A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982 [Reprint 2010 ed.] 9783110868548, 9783110097962

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A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982

Roman Jakobson

A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982

Mouton Publishers Berlin · New York · Amsterdam

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek

Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982 (1982,Cambridge,Mass.) A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1983. ISBN 3-11-009796-6 NE: Jakobson, Roman: Festschrift; HST

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A Tribute to Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982 Contains the proceedings of A Tribute to Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982, which was held in the Kresge Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge on November 12, 1982 - Pref. The selected writings of Roman Jakobson: p. 1. Jakobson, Roman, 1896— — Congresses. 2. Linguists — United States — Biography — Congresses. I. Jakobson, Roman, 1896— . II. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. P85J3T74 1983 410'.92'4 83-23844 ISBN 3-11-009796-6

© 1983 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Mouton Publishers, Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co. Typesetting and Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer Buchgewerbe GmbH, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents

Preface Paul E. Gray

1 Part I: SYMPOSIUM

Introduction Morris Halle Poem for Roman Jakobson Octavio Paz Roman Jakobson and Social Anthropology Sir Edmund Leach Roman Jakobson: Teacher and Scholar Edward Stankiewicz Roman Jakobson and the Grammar of Poetry PaulKiparsky Roman Jakobson and Slavic Mythology CalvertWatkins Roman Jakobson: The Future Vjaceslav V. Ivanov

5 6 10 17 27 39 47

Part II: HOMAGES AND REMINISCENCES Gennadij Ajgi Dell Hymes Linda R.Waugh Sir Isaiah Berlin Claude Levi-Strauss Morris Halle Horace G. Lunt CalvertWatkins.

61 62 63 69 70 72 76 78

Noam Chomsky Walter A. Rosenblith Victor F. Weisskopf Jerome Bruner Stephen Rudy

81 84 86 88 93

The Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson

96

VI

Preface

The present volume contains the proceedings of A Tribute to Roman Jakobson, 1896—1982, which was held at the Kresge Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge on November 12, 1982. We gathered to honor Roman Jakobson — a man who honored our institution, and our lives, by being a part of us. Often when we speak of a luminous figure, we speak of that person as a star. In Roman's case, a more apt term might be 'constellation', given the multiplicity of his interests and the reach of his imagination — and given the fact that so many people, the world over, have set their course by him. When we began planning for the Tribute, we thought that convening both a symposium focusing on Roman Jakobson's work and a service in memory of the man was a logical way to proceed. The recollections, tributes, and papers presented made it clear, however, that in Roman Jakobson, the man and his work are one. When word of the Tribute went out, we began receiving messages from all over the world — from Oxford, Paris, Rome, Tashkent, Vienna, Zurich, and Zagreb, as well as from Cambridge — from those who could not join us that day. In the proceedings of our program, several of Roman's closest friends and colleagues — those who were present in spirit as well as those who actually attended the Tribute — share some of the personal, the particular, ways in which Roman touched and left his trace on their lives. Paul E. Gray President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PART ONE

SYMPOSIUM

Introduction

Our purpose in this Symposium is to honor the memory of Roman Jakobson. We pay homage here to one of the great scholars of our century, whose researches have vastly increased our knowledge and understanding and whose seemingly endless supply of new ideas has deeply affected scholarly discourse in all four corners of the world. Those of us who are working in areas that were of interest to Jakobson have been immensely enriched and stimulated by the new discoveries, the penetrating insights and illuminating formulations that are to be found on almost every page of his huge output. His death has robbed the world of a great source of knowledge and inspiration, and the absence of contributions from his pen will make the pages of our journals and the shelves of new books in our libraries duller, more ordinary, less exciting. For those of us who had the good fortune to know Roman personally the act of honoring his memory no doubt includes a strong component of sorrow, of mourning for a friend, for someone on whom one could rely unconditionally for help and support. Roman was one of the most generous of men. There was an openness in Roman, a total absence of defensiveness and of suspicion towards others that to me has always represented the very best in the Russian national character. And he was always willing to put himself out for others. Even during his final illness Roman insisted on writing letters for a scholar from abroad whom he had never met in the flesh, in order to help the man arrange for an American translation of his work. In the light of this it is hardly surprising that Roman's circle of friends was enormous and included women and men of all ages and from all walks of life. It included most especially the six whose contributions follow, each one not only justly famous for his accomplishments in his own field, but also tied to Roman by bonds of close personal friendship extending over many years. Morris Halle

Poema a Roman Jakobson

Entre lo que veo y digo, entre lo que digo y callo, entre lo que callo y sueno, entre lo que sueno y olvido, la poesia. Se desliza entre el si y el no: dice lo que callo, calla lo que digo, suena lo que olvido. No es un decir: es un hacer. Es un hacer que es un decir. La poesia se dice y se oye: es real. Y apenas digo es real, se disipa. Asi es mas real? Idea palpable, palabra impalpable: la poesia va y viene entre lo que es

Poem for Roman Jakobson

Between what I see and what I say, between what I say and what I keep silent, between what I keep silent and what I dream, between what I dream and what I forget: poetry. It slips between yes and no, says what I keep silent, keeps silent what I say, dreams what I forget. It is not speech: it is an act. It is an act that is speech. Poetry speaks and listens: it is real. And as soon as I say it is real, it vanishes. Is it then more real? A tangible idea, intangible word: poetry comes and goes between what is

POEM FOR ROMAN JAKOBSON

y lo que no es.

Teje reflejos y los desteje. La poesia siembra ojos en la pagina, siembra palabras en los ojos. Los ojos hablan, las palabras miran, las miradas piensan. Oir los pensamientos, ver lo que decimos, tocar el cuerpo de la idea. 'Los ojos se cierran, las palabras se abren. Octavio Paz Mexico City

POEM FOR ROMAN JAKOBSON

and what is not. It weaves and unweaves reflections. Poetry sows eyes in the page, sows words in the eyes. The eyes speak, words look, gazes think. To hear thoughts, see what we say, touch the body of an idea. Eyes close, the words open. Octavio Paz Mexico City

Roman Jakobson and Social Anthropology My own academic subject is the British version of social anthropology. It is rooted in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Raymond Firth, with all of whom I had the good fortune to be closely associated. But that subject would not exist in its present form if it had not, in recent years, developed a dialectical relationship with the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. I know of no British social anthropologist who has ever declared an unqualified enthusiasm for structuralist anthropology of a Levi-Straussian sort, but likewise there is today no British social anthropologist who has not been deeply influenced by Levi-Strauss's work. Levi-Strauss's intellectual debt to Roman Jakobson has been freely admitted on many occasions, notably in 1945 in the famous essay entitled 'Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology' ['L'Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie', Word 1 (1945), 1—22], and in 1956 in 'Structure and dialectics', which was a contribution to the Festschrift presented to Roman Jakobson on his sixtieth birthday ['Structure et dialectique', in: For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (The Hague, 1956), 289-294]. The first of these items, which contains the seedling ideas which bore fruit in the magnum opus on The Elementary Structures of Kinship [Les Structures elementaires de la parente-, Paris, 1949], looks for distinctive features in the structure of kinship terminologies; the second, which is concerned with the structural study of myth, expressly states that 'it is clear that the method I am employing is simply an extension to another field of structural linguistics, which is associated with the name of Jakobson'. The point I am making here is that even though the filiation is somewhat indirect, all my social anthropological colleagues are very deeply indebted to Roman Jakobson, and my contribution here should be seen as a token of their respect.

SIR EDMUND LEACH

I first met Roman Jakobson at the end of 1960, when we were both fellows at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto. Linguistics was very strongly represented that year. Sommerfelt was there, as well as Kurylowicz, Tom Sebeok, Morris Halle, and perhaps others — but the magnetic center of this galaxy of talent was certainly Roman Jakobson. And indeed the almost hypnotic strength of his personality drew into its orbit many of the non-linguistic fellows, including most of the anthropologists, who were also well represented. There were many angles to this fascination. Firstly the extraordinary range of Roman's interests, and the fact that (as is borne out in his writings) he appeared to have a professional grasp of the literature over the whole of this vast spectrum. But equally striking was the fact that Roman himself showed no interest in the distinction between professional and amateur. He would discuss the most complex issues of linguistics with complete tyros like myself, without for one moment suggesting that there was any difference of intellectual status that might hamper our discourse. Morris Halle has noted that when Roman moved from Columbia to Harvard in 1949 most of his graduate students went with him, and adds: What attracted students to him was not only his extraordinary knowledge, scientific imagination, and his dramatic lecture style; much more important was the close personal relationship in which he involved almost every one of his many students, the genuine interest he took in their scholarly efforts, no matter how elementary, and the assistance and encouragement he gave to all who came. [International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 18 (Biographical Supplement), 339; New York, 1979] At Palo Alto in 1961 you didn't even have to be one of his students to get this special treatment. The next point that impressed me was that, although linguistics was certainly at the core of Roman's interests, and although he held that some of the most crucial characteristics of spoken language are absent in other frames of communication, he nevertheless never tried to establish a rigid frontier between linguistics proper and softer forms of semiotics. This is why Jakobson's linguistics has provided such a powerful stimulus in fields such as my own. II

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Distinctive feature theory in its pure form is concerned with phonology and nothing but phonology; but Roman repeatedly encouraged nonlinguists to devise analogous theories in other fields of inquiry. Indeed, he seems to have been a good deal happier with the reductionism by which Levi-Strauss conceived of systems of social relationship as structures of binary coded 'messages' than are many of my anthropological colleagues. But exchange theory in anthropology has certainly benefitted enormously from this unexpected cross-fertilization from linguistics. But to return to Palo Alto in 1961:1 recall that there were two offprint versions of Jakobson publications which were in circulation among fellows of the Center. One was the paper 'Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?' [SW /, 538—545], which had been prepared at the Center a year previously in response to a challenge by the anthropologist George Peter Murdock. Jakobson there showed how distinctive feature theory, as applied to the development of phonological control in the speech of young children, could have a bearing on such a typically anthropological topic as the worldwide distribution of types of kinship terminology. The other item was a preprint of the analysis by Jakobson and LeviStrauss of Baudelaire's "Les Chats" [SW ///, 447-464], which I personally found absolutely entrancing. Besides that, Roman had an offprint of 'La Geste d'AsdiwaP, which had just appeared in Paris [Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, Section des sciences religieuses, Annuaire (1958 — 1959)], and which is, in my view, by far the most satisfactory of all Levi-Strauss's exercises in the structural analysis of myth. Along with the well known Jakobson-Halle volume Fundamentals of Language, which had appeared in 1956, this exposure provided an excellent first introduction to Jakobson's work, and it also showed very clearly how closely interwoven were Jakobson's manifold interests and those of the social anthropologists. In 1961, the development of formal distinctive feature theory in phonology (which was used in the 'Mama and Papa' paper) was just about complete, while the analysis of the Baudelaire poem was one of the first of a long series of papers which marked Roman's revived concern with the nature of poetry and with the problem of how poetry communicates information which is different from that of prose. But what is the bearing of such matters on my sort of anthropology? Roman himself put it something like this. Part II of Fundamentals of Language (which is exclusively the work of Jakobson) is mainly concerned to show how the distinction metaphor/metonymy (association

SIR EDMUND LEACH

based on similarity versus association based on contiguity) is manifested in aphasia. Jakobson there takes Saussure to task for failing to recognize that Saussure's own insight into the fact that the phoneme is the product of a whole set of concurrent distinctive features contradicts his assertion that language is strictly linear and that in speech we can say only one thing at a time. Roman illustrates his point with a characteristically entertaining but erudite comment on Alice in Wonderland's argument with the Cheshire Cat as to whether she had said 'pig' or 'fig'. In order to separate the /p/ from the /f/, Alice needed to be able to recognize not just one, but three different distinctive features, and the recognition of these distinctions depends in turn upon the phonological context in which they occur. All this sounds very abstruse, but a few pages later, along with crossreferences to Tolstoj's War and Peace and the film-making techniques of D. W. Griffiths and Charlie Chaplin, Roman makes the absolutely critical point that although semiotic systems in general are bipolar, in that similarity and contiguity relationships are opposed, nevertheless in all practical cases both dimensions are present, and this combination allows us, in effect, to say several things at once even when we are constrained by the apparent linearity of speech utterances. Indeed it is precisely in this combination of the metonymic with the metaphoric that the essential and peculiar characteristic of poetic communication is to be found. This, it seems to me, is where Jakobson is original. As he himself emphasized, recognition of the polarity as such is to be found in Saussure, in Peirce, in Freud, in Frazer, and elsewhere. But what was missing in these earlier accounts was recognition of the importance of combination. What might be called 'combinational semiotics' has been very prominent in the writings of social anthropologists during the past fifteen years or so. If the authors concerned were to be challenged as to where their ideas had come from, they would be more likely to pay deference to Levi-Strauss or to Victor Turner than to Roman Jakobson. Jakobson's name, to be sure, is mentioned only once or twice, and in passing at that, in the pages of Le Totemisme aujourd'hui and La Pensee sauvage, both of which, like the analysis of "Les Chats", were first published in 1962. But it does not seem to me at all plausible that either of those difficult, but immensely influential and stimulating, books could ever have been written has not their author, like so many others, been caught up in the whirlwind of Jakobson's ideas. I am sure that Levi-Strauss himself would agree.

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The full significance of Roman's contribution in this area has not yet been appreciated. Even in the early days of the Prague Circle he was questioning the assumption (frequently made by Saussure's disciples) that the distinctions continuity/discontinuity and synchrony/diachrony are not only both simple and straightforward but somehow homologous, so that historical linguistics can safely be hived off from semiology. But the detail of what Roman had to say on these matters has been largely neglected, and it is still widely believed that 'structuralism' both in linguistics and in anthropology is somehow 'anti-historical'. During the last few years, for reasons which are far from rational, even if they seem sensible enough to the practitioners, the academic fields of linguistics on the one hand and of social and cultural anthropology on the other have both tended to break up into a variety of mutually exclusive and mutually disdainful sects, a development which is totally at variance with Roman Jakobson's own way of doing things. One of the issues where misunderstanding is most pronounced concerns the relationship of 'history', considered as a continuous sequence of happenings from time past to time present to time future, with the structuralist-geometrical notion of transformation, which requires that events be perceived as discrete entities in time and space. There are linguists and anthropologists who deceive themselves into thinking that they can describe continuous change, and there are many others who imagine that an interest in transformations must exclude altogether the study of history. Even those who recognize the fictional nature of such discriminations do not know what to do about it. I don't think Roman Jakobson would have claimed that he knew quite what to do about it either, but from the very beginning he displayed a dual interest in history as a combination of persistence and development, and history as transformation. My anthropological colleagues could certainly benefit very greatly if they paid close attention to some of Roman's more out of the way writings which are concerned with such issues. One way of describing what is special about Jakobson's distinctive feature theory is to say that it lays stress on the fact that the messagebearing elements of a code are to be found in the patterning of relations between relations rather than in the patterning of relationships as such. It is this aspect of binary coding which links up Jakobson-style linguistics with the interests of computer engineers, and which poses the tantalizing

SIR EDMUND LEACH

question, raised by Roman himself, of the relationship between distinctive feature theory and the genetic code. But for anthropologists the crucial question is: where does history fit in? The opposition between past and present is contrived and artificial. We experience time as a continuity; we describe it as if it were a sequence of discrete intervals. Some recent and quite fascinating work by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins [The stranger king', Journal of Pacific History 16 (1981), 107—132], concerning the historical events surrounding the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779, seems to carry the implication that we are only able to recognize a contemporary sequence of actions as an 'event' with historical implications if we can interpret it, in our own language, as a transformation of another such sequence already recognized as an event with a named identity which has already occurred in the mythological past. It used to be supposed that myth is badly remembered history; Sahlins is saying that it comes closer to the mark to say that history is an enactment of myth. This is a fascinating idea, but too simple, and it is here that my reference to Jakobson as historian becomes relevant. There are hints, it seems to me, of a similar but more complex and equally stimulating argument in what Jakobson wrote about the history of the ninth-century Byzantine mission to the Moravians [SW VI, 101 — 114], where he showed that because the mission was allowed, quite exceptionally, to work with a liturgy translated into the local Slavic language (Old Church Slavonic) rather than in the traditional sacred languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, it had a long-term historical impact of a quite unpredictable sort. Roman shows, among other things, how this sanctification of the local language provided a mythical justification for national identity. This took the form of interpreting the Gift of Tongues at Pentecost as the liberating reversal of the punishment of the builders of the Tower of Babel. This imagery had an influence on Russian poetry which has endured until the present day. Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that Jakobson writing about Constantine-Cyril and Sahlins writing about the death of Cook are both concerning themselves with the same kind of question, which is of absolutely central importance for anthropologists: how does myth relate to history? How does history relate to myth? How does the metaphoric

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

poetry of myth tie in with what we optimistically imagine to be the sedate metonymic prose of history? The trouble is that Roman's writings were of such prodigious scope that one needs to be a veritable library mole to discover even a fraction of the whole. Bur for anyone who is prepared to take the trouble, the rewards of such reference-chasing can be enormous. In any event, I would like to urge most strongly that the multi-volume series of the Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson should not be shelved alongside specialist books on linguistic theory. They should be brought out into the open and drawn vigorously to the attention of all social scientists, but especially all social anthropologists — and not just undergraduates. Even the most diligent of us still have an immense amount to learn from one of the truly great masters of our age, or indeed of any age. Sir Edmund Leach King's College, Cambridge University

