by Janice Lovoos
{published 1966, by Golden Gate Junior Books}
I was in Seattle a few weeks ago. You remember the library, right?
I went to Pike Place Market, because of course, but also because flying fish and dudes in galoshes are a spectacle worth checking out. And I also wanted to get up close and personal with some bluefin tuna eyeballs.
There’s a real reason for that, trust me. But they didn’t have any tuna, so this happened: 
There’s not a real point to that story except that I adore that tweet (and those two Favoriters) and it’s what I did just before I wandered into Lamplight Books.
It’s like I stole something. Fifteen dollars? Sixty quarters? It still has that magical, musty smell of hidden secrets. And it was mine in a fraction of a split second. That fast.
Because…behold:
I’m in love. From the texture of a porcupine, to the form of mountains and weeds, to the repetition inside a squash, design is everywhere.
Design is a Dandelion ends like this, with truth and a charge:
Design is everywhere. It is for everyone. All you have to do is to learn to see it. Open your eyes and take a big, long look.
Tagged:
design,
form,
line,
nature,
shape,
space 
 |
| David Smith, untitled |
I have to admit that while plenty of Damien Walter's
"Weird Things" columns at
The Guardian are interesting, and it's really wonderful to see a major newspaper paying regular attention such stuff, and Walter seems like a passionate and thoughtful person ... the latest one, titled,
"Should science fiction and fantasy do more than entertain?" pretty much made me gag. Mostly it was that headline that caused the coughing and sputtering; the piece itself isn't terrible, is well intentioned, and seems primarily aimed at a general audience. I'm not a general audience for the topic, so in my ways, I'm a terrible reader for what Walter wrote. Thus, I'll refrain from comment on the main text.
But there's a statement he made in response to a commenter that didn't make me cough and sputter, it just made me question something I hadn't really questioned before: the term "formalist" and its relationship to criticism within the field of fantasy and science fiction.
In his
comment, Walter stated, "
The Rhetorics of Fantasy is a formalist approach."
I wonder, though. I haven't read
The Rhetorics of Fantasy, so I don't really want to comment on it too much, since my perception is based on reading a few reviews, what some folks have told me, and glancing at the Google Books preview. So it's entirely possible that my question here has nothing to do with that book. I mention it only because it's the book Walter calls "a formalist approach".
What I wonder is how it's possible to have a formalist approach to fantasy or science fiction that is not also perfectly applicable to other sorts of writing. Is there a specifically formalist approach to SF?
To write criticism about SF is almost always to be stuck in content, not form. (We could, and perhaps should, argue about the soft borders between the two terms, the limits of the terms, the fact that content and form don't really exist outside of the words of the text, what that binary hides, etc. — but at the risk of inaccuracy, let's save such an argument for another time.)
There is nothing I can think of at this moment that
formally differentiates SF from not-SF.
The most formalist approach I know of to SF is something like Delany's
The American Shore, and were I to think of a formalist approach to SF, I'd think of Delany, though I think such a term for his work is pretty reductive. It's formalist, yes, often, but seldom only formalist. How and why depends on what we mean by "formalist" and "formalism".
Of course, "formalism" is not a
term that lacks
history or
context or, quite often, an initial capital. Once we get beyond the most linguistically-based sorts
April 12—And just like that, we're already on to our second "Two for Tuesday" prompt of the challenge. I know this is a prompt that some poets have been craving, while others probably not so much. Regardless, I did this one on Tuesday to provide some options:
1. Write a form poem. This could be a sonnet, pantoum, lune, or even something as sinister as a--dare I say it--sestina. If you need a list of poetic forms and there rules, click here.
2. Write an anti-form poem. Just as there are poets who love playing with forms, there are poets who think they are the worst thing ever. That's fine. Express (in either free verse or a prose poem) your feelings on writing in traditional forms.
On Formlessness
By Bill Kirk
Could it be some days the poetry
Will be less well formed than others?
I’d have to say, it’s true.
Tonight, my brain itself is a formless blob.
Thus any attempt at poetic form
Will likely have scant chance at success.
Yet, I suppose the very capture of
Any thought or idea takes on
A certain structure, even if drawn
From wordless mush—much as
An artist’s blank canvass will
Eventually move toward an
Expression of artistic form,
Even if very sketchy.
Far be it for me to
Squeeze, mold or force
These words into a shape
They have no interest in taking.
