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This article proposes a way of linking textual form and the social world. The forms in question are the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, specifically those he kept between 1866 and 1875, a period that begins with his conversion to Catholicism, initiation into Jesuit training, and rejection of poetry. These five notebooks (A1–A5) have struck some readers as intensely asocial.Footnote 1 Their creator was famously resistant to circulation and readership, on one hand (“Please not to read,” he inscribes on the inside front cover of the first), and more concerned with natural than human phenomena, on the other.Footnote 2 I show instead that the notebooks project networks of relation between humans, objects, and the natural world. My hope is that what follows will refresh some of the ways we think about and navigate online social forms in the twenty-first century.
Approaches to Hopkins's notebooks often take one of two paths. On one hand, some critics treat them as covert lyrics, or as preparations for his later poetic output. Thus Paul Mariani, in his biography of Hopkins (2008), writes that the journals “have not gotten the message” that poetry had been expelled from his life, explaining how they embody “a way of writing . . . that captures in its language and rhythms the poetry he has foregone.”Footnote 3 This is how many early readers of the 1937 edition of the notebooks understood them. One of the first books ever released by New Directions, the storied modernist publisher, was a slim, elegant volume entitled Selections from the Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1944). This charming book presents fragments from the notes stripped of context and editorial apparatus. The passages float on the page like haiku: “moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobwebs,” for example, or “the sky minted into golden sequins.”Footnote 4
In his introduction to these fragments, editor Theodore Weiss calls them “the raw material of eventual poems,” a view that inflects much criticism which casts the notes as preparations for the later lyrics.Footnote 5 While I do not think the journals should be read as poems in detention, this view is worth acknowledging for the way it infuses the notes with aesthetic value. I think the art of the notes, however, is much stranger and less familiar than lyric as such. We should take seriously the fact that the materials in the notebook were not predestined for poetic use. For example, when Hopkins says of “roses” that “their richness, variety, etc& will no doubt always make them necessary to the poets,” he acknowledges the lyrical potential of what he gathers and at the same time distances himself from it. He is driving at something else in these books.Footnote 6
Second, and more important for the present discussion, the notebooks have been useful for their elaboration of the esoteric concepts of “inscape” and “instress,” Hopkins's famous coinages, which he introduces and explores through the pages of A1–A5. The former concept—inscape—will be the primary focus of this article.Footnote 7 While he would eventually declare that inscape is “above all what I aim at in poetry,” the concept emerges first in his notebook writings in which poetry was suppressed.Footnote 8 Inscape, as we will see, has puzzled Hopkins's commentators for nearly a hundred years. “[T]here are hardly two who completely agree upon its meaning,” writes Dennis Sobolev in his recent and thoroughgoing survey of the concept.Footnote 9 The word wavers in Hopkins's own writings and critical accounts of it, seeming to refer at times to the irreducible “thisness” of an object or phenomenon—that which differentiates one thing from everything else—and at others to a “pattern” shared by different objects or else running through multiple objects in proximity.
At the risk of adding to the confusion, I suggest in what follows that the words “inscape” and “scape,” used alternately as verbs and nouns, may be productively conceived as synonyms for “network,” again with the same grammatical alternation. I argue that this alternation reveals a productive continuity between textual and social form. Emphasizing movement and recombination, Hopkins's documents illuminate the resonances and relationships between entities in the world. He thus allows us to see how the notebook, a seemingly asocial form, creatively generates and sustains collectivity. Taking a mystic such as Hopkins as a case study underlines the spiritual, creative, and small-scale social potential of minimalist documentation. It also considers networks, most frequently invoked in large-scale analyses, in their more creative, personal, and expressive dimensions.Footnote 10 One of my goals here is to reconnect twenty-first-century readers and writers with these more intimate possibilities.
To clarify this account of inscape, I return to its fraught relationship with the concept of haecceity (“thisness”), theorized by the medieval theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus. Scotian theology deeply influenced Hopkins.Footnote 11 Yet rather than look backward to clarify questions of influence, this article moves in the other direction. Aside from these two men, a thinker who makes extensive use of the haecceity concept is the twentieth-century microsociologist Harold Garfinkel. Reading Hopkins and Garfinkel side by side yields a version of form that is simultaneously textual and social, one in which documentary notes metonymically depict and arrange collective relations. While the concepts of haecceity and inscape are admittedly arcane, I pursue them here precisely because of their alternation between social, material, and textual contexts.