16

Roman Jakobson: Teacher and Scholar

On July 18, 1982, the scholarly world lost one of its intellectual giants; most of us lost an inspiring teacher; many of us a warm and reliable friend. This is neither the place nor the occasion for a thorough evaluation of Roman Jakobson's scholarship, nor of his impact on contemporary linguistics. Jakobson's work has been discussed in innumerable articles, reviews and books, and in the many tributes that came his way over the sixty or so years of his scholarly career. The keenest analysis of Jakobson's work has come from Jakobson himself in the 'Retrospects' appended to his Selected Writings, and written in that inimitable Jakobsonian style that combines depth, erudition, polemics and wit with a masterful and crisp turn of phrase. It is tempting, however, to try to recapture some of the moments that we spent in the shadow, or rather in the light of his magnetic personality, and to indicate what he meant to us as a scholar, teacher and friend and how he affected our outlook on language and on the whole scholarly enterprise. I met Roman Jakobson in the summer of 1951, a year after my arrival from Europe, when I had to decide on one of the three universities that offered me a chance to continue my studies. My 'interview' with him took place in the relaxed atmosphere of one of the summer resorts in the Catskills. By that time I had taught a course on the Igor' Tale at the University of Chicago, I had read the works of Bloomfield and some other American linguists, and had dipped into some of the writings of Jakobson. His Remarks on the Phonological Development of Russian \Remarques sur revolution phonologique du russe comparee a celle des autres langues slaves-, SW 1,7—116] was tough going, but I was fascinated by his Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze [SW I, 328—401; cf. Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals; The Hague-Paris,

ROMAN JAKOBSON, TEACHER AND SCHOLAR

1968], which filled my head, as Alice would have said, with all kinds of ideas, though I could hardly grasp their full meaning. The thought of meeting a world-famous linguist filled me with anxiety and some trepidation, for I was acutely aware of my ignorance and of the embarassing gaps that might arise in our conversation. My apprehensions were put to rest the moment we sat down to talk. Our discussion soon turned from my immediate plans to scholarly questions, and as the afternoon went on we touched on a great variety of topics, beginning with the Igor' Tale and ending with Jakobson's theory of distinctive features, which was at that time at the center of his interest. Two things about my first encounter with Jakobson have stuck indelibly in my mind and have colored forever my perception of him as a man and as a scholar: his utmost simplicity and the breadth of his scholarship. I was captivated by his warmth and liveliness, and although he, in fact, did most of the talking, I was made to feel that I was contributing in some inaudible, though highly significant way to our brilliant conversation. Also, the world of linguistics acquired for me on that afternoon a new glitter and unexpected dimensions. From the few courses in linguistics I had taken in Chicago and at the Summer Linguistic Institute I had come away with a sizeable bag of esoteric terms and unshakeable linguistic truths, such as that the final word in linguistics was Bloomfield's 'Postulates' [Leonard Bloomfield, Ά set of postulates for the science of language', Language 2 (1926), 153 — 164], that the ultimate unit of language is the phoneme, that one dare not mix linguistic levels, that phonetics and phonology are irreconcilable domains, that the study of meaning is not the business of the linguist, that synchrony and diachrony have nothing in common, that the study of poetry does not become a linguistic scientist. These and similar taboos and prescriptions were meant to guide us to a linguistic Eldorado free of mentalistic and other antiquated notions. Jakobson's work was a resounding denial of all these truths and of the selfimposed limitations that passed at the time as the great achievement of American linguistics. Jakobson's fleeting but incisive remarks, his ability to see the interconnection of subjects, his vast erudition in a variety of disciplines confirmed me in my resolve to study with him, and by all means to mix the levels and to combine the study of language with that of Slavic philology and poetics. On that afternoon I lost my linguistic innocence, though only years later did I come to realize that his adage linguista sum, nihil linguistici mihi alienum puto was applicable to no one 18

EDWARD STANKIEWICZ

else but himself. We who became his disciples and followers could only watch from a distance the agility with which he moved from field to field, his ability to penetrate to the heart of a problem and the staggering growth of his scholarly output. The size of his output was not, of course, his major accomplishment. The study of laws or of what he liked to call the nomothetic character of language animated all his life-long efforts, beginning with his pioneering study On Czech Verse written in 1923 [O cesskom stixe — preimuscestvenno v sopostavlenii s russkim; SW V, 3 — 130], up to his last study 'Einstein and the science of language', published a short time before his death [in: G. Holton and Y. Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 139—150, Princeton, 1982 (to appear in SW VII)]. Jakobson was, indeed, a unique phenomenon in modern linguistics, and the twentieth-century science of language will be inseparably linked with his name in the way seventeenth-century linguistics is linked with the name of Leibniz and nineteenth-century linguistics with the names of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay. Two years ago I had occasion to introduce him at what was to be his last lecture at Yale. I reminded the audience of Isaiah Berlin's ingenious classification of writers into two kinds: the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog, according to Sir Isaiah, burrows deep and knows one big thing, whereas the fox knows a large number of small things; when it comes to Jakobson, I said, it would be useful to add a third category, the hedgefox, for Jakobson knows profoundly a vast number of things. This linguistic blend applies to Jakobson in more than one respect: his work in Slavic philology, poetics and linguistics not only expanded the boundaries of these fields, but opened the path to new investigations and showed their common distinctive traits, or, as he would have said, the relative invariance of semiotic systems. The principles that guided his search for the constants and tendencies in Slavic metrics also inspired his quest for universal invariants in phonology and morphology; his study of poetry was linked to the broader question of the functions of language; his work on paronomasia was but another aspect of his research on iconicity. The uncanny ability to detect unity in variety did not, however, make him insensitive to the distinctions which separated the various domains. The autonomy and specificity of each object or discipline was to him no less important than their common traits. Although he objected to Saussure's injunction to practice linguistics en elle-meme et pour elle-meme, he

ROMAN JAKOBSON, TEACHER AND SCHOLAR

recognized the special position of language among systems of signs and the uniqueness of each language in the family of languages. This awareness made him immune to the perennial allure which Platonism has held for linguists ready to sacrifice the palpable and living diversity of things to pure but ultimately intractable abstractions, as well as to that gross empiricism that fails to see the forest for the trees. The inseparable unity of theory and observations was the guiding methodological principle of all his work and the safeguard for its lasting vitality and strength. The striking originality, if not flashiness, of his theoretical formulations concealed an immeasurable amount of plain hard work and an unceasing concern for the sanction of facts. The letters exchanged between Trubetzkoy and Jakobson [N.S.Trubetzkoy's Letters and Notes, The Hague, 1975] give us an insight into the intensity of the search for empirical evidence that attended their quest for universal or near-universal phonological laws. The effort to integrate theory and experience was characteristic of the entire orientation of the Prague Circle, to which we owe a body of work that surpasses in scope all that was done by other contemporary schools of linguistics. This was in part due to the fact that from the beginning the Prague Circle acquired an international character by attracting the collaboration of foreign scholars and by the outstanding quality of its publications. It is no less significant that although the Circle found an ideal home in the democratic and supportive atmosphere of inter-war Czechoslovakia, the moving spirits of the Circle were three Russian emigres, i.e. Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and Karcevskij, who, like some of their better-known compatriots (Chagall, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Stravinsky), left the oppression, deprivations and dogmas of the new Soviet regime for the freedoms of Western Europe and the United States. They repaid the hospitality of the West with outstanding achievements that testify to the intellectual ferment that had taken place in prerevolutionary Russia and that was abruptly suppressed only a few years after the Revolution. The works of these men bear the unmistakable stamp of their Russian heritage, together with a cosmopolitan outlook that was accentuated by the conditions of their personal lives. The intellectual baggage that Jakobson and Trubetzkoy carried out from Russia included a belief in modernity and innovation together with a fascination for the old and popular forms of Russian culture. Their works on Slavic and Russian literature would have been unthinkable without the experiments of the Futurists, the theories of the Formalists, Belyj's 20

EDWARD STANKIEWICZ

studies on Russian verse, the researches in Russian mythology and folklore, or even Xlebnikov's ruminations about primitive Slavic culture. One cannot fail to notice that Jakobson's most original contributions to Slavic studies aimed at a reassessment of medieval Slavic literature (whether it be the Igor' Tale, the Slavic epic songs, Old Czech poetry, or the poems of St. Cyril), and at a theoretical vindication of the boldest experiments of the Russian avant-garde carried out by such poets as Xlebnikov, Majakovskij and Pasternak. The main impetus for his work came, however, from linguistics, which provided the basic tools and the unifying link for all his literary and philological investigations. The reconstruction of Common Slavic verse, the typological approach to Slavic metrics, and the ways in which language is utilized in poetry were the central themes of Jakobson's poetics, which he advanced and developed from his early days in Moscow and Prague until his late years in Cambridge. The poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry', as well as the sound-instrumentation of verse, were clearly the major thrust of his study of poetry and the bridge he threw between linguistics and poetics. Although this bridge appeared to some of us all too narrow to accommodate the creative and holistic aspects of literary works, he opened up a line of investigation that invigorated the study of literature by giving it a more precise, objective and systematic form. Jakobson's contribution to general linguistics can hardly be summarized in this space. Like the great works of the classics, it has a richness of texture and a multiplicity of angles that will forever intrigue the attentive reader and that is bound to stimulate and vivify research. But two aspects of his work seem to me to constitute the foundation on which everything else rests: (1) the view that language is a system of signs, and (2) the quest for the unity and reconciliation of opposites. Emphasis on these two aspects of language is as old as the study of language itself, and Jakobson's profound concern with these questions may qualify him as a conservative, but a conservative of a peculiarly bold and innovative kind. As Einstein once said with respect to his own theory of relativity, 'It is not at all a question of a revolutionary act, but of a natural development of a line which can be pursued through centuries'. The structure and functions of verbal signs and the polarities that pervade all aspects of language have been the pivotal themes of linguistics from Plato to W. von Humboldt, and they reemerged with new force at the end of the last century, when linguistics turned again from its exclusive concern with historical change 2.1

ROMAN JAKOBSON, TEACHER AND SCHOLAR

to the study of the basic properties of language. Permit me to quote Holton's remarks about Einstein, which seem to me eminently pertinent to Jakobson: Science has always been propelled and buffeted by [such] contrary or antithetical forces. Like vessels with draught deep enough to catch more than merely the surface current, scientists of genius are those who are doomed, or privileged, to experience these deeper currents in their complexity.. . . After all, genius discovers itself not in splendid solutions to little problems, but in the struggle with essentially eternal problems. And those, by their nature, are apt to be problems arising from thematic conflicts. Some have suggested that Jakobson's preoccupation with oppositions and unities was due to the influence of Hegel in Russia. But by the time Saussure came around the polarities inherent in language stared everyone in the face, for they had became full-blown and irreconcilable antinomies. One did not have to be a Hegelian to be aware of the opposites, but one had to be a Jakobson to resolve the antinomies. Recall that according to Saussure, langue, i.e. competence, or the collective norm, was sharply opposed to parole, i.e. usage, or individual performance; phonetics, or the study of the physical properties of sounds, was neatly separated from phonology, which allegedly dealt with purely negative, incorporeal entities; diachrony was the province of contingent, nonsystematic change, and was to be clearly distinguished from synchrony, where all the pieces presumably fit together, as in a game of chess; linguistic form was arbitrary and without any order, and bore no relation to the system of concepts; languages differed indefinitely and could not be compared, since each language allegedly had its own monadic design. These and similar polarities of language were emphasized by Saussure, who resolved them, like many of his direct or indirect followers, by declaring that one pole of the enumerated opposites was trivial and irrelevant, or did not belong to linguistics at all. Jakobson's solution of the posited antinomies was far from simplistic, but it was as simple and compelling as St. Catherine's observation about God and the soul: 'The soul is in God and God is in the soul', she said, 'as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.' The interdependence of langue and parole was explored by Jakobson in a number of papers in which he emphasized the basic heterogeneity of 2.2.

EDWARD STANKIEWICZ

language and the stylistic choices this opens to the speaker; the inseparable link between the speaker and the message, which is established by means of the so-called shifters; the reference to addresser or addressee in phatic, emotive and appellative expressions, and the creative abilities of the speaker in manipulating the resources of language that are most conspicuous in poetic forms. Certain levels of language, Jakobson argued, are highly coded, whereas others afford a wide range of freedom for individual invention. Instead of accepting Saussure's equation of synchrony with statics and diachrony with dynamics, Jakobson pointed out the presence of stability in diachrony and the importance of mobility in synchrony. Phonemic distinctions were not, according to him, fictitious or purely psychological entities, but were the invariant phonetic properties which inhere in the speech-sounds themselves; languages could differ in significant respects, but they exhibit everywhere a similar plan and more or less equivalent structural relations. The concept of language as a system of signs was no less essential to Jakobson's thought than his dialectical approach to the linguistic dichotomies. Saussure's statement that the phonemes of a language have a purely relative and oppositional value would have remained an empty slogan, had Jakobson not abstracted their distinctive features and had he not shown that they form sets of binary and hierarchically organized oppositions. Although the theory of distinctive features was formulated almost a century ago by the Russian-Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay, it was Jakobson who gave it its modern, systematic shape, by insisting that the distinctive features are objective and invariant properties of language, and by enriching the concept of oppositions with that of asymmetry between its members. In that view the marked members of an opposition are not merely more specific than their unmarked partners, but are also more susceptible to various constraints and to historical change. The hierarchical patterning of language was thus laid bare: the more subordinate and less stable elements of a system were those which had a higher degree of complexity or combined a higher number of marked traits. The concept of opposition and hierarchy was subsequently extended by Jakobson to the level of grammar, specifically in his analysis of the Russian case system and the categories of the verb. The isomorphic relations in phonology and grammar did not blind him, however, to the fact that the phonemic and conceptual levels of language involve phenomena of a totally different kind and complexity. But phonology, he

ROMAN JAKOBSON, TEACHER AND SCHOLAR

claimed, 'was the methodological model for all other areas of linguistic analysis', and its relative transparency enabled him to draw conclusions of a predictive and explanatory kind, conclusions that have proven to be highly seminal for the study of language acquisition, aphasia, historical change and linguistic typology. Language remained, however, first and foremost a system of concepts, and it was the concepts that determined the value and functions of all the linguistic elements, including the minutest, redundant or expressive features of the phonemic code. Attempts to analyze language without reference to meaning, or to treat meaning as an extra-linguistic dimension, seemed to him a chimerical and fruitless enterprise, and he liked to quip that 'the study of language without meaning is meaningless'. The external forms of a language were merely a means to an end, and the end was the transmission of information. Language was for him, as it was for Sapir, a form of social behavior, a communicative tool that served to convey not only information about the physical world, but also to establish social relations, to give vent to emotions and create art. The inseparable unity of meaning and form was encapsulated in the concept of the sign, without which linguistics, he felt, was forever in danger of becoming a study of inaccessible mental essences or of purely physical phenomena. Meaning meant the translatability of the sign into other signs (belonging to the same or different codes), while the code-given, invariant character of the sign secured its capacity for contextual variation. The study of signs in their various modalities and functions led him, in turn, to place linguistics, more firmly than Saussure and Peirce had done, within the broader framework of semiotics, and to explore the interaction of various types of signs and of coexisting semiotic codes. In the early fifties Jakobson began to write a book that was to be called Sound and Meaning. Although the book never got off the ground, he wrote this book, in effect, all his scholarly life, for this was for him the central problem of language and the ultimate goal of linguistic inquiry. It was not enough for him to state that there is no linguistic meaning without external form; he tried to show more specifically how form is related to content and how differences of meaning are correlated with differences in lexical and grammatical form. The main course and concerns of contemporary linguistics are largely the result of Jakobsoh's work, although his means-ends model of linguistic structure found itself at variance, especially in this country, with

EDWARD STANKIEWICZ

a series of nonfunctional approaches to language. While Jakobson started out, like the early structuralists, by opposing the historicism and positivism of nineteenth-century linguistics, he wound up combating the reductionist tendencies of the new synchronic study of language, with its dual bent towards formal abstractions or mere description. Jakobson made linguistics both more abstract than it had ever been before, and more concrete. He made it more abstract by showing that language is not a heap of disconnected items but a system of relations that remain invariant throughout and despite contextual variation, and he made it more concrete by pointing out the role of social and situational contexts and of linguistic diversity in space and time. The fact that he was not only a general linguist but an outstanding Slavist was of the greatest significance for his work, for the Slavic languages, which are known for their great diversity and similarity, provided the stimulus and testing ground for his theoretical explanations. Jakobson, I suggested before, was an innovator of a peculiarly conservative stripe, for he took up and developed those problems that have perennially been at the heart of the study of language. Ά renewal', he quoted Stravinsky, 'is fruitful only if it goes hand in hand with tradition. . . . Renewal and tradition develop and abet each other in a simultaneous process.' The history of that tradition fascinated him all his life, and he paid the highest tribute to the great, as well as some lesser explorers of language, beginning with Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, the medieval Jewish grammarians, up to Saussure, William Dwight Whitney, Jost Winteler and Henry Sweet. His historical sense and penetrating view have saved from obscurity many a long-forgotten linguist, though he devoted some of his warmest pages to the pioneers of modern structuralism, such as Kruszewski and Baudouin de Courtenay, Boas and Sapir. Thanks to his work in semiotics, poetics and aphasia, he has spread the renown of such men as C. S. Peirce, G. M. Hopkins, and J. H. Jackson. The feeling for continuity, no doubt, also affected Jakobson's performance as a teacher. As if to prove the linguistic credo that the spoken word is prior to and more fundamental than writing, Jakobson was at his best in the lecture hall and in the classroom, where he fascinated, challenged, persuaded, wooed and debated with his audience. His wit was legendary, and it was murmured that some of his listeners did not come to his lectures in order to learn but to write down his jokes. He was a

