Creativity and Form - Or Is it, Form and Creativity?

 I was reading Processing: How Martin Riker Wrote The Guest Lecture, an interview from Counter Craft, rather idly, wondering what there was to learn here and giving it up and then going back. I know not Martin Riker, or his works. Now I may look him up because of the following:

When we first emailed, you called yourself “a card-carrying Shklovskian formalist.” Could you talk more about what a formalist approach means to you and how it manifests in this novel?

I think I just meant that I am wonkish and love to talk about literary form, but I will try to give you a better answer.

For about ten years—basically my thirties—I was the associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, and worked on a number of books by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Perhaps my favorite is Energy of Delusion, in case anyone is interested. A Shklovskian formalist, a Russian Formalist in general, is different from an American New Critic in one very important way. The New Critics were a variety of formalists who wanted to study form free of outside considerations. At least that is the received understanding of what the New Critics wanted. The creative writing workshop model, which has roots in New Criticism, is often criticized for this, and for a while academics were pretty down on formalism for the same reason. But the Russian Formalists saw form as an expression of experience, and as historically and culturally derived. It’s like Guy Davenport’s “every force evolves a form,” where form is understood not as a stand-alone aesthetic structure, but as the unique expression of a force in the world. In other words, literature and life, form and content, are in constant conversation with one another. Shklovsky was a structure nerd who wrote sentences like “When works of art are undergoing change, interest shifts to the connective tissue,” but he also wrote, “Give everything a cosmic dimension, take your heart in your teeth, write a book.”

Another piece of trivia about me is that my master’s thesis adviser was David Foster Wallace (at Illinois State University, where I had gone to work at Dalkey Archive Press). This is relevant because of a conversation we once had, where David asked me how I could even enjoy reading, given that I was such a formalist, always wanting to talk about how a story was made rather than the emotional arc or whatever. This was a surprising question coming from a such smart person. First of all, I love artistic form. I don’t just “find it interesting,” I love the adventure of how artists put things together, how art takes the stuff of the world and figures out new ways to see it. Second, I see no reason at all why the experience of form and the experience of “content” should be mutually exclusive. As it happens, I am extremely susceptible to emotional content. I am the guy who cries at TV commercials, which drives my son crazy. But I have also read Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, about the history of the advertising industry, so I understand the narrative moves the commercial is making as well as the historical traditions of advertising that it draws upon. This is the stuff that interests me.

Last thing I’ll say about Wallace—who was a friend and whose loss was devastating—is that his emphasis on empathy never spoke to me. Obviously, empathy is a really foundational part of what makes novels interesting, but for me it’s only one of the many possibilities constantly at play. It isn’t “the point” of the novel form. Namwali Serpell has that really good essay about this. The point of art, for me, is very simple, and comes from Shklovsky: “Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.”

When I began taking seriously the writing of fiction, I found myself very concerned with form. What is a novel, was one question I tried to answer. Another was how to break the novel into chapters. I had read Moll Flanders when a teen, certainly before I was 20, and knew that Defoe did not split that novel into chapters. I had already read Raintree County, which does not split into traditional chapters. My latest idea for a novel is to put it together as a collage - it is about a prisoner returning to life in America, and I see America as collage. The two before that, I wanted to write about the disparity between what we think we know of our histories and what happened, and has a variety of time shifts. When a friend, Joel C., suggested I use my Indiana stories, I did so, found a theme that interconnected them (after writing three), and decided to write each in a different style. This decision was in part because I do not think I have a natural skill in writing short stories and wanted to experiment, and because after I read Louis Auchincloss' The Winthrop Covenant I thought there was too much of a sameness to the style (albeit a very interesting collection and the only Auchincloss I have read to date). Sorry about being so self-involved, but I felt an explanation was needed for my interest.

At the same time, I think form serves to contain what makes a story humanly interesting. My vanity feels better having this idea confirmed by a smarter, better writer, than myself.

I need to think on the last quote. Part of me shies away from thinking of myself as an artist, but then why all the worrying over revisions if I am not reaching for the artistic. For some reason, War and Peace came to mind while writing those two sentences. I glimpse how reading it is an experiencing the process of artistic creation. I guess for me, within that creation is the empathy needed to draw in the reader and then to keep the reader around to see the execution of the work.

As for my work, it is being delayed today, as it has for the past few! Thinking is good, but I spent too many years thinking and not doing!

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