It may seem quixotic to connect a nineteenth-century Jesuit convert and a twentieth-century social scientist, given that the latter analyzed human interactions and the former, in the main, did not. Yet their mutual interest in interaction and mobile pattern warrants their being linked here. Both are interested in behavior. Hopkins, for example, uses this word in conjunction with inscape and beauty: “A beautiful instance of inscape . . . is seen in the behaviour of the flag flower [iris] from the shut bud to the full blowing: each term you can distinguish is beautiful in itself and of course if the whole ‘behaviour’ were gathered up and so stalled it wd. have a beauty of all the higher degree” (513). Hopkins constantly describes kinetic interactions between phenomena, always seeking for a means of linking and connecting them rather than cleaving them apart.
Much recent criticism of Hopkins aims at locating him within Victorian culture. Norman White calls this “the present-day reallocation of [him] to the Victorian age to which he belongs.”Footnote 12 This is in marked contrast to modernist writers and critics who sought to smuggle him out of the Victorian period and claim him as their contemporary. Yet perhaps the desire to furnish Hopkins with an appropriate context (be it modernist or Victorian) belies his own version of sociality. In these pages I read “the social” as something fashioned and projected by Hopkins himself. In her arguments for an account of form that acknowledges continuity between artistic and social domains, Caroline Levine uses metaphors for communal life that suggest scrapbooking: “What if we were to see social life . . . as composed of ‘loosely and unevenly collected’ arrangements, ‘a makeshift, pasted-together’ order rather than a coherent system that can be traced back to a single cause.”Footnote 13 Levine's broad definition of form has provoked skepticism from those who see it as counterintuitively reductive, encompassing such drastically different orders (social, textual, or material) so as to be unusable.Footnote 14 My wish here is to argue for a very concrete instance—the notebook—in which the textual and the social overlap in surprising ways. I will begin by explaining how Garfinkel deploys the term “haecceity” to describe the ongoing construction of social networks by agents at the smallest, incremental scale. Then I will demonstrate how Hopkins's notebooks simultaneously document and generate “scapes” of relation between supposedly discrete objects. Ultimately, I show how the notebook, with its seemingly inconsequential descriptions, allows Hopkins to envision a harmonious aesthetics of sociality.
Microsociology
Hopkins's concept of inscape has proven notoriously difficult to stabilize. While the meaning of inscape differs depending on who is using the word, let us begin here by considering two established (and apparently contradictory) ways of understanding it. First, the more canonical version that made it into the Oxford English Dictionary on the force of Hopkins's work alone: “Hopkins's word for the individual or essential quality of a thing; the uniqueness of an observed object, scene, event, etc.”Footnote 15 Its official definition suggests the particularity of a given thing, the quality that distinguishes it from everything else. The following lines from “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (1877) underline this meaning:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells
Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (5–8)
The poem celebrates and cherishes difference, illuminating a world humming with an infinite number of subjectivities. This is a metaphysical, spiritual force, related to the Incarnation: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” (12–13).Footnote 16
The critical understanding of inscape as “thisness” evolves from Hopkins's association of the term with Scotus. He records the moment of reading Scotus's Sentences in his notes: “[I]t may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus” (531–32). Haecceitas is a noun of Scotus's invention, the feminine form of the Latin demonstrative pronoun hic = “this.” In terms synonymous with its definition of inscape, the OED calls haecceity “the property of being a unique and individual thing.” In Scotus's thought, it refers to an ineffable difference (a “this”) that allows us to distinguish objects almost identical in their empirical characteristics.Footnote 17
Yet many reject the idea that inscape and haecceity are identical, on the basis that Hopkins deploys it to refer to specific formal qualities in combination. “It is the coexistence of the singular and the plural that seems to be the site of inscape for Hopkins,” Brian Willems writes, drawing on W. A. M. Peters's notion of inscape as a “unified complex” of the qualities of an object.Footnote 18 On these and other similar readings, inscape refers less to any specific element or property of an object than to the force that composes elements together. Thus W. H. Gardner writes that inscape can run through a “group of things.”Footnote 19 J. Hillis Miller goes so far as to say that inscape means “just the opposite of Scotist haecceity,” arguing “it can be a group of objects which together form a pattern.”Footnote 20 Seeing inscape as a phenomenon of patterned interaction resembles the definition and application of haecceity offered by Garfinkel. In his usage, haecceity refers to particular configurations of social interaction that are created, sustained, and even understood as methodological by their participants.
Garfinkel founded a heterodox school of sociology that he calls ethnomethodology. Commonly glossed as the study of everyday life, ethnomethodology, like other microsociological practices, departs from methods that emphasize large-scale, statistical data collection. Its practitioners challenge the existence of a pregiven social dimension of existence whose illumination and explanation requires their own expertise. Instead, Garfinkel and his disciples propose to treat sociology as an everyday phenomenon, something created or achieved by actors themselves in their daily lives. This school of thought posits that everyone has a “method” by which they constitute the social.