ROMAN JAKOBSON, TEACHER AND SCHOLAR

patient listener and a passionate adversary, and he won the loyalty of his students and friends even when they happened to disagree with his views. He did not cultivate a school, but created one just the same because of his breadth and flexibility, and his tolerance of other approaches. But he was a sworn enemy of sectarianism and of mere plodding, and he saved Amerian linguistics and Slavic studies from the early parochialism which threatened their growth. Jakobson's ability to identify significant problems and to reveal their interconnections has been a boon to a long line of scholars, young and old, native and foreign, who profited from his insights, advice, collaboration and support. The structuralism he fostered was not a straightjacket but a method of discovery, and it had little in common with the restrictive meanings attributed to it by some of his opponents. Above all, it was an enormous advance over the Saussurean heritage and a guide to the future development of linguistics. Work in science is a highly impersonal enterprise, and if it does not become in time public goods, it is simply not good enough. Jakobson had the good fortune to exert a decisive influence on our generation, and to affect the world of scholarship far beyond the confines of linguistics. If we pay tribute to his work and celebrate his name, it is because he gave salient expression to what others had barely intuited, and because he brought order and simplicity to our fragmented knowledge. But he also brought order and meaning to our personal lives, for he made us believe that our efforts were worthwhile and that the quest for truth, and not only its attainment, has its own rewards. Jakobson made us believe that we were better than what we did, and thus he made us better than what we were. He had an almost naive faith in our capacities, and he attributed our shortcomings and blunders to all kinds of psychological and external obstacles. He took pride in his students and cared for their welfare, and he was a loyal, warm and generous friend. We were lucky to accompany him on a part of his road. Edward Stankiewicz Yale University

2.6

Roman Jakobson and the Grammar of Poetry

One measure of Roman Jakobson's towering role in linguistics is that his work has defined the field itself. The very existence of linguistics as an academic discipline in its own right owes much to his tireless struggle over many years to win recognition for the autonomy of linguistics. And certainly linguists would not be so freely involved with topics as diverse as synchronic and historical grammar, phonetics,. semantics, poetics, language acquisition, and language pathology, were it not for Jakobson's insistence on defining the boundaries of linguistics in the broadest possible way, so that everything relating to language is accepted as being in its province. Jakobson himself made fundamental discoveries in each of these branches of linguistics. None of them was more important to him, and in none did he reach deeper, than poetics. My personal debt to Jakobson goes back to my undergraduate days in Finland, when I was becoming interested in linguistics. By then he was, of course, a legendary figure. As a matter of fact, he had already become a legendary figure when my father was a student in Prague in the thirties. When I first heard Jakobson speak in 1959 at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Helsinki, I decided that I wanted to study with him. He eventually advised me to apply to MIT, where a new department had been started by two obscure young linguists named Halle and Chomsky. Jakobson himself was also lecturing there, as well as at Harvard, though his most exciting courses tended to be the ones he gave in the more freewheeling atmosphere of MIT. Jakobson was certainly the most captivating teacher I ever had. There was always a kind of mystery behind his teaching and writing. He explained what the problems were that interested him and why they were important, he dazzled you with his brilliant solutions to them, but if you wanted to try that kind of work yourself you had to figure out on your

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

own how to do it. In his articles he would hide his tracks the way mathematicians do, presenting his results but not revealing how he discovered them. The extreme cases of this are the classic grammatical papers such as 'Russian conjugation' [SWII, 119—129], and 'Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb' [SW //, 130—147], but the same style is to be seen in all his works, including the great poetic analyses collected in volume III of his Selected Writings. It is quite different from the current style of holding the reader by the hand and helping him through the hard parts. Reading a typical linguistics paper today is like being invited into someone's kitchen, while reading Jakobson is like dining in an exclusive restaurant. As a result, while his leading ideas inspired several generations of linguists and entirely changed the field of phonology in particular, relatively few people truly learned how to apply his analytic techniques, so that there are not nearly as many 'Jakobsonian' studies extant as his enormous overall influence might lead one to expect. Many of his more original ideas have not yet been exploited, and have perhaps not even been fully understood. This again, I think, applies particularly to his pathbreaking work in poetics. Jakobson's approach to literary problems is thoroughly linguistic in orientation. But it would be a mistake to see it simply as an 'application' of notions from structural linguistics to the analysis of literary texts. It stems rather from a deeper unity that Jakobson saw in linguistics and poetics. If anything, poetics has a better claim than linguistics proper to being the source of Jakobson's key insights. In his youth Jakobson was personally involved in the literary movements of his day. It was a period when aesthetic as well as scientific values were undergoing a radical reorientation. Nineteenth-century realism in art and literature had been dominated by the same concern for fullness of descriptive detail as nineteenth-century linguistics, with its emphasis on phonetic and lexical problems. The question was: 'How much can I put in?'. Artists around the first decade of this century lost interest in this ambition and began to ask instead: 'How much can I leave out?'. Jakobson has recalled his excitement over his first encounter with the works of the Cubist avantgarde and credits them with having inspired his search for abstraction and structural invariants in language. At the empirical level, too, Jakobson's exploration of the Slavic languages as a typological laboratory for investigating principles of phonological organization begins with his comparative metrical study Ο cesskom stixe — preimuscestvenno v sopostav2.S

PAUL KIPARSKY

lenii s russkim (1923; SW V, 3 — 130). The idea of a system of relevant phonological oppositions appears there and is shown to account for otherwise puzzling differences between Russian and Czech versification, years before its application to historical phonology in the Remarques sur ['evolution pbonologique du russe comparee a celle des autres langues slaves (1929; SW /, 7—116). Jakobson's view that poetics is part of linguistics must be taken quite at face value against this background. Around the time I came to Cambridge in 1962, Jakobson was beginning to turn intensively to poetics again after many years of concentrating on phonology and morphology. He had recently published his famous 'Linguistics and poetics' [SW ///, 18—51] and his two programmatic articles 'Poetry of grammar and grammar of Poetry' [SW ///, 63—86 and 87—97], in which nearly every sentence seemed to imply a vast project of research waiting to be done. During most of the sixties and seventies Jakobson followed up the program outlined in them, by working out systematic analyses of a great variety of poetic material. They appeared in an astonishing series of essays disclosing the linguistic texture of lyrics ranging from medieval to contemporary in some fifteen different languages. The results were always new, always surprising, yet they all illustrated the same general point that poetic form consists of an organization of linguistic categories in certain characteristic types of patterns. It has been recognized since antiquity that the organized recurrence of linguistic categories is an intrinsic property of verse. Jakobson's achievement was not just to reemphasize this commonplace but to generalize it in crucial ways and to pursue its consequences in entirely new directions. Here is his formulation of the key principle: 'The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination' ['Linguistics and poetics'; SW ///, 27]. That is to say, the syntagmatic recurrence of paradigmatically equivalent linguistic elements is the constitutive element of poetic form. One important feature of this formulation is that it encompasses all linguistic categories — not just phonological categories such as syllables, stresses and so forth, but equivalence classes at any level of linguistic structure, including syntax, morphology and lexicon. An immediate consequence of this generalization is that a principle like parallelism, the regular recurrence of syntactic patterns, which in traditional poetics stands out as an exotic oddity, falls right into line as the predicted syntactic counterpart of metrical organization. In Biblical Hebrew poetry,

2-9

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

for example, syntactic parallelism is an invariable obligatory feature, while metrical structure plays a secondary role. In English poetry it is exactly the reverse, while traditional Finnish poetry imposes both strict meter and parallelism. Thus, one corollary of Jakobson's ideas is that it opens the way to an understanding of the grammatical texture of poetry, bringing to view a whole facet of poetic form of which traditional literary scholarship had only a dim and intuitive notion. The second point that is implicit in Jakobson's characterization of the poetic function is that only linguistically relevant categories figure in the patterning of verse. In other words, the linguistic sames whose recurrence is relevant to poetic form, or constitute poetic form, are just those which may enter into grammatical rules and principles. To cite a trivial example, metrical systems all over the world specify the number of syllables in a foot or line but none restricts the number of phonemes in a foot or line. In terms of Jakobson's principle this behavior is explained by the independent fact that linguistic rules can keep track of syllables but not of phonemes — for example there are no phonological rules that refer to all words containing two or more phonemes or to the first phoneme of every word, while there are numerous phonological rules that refer to polysyllabic words and to initial syllables. Or consider the following example from another area of grammar. Nouns and verbs of course do not normally count as equivalent in parallelism. But Jakobson noticed that in several poetic traditions, vocative nouns and imperative verbs do pattern as parallel, e.g. in the Song of Solomon: With me from Lebanon, bride With me from Lebanon, come! Given Jakobson's principle, this poetic fact implies on the linguistic side that vocatives and imperatives must share a morphological feature. And this has indeed been proposed on purely grammatical grounds (note the parallel formation of these categories in Indo-European languages such as Greek). To see the kind of issue that is at stake, consider a slightly more complex case that I encountered in trying to apply Jakobson's theory to the traditional Finnish epic poetry. I had studied the Kalevala in high school in Finland with what I must confess was a certain lack of enthusiasm. It was Jakobson who really awakened my interest and appreciation 30

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for it, indirectly through his writings on Slavic oral epics and directly through his insistence that I undertake a study of its intricate meter and system of formulas and parallelism. More interesting even than the Kalevala itself turned out to be the actual body of oral poetry, recorded from illiterate singers, which constituted its source. In tackling its parallelism it proved essential to distinguish between two types, analogous (including synonymous as a special case) and antithetical, or what G. M. Hopkins, in a statement often quoted by Jakobson, called "comparison for likeness' sake" and "comparison for unlikeness' sake". Jakobson had talked about this as a functional distinction, but in the Finnish material it has clear formal consequences. For example, if the second of two parallel lines involves the same verb as the first, it is in the great majority of cases omitted ('understood') if the parallelism is analogous, but usually repeated if the parallelism is antithetical. (W. Steinitz, in his excellent monograph Der Parallelismus in der finnisch-karelischen Volksdichtung [Helsinki, 1934], had noted the omission of the verb for the special case of synonymous parallelism, but missed the more general formulation because he grouped all non-synonymous parallelism together into one type.) Quite similar facts, I gather, are also found in Hebrew poetry. It would seem then that Jakobsonian theory again commits us to treating the distinction as a linguistic category. In fact, analogous and antithetical parallelism correspond respectively to the and relation and the but relation and have similar reflexes within the syntax of English and other languages. For example, we can omit the repeated verb readily in an analogous conjunct John saw Mary and Bill Max but hardly in an antithetical conjunct *]ohn saw Mary but Bill Max. The distinction also plays a role, much subtler and less stereotyped of course, in the accessory parallelism that figures in English poetry. It achieves almost a constitutive role in Blake's lyrics. Antithetical parallelism occurs frequently in the Songs of Experience but never in the Songs of Innocence. This can be verified neatly because there is almost a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets of lyrics, each song in one set being paired with one in the other. Thus, the counterpart of "The Tyger", from the Songs of Experience, is "The Lamb" in the Songs of Innocence, and characteristically "The Tyger" employs antithetical parallelism (Did he who made the Lamb make thee?) while "The Lamb" is restricted to analogous parallelism (/ a child and thou a Lamb}. From this one learns something about the Blakean metaphysical dualism. His Innocence and

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

Experience and the correlated system of oppositions (Heaven and Hell, etc.) are not oppositions of a plus quantity to a minus quantity, A to not-A, but second-order oppositions between a state in which an opposition is manifested (Experience) and a state in which that contrast is suppressed, i.e. neutralized (Innocence). In this way the Jakobsonian approach to poetics typically takes you from literature to grammar and back, letting points of structural detail throw a sharp light on the underlying ideas and linking the seemingly most disparate domains into a coherent whole. Jakobson's approach not only led him to a new appreciation of the role of grammatical figures, underestimated by traditional literary study, but to a radically new conception of semantic figures, or tropes. Classical rhetoric regarded them as verbal substitutions, and classified them according to the relation between the substitute and the implicit underlying verbum proprium. It defined metaphor as based on the relation of similarity, and metonymy as based on 'material' relations. Jakobson interprets metaphor and metonymy in firmly grammatical terms as involving the two axes of selection among members of linguistic equivalence classes (the axis of similarity) and combination into syntactic units (the axis of contiguity). These axes can be equated with the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of Saussure. The opposition between metaphor and metonymy is of fundamental importance in Jakobson's poetic theory. The metaphorical relation based on similarity is dominant in (lyric) poetry while the metonymical relation based on contiguity is dominant in epic and prose. Going beyond literature, the metaphor/metonymy opposition is tied to such dichotomies of style and genre as romanticism vs. realism, surrealism vs. cubism, and drama vs. film. Jakobson even suggests that the same basic dichotomy manifests itself in language pathology and in the interpretation of dreams revealed by psychoanalysis. Why is poetry predominantly metaphorical? For Jakobson this is simply a consequence of the constitutive role of parallelism in poetry. All metaphor, being based on similarity, is implicit parallelism. Ultimately, its essential function is to link the lyrical protagonist by an extended network of correspondences to the world with its manifold levels of reality. The corresponding question then is, what is the function of metonymy in realistic narrative? The answer again follows from Jakobson's linguistic analysis of this figure. All metonymy implicitly depends on some relation of 'contiguity' (in Jakobson's terms), such as attribute, source, part, cause,

PAUL KIPARSKY

or location (e.g. crown or palace for king, winter for year). Consequently, metonymy serves not to establish correspondences between distinct domains but to locate individuals among contiguous objects within a domain. Metonymies articulate a relational topography of which the protagonist himself is a part and through which he is defined. Jakobson develops these ideas in his rich and suggestive "Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak" (1935; SW V, 416-432; cf. 'Marginal notes on the prose of the poet Pasternak', in: Pasternak: Modern Judgments, ed. D. Davie and A. Livingstone [Glasgow, 1969], 131 — 151.) On the interpretation of Jakobson's theory offered above — let us call it the 'strict interpretation' — one of the main criticisms that has been leveled against it, namely that it is excessively arbitrary, simply turns out to miss the point. Here is how one critic expresses his doubt: One can produce distributional categories almost ad libitum. One might, for example, begin by studying the distribution of substantives and distinguish between those which were objects of verbs and those which were subjects. Going one step further, one might distinguish between those which were objects of singular verbs and those which were objects of plural verbs, and then one might subdivide each of these classes according to the tense of the verbs. This process of progressive differentiation can produce an almost unlimited number of distributional classes, and thus if one wishes to discover a pattern of symmetry in a text, one can always produce some class whose members will be appropriately arranged. (Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics [London, 1975], 57.) But Culler is entirely mistaken in supposing that grammatical categories can be multiplied ad libitum. They are in fact a fixed set to be established within the theory of grammar. To be sure, there are open questions about what the correct theory of grammar is, including precisely how the set of categories should be delimited, but this much seems clear, that the pseudo-categories cited by Culler, such as objects of plural verbs, have no linguistically justifiable status whatever and therefore should not play any role in poetic patterning either. Of the many questions that Jakobson's work on poetics raises for further research I would like to consider two here. The first concerns the problem of what might be called latent elements of structure. If we take 33

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

the position that the poetic principle organizes the linguistic material in the sense of the phonemes, morphemes, words, and syntactic constituents that make up the text, then we run the risk of excluding what may be significant formal features of a more abstract nature. Let us again take an example from metrics and another from parallelism. Traditional metrics, in Sturtevant's words, had taken it for granted "that an obligatory feature of versification must be in some way audible". Jakobson (SW V, 195) contested this very restrictive view, citing the word break that is required after the fourth syllable of every line in Serbian epic poetry, without any audible cues in the reciter's normal delivery. He suggested the weaker position that features of versification must at least be potentially realizable, in the sense that, e.g., one may make a pause between words. However, it looks as though we must go still further and recognize that even linguistic features that must remain latent may play a role in verse. There are poetic traditions, most of them oral, in which the metrical constraints are defined on a relatively abstract level of phonological representation, so that for example certain vowels that are obligatorily elided in pronunciation are nevertheless always counted for purposes of metrical scansion. These may include traditional verses composed at a time when the vowels were still pronounced, but they also include verses that continue to be made up on the same pattern after the language has changed. Moreover, it appears that the traditional scansions are generally retained only where they can be apprehended by the poets on the basis of their unconscious understanding of the morphophonemic system of their language. Such situations are found in the oral poetry of Finland and ancient India; V. Zeps, J. Malone, and others have cited similar cases in other languages (see Malone, Linguistic Inquiry 13 [1982], 550ff. for references). The syntactic counterparts of such phonological 'unheard melodies' are null elements that are allowed to pair with overt lexical items even in otherwise quite strict systems of parallelism; one example would be the verb-'gapping' phenomenon I mentioned above. More importantly, much of modern poetry invites the reader to project the kind of parallel structure that traditionally would have been displayed overtly in the poem itself. In Richard II, the king, about to die, says: I wasted time, and now doth time waste me (5.5.49) 34

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In a modern poem we might read only: The man is killing time — there's nothing else (Robert Lowell, "The Drinker") or (in a poem about the drowing of a child): What did I do to kill my time today (James Wright, "At the Slackening of the Tide"), where it is up to you to complete the implicit parallelism. Or compare the intricate lexical and grammatical texture of the first two quatrains of Shakespeare's Sonnet 43 When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected, But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed. Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow's form form happy show To the clear day with thy much clearer light When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! with the bare phrasing of the first two lines of Theodore Roethke's "In a Dark Time", with very similar imagery and ideas (though the content is religious rather than erotic): In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; Here again the reader must himself project the implied parallelism in each line. The hypothesis then would be that the projective capacity demanded by contemporary poetry draws on the same internalized linguistic competence that defines the range of overtly parallel structure in traditional poetry. Valery's remark that 'God gives the first line of a couplet, it is up to the poet to find the second' might then be rephrased: The poet gives the first line of a couplet, it is up to the reader to find the second'. 35