Perhaps words on a page
Will somehow find their natural form
Much as water seeks its own level.
Might formelessness be its own reward?
by Janice Lovoos
I’m in love. From the texture of a porcupine, to the form of mountains and weeds, to the repetition inside a squash, design is everywhere.
.jpg?picon=160)
I'm not a great expert on critical terminology, but I think I recall Adam Roberts using "structuralist" rather than "formalist" for Rhetorics.
Still, as you say, that's not relevant to your lovely idea.
As Cheryl suggests above, I've seen/heard Rhetorics of Fantasy called a structuralist approach more often than a formalist one, but honestly I've always questioned the distinction between formalism and structuralism. Structure (and Delany illustrates this beautifully in his essay for "intermediate and advanced creative writing students") is one of the defining characteristics of form. As such, Rhetorics does an amazing analysis of the structures utilized in fantasy, and I think it could easily be dubbed a "formalist" look at fantasy even without getting into the syntactical constructions thereof.
That being said, I think both "pure" formalist approaches which abandon content, and "pure" content-oriented approaches risk missing the forest for the trees. Content is what gets expressed through the form, and the two have a recursive relationship. Consider Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: can something meaningful be said about it by wholly separating form from content?
To apply either approach to the exclusion of any other forces us to miss fine-detailed nuance and/or broad macro-level implications: it's the equivalent of a critic of SF never reading outside the genre, or a "mainstream" critic never reading within it. Either is ultimately hobbling.
Who, though, other than Delany, is trying to show that SF is distinguished from non-SF primarily through its language?
I still haven't got round to The American Shore, for shame, but I've been arguing for a while that Delany's application of subjunctivity level can be (and needs) modified and extended: firstly, modified to rearticulate the false distinction between s-f as what "could happen" and fantasy as what "could not happen," since the former also changes subjunctivity level to what "could not happen" -- just in terms of *temporal* rather than metaphysical possibility -- as indeed there's an even more extreme breach of *logical* possibility (Delany's own Dhalgren being a prime example of the use thereof); secondly, extended by recasting subjunctivity as alethic modality, allowing us to view a larger context of other possible modalities -- epistemic, boulomaic, deontic -- think, what "may have happened," what "should have happened," what "must not happen".
Basically, I see the sentences of fiction as having a baseline modality of "could have happened" -- even a pretended modality of "did happen" in suspension-of-disbelief -- which isn't changed so much as *disrupted* by additional modalities that enter into tension with that conceit. That which changes the subjunctivity / alethic modality of a sentence (e.g. the second sun in Delany's "About 5750 Words" example,) to "could not happen" can be considered a "quirk," as I call it, specifically an alethic quirk (technical novum, historical erratum, metaphysical chimera or logical sutura depending on possibility level.) I'm not sure whether one would call this approach formalist or structuralist, but it's certainly about looking for technical linguistic features.
It is an approach that, yes, practically speaking, obliterates the boundaries between fiction in general and the various traditional strange-fictional genres, in decomposing genre to low-level linguistic elements which don't define a text as essentially this genre or that any more than my use of alliteration and rhyme in certain sections of INK suddenly renders the whole thing a poem rather than a novel. So this text throws nova in with chimerae, errata and even suturae, and suddenly there's argument over whether it's SF or Fantasy. So this text has a single novum or chimera used in a non-traditional way and suddenly there's argument over whether it's spec-fic or not. That taxonomic bickering is utterly tangential to my aim of analysing the dynamics of the modalities. In fact, while I refer broadly to works which utilise quirks as "strange fiction," when it comes down to it, tragedy is as parseable in terms of boulomiac & deontic quirks as horror is.
Anyway, enough blather from me. There's a more detailed attempt to thrash out the general idea(s) here: http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/notes-toward-theory-of-narrative.html
Hal, would you mind translating your comment into a language I speak? I'm lost!
What? Does no-one know their alethic modality from their boulomaic these days? We're talking formalist criticism of science fiction and you baulk at the linguistics terminology? Have we lived and fought in vain?!
Sorry, just kidding. This glossary of modality has the technical jargon if you want: http://dinamico2.unibg.it/anglistica/slin/modgloss.htm And the post linked above should be a bit less "WTF?!" TBH, I just didn't want to hit and run with a link to me, me, me, or to expound My Pet Theory at length on Matt's blog either. Hence the comment is condensed to a rather abstruse gloss, I freely admit.