There are innumerable examples of such “ethnomethods.” Everyone has one or many that help them navigate society and their appearance within it. As Garfinkel claims, “[T]he meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday life is something people must continually work cooperatively to achieve.” As a discipline, ethnomethodology amounts to “the study of the methods people use of producing recognizable social orders.”Footnote 21 Such studies could involve, for instance, the careful examination of documents that generate social order in institutions, or the famous “breaching” experiments, in which observers interrupt the processes by which subjects, often without self-awareness, produce meaningful interactions.Footnote 22 In the wake of these breaches, observers would attend to the subject's efforts to repair fractured relations in such a way that reveals the ongoing facture of social protocols.
Thus “the social” becomes available to analysis as what I would argue is a formal creation by people upholding networks between individuals, objects, and institutions. Haecceity names the target of analysis for the microsociologist and something individuals generate through their actions and descriptive practices. Like Hopkins, Garfinkel develops a strange idiolect in which to cast his ideas. One of his more verbose titles reveals his eccentric style: “Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and as of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society.” I will address this strange diction below, but for now I want to note the way that Garfinkel opposes sociological methods that treat the world as a chaos of disorderly activity (in the above article he calls it a “plenum”) crying out for analytical explanation by sociologists.Footnote 23
Readers of Bruno Latour will recognize Garfinkel's importance to the development of actor-network theory. “It would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as half Garfinkel,” Latour himself explains in Reassembling the Social.Footnote 24 In his estimation, Garfinkel “believed sociology could be a science accounting for how society is held together, instead of using society to explain something else or to help solve one of the political questions of the time.”Footnote 25 Latour extends Garfinkel's account of the social to include nonhuman actors, whether this means tools the scientist brings with her into scenes of investigation or the institutional constellation of things and people. In terms that are by now familiar to many literary critics, he explains that the social “doesn't designate a domain of reality or some particular item” but rather is “an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together. . . . [T]hus, social, for ANT, is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes.”Footnote 26 If there is no definable place or thing that we can index as “the social,” what matters for Latour is that we view networks as ongoing, contingent, and ephemeral things.
Because of its emphasis on particular, small-scale social scenes that are creatively fashioned by participants, microsociology may offer surprising resources for literary critics interested in developing new accounts of the relationship between form, society, and action. Heather Love's ongoing recuperation of the work of Erving Goffman emphasizes the continuity of textual and social expressions: “Goffman ignores the distinction between text and world, enlisting literature as well as other narrative and fictional forms in the service of describing social dynamics and their reinscription of hierarchy. . . . [H]e analyzes scenes from ‘real life’ with the slow, careful attention of a close reader; and he reads literature for its representation of social dynamics and hierarchies, without attending to many of the formal and ideological questions native to literary studies.”Footnote 27 As we will see now, Garfinkel's ethnomethodological approach resembles practices of close reading—except that he applies this technique to relations between people and things, rather than to text alone.
As I mentioned above, Garfinkel faulted twentieth-century sociology for operating under the assumption that “order” in this world “can only be discovered after, and as a result of, the application of a social scientific method.”Footnote 28 His whole project serves to revise Durkheim's aphorism, which states: “[T]he objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental principle.”Footnote 29 This is usually understood to mean that it is up to sociology to discover and specify those facts, to mine them from a quarry of seeming chaos. Garfinkel reformulates Durkheim's aims in another baroque sentence: “For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that and just how it is every society's locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing postponement, or buy-outs, is thereby sociology's fundamental phenomenon.”Footnote 30
Notoriously, he uses bizarre subordinating conjunctions, such as “in that and just how it is” here, and the even more bizarre relative clause “as of which,” which appears in the title quoted above. Elements in social scenes must always be understood “as of which,” that is, pertaining to particular contexts. His language breaches normal ways of describing interaction in order to refresh the way in which we talk about what counts as social in the first place. I believe such defamiliarization is valuable in our own time, when people use the word “social” as shorthand for navigating Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram as often as they use it to refer to in-person interactions. Yet more than a decade after the appearance of such media, we still need more terms to describe their unusual configurations of verbal, visual, and interpersonal interplay.