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

The second set of open questions that I would like to mention here concerns the abstract patterns themselves that are induced by the recurrence of paradigmatic equivalence classes in the poetic text. This is probably the most problematic part of the whole theory. Jakobson views a poem as having a kind of constituent structure, characterized relationally in terms of succession (aa bb), alternation (ab ab) and enclosure (abba). It is possible that the right way to visualize these structures is in terms of binary branching hierarchical tree representations. He states the distribution of linguistic elements over those relational structures by quantifying expressions that include all Xs, no Xs, the only X. This then means that it is a relevant structural fact about a poem that, say, all finite verbs occur in the second half, or that it contains no animate nouns. This much seems clearly established by Jakobson's demonstration of significant aesthetic consequences of such features of organization in an impressive range of cases. More problematic would be the admission of such properties as 'having the same number of Xs as', entailing for example that it is a relevant structural fact about a poem that it has the same total number of prepositions in the odd and the even lines. Jakobson occasionally invokes such numerical properties but on the whole they play a marginal role in his analyses. Recently some scholars (notably J. R. Ross) have made much more of them. My own impression, for what it is worth, is that it might be possible to eliminate them entirely from the theory. This would also at once eliminate the weakest aspect of Jakobson's conception of symmetry, and the one most readily criticized (cf. Culler, p. 66). Moreover, the 'strict' interpretation of the Jakobsonian poetic principle that I sketched out would in any case exclude numerical predicates if, as seems to be the case, grammatical rules and principles are never formulated in such numerical terms. Jakobson's achievement in poetics is to have explicated and vindicated in a deep sense the view expressed in Paul Valery's dictum that 'literature is, and cannot help but be, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language'. I have often been puzzled why this remarkable work has received such scant resonance among literary scholars and critics. I rather suspect that its acceptance, even to some extent its serious discussion, has been slowed down by a set of prejudices that are essentially the same as those that generative grammar has had to face. The first of these barriers is that the literary scholar has traditionally felt comfortable only with the particular characteristics of individual and

PAUL KIPARSKY

traditional styles on the one hand and with non-empirical, purely conceptual reasoning on the other. There is no room in between for empirical theories, systems of abstract hypotheses that interact to predict particular testable consequences, which is what Jakobson's ideas amount to. We can easily construe Jakobson's theory of the poetic function as belonging to the theory of mind; but this implies also that some body of verbal art newly discovered, say, in New Guinea could potentially show principles of composition that would refute or confirm some aspect of the theory. The reluctance to view matters this way seems to reflect a deep-seated idea in the humanities that whatever is not individual or traditional can be deduced a priori from the essence of things — so that there are no contingent universals and the nature of man is not a subject for empirical theorizing. A second factor of resistance seems to be the distrust of the notion of unconscious patterning in verbal art. This notion is essential to Jakobson's theory since readers can be quite unaware of the intricate symmetries that poetic analysis discloses, and what is more the author himself may have no inkling of them either, as Jakobson demonstrates. His most powerful argument that poetic form is apprehended unconsciously comes from illiterate bards who fluently improvise metrical verse and instantly reject a faulty line without being at all able to verbalize just what is wrong with it: Phonology and grammar of oral poetry offer a system of complex and elaborate correspondences which come into being, take effect, and are handed down through generations without anyone's cognizance of the rules governing this intricate network. The immediate and spontaneous grasp of effects without rational elicitation of the processes by which they are produced is not confined to the oral tradition and its transmitters. Intuition may act as the main or, not seldom, even sole designer of the complicated phonological and grammatical structures in the writings of individual poets. Such structures, particularly powerful on the subliminal level, can function without any assistance of logical judgment and patent knowledge both in the poet's creative work and its perception by the sensitive reader . . .. (SW V, 147) Linguists have been reasonably comfortable with the idea of unconscious patterning at least since Edward Sapir, but literary scholars have tended 37

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND THE GRAMMAR OF POETRY

to take the position that whatever is significant for the interpretation of a work has to be at least accessible to the reflective consciousness. This empirical discomfort even led one critic of Jakobson to identify poetic form with the reader's response as determined by a poll of some number of average subjects. Linguists, meanwhile, are still held back by more banal residual prejudices of their own: that questions of poetics are somehow intrinsically intractable, and/or of peripheral relevance. There was a time when the same doubts prevailed about syntax, and they are only now being overcome in regard to semantics. Today the integration of metrics into linguistics is an accomplished fact and other aspects of poetics are beginning to receive more attention. Perhaps the time is not far off when Jakobson's comprehensive vision of the scope of linguistics will be taken seriously in practice as well as in principle. Paul Kiparsky Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Roman Jakobson and Slavic Mythology

In 1950 the English scholar Leonard Palmer gave an article to the venerable Transactions of the Philological Society on 'The Indo-European origins of Greek justice' [TPS 1950 (1951), 149-168]. In particular he discussed the divine pair Aisa and Poros, 'Portion' and 'Allotment', termed by the seventh-century Spartan poet Alkman 'the most ancient of the gods'. Palmer calls attention to the semantically identical Vedic pair Amsa and Bhaga, and rightly assumes the similarities are genetic in character. In an appendix he records his indebtedness to Roman Jakobson, who was in Oxford at the time to give his Ilchester lecture on Slavic Epic Verse [cf. SW IV, 414—463], for calling to his attention the wholly parallel Slavic divine pair Daztbogt and Stribogi»; the three traditions point unambiguously to genetic filiation, to common inheritance from an Indo-European prototypical divine dyad. Palmer's contribution of the Greek evidence was duly noted shortly thereafter, but without bibliographical reference (since the article had not yet in fact appeared), in a brief and pregnant paragraph on the Slavic 'giver of wealth' Dazbhogt and the 'apportioner of wealth' Stribogi>, in one of the most remarkable publications of Jakobson's entire career. For in 1950 also appeared Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, with Roman Jakobson's contribution, a three-page article on 'Slavic mythology': five columns of text and one of bibliography (vol. II, pp. 1025 — 1028). Perhaps never before or since has an entire field been so deftly and so surely delineated and defined, and so many fertile suggestions for future exploration been so lightly tossed out, in so few pages. This work was to be proved programmatic: in 1966 it formed the basis for an entire semester's course at Harvard entitled 'Slavic Paganism'. Indeed all of Jakobson's not very numerous subsequent contributions

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY

to the field of Slavic mythology, published and unpublished, are only minor modifications, expansions, and elaborations of this single seminal work of 1950. These contributions may be mentioned here, for the sake of completeness; their interest is as much biographical as scientific, for above all they are graphic testimony to Jakobson's enduring and passionate concern both with the central issues and with the smallest details of comparative mythology, Slavic and Indo-European, down to the very last months of his life. The immediate stimulus to Jakobson's scholarly concern with Slavic mythology was his work on the Slovo o polku Igoreve, the Igor' Tale, rehearsed and researched no doubt for decades, written in 1945—47, and published in 1948 [SW IV, 106-300). The concluding section of his vindication of the authenticity of the Slovo demonstrates briefly, one after the other, the genuineness of each of the pagan mythological elements and figures. The Funk and Wagnalls dictionary article appeared in 1950; it must rank as well as Jakobson's greatest single contribution to Indo-European studies, both cultural and linguistic. Speaking personally, I must acknowledge that after reading his discussion of Perun, Perkünas and (Greek) keraunos there, I was never the same again. The next period of his activity in the mythological field came in the decade of the sixties, with a contribution on 'The role of linguistic evidence in comparative mythology' to the Moscow anthropological congress of 1964 [to appear in SW VII]', a lecture in 1964 to the Armenian community on the Vahagn myth in the legendary songs of Golt'n preserved by Moses of Chorene; two pages (701—702) in the 'Retrospect' to Selected Writings IV; the Harvard course on Slavic paganism in the spring of 1966 (which was recorded on tape); and a lengthy — and we must admit finally unsatisfying — paper on 'The Slavic god Velest and his Indo-European cognates', presented in lectures in 1967 and 1968, and published the following year in the Festschrift for V. Pisani [to be reprinted in SW VII]. In April of 1975 Jakobson lectured on 'Comparative Indo-European Mythology' for a symposium at MIT; and in April of 1982 he returned once again to a topic dear to him, and prepared — in Massachusetts General Hospital — an abstract on Old Armenian Vahagn in the light of comparative mythology'. It was presented posthumously to the inter40

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national conference on Armenian studies in Erevan in September of 1982 by his widow, and will appear in the proceedings of that conference, as well as in the forthcoming volume VII of Jakobson's Selected Writings. In the field of folklore and mythology, as in so many others, Jakobson was a comparatist. But we must be sure to understand the term as he did, and not in the more restricted sense that Antoine Meillet had in mind when he asserted passionately, to the challenge of synchronic phonology posed by Jakobson himself, 'mais moi je suis comparatiste!'. What Jakobson meant he tells us precisely, in the 1966 'Retrospect' to his Selected Writings IV (Slavic Epic Studies): 'Comparative linguistics brings out (1) intrinsic typological parallels, (2) analogical developmental traits due to similar social and cultural preconditions, (3) correspondences based on common ancestry, and (4) points of likeness caused by diffusion. Finally etymologists trace the connection of the vocabulary and phraseology of a given language with historical events, morals and manners'. That is an utterly remarkable definition of etymology, by the way, which merits wider circulation. But Jakobson continues: 'However, no linguist today would declare a single one of these problems the only legitimate task while discarding and discrediting the rest, as has quite often been the case in the study of Russian folklore, especially epics. Both aspects of linguistics — diachrony and synchrony — complement each other . . .' The novelty of Jakobson's position here is precisely that all of these are subsumed under the label of comparison, and that comparison is at the same time both a diachronic and a synchronic concern. In folklore, just as much as in phonology, Jakobson was, as I put it elsewhere, the great unifier, the resolver of antinomies, the creator of a more meaningful totality. The same intellectual atmosphere in Prague at the same time produced Jakobson's famous phonological 'manifesto', the 'Proposition au Premier Congres International de Linguistes' (countersigned by Karcevskij and Trubetzkoy), written in 1927 and presented in 1928 [SW /, 3 — 6], and his programmatic joint work with Bogatyrev, on folklore and letters as two autonomous varieties of verbal art, written 'after years of deliberations' in 1929 [SW IV, 1-15]. For we should never forget that it was in the field of Russian folklore that the young Roman Jakobson did his first apprenticeship. He describes for us vividly in the 'Retrospect' to Selected Writings IV his fascination with Russian proverbs already as a six-year-old child. As he puts it, 'proverbs act as a preparatory school for apprehending folklore'. Jakob-

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY

son goes on to recall his high school classes at the Lazarev Institute, in an atmosphere where oral poetry, ethnography, and folklore Occupied a substantial place in general courses of Russian language and literature'. In May and June of 1915, the 18-year-old Jakobson with Bogatyrev and Jakovlev did his first systematic fieldwork, collecting some 200 tales as well as songs, spirituals, proverbs, riddles, beliefs, rituals and customs. The wartime hysteria of the period led as well to an episode of 'nascent folklore' in the village of Novinskoe, as Jakobson tells us, where 'something sprang up that probably might be called collective creation', as a result of which the three of them were nearly lynched as German spies. It was his concrete experience with living Russian folk poetry and oral literature (ustnaja slovesnost1} that led Jakobson to the rehabilitation in a structuralist context (as well as in the prevailing climate of political opinion) of the Romantic notion of collective versus individual creativity: writing in 1944, he states that The folktale is a typical collective property. The socialized sections of mental culture, as for instance language or folktale, are subject to much stricter and more uniform laws than fields in which individual creation prevails' (SWIV, 91). These lines are virtually translated word for word from the German of his and Bogatyrev's folklore 'manifesto' of 1929 already alluded to (SW 7V, 13); they would recur in 1966 in the 'Retrospect', with a deft if unwitting touch of seventeenth-century English, as 'the disreputed distinction between collective and individual production has to be rehabilitated and redefined in the light of corresponding linguistic notions'. Indeed more than half a century later, Jakobson and Bogatyrev's insistence in 1929 on the fundamental role of the ''Präventivzensur der Gemeinschaft1 (the 'preventive censorship exercised by the collective body') remains an extremely fertile notion, and one which can be profitably applied to the critical nexus of audience/performer interaction currently emphasized in contemporary theory of oral literature and the formula. Jakobson's concrete exposure to living Russian heroic epic, to the byliny, was to exert an even stronger influence on his intellectual biography. Verse form and metrics, sound texture, grammatical figures, formulaic constructions, all awaited the young student of poetics. But at the same time note incidentally that the young student was already a field worker and philologist — in the true sense — who used for his first study of .the Slavic epic decasyllabic in 1929 [SW IV, 19-37] a text of the 'Vavilo'-song which he had personally corrected and annotated as to

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rhythm and phonetics at a performance by the peasant epic singer Krivopolenova in Moscow in 1915, when he was eighteen years old. It was in his treatment of the Russian heroic epics, the byliny, that we first observe Jakobson's characteristically holistic approach: the tension of the synchronic and the diachronic is resolved into a new and integrated whole. The historical or diachronic approach is necessary but not sufficient, just as is a totally anhistorical description. 'Neither the socalled mythological school, the theory of migratory motifs, or the search for the historical basis for the epics was wrong in itself, he said in 1940 (SW 7V, 649); what was wrong was their mechanical application, to the exclusion of the fact that 'the epic song is preeminently a poetic work, and everything that it acquires from outside — a mythus, a historical impetus or an international literary model — necessarily undergoes a transformation with respect to the intrinsic design of this song'. These words could and should be prolegomena to a variety of epic and other traditional texts and genres in any number of archaic literatures, such as those of Greece, India, Iran, and Anatolia in pre-Christian times, or the early Germanic and Celtic literatures of Western Europe. At the same time we must recognize that recent work on the persistence of traditional elements, of what we may call 'traditionality' in an ambiance of individual rather than collective creativity — for example on the one hand the odes of Pindar, on the other the social function of poetry in Ireland down to Elizabethan times — means that the role of what Jakobson termed 'transitional borderline phenomena' between the two 'essentially heterogeneous provinces' of folklore and letters is perhaps rather greater than he first imagined. In Jakobson's approach to the byliny we see again in the last analysis the rehabilitation of a Romantic notion in a structural context. It is the comparatist in a new key. The old mythological school had sought 'residual elements of ancient Russian, Slavic, and finally Indo-European survivals in the byliny'; their attempt was premature, and foundered precisely on inept comparative methodology. But, as Jakobson avers, 'the assumption of such a prehistorical nucleus in the Russian epic tradition was sound and justified'. It was a question first of getting at that nucleus: the first law of the comparative method is — you've got to know what to compare. But the second question now became the critical one: how is that historical nucleus preserved — perhaps very marginally — in a complex network of relations that itself must have undergone countless 43

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY

changes across time? In this area Jakobson appeared as the consummate comparatist — in itself perhaps a Romantic preoccupation, as he believed, rightly or wrongly — but the comparatist in his sense with which we began: not only the genetic comparatist, but the typologist, the diffusionist, and the developmentalist, that is, the searcher for parallel sociocultural preconditions. We must also add, the structuralist. Classical structuralist doctrine permeated Jakobson's approach to all facets of comparison: the search not for things but relations. It was the exact correspondence of relations, the isomorphism, between the meters of Serbo-Croatian epics on the one hand and those of laments on the other, and the meters of Russian epics versus those of laments, which enabled Jakobson the comparatist to reconstruct a whole set of Common Slavic metrical forms in his Ilchester lecture on Slavic Epic Verse. 'The assumption of such a prehistorical nucleus in the Russian epic tradition', to repeat the above quotation of his, was indeed 'sound and justified', and the confirmation comes from a side not dreamed of by the nineteenth-century Russian mythological school. Jakobson the genetic comparatist was then able to link this Common Slavic metrical tradition with that of Common Indo-European itself, as previously established by Meillet [A. Meillet, Les origines indoeuropeennes des metres grecs-, Paris, 1923]. Yet it should be noted that Jakobson's comparative metrics, though he clearly intended them in the genetic sense, can also be read as 'developmental'. For many scholars the observable similarities (or at least some of them) are not genetic but 'analogical developmental traits' attributable to similar linguistic and phonological preconditions. My own position is now rather that, as I put it in the Collitz lecture on Indo-European poetics, 'we should content ourselves with the observation of certain recurrent similarities which are consistent with the hypothesis of a common prototype, without seeking to define that prototype in too narrow a fashion.' That phrase of mine, written about metrics, can I think be applied, virtually as a definition, to Roman Jakobson's contribution to Slavic mythology. Permit me a single example, and then a comparison. In the Igor' Tale we find the line (108): uze vrbzesa Dwt na zemlju '(the demon) Div hurled himself upon the earth' Jakobson showed already in 1948 that this formula collocating the violent precipitation of Divt on Zemlja itself encapsulated a myth, with

