FORM AND CONTENT
33
work or as the linguistic method employed. It is taken as the mould into
which a writer's ideas are poured. \Vhen people speak of the sonnet, the
novel, reportage as literary forms, they are really referring to the tra–
ditional
patterns
of writing. The use of these
patterns
for varied esthetic
and political purposes indicates that no literary traditions or social class
has any particular rights to these patterns and that in using any of them,
revolutionary writers do not take anything specifically esthetic from their
literary heritage.
A
more frequent meaning is
form
as
technique
or
method.
But method or technique alone are merely the verbal
surface
of the impact
which a poem or novel has upon the reader, because linguistic methods
are intimately associated with the writer's purposes and perceptions. Joyce's
methods, for example, are a function of his sensory and intellectual ex–
perience.
Content,
on the other hand, is usually pictured as something solid,
organized and completely philosophical.
It
is considered as the
what a
writer is saying,
and form as the
how a writr.r sayiS it.
But in examining
typical literary works, we usually cannot point to any such
logzcal
content.
No critic has yet systematized Shakespeare's
beliefs
into a coherent set ot
ideas. Only in predominantly philosophical writers are the ideas recog–
nized as such; but even in the work of Thomas Mann (who is commonly
considered a philosophical writer) it is impossible to isolate a
content,
since
his view of the world is so completely .merged with the narrative structure.
In
The ll1agic Mountain,
the attitudes and values emerge from the novel
as a whole. And we would be hard put to reconstruct the purely
content
side of such a novel as Cantwell's
The Land of Plenty.
The content of a
work is its complete
meaning,
and this includes: its politics, conceptions
r
f
J)'eople, subject, emotions and incidental insights.
A
more significant definition of form and content would reveal them
as two aspects of a unified vision.
The basic equipment of a writer is
his scheme of values and his grasp of the quality of human activities and
relations. These, of course, are conditioned by the prevailing modes of
thought and perception. Content would include: the subject in the most
literal sense, like the leisure class life in Henry James' novels; specific
systems of thought, like Lucretius' philosophy, or Dante's medieval
theology; general moral, philosophic.al or social views which are woven
into the texture of action, like the Greek sense of fate, or Shakespeare's
sense of tragedy, or Dostoevsky's nihilstic, amoral view of the individual;
an intangible outlook, like Faulkner's or Eliot's vision of decay and tension.
In examining any specific literary work, however, it is immediately evident
that we can point to the content only when we tear it from its context, and
and if we bear in mind that it is but a relatively distinct part. Consider
the most famous passage in English poetry, Hamlet's soliloquy.
As
sheer
