Imagine a scene that takes place over 30,000 years ago in the Chauvet caves in southern France. Prehistoric man presses his hand against a cave wall and blows paint around the edges. He pulls his hand away and leaves an outline of his body – an imprint of absence. The act of blowing paint through an instrument over his hand anticipates writing; it translates oral language into a visual sign. Nearly 25,000 years before the first known writing system, human beings already understand that writing is an embodied act. But bodily expression is not simply a question of signs and representation. It also concerns form. Like the paintings of horses and bison found in the same caves, the hands play with the cave’s undulating surface. By transforming the cave’s brute matter into a meaningful form, prehistoric man leaves an index of presence; he announces himself as a subject and, most importantly, as a political animal whose existence graces the community’s social and symbolic spaces. His primal impulse is not merely for self-expression but for communication to – and recognition by – an other. What unites form, representation, and the political is the body. And the relation between them is the subject of this book. Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature contends that literary theory has privileged the body’s relationship to representation at the expense of its connection to form. Embodiment, this book argues, is not what resists but what constitutes form.

Form and representation are both types of organization, but they organize in divergent ways. Form shapes things into cohesive wholes; it implies organic unity. Representation produces patterns of difference: the sign creates a likeness, and its meaning derives from its difference from other signs in a chain of signification. Both form and representation are foundational elements of Western literary theory, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, and they are the essential components of narrative. Form and representation have also always been tied to the body. Form molds elements into an outward shape whose organic wholeness retains a close connection to the figure of the body, as in Aristotle’s understanding of form as the holistic container that unifies physical matter. Representation, on the other hand, refers to something other than itself and thus entails a separation.