44

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Thracian and Phrygian affinities, which is most familiar to us as Zeus (IE *dieu-} destroying his paramour Semele with a thunderbolt. 'La formule du Slovo date, semble-t-il, de loin', as he ingenuously put it. Jakobson returned to this remarkable exampl, and repeated it in his 'Retrospect' of 1966. Yet he did not to my knowledge know the most telling parallel for Slavic, the version of the myth (there specifically termed a logos) in Pindar, Olympians 2.22—27: έπεται δε λόγος εύθρόνοις Κάδμοιο κούραις, ί-παθον αϊ μεγάλα' πένθος δε πίτνει βαρύ κρεσσόνων προς αγαθών, ζώει μεν εν Όλυμπίοις άποθανοΐσα βρομώ κεραυνού τανυέθειρα Σεμέλα, φιλεϊ δε νιν Παλλάς αΐεί και Ζευς πατήρ, μάλα φιλεϊ δε παις ό κισσοφόρος' Thus the tale for the queenly daughters of Kadmos, who endured much; grief falls a dead weight as goods wax in strength. Semele of the delicate hair, who died in the thunderstroke, lives on Olympos, beloved of Pallas forever, of Zeus, best loved of her son with ivy in his hands. (tr. Lattimore) Had Jakobson known this passage he would surely have cited it; for in a syntactically and formulaically highly marked context (word order Verb—Object—Subject; verb—enclitic relative pronoun, etc.), it encapsulates not just the myth of Dios precipitating himself on Zemelo, but the whole and total mythological system of the chief god of the Proto-Slavic pantheon Perun, and of his female paredra Perperuna, as elucidated long ago by Jakobson himself. For it collocates not only Father Zeus but keraunos (= Slavic god Perun) with Semela the earth to be fructified — living after dying — Semela who corresponds exactly to the Slavic female counterpart of Perun Perperuna, the naked girl covered with leaves in the ritual, just like Dionysos (son of Semele and Zeus) 'with ivy in his hands' (kissophoros). Even more striking is a 45

ROMAN JAKOBSON AND SLAVIC MYTHOLOGY

dithyrambic fragment of Pindar (75), where Semela herself is helikampux 'with headband of ivy', and in the description of the ritual we get the very phrase tote balletai tot' ep' ambrotan khthon' 'then, then is hurled upon the immortal earth' where the Greek verb phrase would translate into Old Russian exactly as vrfzesa na zemlju 'hurled himself upon the earth', the formula of the Slovo with which we began. In Benveniste's words in his and Renou's 1934 study in Indo-Iranian mythology (Vrtra et VrQragna, 199) 'Every study of a mythological fact must set itself the task of reconstituting its formation . . ., of discovering the generative scheme as well as the process of development. That will be the indispensable condition for every comparison with neighboring systems.' Of this task we can fairly say that Jakobson acquitted himself precisely. It is Jakobson's Slavic religious system as masterfully sketched out in 1950 that permits one now to make a meaningful and total equation. In 1965 the Soviet scholars Ivanov and Toporov, building on a pioneering article of 1963, published a joint work with the ambitious if sesquipedalian title Slavic Linguistic Modeling Semiotic Systems [Slavjanskie jazykovye modelirujuscie semioticeskie sistemy-, Moscow, 1965]. The work deals brilliantly with the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic religious system, on the content plane. The authors specifically acknowledge their indebtedness to Roman Jakobson; he himself described their approach as very close to that of Levi-Strauss. The book concludes with extensive samples of formal notation of reconstructed Proto-Slavic texts, consisting of rather forbidding strings of asterisked Proto-Slavic words and names connected by symbolic logic operators. I have the distinct impression — and I know both of them — that these two very gifted scholars feel they are legitimate continuators of Jakobson's doctrine, that they have spelled out what he would have done, perhaps, had he but world enough and time. Yet I think that there is something missing in their treatment of Slavic mythology in comparison with Jakobson's. I like to think of that something as art. Calvert Watkins Harvard University 46

Roman Jakobson: The Future

Today we may try to begin thinking about Jakobson's ideas; about what remains to be done and to be thought through in that enormous legacy that he has left. When a man dies, his portrait changes. What has changed now in the portrait of Roman Jakobson that we knew for so many years? Perhaps what has changed does not refer directly to science, but can nevertheless be most meaningful, especially in the case of Jakobson. The attempts to present his portrait in fragments are well-known. An entire book has been published, called Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship [ed. D. Armstrong and C. H. van Schooneveld, Lisse, 1977]; many scholars working in language and culture contributed to this substantial work about Jakobson's various scholarly pursuits. The book was published but a few years ago, and already today, when one considers what Jakobson has left behind — the book, as well as the many other articles about him, seem somehow inadequate. The reason is that everything about him was written in the past tense; scholars always analyzed everything that Jakobson had done up to the moment when they set to write an article about him. But in fact, much of what he was doing belongs not to the present, but to the future. And today we feel this particularly strongly. I believe that during my last meeting with Roman Osipovic, at the Symposium in Tbilisi, I told him that he belonged more to the twenty-first than to the twentieth century. Jakobson himself strove to be together with his contemporaries, and made great efforts not to be left in the future, which probably would have been much easier for him than being located in a present that was not especially congenial. I shall try to recall the quote from Einstein that is to be found at the end of one of Jakobson's last articles — the last article, in fact, that I was ever to receive from him with a personal dedication ['Einstein and the

ROMAN JAKOBSON: THE FUTURE

science of language', in: G. Holton and Υ. Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 139—150; Princeton, 1982 (to appear in 5W VII)]. In this article, Jakobson wrote that the idea of symmetry, which is so important in modern post-Einstein physics, is no less important for linguistics, but that at the moment this refers more to the future of linguistics than to its present. And at the end of this article Jakobson quoted a remark, made by Einstein shortly before his death, that the distinction between past, present and future is illusory, and that we should always keep this idea in mind. With this remark in mind, I would now like to say how I see the changed portrait of Roman Jakobson. The unity of past history, of what exists now, and of what is about to come into being — this unification of synchrony and diachrony is an idea that linguistics as well as other branches of the science of man owe to Jakobson. And this unification is a most striking trait of everything connected with Jakobson, in his life and in his scientific and cultural pursuits. Roman Osipovic often talked about the generation of the 1890's. I remember him talking about Pasternak, and others who were born about 1890. These people seemed to him to have been able to accomplish so much because their formative period fell in a time which preceded great catastrophes of our age, such as the First World War. Although Jakobson was half a decade younger than they, the people of the '90's (about whom he wrote so much, especially in the 'Retrospect' to the first volume of his Selected Writings) were the artists, poets and composers who contributed most to his own formation. Perhaps as a prodigy, perhaps as a man who was always ahead of his own time, he became part of the generation that preceded his own. This is true even in a literal sense, for his first poems appeared before the great historical collapse. The 'transrationaP poems by Aljagrov (Jakobson's poetic pseudonym) belong to the pre-war period of our poetry, as do Jakobson's first scholarly attempts, about which we learned only later. And it was before the First World War that Jakobson received from Germany and first read Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen. So he began to work in this relatively peaceful pre-war decade, in which he saw the beginning of everything that was to initiate the unprecedented flowering of art, literature and science of the twentieth century. It is to these times that he belongs, and it is through him that we were in touch directly with an epoch that otherwise would have remained for us pure mythology. He was the living embodiment of this mythology, a personality of a different dimension, both in his scholarly activities and 48

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in his life, on a scale that our age, the generation that followed him, never achieved. To return to my starting-point: his 'not fitting in' with the epoch that followed was the result of the fact that he belonged indeed to the epoch of the Renaissance that began the century, but that had no continuation; and Jakobson himself was a man of that half-realized Renaissance. He was that gigantic promise that was held out by the beginning of the twentieth century. The extent of his enormous achievements equaled the almost inconceivable situations in which he worked. Moreover, he was not frightened by the catastrophe that followed. During our last meeting in Tbilisi, he recalled his last talk with Trubetzkoy in 1938 just before the Anschluß of Austria. He told me that exactly at that point, the idea of distinctive features came to his mind, an idea that he later developed over the course of many years, and that resulted in the concept known to us as the universal system of distinctive features. He said that the idea occurred to him in that tragic moment when both Trubetzkoy and he knew that they were meeting for the last time, when the occupation of Czechoslovakia that forced Jakobson to change his entire life was close at hand. He remarked that this was very much like the rest of his scholarly experience, and he emphasized that the most important ideas come in moments of catastrophe; nor did he see any contradiction in this. I believe that precisely for this reason, he was able to do so many remarkable things during the stormy age that followed the short period of relative peace at the beginning of the century. He could do it because he was not afraid of catastrophe. I remember our first meeting, in Oslo. His paper, which was to open the International Congress, was scheduled for the next morning. The night before, very late, he entered a restaurant that was about to close. There was nothing available there except for a cup of coffee; he explained that he had been caught by a storm above Newfoundland, and that his plane had been delayed so that he had just arrived. When I told a friend about this later, he said that it was quite natural for Jakobson to appear for his lecture directly out of a storm above Newfoundland. It was natural in his life to come out of a storm to present the opening paper at a congress. The first storm that coincided with one of Jakobson's many achievements was, in a broad sense, the Russian version of Futurism, the avantgarde movement to which he remained faithful till the end. Again I will recall his words from our last conversation. Leaving Russia the last time, 49

ROMAN JAKOBSON: THE FUTURE

he said, was for him a very difficult thing to do; yet he could bear it, because he was already thinking about the future, about what would happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the next. That was the way he lived — not with the memory of the past, but with tomorrow. Let us, too, when thinking about him, try to think more about the future, and to look at our past through this future, so that Jakobson remains for us what he was: the guest from the future. I think in the science and culture of our time, too, he was a stranger, a visitor from the time to come, and not simply a chapter of our history. Futurism was innate in him, as in a man who lived by the future. That is why Xlebnikov was so close to him, and why all his life Jakobson used to say that for him, Xlebnikov was the most important, the most fundamental poet of the twentieth century. From the point of view of technique, one theme united them: the theme of sound and meaning. In Jakobson's last major work, The Sound Shape of Language, written jointly with Linda Waugh [Bloomington, 1979], there is a wonderful chapter (Chapter FV), which has perhaps been underestimated by the critics. The reason, I think, is again the same: it belongs to the future science of language, of poetry, of the word. In our time, it is not common to talk about the magic powers of language. Therefore, when an entire part of a scholarly work is devoted to these questions, it puzzles linguists who are not accustomed to speak in such terms. For them, the way man speaks with God, what glossolalia is, or any other description of the magical essence of the word seems to be something that lies beyond the borders of science. But this is precisely a domain that the science of the future will begin to consider. The epigraph to this chapter says: que tels sons signifient ceci, i.e. 'that such and such sounds designate this'. The epigraph is taken from Mallarme. From the recently published Dialogues (between Roman Osipovic and Krystyna Pomorska) [Paris, 1980], we learn that Mallarme was the topic of one of his schoolboy compositions. He recalls, in the Dialogues, his teacher of French, who appreciated his interest and understanding of the poetry of the turn of the century, and encouraged his work on Mallarme. So the epigraph refers to the very early period in which Jakobson's scholarly activity began. At the same time, it refers to something that science will be occupied with long after Jakobson: the understanding that sounds are interesting not in themselves, but because they communicate certain meanings.

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This is not merely a technical problem, but has a much broader significance as well. All his life, Jakobson was occupied with meaning and meaningfulness while other people's main preoccupation was with meaninglessness and the absence of sense. This in particular was the cause of the controversy between American linguists and Jakobson, when he first came to America. The mainstream of American linguistics at that time was immersed in a rather formal, and essentially mechanistic, description of language, and the ideas that Jakobson brought were all still in the future. Now, in America, the names of two Russian scholars — Baxtin and Vygotskij — have become fashionable: conferences are organized, articles published about these two outstanding scholars of the twentieth century. However, when Jakobson first mentioned these scholars, in the 1940's and 1950's, America did not pay attention, although he spoke about them quite often. And when Roman Osipovic came to Moscow in 1956, it was at his lectures that the students heard the name of Vygotskij for the first time. Vygotskij was not yet known here, since this was before his works were republished. The students also heard for the first time about Baxtin, whose book was also forgotten. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing happened in linguistics. While in our country, Jakobson remains to be discovered in the future, in America, much of what was always obvious for him is only now beginning to be understood. Thus of the two countries to which Roman Osipovic was tied — Russia by his origins and America by the last period of his life — both were to the same extent, and at different periods, unprepared to appreciate his scholarly ideas. He was always ahead, and only now will people begin to understand what he himself had always understood. Everything in sound, in poetry, in culture interested Jakobson from the point of view of its meaning — in an epoch that most of the time tried to see all this as something devoid of sense. And because of this, his relations with the epoch were not as smooth as it might appear from simply looking at the list of everything he did. He did these things rather in spite of all that was happening around him. How does all this relate to Xlebnikov and to the Futurism Jakobson started with? Rather than analyzing, I shall provide an example that came to Jakobson himself when he wrote one of his later works. He quotes the following lines of Xlebnikov: ί,ίο sestvujut tvorjane, Zamenivsi D na T.

ROMAN JAKOBSON: THE FUTURE

Herein lies the entire idea of language that united Jakobson with Xlebnikov. What is the meaning of tvorjane ['creators' — Xlebnikov's neologism] who 'changed d into i'? It means that dvorjane ['noblemen'] and tvorjane differ by one distinctive feature: voicing versus voicelessness. It means that it is sufficient to change voicing into voicelessness in order to distinguish between the protagonists of Xlebnikov's poem "Ladomir" from the people of Russia who lived there before the situation described in "Ladomir". It means that Xlebnikov uses distinctive features in practice, while Jakobson devotes the greater part of his scholarly activity to the development of a similar approach to language in terms of theory. The epoch to which Jakobson belonged understood everything in terms of discreteness — all that exists in the world, in culture, in language was perceived as composed of discrete elements, in contrast to the very different approach that prevailed in nineteenth-century science. Jakobson was deeply aware of this in his capacity of discoverer of the distinctive features, which he called the elementary quanta of language, and which he discussed with Niels Bohr at a seminar at MIT. What is less well-known, and still unpublished — I know it only by word of mouth — is that Jakobson was intensely interested in the subsequent development of the same ideas in physics, including the present theories of quarks. At a meeting of the American Physical Society, he gave a talk about the etymology of the word quark, which appears in the transrational novel Finnegans Wake, by Joyce. From there, it was taken up by the creators of the theory of quarks as designating something transrational, senseless, and therefore suitable for designating elements that in a way do not exist, and which are at the same time the basis of everything that exists. Jakobson showed in his paper that Joyce took the word quark from the Viennese German Quark. This word, which means 'cottage cheese', is related to Russian tvarog and Slovak tvarog. Its etymology is the same as that of French fromage, which is connected with the wellknown word forma, just as tvarog is connected with the root of tvorenie 'creation'. So the term designating the most basic elements that determine the form of the universe goes back to a word that etymologically means 'form, essence, creation'. And physicists who thought that Joyce had used a senseless word were deceived. The preceding constitutes an interesting argument for the proposition that the twentieth century is unable to escape into nonsense. At the very moment when it seems to enter the region of

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senselessness, it returns to the source, to the very essence of things. This is the gist of Jakobson's recent work. There is another side to Jakobson's linguistic work that is less wellknown than the theory of distinctive features. I refer to what Jakobson did in the sphere of morphology, where he made basic changes in the traditional understanding of morphs. He introduced into classical linguistics — with which he had strong differences — a new understanding of morphology. He saw morphology as a system of particles of grammatical elements that always relate to meaning. In this way, he came to separate out 'submorphs', that is, components of morphs, which stand in a fixed relation with particular grammatical meanings. This remarkable idea was developed in his later works on the verbal and nominal systems, and has been further developed in our Institute. In my opinion, this area of Jakobson's work is still underestimated. It was his understanding of the spell of sounds that enabled him to discover in morphs submorphemic particles, such as an m-element in certain of the Russian case endings and their historical prototypes, up to Indo-European; such endings are correlated with their grammatical meanings by means of these particles, rather than globally by means of entire morphs. This is something similar to what he did in the theory of distinctive features. And so I return to the basic theme that always occupied him, the relationship of sound and meaning. Let me simply enumerate what else he did with regard to this theme. Above all, he conceived of new ways of thinking about parallelism. Rather than as a purely technical device, as it was perceived in poetics, parallelism was shown by Jakobson to be one of the basic ideas that provides the key to the structure of any poetic text. He developed this further by applying it to the questions of asymmetry that I mentioned above. Another one of Jakobson's ideas, I think, is better known than that of sound and meaning, with their far-reaching correspondences, and therefore I shall mention it only briefly: that is the idea that in any semiotic system, two axes are at work, the vertical and the horizontal; the first is connected with the metaphoric and the second with the metonymic pole, and this holds everywhere: in poetry, in myth, in ritual, in dreams, in neuroses, in various artistic modes of the cinema, to mention only those examples that Roman Osipovic analyzed himself.

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Let me clarify this idea. What is the nature of the metaphoric element, from the point of view of the history'of culture? It is apparently a characteristic of particularly stormy epochs in history that they can express themselves only in a metaphorical style; the end of such an epoch is marked by a departure from the metaphorical style. The beginning of the century, to which the early works of Jakobson belong biographically, was such an intensely metaphorical epoch, as was Russian Futurism, and the Futurist poet Majakovskij, to whom Jakobson was close. The rest of the twentieth century gradually but decisively departed from metaphoric towards metonymic orientation, and now art is entirely oriented toward the close-up, toward detail. Examples can be quoted from almost any writer who is considered characteristic of the twentieth century, such as Boll, Salinger, etc. They themselves admit that in their poetics, it is the telling detail that is essential, and metonymy is the representation of the detail as such and not as a symbol or as a metaphor. Biographically, Jakobson occupied a position between the metaphorical period of the beginning of the century and the metonymical period of its second half. Yet in his work, he successfully defined the contrast between these two elements, and illustrated it with a vast and diversified body of material from various types of cultural and semiotic activities. I will give only one example, perhaps the most brilliant one — Jakobson's work on Pasternak's prose, published in 1935 [SW V, 416— 432]. Pasternak himself valued it very highly, and considered it to be the major work written about him. Jakobson shows that, as a prose writer, Pasternak belongs entirely to the metonymical way of thinking, as opposed to Pasternak the poet, especially the early Pasternak, who belongs entirely to the epoch of the metaphor. It is interesting that Pasternak's later prose confirmed this idea, so that once again Jakobson appears to have predicted the future. Pasternak's prose often takes the reader by surprise. It is constructed as a continuous and seemingly unjustified series of shifts from one situation to another. These shifts based on contiguity are entirely strange to the reader, who is used to a prose based on cause-effect relationships. These are absent in Pasternak's prose, just as they are absent in many scientific studies. Jakobson understood that this is a manifestation of a more general characteristic, pertaining both to style and culture. Later, he applied the same ideas concerning the vertical and horizontal axes in his studies on brain and language.

