Status Updates From Sentimento e forma

The last two chapters suddenly switch to a take-down of other theorists whose old-key philosophy on arts didn’t meet the Langer standard, but the appendix is another story altogether. She adds reflections on cinema, gathered by her colleagues, that accurately predict the appeal of virtual reality as the “dream mode” or virtual present that unfolds past and future, but would not be an actual thing for several decades.

Amazing to discover the two great forms of art have little to do with literature, but as a poetic display of virtual future, drama breaks away from static words on a page (or other completed “works” of art) as the audience anticipates the happy or tragic end. For the comic rhythm Langer really gets into the biological analogies, appropriately enough for the procreation-themed plays, yet tragic’s destiny is ineffable.

With Langer’s exploration of literary arts, from lyric to epic and novel to non-fiction, she runs the risk of having her pages ripped out by the students of John Keating’s class before they emblematically stand on top of their desks. Using words discursively to explain how artistically they can be formulated takes something away from their impact and yet helps her instill the idea of a virtual world created in words.

With a well-reasoned analogy set between music and virtual time, Langer looks at the next step in describing art forms philosophically, dance. It turns out to be a giant leap away from all the arts previously discussed and will not find its match in literary and dramatic forms to follow, but the virtual power described here is something more elemental and mystical to human experience that escapes even Isadora Duncan.

The plastic arts are given the awe-inspiring description of virtual space, and for the next few chapters Langer writes of the close cousin yet sensorily unique form, music, as virtual time. She very accurately assessed the need to perceive the combination of notes, rests and reverberations as whole in order to make music, hence the need for a non-visual fourth dimension that actively stimulates our own inner visions.

Amazing to see Langer's theory take form as words printed on the page (also a number of illustrative plates) yet she captures the feeling of creativity as the artist brings something new and virtual into the world. While so far the book focuses on painted canvas, the chiselled sculpture and architecturally realized space, her theory conjures up a modern sense of virtual tech at a time when computers did not make art.

Langer’s theory of art developed, as the title page clears states, from her New Key philosophy which I can only imagine as a similarly thick book, meaning everything that follows in Feeling and Form could not be crammed into the former volume! Nevertheless, she finds aesthetic balance mentioned in the Introduction and opening chapters: how the and of the latter title is adding not dividing.