Organic Form

Criticism of the novel is concerned, above all, with meaning – and, most often, meaning understood as a noun, something that can be extracted from the text or something outside the text to which it refers. Character, plot, scene, motive, development, crisis, recognition, reversal, and other features of the world brought into being by the text are the staple of most accounts of fictional works. Less often, criticism concerns itself with the experience of meaning, how the text does its work of meaning as it is read (which, to my mind, is a better way to think of literary meaning). In either case, when the question of form is being addressed in studies of the novel, and when it's not simply being described, it's almost always assumed to have as its sole raison-d’être the enhancement or complication of meaning in this sense – what we can call ‘referential meaning’, or content. When Samuel Richardson writes Clarissa in the form of letters, it's in order to convey a sense of immediacy and authenticity in the writing; when Dickens switches between first-person and third-person narration in Bleak House it's in order to achieve a contrast between subjective and objective views of the world – these, at least, are the kinds of explanation usually given. And if a critic raises the question of the pleasure to be gained from literary form – a question not often asked, but in my view a crucial question, one which underlies all our reading – the answer is usually also given in terms of its contribution to the referential meaning of the work.

Literary form is most often discussed in terms of the dictum that form and content are inseparable, that the former arises ‘naturally’ from the latter, an idea that goes back at least to the Romantics. The notion of ‘organic form’, introduced most influentially into English literary criticism by Coleridge (in the footsteps of A. W. Schlegel), continues to surface right up to the present.