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VJACESLAV V. IVANOV

The vast body of Jakobson's scholarship actually comprises many questions addressed to the future. For example, Roman Osipovic used to say long ago that relatively soon, neural mechanisms for the identification of phonemes would be discovered. At that time, this was considered science fiction. Now, it has become the subject of serious discussions. Jakobson belongs to that powerful trend in our culture that is larger than just linguistics and literary studies, one to which the names of Baxtin and Vygotskij also belong. This trend — at a time when no one even thought about it — interpreted culture in a completely new way, and this is reflected in a key work by Jakobson that he himself called the 'triple M': 'Medieval mock mystery' [SW VI, 666-690]. Originally published in the Festschrift for Leo Spitzer, this article on the Czech medieval mystery analyzes with remarkable clarity the phenomenon that today bears the fashionable name of the 'Carnival culture', or the Carnival tradition in culture. Jakobson's article drew attention to something in culture that until then was simply unknown or unnoticed — that is, the unofficial part of culture, as Baxtin called it. Jakobson himself not only researched that culture, but was himself its embodiment. What then is his place in the culture of our time? He was an embodiment of the Carnival principle of culture. I remember what he said ä propos the numerous volumes on Russian Formalism that keep on appearing. The Formalists themselves wrote rather little, but many thousands of pages have been written on them. Jakobson remarked that it seemed strange to him to read such elaborate scholarly compositions on the history of Formalism, equipped with the entire scholarly apparatus of footnotes, bibliographies etc., because the Formalists themselves worked for fun, treated their work as something cheerful — I would even say that for them it was a game. They behaved like some sort of homines ludentes, 'people at play', as always happens in epochs fundamental for the development of human culture. (Socrates was by no means always serious.) All of this did not make Jakobson's coexistence with official science especially easy. I have already referred to American descriptive linguistics, and more generally to the research characteristic of American linguistics in the fifties. Note that the harshest criticism directed against that research, and the one that achieved international recognition, arose from Chomsky — a

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direct pupil of Jakobson. In many respects, Chomsky's ideas clearly derive, in fact, from Jakobson; the immediate connection between them is apparent to every careful reader of Chomsky's early works. The Futurism and avant-gardism of Jakobson's beginnings remained forever an essential part of him. But not in the sense that he would remain for long in the same place. He very quickly departed from his own self. This was a special manifestation of his Futurism. He once said that he was like the Baron von Münchhausen, who pulled himself up by his own hair. He always wanted to be unidentical with himself. So when I speak of his avant-gardism, I don't mean that he got stuck in the old, historical trend. I mean that an inner avant-gardism was a part of him, which is never a part of any established science. This is an interesting aspect that makes the majority of Jakobson's works on the history of science autobiographical. Whether he speaks of Peirce as a genius for whom no American university was able to find a place, or of Baudouin, who wrote his best things in Kazan', geographically cut off from contemporary and accepted theories of grammar, Jakobson had always his own experience in mind. It is very difficult for a real avant-garde person, even simply for a Russian intellectual — a Russian philologist, as Jakobson defined himself in an interview — to exist among the conventions that generally constitute the scholarly routine in any country. All of the catastrophes that were the constant companions of Jakobson's scientific discoveries may have prevented him from submitting to a framework of scholarly routine. In our times, we are experiencing a growing impoverishment of science, typical of the end of a century. Science is becoming more and more a mass effort, and yields less and less interesting results. Experiments simply prove previously proposed theories. In the past, theories preceded experiments, whereas now, theories of that sort are almost nonexistent. Again and again, experiments confirm something done long ago, and we live by the heritage of the first half of the twentieth century. We have gathered here to present various concrete examples of scholarship, and thus to pay tribute to Roman Jakobson, who always thought about the most general matters in concrete terms, with reference to particular examples, and always spoke about this clearly and understandably. Today we remember Jakobson as proof that one can do scientific work cheerfully, without pedantry or routine, that one can do it as some-

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thing great and meaningful, that one can do it under any circumstances, even in the face of catastrophes — and successfully. Vjaceslav V. Ivanov Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the Academy of Sciences, USSR (A lecture presented in the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies; Moscow, September 17,1982.)

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PART TWO

HOMAGES AND REMINISCENCES

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Dell Hymes

In Memoriam: Roman Jakobson If language is an essence of what it is to be human, The language of language, linguistics, was the essence of your life; Your work and fame became a country continents wide, Moscow, Prague, Oslo, New York, Cambridge, Paris, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, its provincial capitals, The scholars friends, citizen-soldiers of its progress, Each new audience new witnesses to its history. How they flocked to hear you in Moscow, 1964, That August morning, overflowing the scheduled room, Officials of the Congress coming and going, flustered, A hallway commandeered, Olga Sergeevna and I Having to search out extra chairs, she shaking her head, Ί told them last night that room would not be large enough' — Your Ocen' interesnyj' floated out to the last row. A little flowery, a little vain, a memory Vast and loyal, you made your way through revolution, Languages, wars, deans, and Yankee condescension; And death? It is for us to see to that, Roman, If we can. Only you could be, in heart as much as fame, First Linguist to the world, but we can keep nothing of language Alien to us, our citizenship in the country that you loved. University of Pennsylvania July 20, 1982

Linda R. Waugh

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept, as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. And now that you are lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take. - William Johnson Cory (after Callimachus)

On October 11, 1896, Western calendar, the world saw the beginning of the life of the man whose spirit and intellect we now celebrate. On July 18,1982, he left us both richer and poorer: poorer because of the loss which we suffer, poorer because we miss so profoundly those nightingales, those multifarious voices, which resounded in his world; richer because of what he left behind, because of what his intellect and his spirit gave to us, because of the voices he created for us. I would like to pay tribute to those voices of his which we were all privileged to share in. We pay tribute to that warm and generous voice of friendship and scholarship which told us we were better than we were and which made us feel greater, uplifted, as if we too were capable of the same leaps of insight as he; which believed in us even when we fell short of his expectations and which believed in us at times more than we believed in ourselves; which could tire not only the sun but his interlocutors and collaborators with talking and writing and which, even when 80 years old, could tire out his 34-year-old collaborator;

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which believed fiercely in his friends and intimates and was just as fierce against those who disappointed him; which could tell anecdotes and jokes and give personal advice and dwell on intellectual matters all in the same conversation; which was at home in Moscow and Prague and Brno and Copenhagen and Oslo and Uppsala and New York and La Jolla and Ossabaw Island and Peacham, Vermont, and Cambridge; which made us believe that it was truly tireless, that it would never stop, that it would always be with us. We pay tribute also to that multilingual voice which caressed many different languages and spoke excellent Russian through all of them and which deemed Russian to be the most subtle and the most perfect for the expression of its thoughts; which ranged over many languages and many cultures in its search for antecedents, for poetic examples, for foci of analysis and yet returned constantly and faithfully to its own Slavic and especially its Russian basis and heritage. We pay tribute to that dialogic voice which never relinquished the belief in the fundamentally dialogic and communicative nature of language and which sought always a dialogue with others and for which the creation of a scientific text was done first and foremost through and as a dialogue and which generously gave tribute to younger collaborators and assistants who shared in that dialogue. We pay tribute to the evocative and inspiring voice which wasted not one word and sought to invest as much meaning as possible in each word and phrase and sentence; whose expressive magic could make us believe in almost anything, so powerful it was; which could fight long and hard over an epithet or a phrase and when searching for the apt expression tirelessly tried synonyms and nearsynonyms and metaphorical substitutes more often than not gleaned from the wealth of the Russian language; which could struggle half a day over the correct wording of a short paragraph and sometimes end up by throwing it out and thus found its written 64

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expression through painstaking labor, prodded by articles and books, dictionaries and thesauruses; which combined polemics and wit and literary allusions and metaphorical relations and the articulation of factual details often in the same sentence; which exemplified, itself, that 'there exists in the word, in the verb, something sacred which prohibits us from viewing it as a mere game of chance. [He knew full well that] to manipulate language with wisdoTn is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.' We pay tribute to that erudite voice whose richness of texture was due just as much to the attention he paid to each word and phrase as to the extraordinary range of ideas which lay behind every phrase; which embraced with equal fervor mythological discourse, epic discourse, proverbial discourse, folkloristic discourse, poetic discourse, and scientific discourse, and could combine all of these in a network which was as compelling as it was awe-inspiring; which launched programmatic statements and showed the way to others in more fields than most of us can hope to understand. We pay tribute to that intellectual voice which believed in the force of the intellect and in the supreme importance of intellectual matters; which could break emphatically and violently with a tradition it didn't agree with and at the same time cling tenaciously and creatively to its own tradition; which found its tradition as much in the turbulent artistic movements of the early 20th century in painting, artistic prose, poetry, music and architecture as in philosophy, topology, physics, literary analysis, philology and linguistics; which evolved and in the dynamics of evolution found its creativity, but which remained ever the same and in the steadfastness of its own conceptual basis found its creativity; which could return even after many years' absence to old problems but always with new insights; which could say that all of his work was only understood 25 years later, and could mourn that he wouldn't see that later reception of his most recent work;

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which loathed blind empiricism on the one hand and pure abstractionism on the other and sought a structural and phenomenological basis and which subbornly believed in the reality of facts but just as stubbornly sought an explanation for those facts in systemic and relational fundamentals; which couldn't believe in data without some constructive principle and couldn't believe in generalizations without their empirical support; which has opened up many more vistas and showed us many more pathways of scientific and poetic endeavor than we can hope to pursue in our own lifetimes. We pay tribute to that poetic voice which at first created poetry that took us beyond the senses and the sensical and later sought to find the sense of poetry in the equivalences and differences at all levels of poetic discourse; which lovingly recreated the poetry of many different linguistic traditions and declaimed poetry and gave scientific lectures with equal enthusiasm and grace and which invested scientific prose with a literary and poetic dimension; which loved poetry above all other functions of language and carried on a life-long love affair with the poetic function of language. We pay tribute to that metaphorical voice which could find the metaphorical in the metonymical combined, but taught hierarchy and difference and markedness and was itself markedly metaphorical and thus spoke simultaneously in a plurality of worlds and could jump from one to the other seemingly effortlessly and bring them together in bold and surprising ways; which sought invariants and equivalences, parallelisms and similarities in all matters; which could shock the interlocutor by seeking parallelisms and equivalences and metaphorical relations where no one else would dare to and yet through that reach an insight which gripped the interlocutor through its clarity and its fecundity. We pay tribute to that dialectic and structuralist voice which enthusiastically believed in relationships, not things, and pursued things-in-relations; which stubbornly believed in the reality of facts and just as stubbornly celebrated their relational and systemic basis; 66

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which could see simultaneously the intense incompatibility and inalienability of the cardinal dichotomies of language and attempt to bridge the gap between them; which embraced relativity on the one hand and truth on the other with equal enthusiasm and decisiveness and for which the objective viewpoint was as well the relational, functional, and teleological viewpoint; which stubbornly believed that 'what fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes'. We pay tribute to that semiotic voice which deemed the sign to be the fundamental unit of language and of other human communicative systems and for which interpretation and translation were constant semiotic behavior. We pay tribute to the linguistic voice which celebrated the wonder and beauty of language, and which believed in the architecture of words and the plasticity of language; for which the plasticity of language revived words anew, clothing them in flesh and blood ... 'the substantive in its substantial majesty, the adjective, the transparent garment clothing and coloring it like glaze, and the verb, the angel of motion who gives impetus to the sentence'; that voice for which words were not mere substitutes for their denotata, but signs in their own right; for which 'words have, in themselves and aside from the sense that they express, their own beauty and value'; whose own quest for the essence of language led him to leave aside nothing which was connected with language; which found truly meaningless the meaning-less study of language; whose love for grammar led him to seek out the poetry and the immanent structure and semantic basis of grammatical categories and whose love for poetry led him to search for the grammatical structure of poetry; whose interest in the sound shape of language grew out of his early poetic studies and developed into his theory of distinctive features and culminated in his search for the ultimate constituents of language; for which meaning without sound is groundless and sound without meaning is futile, 'and which believed utterly in the communicative function of language and in its teleological foundation and refused to 67

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believe in chance and arbitrariness and disorder, and celebrated lawfulness even when the laws were being transgressed; for which language was a social and cultural fact, a psychological and conceptual fact, a semiotic fact, a poetic and literary fact, a cerebral and mental fact; which could in the brief span of six lessons trace the framework for the study of the relationship between sound and meaning; and which even in early July 1982 on the one hand was fascinated by recent research on the relationship of distinctive features and the brain, and on the other hand was eager to return to the question of metalanguage and its importance for an understanding of language structure. But while Roman had these many voices and more, we can search, just as he searched throughout his life, for the invariant in the sea of contextual variation, for that which binds them together, which is the keystone for his work and which is the voice behind the voices — namely, his love for language in all its facets. To paraphrase the poet W. S. Graham, 'what is the language using us f o r ? . . . What I am making is a place for language in my life which I want to be a real place . . .' Roman Jakobson, the master-explorer of language, made a real place for language in his life just as surely as he allowed language to speak through him and just as surely as he created for us new languages, new voices. And just as our voices echo what he taught us, so his voices, his nightingales, are with us still and will be in written form, in recorded tape, and most of all in our thoughts — 'For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take'. Cornell University

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Sir Isaiah Berlin

I am not qualified to assess the achievements of Roman Jakobson in the world of learning, or even of thought. But even I know that everyone who has ever read his work, or even met him, knows that he was a man of immense intellectual power, exceptional originality, audacity of thought and imaginative breadth and depth. His erudition was very great; he was a master of the provinces both of Slavic studies and linguistics, of extraordinary range. But I know of no one else in whom these attributes were combined with so rich a personal culture, so much insight, poetry, and sheer creative genius, fused into astonishing unity by his controlled but deeply passionate temperament, which exercised so much sway over students, professional and amateur, of every subject that he touched. I am proud and happy to have won his friendship; in his company one felt, as perhaps did many others, that one was on an ascending curve, more intelligent, more sensitive, more interesting than one in fact was or could be. This gift of being the cause of life and intellectual delight in others made every meeting, indeed, every form of association with him marvellously — and, if I may say so, permanently — exhilarating and wholly unforgettable. It is given to very few to be so inexhaustible a source of new and important ideas and increase of vitality and ingenuity of mind for so many in so many lands, beginning in his native Russia during the early years of the Revolution, and then wherever literature and language are held of account. I feel honored and grateful to be given this opportunity of saying how much the genius and the friendship of this wonderful man meant to me. Oxford University

Claude Levi-Strauss

J'ai rencontre dans ma vie quelques grands hommes. Mais, si je devais designer celui d'entre eux auquel Pepithete s'applique de la facon la plus indiscutable, ce serait, sans hesiter, Roman Jakobson. Que voulons-nous dire, en effet, quand nous parlons d'un 'grand homme'? Non pas, certes, une personnalite seulement originale et attachante; et pas davantage 1'auteur d'une oeuvre considerable, mais qu'on a du mal ä relier ä la personne de son createur. Ce qui frappait d'abord tous ceux qui approcherent Roman Jakobson, c'etait, au contraire, la parente saisissante entre l'homme et son oeuvre. De pair avec ses ecrits, sä personne rayonnait d'une vitalite prodigieuse. Une meme generosite, une meme force demonstrative, une meme verve etincelante identifiaient les contacts personnels qu'on avait avec lui et la connaissance qu'en la lisant, on prenait d'une oeuvre qui a donne ses assises definitives ä la theorie linguistique, et qui a exerce son influence bien au-delä, en apportant ä Pensemble des sciences humaines une nouvelle inspiration. Probablement pour cette raison, notre pensee refuse d'admettre que Roman Jakobson soit mort. La grandeur de l'ceuvre et celle de la personne se confondaient de fagon si intime que I'une reste ä jamais vivante dans l'autre. La geniale ampleur de ses idees, la chaleur de son eloquence, la richesse et la vivacite de tous ses propos, le charme, aussi, qui emanait de sä conversation, tout cela, qui faisait de Roman Jakobson un etre unique, nous le retrouvons — et ceux qui viendront apres nous continueront de le percevoir — ä travers l'oeuvre immense qu'il nous laisse et qui le conserve present parmi nous. College de France

In the course of my life I have encountered some great men. But if I were to name the person to whom this epithet applies indisputably, it would be, without a doubt, Roman Jakobson. What do we mean, in fact, when we speak of a 'great man'? Certainly not just an original and engaging personality, nor even the author of a distinguished body of work, which may be difficult to relate to the personality of its creator. On the contrary, what struck those who approached Roman Jakobson was, above all, the extraordinary kinship between the man and his work. In harmony with his writings, his personality radiated a prodigious vitality. The same generosity, the same demonstrative strength, the same effervescent spirit defined one's contact with him as well as the perception that in reading his works, one was in touch with an ceuvre that gave definitive foundations to linguistic theory; it exercised, in fact, an influence far beyond that field, lending the body of human sciences a new inspiration. Probably for that very reason our minds reject the idea that Roman Jakobson could be dead. The grandeur of his work and of his person are so intimately linked that the one remains alive forever within the other. The brilliant profusion of his ideas, the warmth of his eloquence, the richness and vivacity of his words, and the charm emanating from his conversation: everything that made Roman Jakobson a unique being we rediscover — and those who come after us will continue to perceive it — through the immense body of work that he left us, and that makes him forever present among us. College de France

