"And the earth was without form and void" : The Paradoxical Nature of Formlessness in Eleanor Wilner's "Reading the Bible Backwards"

Abstract

This thesis explores the two-fold nature of formlessness through a vital materialist lens. The focus of the study is Eleanor Wilner’s apocalyptic poem “Reading the Bible Backwards”, which is a retelling of the Christian creation story in reverse. The driving questions are: if matter and form are regarded as inseparable, how can the formless be perceived, or exist at all? Is it possible to portray formlessness, and if so, how does Wilner do so in her poem? To answer these paradoxes I differentiate between absolute and relative formlessness. The loosening of concepts such as form and matter is a crucial praxis for this thesis. Absence is explored through its positive counterpart in a poetics of negativity.

Literary pragmatics and an interdisciplinary methodology offer a holistic approach to this elusive topic. Apart from the main theoretical framework of vital materiality, the analysis contains four other interpretative perspectives. These are ecocriticism, historicism, narratology and spatial deixis. This composite close reading is followed by an overview of the materiality of poetry. The results of this study conclude that, on the imaginative, literary level, Wilner succeeds in breaking down structures of form and subsequently portrays formlessness. However, on the material level, it is impossible to achieve formlessness, as poetry as a medium is anchored in tactile reality. This is the two-fold nature of formlessness.