists believe? Again, I cant make a general statement about the entire literary movement based on three examples. In these three examples, however, it seems apparent that there was at least a healthy degree of skepticism about the ideas of Formalism, if not an outright denial of them.

Works Cited
Eliot, T. S. Tradition and the Individual Talent.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. Rutgers: Rutgers UP, 1986.
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. New York: Penguin Books, 1920.
Maugham, W. Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. New York: Penguin Books, 1919.
Stevens, Wallace. The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1937.
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New
York: Vintage Books, 1942.
Valéry, Paul. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958.
Valéry, Paul. Selected Writings of Paul Valéry. New York: New Directions Publishing,
1950.