Morris Halle

Jakobson's scholarship is largely a matter of public record and will live long after all of us are gone. But Jakobson's contribution as a teacher is stored in the memory of the relatively small number among us who were fortunate to have been taught by him, and may thus be 'interred with our bones'. In the thirty-three years that I knew Jakobson we rarely if ever talked about teaching. And this was the first great lesson about teaching I learned from him; namely that many matters — perhaps most — are best taught not directly by abstract discussion and explicit advice, but indirectly by example and demonstration. The demonstration began at the second meeting I had with Roman, a meeting which took place under somewhat inauspicious circumstances. In December of 1948 Jakobson had been in a serious automobile accident, as a result of which he was hospitalized for a number of weeks. As he had let it be known that he would welcome visits from students in the department, I and two other students went to see him at the Columbia University Medical Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. (Years later Jakobson pointed out to me that his hospital room resembled the set of one of the scenes in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, a fact that I had not failed to notice myself.) Jakobson received us with great warmth, spoke about the course of his recovery, and for about ten minutes engaged in the social chit-chat that is normal on such occasions. Once he judged that he had adequately discharged his social obligations, he abruptly switched the conversation by asking each of us what research we were engaged in at the moment. The three of us, being first-year students, had rather little to contribute and were a bit uneasy about it. I believe that by way of justification I said that

MORRIS HALLE

I felt that all the easy problems had already been solved by earlier generations of scholars, and that what was left for us was either extremely difficult or altogether insoluble. Jakobson's reaction to this remark was to tell me that he knew of numerous problems of varying degrees of difficulty that had not been solved. He then enumerated half a dozen or more of such problems, among which I remember the following: Slavic glosses in medieval Hebrew writings; the influence of Slavic and Baltic languages on the phonology of the co-territorial Yiddish dialects; the morphophonemics of inflection and derivation in Slavic; and finally, the nature of the Baltic and Slavic accentual systems. He ended by saying that he had already done work on each of these topics and had accumulated significant amounts of data and bibliographies, which he would be glad to turn over to me, should I wish to work on one of these topics, for, he remarked, Ί have so many ideass in my head that I shall never live long enough to work properly on even a tiny fraction of them'. I found this response incredibly elating. More than any single event, it showed me that I had finally gotten on the right track, or at least found someone who could be depended upon to guide me to it. And I daresay that there are a number of people who had much the same experience in the course of their studies with Roman. To guide students to productive areas of research is, however, only one of the essential services that outstanding teachers provide for their students. Of equal, if not of greater importance to the learning process, is that a teacher must motivate students to work hard, to push themselves to the limits of their capabilities and occasionally even a bit beyond, for it has almost always been true that the easy problems have already been solved by earlier generations of scholars. The crucial element in Jakobson's approach to motivating his students was constantly to keep before our eyes the big picture, the ultimate aim towards which all our research was directed. The aim, as Jakobson articulated it, was grandiose indeed. It was nothing less than to gain an understanding of man's place in the world through the detailed study of the myriad manifestations of language, the most essential of human faculties. To fill in this big picture there was need for information on topics of the most disparate sort: from the orthographic conventions of the medieval Russian codex known as the Sbornik of 1076 to the latest experiments in psychoacoustics, from the covert sexual symbolism of Russian folk dances to Charles Sanders Peirce's researches into the nature 73

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of sign systems, from Saxmatov's discoveries about the vowel system of the dialect of the village of Leka in West Central Russia to the aesthetic theories of Formalist literary critics. All these topics and many more had a definite place in the scheme of things, which Jakobson never tired of explaining in his lectures. And he never failed to refer in his lectures to work by students in the program. As a result, those of us who were working with Roman quickly developed a feeling of being participants in a common enterprise of great excitement; we were all of us members of a true community of scholars. These feelings of community, this esprit de corps, were much amplified in 1949 when Jakobson moved from Columbia to Harvard and brought most of Columbia's Slavic department with him. Those of us who participated in the hegira will no doubt recall the strange feeling of moving to a new place with one's social structure largely intact. We came to a place that was strange and new to each of us,.yet it was we who were the oldtimers, the in-group. And this group feeling persisted for many years afterwards. Important and creative though these pedagogical devices were, none of them would have been fully effective in the absence of Jakobson's unquestioning acceptance of and respect for each and every student. Jakobson dealt with a beginning student with the same courtesy and complete seriousness as he dealt with university presidents, prime ministers, or professional colleagues. Although Roman could on occasion be extremely cutting, especially when he felt unjustly attacked by his critics, I cannot recall one instance where he 'put down' a student in his class, and there were many occasions where a lesser person would not have resisted the impulse to respond with a devastating wisecrack. I shall never forget an incident that took place in New York when Roman was still confined to a wheel-chair in consequence of his accident, and lectured not at Columbia but in his apartment on West 116th St. The topic that day was the poetry of the Russian avant-garde, and a student, in a convoluted and somewhat offensive comment, expressed the opinion that poetry that was not immediately accessible to him was nothing but a form of fraud perpetrated on the forever unsuspecting public. In his response Jakobson made no mention of the offensiveness of the question; instead he gave a brief overview of the changes toward immediate accessibility as an aesthetic value that had taken place in poetry throughout history. I do not know what the questioner learned from this answer. 74

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I learned much of interest about the changing aesthetics of poetry. But more importantly I learned that Roman Jakobson was not only a great scholar and teacher, but also that he was the most extraordinary human being that it has been my good fortune to have encountered. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

75

Horace G. Lunt

The Symposium [Part I of this volume] provided varied and eloquent testimony about the stature of Roman Jakobson as a creative scholar, a man of ideas whose theories have been influential all over the world and in many fieds. I should like rather to focus on Roman Jakobson the teacher, the compelling lecturer who commanded the attention of his listeners even in spite of themselves. I heard him for the first time in the summer of 1946, at a time when his English pronunciation was still so foreign that a novice could easily fail to get even the gist of many sentences. The topic — the Indo-European heritage of Slavic metrical patterns — was entirely new to me. I understood almost nothing and was therefore unimpressed. Still, after a year in Czechoslovakia, I went to study with Professor Jakobson because I had decided on my own that the study of Slavic linguistics was the most fascinating subject in the world. His brilliant lectures at Columbia in 1947—49 rapidly expanded my horizons and stimulated me to think and work as hard and productively as I could. It was no particular surprise to me that I was enthralled by his presentations, for I was delighted with any reasonably competent exposition of those particular topics. What did surprise me was that certain of my fellow students, people who deigned to study language only for urgent practical reasons and who scorned the very idea of technical or theoretical linguistics, were openly enthusiastic about Jakobson's courses. It became clear to me, as I attended Roman's lectures to extremely varied groups at Columbia and Harvard, that the individual members of every single audience responded with an enthusiasm that was often a surprise to the individual. Let me illustrate the reaction of a listener whom Roman compelled to pay attention by quoting a conversation my colleague Donald Fanger, the literary scholar, has often repeated to me. After a particularly stimulating

HORACE G. LUNT

lunchtime discussion with Roman, Don was moved to express to Roman the pleasure it had given him some years before to attend every lecture in a course Jakobson had given on the Russian verb — a subject in which previously Don's interest had hardly ever risen to the level of the desultory. He added that Roman was the only lecturer he had heard who seemed constitutionally incapable of being dull, and asked, 'How do you do it?' Roman's answer ran as follows: 'It is simple. I go into the classroom, and I see that young man in the corner worrying about where he will find the money to repair his car. I see a young woman at the front wondering whether she will receive a certain phone call tonight. I see someone else looking at the life outside the window. And my job is to make all these people, for the space of one hour, believe that the denasalization of nasal vowels in the tenth century is the most important thing in the world? And that is precisely what Roman did consistently, on the lecture platform and off of it. Whatever the subject, for as long as he was talking, it was the most important in he whole world. It was this passionate engagement that was communicated to his listeners, this sense of urgency that impelled many to realize that careful attention to linguistic structure could enhance the understanding of their own (supposedly nonlinguistic) fields. Jakobson's magnificent teaching ability manifested itself in discussions with individual students in a different way. He could make even a nervous or diffident student feel that his or her intellectual interests were of great importance. He would skillfully turn what a student expected to be a recitation of the standard explanation of generally known facts into a critical discussion. The student would suddenly perceive flaws in the work of revered authorities, and, with a thrilling flash of insight, would realize that major work in crucial areas not only needed to be done, but was possibly within his or her own power to accomplish. We were required to know the standard literature, but we were led to understand that it was incumbent on us to improve on it, to set new standards. Roman made us develop our critical sense, encouraged us to seek new solutions, and above all gave us confidence in our ability to advance scholarship. His lectures and his personal guidance were decisive in determining the scholarly development of his students, and through them, in bringing about significant breakthroughs in linguistics and its many related fields. Let us hope that we can be even half as effective as teachers. Harvard University 77

Calvert Watkins

In the summer of 1950, just before I entered Harvard College, I was talking with an old family friend, Edward Mason of the Harvard Economics department, about my plan to major in Linguistics. Edward Mason then told me that Harvard had just recently been fortunate enough to add one of the world's great linguists to its faculty, 'a Russian named Jakobson'. This was my introduction, at the age of seventeen, to his name and reputation. And the feeling of awe that surrounded that name is as real and vivid to me today as it was on that day thirty-two years ago. Awe can be attenuated by time, and by fellowship and friendship; but it can also be intensified by knowledge, and by love. Awe and sollemnity are also bubbles, which can be pricked. Responding at his 80th birthday dinner to a lengthy series of tributes by friends, which tended to start with the phrase Ί have known Roman for twenty years', or 'thirty years', or 'fifty years', Jakobson answered with 'As for me, I have known myself for eighty years'. But to continue in this discredited autobiographical vein, I saw him face to face a few times in my freshman year, when he gave a talk or someone brought me to a class. The next year I began more or less systematically to listen to everything he taught, and did so for three years running. For it was clear that Jakobson's classes were where one learned what human language was all about. This took place in Sever Hall, but it was no ordinary Harvard education. I recall an evening a couple of years later, a meeting of the Philological Club in Clyde Kluckhohn's house, at which Jakobson was giving the paper (on the history of phonology). It was one of many to be introduced as 'a chapter from my forthcoming book Sound and Meaning'. Dell Hymes and I were present, by invitation of the host and the speaker

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respectively. After the brilliant paper — never published — and a magnificent dinner, the other members of the club took their leave, and Kluckhohn and Jakobson, meekly followed by their two young guests, settled down for what in the South is called some serious drinking. Two hours later or so, after a series of toasts to the memory of Edward Sapir, Baudouin de Courtenay, and countless others, Hymes and I had to restrain the two of them bodily from making placards and picketing President Pusey's house with signs saying 'More linguistics at Harvard!' Harvard has more linguistics now, but it seems a much tamer, quieter place. It could be fairly said that no other linguist, and no other observer of language, has ever seen at once so deeply into the center of language, and so broadly into its periphery, as Roman Jakobson. Casting back to an earlier great age, it is as though a single personality combined Copernicus and Rabelais. His own phrase for his work, one that few if any of us would dare to arrogate, was 'quest for the essence of language'; on his lips it was as right as rain. How far afield this quest took him can only be grasped — and that very imperfectly — by contemplating the range of his bibliography. No other figure in this century could so fairly claim, as he would often do, 'Hnguista sum; nihil linguistici a me alienum puto\ 'Quest for the essence of language' — the image is that of the Holy Grail. Jakobson described the great Genevan Ferdinand de Saussure as 'this eternal pathfinder and wanderer'; the Genevan Robert Godel has applied this description tellingly to Jakobson himself. For despite some fundamental differences, Saussure and Jakobson invite comparison. But in theory as well as in fact they are sequential: the dualities which established and defined linguistics for Saussure were resolved and reunited by Jakobson. For both, language is a double object. Everything in language is a twofold, duplex structure, an oppositional duality: sound and meaning, language and speech, code and message, synchrony and diachrony, and so forth. But while Saussure focused on the duality, on the opposition, Jakobson was the great unifier, the resolver of antinomies, the creator of a more meaningful totality. Self-portraits are revealing, whether plastic or verbal. Rejecting the flat and feckless label 'educator' that the editors of Who's Who are so fond of, Jakobson termed himself 'linguist, literary historian'. Each of us who considers himself just one of these might pause and reflect on this twofold, 79

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duplex structure 'linguist, literary historian', and on the resolution of the antinomy. Jakobson's future biographers will have to ponder what it was about his persona that made him a great figure, a 'genius', if that term is to have any meaning at all. For his greatness was as manifest in how he drank his vodka as in how he treated medieval mock mystery in Czech. It is genius to say that in the sentence Estonia borders on Latvia, Estonia is the 'hero'. Jakobson would claim that he had a poor visual memory, and offer that as the reason, or perhaps the 'excuse', for becoming a Slavist and not a Sinologist. But he saw pictorially as well as verbally the nature of the interrelations of linguistic entities, as his use of models shows, and he repeatedly represented one all-important relation iconically as a mirrorimage rhetorical figure: in 1929 as 'the changes of structure and the structure of changes', then in 1960, repeated in 1981, as 'poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry'. But he also had a sense of the absurd which touched on genius. Who else could illustrate at once the productivity of the Russian augmentative suffix, and the quintessence of linguistic relativity, with the scenario of a Russian physicist — we are in 1953 — looking up from the eyepiece of some preposterous scientific instrument and exclaiming, 'What an enorrrmous electron!'. After Jakobson, no one can ever view the phenomenon of human language in the same way as before. I suspect it may be another generation before the extent of the difference can be truly apprehended. Jakobson made the study of language an art form, and then he pushed it to its limits. As was said of another great linguist half a century ago: 'Everywhere he passed, things appeared clearer, better organized, and more beautiful than they were before'. Harvard University

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Noam Chomsky

In a few words I would not dare to try to say anything serious about Roman's intellectual contributions to an astonishing variety of disciplines, even if I were competent to do so, which in fact I am not. Instead, I'll just keep to some simple personal remarks about what his work, his personal warmth and friendship, and his support and generosity meant to one young student entering the field about thirty years ago. I arrived at Harvard in 1951, after a couple of years of graduate work in linguistics, feeling quite confident that I knew my way about the field. One of the first things I did, naturally, was go to see Roman Jakobson, who was of course a legendary figure. Our first meeting was rather curious — we disagreed about everything imaginable, and became very good friends. I was at that time very much committed to a research program that had its roots in American descriptive linguistics, in relativistic anthropology, and in a kind of latter-day logical positivism. Roman's very different ideas posed a major intellectual challenge to this picture. At the time, he had created an intellectual milieu in Cambridge that had very powerful attraction and that I found myself quickly drawn into, as were many others of that academic generation. Out of this ferment and debate, in which Roman was always a central, even though sometimes an absent, figure, quite a few ideas were formed and developed — many of them his, others bearing his imprint — which have had a significant impact on the development of linguistics and cognitive psychology, and fields that I know nothing about, in the following years. What kind of a challenge did Roman's way of thinking pose to the approaches to language that were prevalent in linguistics and many other fields at that time? At the heart of the matter, I think, is the question of the seriousness of the endeavor. For Roman, linguistics was a science that sought to discover something fundamental, something real and invariant,

NOAM CHOMSKY

in the real world — something analogous, let's say, to the laws of physics. To many people today that may not seem very controversial, but this was certainly not the case at the time. American linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language took quite seriously the idea expressed by no less a figure than Edward Sapir that language is a human activity that can vary without assignable limit — something that Sapir certainly didn't mean literally, but that did express an attitude that was pervasive and influential. In my own training, linguistics was a system of ingenious analytic techniques that could be used to yield a systematic organization of data, which in principle could be done in many different ways. For others, language was an adventitious habit structure mirroring the environment, and so on. As far as Roman was concerned, all of this was deeply wrong from the start. In phonology, for example, there was a fixed inventory of atomic elements, and universal laws governing their combinations — a view that was often rejected at the time as 'absolutist'. The enterprise was not one of data analysis, but rather of discovery, and it was therefore answerable to evidence of a very wide scope: from child language, aphasia, poetics, the study of the production and perception of speech, and many other areas. Linguistics had the task of discovering explanatory principles, and nothing having to do with language was alien to its concerns (a phrase that has often been used with reference to Roman himself). All of this presented an exciting vista, which challenged the imagination in a way that made other approaches to the study of language seem pallid in comparison. Quite apart from Roman's specific ideas and contributions, this way of thinking about the subject is certain to have a lasting impact — in fact, many different impacts, since it can be variously interpreted, being a rich and complex legacy. I was never actually a student of Roman's, technically speaking, but my own thinking was very much influenced by his work, and in other ways, too, he had a significant influence on my personal life. In fact, it's very unlikely that I would have stayed in the field at all if it hadn't been for his interest and encouragement, which at the time was quite unusual among professional linguists. And this was all the more unusual, because he really didn't agree with what I was doing, and he thought it was probably not on the right track. But he nevertheless encouraged me to continue with it, even though I was somewhat reluctant to do so at the time, because of considerations that will not be foreign to students today: namely the uncertainty or apparent impossibility of employment, or even,