When Garfinkel says that the focus should be on “members’ work, with no time out,” he respecifies the target of sociology, arguing that the discipline should move away from analytic methods (which rely, crucially, on the collection of data on a large scale) and focus instead on the incremental ways that subjects call “the social” into being. Whether the context is “freeway traffic jams, walking together, the exhibited order of service in formatted queues, turn taking in conversation,” the sociologist must attend to “the coherence of its identifying orderliness as the population that staffs it.”Footnote 31 This also involves “total immersion” in the social contexts whose “patterned orderliness”—haecceity—they wish to identify. Their practice often attends to the consideration of particular “scenes” of sociality rather than their underlying psychological causes. It is in this sense that it works as sociology's answer to close reading, asserting the value of formal particularity in any interpersonal scene.Footnote 32
One of the advantages of this method is its self-reflexivity: there is no fundamental split between the subjects and scenes under investigation and the scholars doing the investigating. As I hope to show now, Hopkins, like Garfinkel, uses his own version of the concept to reflect specific contingencies he apprehends in groups. Just as the ethnomethodologist practices a form of immersion in social worlds—merging and integrating with the orderliness she wishes to document—so too does Hopkins suture himself within these contexts. He at once traces the contours of particular scenes and describes his appearance within them.
Scaping
The notebook is a venue for connections, not compartments. Hopkins's notebooks flow, depicting and enacting exchanges, combinations, and linkages between clouds, waterfalls, snowdrifts, bluebells, stars, flocks of sheep, human forms, the patterns on animal skin, or sunsets. Garfinkel has prepared us to see how haecceity can refer to the small-scale fabrication of social relations. Hopkins's notebooks bear out this sense of the word, revealing how notation formally doubles collectives in the world through the collection of small documents.
He is everywhere concerned with groups and their movements, as, for example, in the following passage that considers a mass of humans: “Was happily able to see composition of the crowd in the area of the theater . . . the short strokes of eyes, nose, mouth, repeated hundreds of times I believe it is wh. give the visible law” (366). He is equally compelled by the movement of a flock of sheep and its similarity to running drops of water: “I saw the phenomenon of the sheepflock. . . . It ran like the water-packets on a leaf—that collectively, but a number of globules so filmed over that they wd. not flush together” (462). To read the notebooks is to learn about clusters, bunches, and flocks. The features of the natural and human realms appear in multiple and in mixture. Even when discussing uncountable nouns, such as cloud formations or flowing water, Hopkins deploys a vocabulary of network and constellation: “In the train noticing that strange . . . rotten-woven cloud which shapes in leaf over leaf of wavy or eyebrow textures: it is like fine webs or gossamers held down by many invisible threads” (457). There is always a plural quality to Hopkins's descriptions, and also something unfixed about inscape's grammatical role in his notebook writings.
Consider the following scene, in which Hopkins names elements and binds them together with his favorite concept: “Another night from the gallery window I saw a brindled heaven, the moon just masked by a blue spot pushing its way through the darker cloud, underneath and on the skirts of the rack bold long flakes whined and swaled like feathers, below the garden with the heads of the trees and shrubs furry grey: I read a broad careless inscape flowing throughout” (526). The sky, moon, cloud, trees, and shrubs are sewn together by the needle of inscape. The word indicates an action of interconnection, accumulation, and combination. “Embodied organized form” is how Sobolev ultimately defines it.Footnote 33
While the noun “inscape” appears most frequently in Hopkins's notebooks, he varies his use of the root word throughout its pages. “Inscape” functions alternately as both noun and verb. This allows the term, as Martin Dubois observes, “to refer not just to the quality observed but also to the act of perception.”Footnote 34 The word “scape,” without the prefix, appears in equally ambiguous ways. “Scaping” also appears as a noun. These variations suggest the vitality of the concept at this stage of Hopkins's life as well as his own “profound sense of the originality of his ideas and perceptions.”Footnote 35 In addition to specifying the unique qualities of a stream or a mountainside, it can also serve to yoke apparently separate objects together. If it is a kind of beauty, it is that disclosed by ongoing communal assembly. For example, it is not the inscape of a single star that interests him, rather it is “a noble scape of stars—the Plough all golden and falling, Cassiopeia on end . . . the graceful bends of Perneus underneath her” (439). Scape works as a synonym for “group” or “spread.” Fascinated by the spots of a leopard in a painting by Briton Rivière, he notes the way the flow of marks on the animal “inscape the whole animal and even the group of them” (575).
