Strategic Formalism and the Reader in TItus Andronicus

Better late than never...right?  Here goes...

Caroline Levine present “strategic formalism” as an intervention in cultural studies, a method that harnesses the power of popularly scorned formalist techniques in order to reveal the political efficacy of highly contestatory social and political forms.  She hopes to accomplish this without resorting to deconstructive practices that pit binaristic elements against one another, but rather by understanding how they “rub up against one another, operating simultaneously but not in concert” (633).  Such interaction among differing forms affords a social impact “not so much from active and intentional agency as from the openings that materialize in the collisions among social and cultural forms” (ibid).  Her argument shapes itself around a reading of a Victorian poem, in which she finds and traces competing iterations of the metaphor of family and suggests that “the potential for revolutionary new social formations may come less from organized resistance and conscious radicalism than from the unexpected encounter between forms” (651). 

Interestingly, while Levine’s essay effectively displays the “radical alterity” that results from the meeting of these competing forms, she focuses on ostensibly political loci such as gender, class and colonial imperialism, and neglects to consider another powerfully shaping (but often invisible) entity—the reader.  Though she discusses the implications of a political body in her discussion of hypocrisy, she divorces that body from the body reading the words on the page, and relegates the hypocritical figure to the realm of literary subject.  I would argue that this shortcuts a very important critical move; not only can we see how contested forms play out in the poem and the environment surrounding the poem, we can analyze how these same forms come in conflict with the reader-form.

The reader is anything but uncontested ground; as Ellen Rooney describes in her essay “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” form and the reader are not so easily separated: “Form as a productive consequence of reading disrupts the distinction between description and analysis, reading and writing, inside and outside, surface and depth; it generates a disorienting doubleness of meaning on a single plane” (132).  I’d like to think not only of form as a consequence of reading, but reading as a consequence of form; after all, if every reading is also itself an act of writing (112), then it seems necessary to consider the forms that shape the reading as much as the reading shapes the form.  In other words, what we have here is a symbiotic relationship between reader and text, and this is precisely where Titus Andronicus steps in to teach us a lesson about reading.

In Shakespeare’s play, reading consistently presents itself as a problem.  Whether literal—the emperor’s reading of a letter that wrongly condemn Bassianus to death, Lavinia’s reading of Ovid that provides form for the revenge plot—or more broadly applied—Titus’s “reading” of his daughter’s body language—or considered as a metacritical approach—the audience’s/reader’s “reading” of the play shapes whether Titus’s murder of Lavinia is merciful or cruel—this play is determined to shake up the idea of a unidirectional shaping force between text and reader.  Each of these instances provides an opportunity for the work to shape us, while also insisting that it is our “thoughts that now must deck our kings,” as the prologue of Henry V reminds us. The play’s presentation of contesting forms such as national allegiance, the family, gender and imperialism all also mingle in the reader, and, as Rooney puts it, we ought to be aware of how “we can only ever hope to coax them into revelations by being as explicit as possible about what we are looking for…and keeping track of how that transaction plays out, that is, by saying what reading we are guilty of” (124).  The purpose of Rooney’s article is to highlight the politics of reading; Levine seeks to champion the political efficacy of contestatory forms; Titus, then, enacts the combat of contesting readerly forms, both within the play and its characters, and without (by forcing reader/audience to interpret events).  Ultimately, the play seems to side with Rooney (at least in the debate about surface/symptomatic reading); the consequences of reading are what drive the events of the narrative, for good and for ill, and it is in intersections with this form—the reader—that other social and political forms begin to collide in meaningful and surprising ways.