The Formalists and the Human Condition

One of the questions that we posed on the very first day of class was, "Does literature help us understand what it means to be human?" Does studying literature allow us to reflect on the condition of our shared humanity? My instinctual response to this question after reading the work of some of the formalist critics is "no," but I hope to explore this idea more deeply through reflecting upon it.

In Eliot's essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent", he describes how poets both actively acquire and create tradition through training and the catalyst of the poet's mind. While the romantics envisioned the creation of a poem as the bubbling over of the poet's deepest thoughts and emotions, or "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility" (as Wordsworth famously said), Eliot conceives of the process in a completely different way. When tradition and experience combine in the receptacle of the poet's mind, a poem emerges, pressurized and transmuted into a whole greater than the sum of its two parts. Eliot almost seems to advocate a sterilizing of the poet's true, embarrassing emotion and experience so that a loftier, more meaningful significance may come out. Is this new emotion then a reflection of the human condition, or is it only significant because it enlightens us beyond the confines of our humanity?

Eliot writes, "There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done."

Does this impersonality which Eliot aspires to automatically negate the suggestion that poetry could help us understand what it is to be human? Or, conversely, is this impersonality the only means by which we might get at the human condition-- when we separate our subjective selves from our words and allow a deeper meaning to take root? Is the "significant emotion" that Eliot writes about reflective of true human emotion and experience, or is it somehow greater than the usual limitations of our humanity?

I tend to think that formalists would not concern themselves with the question of whether or not literature helps us understand the human condition. For this very reason, I struggle to appreciate formalist critique as I feel that it takes the excitement of discovering human connectedness out of reading. C.S. Lewis' words ring true to me: "We read to know that we are not alone." It is that feeling of deep soul-satisfaction that one gets when reading someone else's words and relating to an experience, or observation, or thought process. It is one of our only ways of confirming our sanity, our normalcy-- of confirming that what goes on in our own heads actually goes on in other peoples' heads too. When the author and reader are removed from the equation and the work stands alone, it seems inevitable that this process of recognizing our shared humanity becomes constrained.