The movements of inscape seem to both resemble and require sketching. Catherine Phillips argues that Hopkins initially practiced his descriptions in visual media, where we find “inscape in practice, felt and used in his drawings before he included the term in his notes.”Footnote 36 The notes carry forward the visual aspects of his work (e.g., in his near-obsessive use of “cross-hatching” to describe what he sees) but also, in particular, the sense of sketching and outlining. Consider how he describes a sunset: “Before I had always taken the sunset and the sun as quite out of gauge with each other, as indeed physically they are . . . but today I inscaped them together and made the sun the true eye and ace of the whole” (484, emphasis mine). Here, Hopkins contributes something to the scene. He does not merely record something. As the passage continues, the prefix “in” falls away, enabling another twist on the root word: “It [the sunset] was all active and tossing out light and started as strongly forward from the field as a long stone or a boss in the knop of the chalice-stem: it is indeed by stalling it so that it falls into scape with the sky” (484). In this continuous passage, “inscape” (verb) becomes “scape” (noun), the latter suggesting relationship and coordination.Footnote 37
The word “note” itself can also stand in metonymically for the elements being assembled. The work of scaping can mean drawing disparate tones of colors into relation. Describing the appearance of a rainbow in the midst of clouds, Hopkins adds more and more elements to his description, as though testing how far the scene could be made to accommodate various colors: “Richness of the greens . . . then the blue-green of the lake, then again the grass-green of the heights beyond, and to add a fourth note the sun coming out accented the forward brows and edges of the Battenalp with a butter-bright lustre” (446–47). “Note” in this passage slips between significations, at once a mere element of the scene and a reference to itself as a written note. One can also hear note in its musical sense—the colors of the scene striking a visual chord.
I would argue that these maneuvers define the notebook writings even when the word “scape” is absent. As Anthony Mortimer observes, the journals are filled with images of “webs, nets, meshes, cords, ropes, laces, braids and strands,” whose purpose suggests an activity of “holding in, tying together, preserving form in beings whose natural tendency would otherwise be towards formlessness and dissolution.”Footnote 38 Included in these webs and meshes are many elements of apparently little consequence. Hopkins's understanding of “network” seems to specify something aleatory and quick to dissipate, for example the texture of the surface of his hot chocolate: “I have been watching clouds this spring and evaporation, for instance over our Lenten chocolate . . . the film seems to be set with tiny bubbles which gives it a grey and grained look. . . . It would be reasonable then to consider the films as the shell of gas-bubbles and the grain . . . on them as a network of bubbles condensed by the air as the gas rises” (503). Clouds are favored citizens in Hopkins's world, and many of his notebooks feature sketches of the sky as it appears on a given day. Cloud formations are exemplary expressions of connection and linkage. Watching “a long chain of waxen delicately moulded clouds,” he suggests that they resemble “a brain” or a “bale . . . because its knops are like the squeeze outwards of the packed stuff between the places where a network of many cords might bite into it” (509).
Yet if the association with sketching seems to reduce inscape to poetic preparation, consider another point where it unifies elements that do not seem beautiful at all. Scaping serves both an accretive and integrative function for collecting experiences, no matter how abject. Two days before Christmas, in 1869, Hopkins finds himself sleepily listening to a sermon about the apostles. Suddenly, in his dreamy mind, there appears an image of an apostle constrained by a particular piece of wood, which he remembers seeing “in an outhouse” (479). Yet in his vision it rises up again, demanding attention. “It is just the things,” he remarks, “which produce dead impressions, which the mind, either because you cannot make them out or because they were perceived across other more engrossing thoughts, has made nothing of and brought into no inscaping, that force themselves up in this way afterwards” (480). This may look to some like a proto-Freudian account of the “day-residue” or something like the return of the repressed. But in this context it marks scaping (note the strikethrough of the prefix “in”) as an event that links fragmentary experiences together. It is not exclusively aesthetic: it is hard to see how Hopkins could have composed a lyric poem based on his “dead impression” of a piece of wood in an outhouse. Yet the notebooks suggest that this derelict object is yearning to be brought into connection with others.
In the notebooks, then, inscaping and scaping connote integrative actions both revealed and produced by documentation. They reach for an ideal of harmonious assembly. Everything—even the piece of wood in the outhouse—asks to be brought “into scaping.” Those impressions that seem negligible, uncountable, or fated to be lost proffer themselves up to be folded into a collection of experience, to be preserved. Even dying, and the ravages of old age, find accommodation within the interlacing threads: “It is not that inscape does not govern the behavior of things in slack and decay as one can see even in the pining of the skin in the old and even in a skeleton but that horror prepossesses the mind” (513). The provocation of horror and disgust, brought on by death, decay, or an outhouse, is no reason against something being incorporated into the system of connections Hopkins imagines in his notes. Activities that we now associate with machine activity—locating patterns, linking individuals, discerning and predicting “behavior”—are for Hopkins deeply felt, spiritual, and personal actions. As we struggle not to drown in the rapids of twenty-first-century social media, we might do well to consider how these media conscript human labors that we can bring to light through the formal examination of unusual and “secondary” forms.
