Bryan Counter reviews Formal Matters

Zoë Roth. Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024. 240 pp.

Review by Bryan Counter

15 August 2024

Zoë Roth makes a strong distinction between representation and form. Whereas the latter “shapes things into cohesive wholes” and “implies organic unity,” the former “produces patterns of difference” (p. 1). Rather than representation, Roth reads for embodiment, which “endows literature with its specificity” and “underlies aesthetics, form, and politics” (pp. 7, 12). She attempts to do so carefully, however, reading the body and literature on their own terms, “without subjugating [them] to politics” but rather allowing them to be generative of new ways of thinking politics (p. 52). It is fitting that Roth approaches this difficult task by way of novelists “whose works give form to embodied experience where representation—both aesthetic and political—fails to figure” (p. 45). One gets the sense that representation already includes a prefigured or preprogrammed interpretation, a tendency that Roth dutifully avoids.

Formal Matters is divided into five main chapters. The first, “The Corporeal Urn,” justifies the book’s aim of reading form and embodiment together. To do so, Roth relies on close reading, which “is what produces embodied form” (p. 68). The four other chapters dealing with her main literary interlocutors use tropes like metalepsis, aporia, catachresis, prosopopoeia, and chiasmus to investigate the various ways that literature allows the body to speak aesthetically and politically.

The next chapter is an ambitious, thorough reading of Sphinx (2015) by Oulipo member Anne F. Garréta, whose work “encapsulates the political approach that emerges when we theorize the relationship between embodiment and form” (p. 69). For Roth, Garréta’s novel—which at once hides the characters’ genders and draws attention to their respective races—“capture[s] the postmodernist tension between a body that either escapes or is reduced to representation” (p. 71). Precisely by disavowing the representation of embodiment, “language becomes a commentary upon its own embodiment,” which in turn points out how language itself embodies and affects the body (p. 78).

Chapter 3 deals with Samuel Beckett and opens with a critique of our contemporary impulse to reduce violence to rhetoric, to call everything violence. In response, she uses the trope of metalepsis to approach violence, which “momentarily puts violence back in its place” (p. 122). A close reading of How It Is (1961)—a novel whose dealings with both form and embodiment are complex, to say the least—shows how metalepsis “stretches violence beyond physical force, and . . . reduces rhetoric to pure violence” (p. 128). This also reveals what happens when we conflate representation and violence, and when we champion “formlessness as a type of counterviolence” (p. 128).

A brief explication of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort (1994) is named as the chapter that turns the book into a chiasmus, connecting “two very different concepts of writing and the body” (p. 138). On the one hand, Garréta and Beckett operate embodiment “beyond representation,” whereas the final chapter’s reading of Primo Levi will grapple much more directly with the question of representation, and whether it is possible to represent the Holocaust (p. 138). Roth writes that Blanchot’s “work demonstrates how embodiment forms through interpretation, as it requires an active reading mode” (p. 143). The flatness or inscrutability of Blanchot’s récit, which narrates a close brush with death by firing squad, gives rise to “the embodied sensation of lightness, a weightlessness found at the level of textual structure,” particularly through chiasmus (p. 146).

Finally, the chapter on Primo Levi once again makes a strong argument against postmodern ideas of the unrepresentable. Roth writes that “Holocaust testimony does not point to the limits of representation; nor does the body fundamentally escape signification. The inseparability of testimony and embodiment lead to the opposite: they disclose how such limits are themselves rhetorical rather than intrinsic qualities of either representation or experience” (p. 158). In other words, because of its direct link to the body, speech remains possible, however horrific the referent and however taxing it is to find a language proper to the event. This chapter stands out for its meticulous attention to Levi’s writing and how it navigates not only between languages, but between experience and language in the first place.

Roth ends by evoking Hannah Arendt’s discussion of common sense, which pervades literary form and gives us access to a common world. Roth finds in Arendt “an alternative to both postmodernism’s suspicion of language and its ability to convey material, bodily experience and the metaphysical tradition that postmodernism rightly critiques” (p. 198). If, as Roth alleges, “embodied form is the sensus communis of literature” (p. 204), then her book is also a call for all readers to attune their interpretation to embodiment rather than representation: only then, it seems, can we do justice to experience.