34
PARTISAN REVIEW
content it asks whether it is nobler to yield to adverse fortunes or to resist
them. As such, it is, of course, banal and silly. But the question takes
its meaning from Hamlet's person and state of mind, in short, from Shake–
speare's complete perception of the play of human motives and of the
character of Hamlet. And this is given not only in the working out of the
plot, in the innuendos of action, but also in the very idiom of the soliloquy
which imparts Shakespeare's grasp of behavior in his time. In saying this,
the idea of form is included in that of content.
Similarly, in Prousts's study of the upper layers of French society, his
view of memory as a store-room of associations, and of time as a stream of
events and memories, his delicate but detailed probing of the psychology of
his characters, his subtle, winding prose; the structure of nuances in char–
acter relation: all make up a single texture. And Joyce's linguistic meth–
ods are as much an expression of his perceptions as of his theories of style.
The content of
Ulysses
would simply be something else were it not con–
tained in the form of a telescoped association of prose. What we call
style is really the "vriter's instrument for evoking the quality of experience,
for the idiom is the unit of style. Hemingway's lean idiom is well adapted
to the opaque, casual relations of his characters.
And when Eliot says:
Our dried voices, •when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As mind is dry grass
Or ,rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
the very flavor of the idiom is calculated to convey the note of resignation
which makes up the
belief
of the poem.
Since any suggestive idea of
form
would have to include the elements
which give shape and quality to content, form should be defined as a
mode
of
perception~
In fact, some such unconscious view of form has ·been
current in modern poetry. Imagist and surrealist poetry concentrated to
such an extent on the perceptive character of literature, as to narrow the
range of explicit meaning to the point of extinction. Technical innova–
tionism became the method of verbalizing a sensory approach to experience.
Poetry, the most susceptible literary genre to formal preoccuption, was
worn to a frazzle. The history of modern poetry serves as evidence that,
wqile form should be regarded as a mode of perception, it cannot be for–
gotten that it is a way of perceiving a specific literary content. The values,
philosophy and subject of an art-work are modulated by the insight of the
writer into events and characters which give the structural embodiment of
the content. The point of contact to the reader is the final fusion.
