Soul and Form

The paradox of a sentimental form shows not only how form is organized to refer to life but also how that very reference undoes the organization of form.

So life becomes an uncontainable referent, animating the process of form-making and setting necessary limits on its final efficacy.

Forms do not exist unless men make them, and those who do make these extraordinarily capacious forms find that every aspect of life, however accidental, becomes necessary and essential.

The task of form, of literary form, but also of “form” in some loosely Platonic sense, is to rationalize the accidental in every life.

How does that life come to structure the very form itself, so that the form does not merely have a history, but carries historicity within it as part of what gives shape to the form?

Lukács maintains not only that soul requires form in order to become manifest but also that form requires soul for its animation.

form carries within it the history of this process, the process by which form comes into being.

In this sense, form is not a technical device imposed upon thematic or historic material: it is the index by which historical life becomes distilled and known, where its tensions are encoded and expressed.

Moreover, form is always in a bind with life, with soul, and with experience; life gives rise to form, but form is understood to distill life; life wrecks the distillation, only to open us to the ideal that form itself seeks to approach, but cannot.

under what conditions do forms emerge and how is it that forms carry with them, communicate and transform, the social and authorial conditions of their own emergence?