NOAM CHOMSKY

at that time, publication. In these respects, too, Roman was very helpful and supportive; in fact, that's the major reason why linguistics developed at MIT. It's quite unlikely that what did develop here could have been managed at any other academic or research institution at the time, and Roman was always influential in facilitating and helping to guide the developments that took place here. So apart from a major intellectual debt, I also owe him a great personal debt, and I know that many others can say the same. Fifty or sixty years ago, major figures in the field felt that they could write books with the title Language, and in fact several did so. Perhaps Roman was the last person who could have attempted any such thing, and could in fact have succeeded in doing it, perhaps the last person ever. He also bears a large measure of responsibility for the fact that the goal now seems beyond reach, as the field has exploded in many new directions, very largely under his influence. This in itself is a considerable achievement of the remarkable person whom we now honor and remember. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Walter A. Rosenblith

Around mid-century Cambridge was intellectually incredibly alive. The disciplines were recovering from the World War, new technologies were changing the face of many sciences, and ambitious attempts at a wideranging synthesis — such as cybernetics — challenged earlier philosophical views in the natural sciences. There were many exciting visitors from Europe eager to partake of this perpetual symposium and to contribute their newly-gained insights and perspectives. It was into this somewhat noisy environment that Roman Jakobson came. His encyclopedic knowledge and his youthfully enthusiastic willingness to come to grips with the new theories of information and communication made his voice heard and his presence felt far beyond linguistic circles. I was fortunate in enjoying first his acquaintance and later his friendship because of our interests: mine in hearing and the brain and his all-encompassing curiosity in anything relating to communication and language. We met at a conference on speech communication at MIT, and a few years later I watched and marveled as he, Morris Halle, and Gunnar Fant put together Preliminaries to Speech Analysis [MIT Press, 1952]. For a couple of years we lived in the same apartment house on Prescott Street; I remember how we grew closer over the years in discussions about the grammar of the visual world, about distinctive features, about science and politics in many lands, and about the brain. In later years he often scolded me gently for having become too much absorbed in administrative pursuits. Roman had a unique ability to relate so many creative endeavors to linguistics, which led during his long life to his being acquainted with the most original minds — from poets and artists, to biologists and computer specialists, from anthropologists to philosophers. This — in his eighties —

WALTER A. ROSENBLITH

frail man was a durable intellectual giant. He left an indelible imprint upon the people and the fields he came in contact with: never again would they be able to think about language without evoking in their memory Roman's very special cosmopolitan accent. National Academy of Sciences

Victor F. Weisskopf

Thinking about Roman Jakobson made me aware of an observation: although the total number of intellectuals has increased considerably in the span of my life, the number of 'personalities' has decreased. What is a personality? In my own field of science, there are some good examples: Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, to name the first that come to my mind. But the best example is Roman. How should I describe a personality? There are many sides to it. A personality must be 'stunning': more often than not you are surprised by what he or she says. Personalities see connections and relations where we others do not. This is why they are apt to broaden the fields of their interests and create new ones. (I use the plural advisedly, since a personality does not have only one field or one interest.) A personality's reactions to problems are broader, more emphatic, more unconventional, and more all-embracing than those of us normal people. They strike us as bright flashes of insight, revealing new and unexpected sides of issues, when we stumble in semi-darkness. A personality makes our lives more interesting, more creative, and more productive. Without telling us exactly what we should do, or what problems we should solve, a personality's impact makes us find the right problems and the right way to their solution. All of this applies to no one better than to Roman. I am not equipped to judge or to discuss his pervasive influence on linguistics; but I know that all through his life he introduced a constant stream of new ideas, that he found different ways of looking at things at each turn, and that he struggled tirelessly against false and misleading ideas. He was most fittingly compared with Picasso, another great personality of our time, who changed the course and the style not only of his own painting, but of the art of painting, many times. And like Picasso, there was an aura of intel-

VICTOR F. WEISSKOPF

lectual intensity about him that made everyone in touch with him vibrate in resonance. But his personality was not restricted to the intellectual side of life. He united intellectual, personal and emotional concerns and elevated them to a higher level. His studies of the linguistic context of poetry, among many other examples, show his ability to bring reason and soul together in demonstrating the many complementary aspects of our existence. To his fellows, Roman was the warmest and most loyal friend and helper. His soul radiated friendship and love with such force that all of us lived more intensely in his company. I began by stating that there are fewer personalities today than there were before. (Try to count them and you will see.) I am afraid that this is caused by today's culture, which considers it unfashionable to be too different from the rest. Somehow, the world of today rejects the odd person, the one that goes his own way, the one that is different. This is the age of teamwork, when things have become so complicated that one person cannot do the work alone: everyone has to do his or her little bit to add to the collective result. But now, more than ever, the team requires a leading personality in order to achieve something extraordinary. This is why the loss of Roman is more than the loss of a spectacular personality. We are poorer without him, and we must do what we can to create a spiritual climate in which personalities will flourish again. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jerome Bruner

Roman Jakobson lives in our memory — a human being whose life had the very same structural integrity that so deeply marked his view of language and particularly of poetry. He has bequeathed us not only great works but also the memory of a great man. It is canonical, I know, to reflect at such an occasion as this upon the man — his character, his virtues, his greatness. Character, virtue and greatness: these he had in heroic measure. But they are not fully to be understood if we separate the man and his life from his work. It was he who spoke of the grammar of poetry and the poetry of grammar. In the same spirit, let me address myself to his greatness in making life and work one spiritual unity. They infused each other much as sound, syntax, and meaning infuse each other in his theory of poetry. For there was some deep sense in which there was a seamless quality in Roman's living, working, being. His work — his speculations, his deep readings, his hypotheses, his labors — were woven into the rich and intricate tapestry of his life. Even his occasional flashes of ironic criticism had about them this spirit, as in his magisterial rejection of the phonetic theories of the neogrammarians as failing to take into account how sounds could only be understood by reference to their place in a wider system for discriminating meanings. He could not abide theories of language that found easy ways of making syntax autonomous from semantics, poetics separate from other pragmatic functions of language, or any of the six functions of language independently manipulable one from the other. No form, no function was an 'island entire to itself. Indeed, he says somwhere that, for man endowed with speech, not even nature and culture can be separated — sound is nature, and meaning the product of culture that makes it possible for physical sound to be converted into the constitutive reality of speech.

JEROME BRUNER

In the same spirit, the parts of his life take meaning from their place in the structure of the whole. Let me celebrate a pair of the deep currents that ran through everything that Roman did — from his poetics and linguistics, to his rich life with colleagues, with friends, with family. It is the counterpoint in his thinking between the unconscious determinative role of structure in giving meaning to isolated particulars and the role he gave to consciousness — particularly the symbolic means by which language evoked, illumined, even directed consciousness. I speak in the latter case, of course, of his distinction between marked and unmarked. I do not wish to comment upon this fundamental contrast as a linguistic concept so much as a distinction that was, I think, at the heart of his conception of mind. Let me start with the early poetic version of this distinction — Roman's concern in the 1920's with 'disautomatization' as an essential aesthetic feature of poetry, the heart of literaturnosf'. Disautomatization entails a process of foregrounding that keeps a poetic utterance from being rendered principally as referential, metalingual, or expressive. At various times in his life, he conceived of this process of disautomatization in different ways; there is a never ending discussion of the issue in his writing, culminating, perhaps, in his 1960 paper on 'Linguistics and poetics' [SW ///, 18—51], where he explores the linking of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language as crucial to this poetic work. But never mind the long search that took him from the poetic 'devices' for increasing 'palpability' and consciousness in his writings of the early 1920's to his more systematically structural approach of later years. What is crucial is that he always saw as a central prosthesis of language its capacity to alert, direct, refresh awareness — and most particularly where poetry and the poetic are involved. It is this that marks poetics, as he said in 1960, as 'entitled to the leading place in literary studies'. Throughout his studies of phonology, morphology, and grammar, the idea of 'disautomatization' by marking continued to be central. The marked, in contrast to the unmarked, signals the point at which attention should be directed to presupposition, to specialness, to a non-canonical perspective. Indeed, marking is the means whereby the speaker communicates to the listener that more consciousness should be brought to bear on the message being transmitted. But now we need to consider consciousness and unconsciousness in Roman's account of language use.

JEROME BRUNER

In his first lecture in 1942 at the ficole Libre des Hautes Etudes, Roman recounted the hundred-year-old story by the Russian Romantic Vladimir Odoevskij about the 'man who received from a malevolent magician the gift of being able to see everything and to hear everything' [Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning; Cambridge, MA and London, 1978, p. 20; originally published as Six leqons sur le son et le sens; Paris, 1976]. In Odoevskij's words 'everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed into a whole in his mind'. Or, as Roman later puts it, we cannot exist 'having no intrinsic criteria for distinguishing what is significant from what is not'. An implicit, unconscious knowledge of the system of things is one guide, one form of intrinsic criterion. But marking alerts and directs attention to what ordinarily must not be managed automatically and unconsciously by merely implicit knowledge of the system. Marking is everywhere evident, even in the initial decision whether to speak or to stay silent, and then in how and what we select as the element of an utterance, and how we then combine the elements. They, the marked aspects, are choice points in the system. So language (as Vygotskij, Luria and others of his Russian admirers took the idea from him) also has the function of directing and regulating consciousness by its marking and by the other means it has for disautomatizing mental processes. And in no domain is this more powerfully done than in poetry, although, as we have noted, it is a feature of language at any level. I cannot resist the idea that Roman's dedication to linguistic poetics was precisely in recognition of the evolved power of poetry to disautomatize, to cause consciousness, to generate new perspective. It is interesting that Vygotskij should have added to the poetic function the metalingual one as a route into heightened consciousness — a matter of which Roman was quite aware and to which he alludes several times in his own writings. When I recently read a paper by Thomas Winner on Roman's early association with avant-garde art, I thought perhaps it was this early ferment of Futurism that had created this interest in innovative consciousness. But perhaps not, and here I must return to Roman's personalness — his form of integrity and his style as a human being. I have never known a man so structurally of a piece as Roman, nor one so conscious of relatedness in the world aroung him. He, of all men I have ever known, had what my friend and former colleague Henry Murray used to call a 'unity thema', an urge to connect — metonymically or metaphorically. It was not simply that he was possessed to treat all 90

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manifestations of language — literary or uncontrived, aphasic or normal, child or adult — under a common, overreaching set of structural principles. There was rather, I think, an impulse to see structural indivisibility in all expressions of the human mind. I think it was this impulse that gave such a sense of his charisma to his friends, his disciples, even his critics. His enormous influence on literary studies, on anthropology, and increasingly in the human sciences is a testament to the power of this impulse to structural unity. I recall his return from Paris after a visit with the molecular geneticist Fra^ois Jacob. He expressed the conviction that the structure of the genetic code, organized in such a way that lower order elements achieved higher order functions only in structural combination, would provide a universal basis for all forms of the transmission of information — including a biological basis for language. Yet, for all the unity, sought after and achieved, there was something else in the man as in the work. Claude Levi-Strauss, in the preface to Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, comments on the vividness, brilliance, discernment of the Jakobson style as a lecturer and, indeed, as a writer. He could never forsake the poetic function. One had the feeling in his company of one's consciousness being off the 'automatic/hold' position on to the 'disautomatic/scan' position. Even in his most technical papers, there is this sense of forefronting, marking, drama. There was never a danger of dryness. He could be exhausting, yes, gloriously so. He was, truly, a poet linguist or a linguist poet. Roman once said of a mutual friend that he organized his life into journeys, each kept separate in his mind, each exquisite, each self-contained, each computable. He, Roman, he said, had no such episodes. Like his historical mentor, Charles Sanders Peirce, it was all the same journey, whether the object was epic, lyric, and hortatory poetry of the first, second, or third person, or distinctive features of phonemes. His greatness as a companion was not just his loyalty and kindness, but also his readiness to welcome you into that world whose unity he was seeking to unmask by his consciousness and by goading yours. We flew together on a long flight from Boston to Moscow in 1966 — over the ocean, over the Alps, over wherever, for hours. We talked about language, about human development, about thought and consciousness — gossiping, discussing, joking, trying out hunches. It was much too short. I shall never forget his

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generous capacity to share his conjectures, his tentative as well as his settled conclusions, his shrewd reminiscences about this Czech Futurist poet or that departed linguist. Kindness, connection, consciousness, and in such concentration! Such a man! New School for Social Research

Stephen Rudy

Those of us who knew Roman Jakobson closely are indebted to him for a double gift: not only were we privileged to have known a great man and scholar, but because of and through him we met many a kindred spirit. We should be grateful to Roman both for showing us the meaning of scholarship as a calling and for helping us to overcome the spiritual and intellectual isolation of our times. For many of us Roman was a bridge both to the past and to the future. Others have remarked on his unique position in the history of linguistics, that of a traditionalist-innovator, or arxaist-novator in Jurij Tynjanov's felicitous terminology: like the great linguists of the nineteenth century Roman had a profound command of varied languages and cultures, a vast erudition, and an astounding philological expertise, but as a great linguist of the twentieth century he was first and foremost a theoretician of language. As a theoretician he was able to reconcile the fundamental dichotomies of linguistic science and to forge a bridge between linguistics and such related fields as semiotics, anthropology, neurophysiology, folklore and the study of myth. His theory of the poetic function firmly linked linguistics with poetics, and his studies in the latter realm represent, as Roland Barthes once said, 'a true meeting of scientific thought and the creative spirit'. For me personally Roman was a very real bridge to my own past: my father had been a student and close friend of his at Columbia and Harvard after the war, and Roman — true structuralist in life as in science — delighted in the play of similarity and difference across time and space that I embodied for him. For me Roman was a figure who bridged this century and the last, and within this century — our period and the golden years of the avant-garde which he recalled with such passion and the energy of which he retained all his life.

STEPHEN RUDY

One of the dominant topics and methodological devices underlying Roman's work was the 'question of invariance in the midst of variation'. When I reflect on Roman's life, in particular the last decade and a half during which I knew him intimately as his student, collaborator, editor and friend, I am struck more by the invariant — the fullness and consistency of his life work — than by the variants — the geographical, cultural and topical diversity of his long career. This period represents in many ways a return to the topics of Roman's youth, the time of his affiliation with Russian Futurism. He was fond of quoting a statement by Xlebnikov, whom he regarded as the greatest poet of our century: 'It happens repeatedly that the future of mature age is revealed in faint inklings to youth', and this was certainly true in his case. Chief among his favorite areas of study was poetics, and volume III of his Selected Writings ('Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry'), which appeared in December of 1981, was a realization and consummation of theoretical and methodological principles sketched in his earliest studies of the teens and twenties. It is appropriate that the chronologically first article included there was 'Futurism' (1919), a survey of the so-called 'transrational' or 'supraconscious' poetry (zaum') of the Russian avant-garde, while one of the last, 'Supraconscious Turgenev' (1979), examined a transrational utterance of that supposedly staid Russian classical writer. Zaum', which appears to verge on nonsense, interested Roman throughout his life as an extreme manifestation of a phenomenon characteristic of poetry in general, whatever its period or style, namely the close and complex tie between sound and sense, between external form and meaning. It is a topic that, along with the exploration of parallelism and grammar of poetry proper, may be deemed the major theme of Selected Writings III and one that remains a fruitful area for future study. The forthcoming volume VI of the Selected Writings ('Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads') also marks a return to Roman's early work — in this case, as a Slavist. In it he sketches the principles that a methodologically well-founded science of comparative Slavic literature should follow, and examines vital questions of Cyrillo-Methodian studies and medieval Slavic, in particular Czech, literature. Again, in many instances the topics under scrutiny were ones that had suggested themselves more than half a century earlier and ones that remain central to the future of Slavistics. One of Roman's earliest articles of 1917 was aimed at unearthing the vestiges of Old Church Slavonic poetry in liturgical texts, and it is 94

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characteristic of the vitality of that endeavor that among the last articles he wrote were two important studies — one on Constantine the Philosopher's Progla^s or verse prologue to the Bible, the other on the earliest Slavic Canon, to St. Demetrius of Thessalonica, which may be ascribed to Methodius or his close circle. Constantine the Philosopher, the ninthcentury founder and champion of Slavic literarcy, was a figure akin to Roman himself. The Cyrillo-Methodian ideology, which called for worship in one's native tongue, was based on 'the equal right of every individual and every people to acquire the key of knowledge', and it stressed the creative powers and spiritual relevance of language. It was both fitting and moving that the concluding note Roman wrote for the Selected Writings VI during his final illness was on Constantine's 'inspiring tenet' of equality and individuation, simply entitled 'More on the Enlightener'. As a scholar Roman displayed a totally selfless dedication to knowledge, free of any pedantry or pretentiousness. From his earliest years he fought for linguistics as a modern science and did so in a militant and engage manner, believing that success could be achieved only by collective research and true international cooperation. His founding role and work in the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles and his activities at the great International Congresses of the inter-war period are indicative of an active ideological stance toward science and its role in society that is profoundly characteristic of our century. During his lifetime Roman coauthored articles and books with dozens of collaborators, and those who worked with him will always remember the experience as one that bolstered their faith in the future of scholarship. Whatever one's personal, political or academic difficulties, working with Roman was a tremendous comfort, reminding one as it did of the deepest ideals and goals of scholarship and inspiring one to continue the cosmopolitan and humanistic tradition he embodied. As a man Roman was possessed of great personal charm and fortitude. His wit, enthusiasm and openness made even his youngest friends feel that he was their contemporary. His prodigious energy and the sharpness of his concentration stayed with him to the end. But even more than his undeniable genius, Roman's students and friends will always remember his generosity of spirit. It was that generosity, founded on an unshakeable belief in the quest for knowledge as the highest spiritual value and its accessibility to each and every individual, that earned Roman the epithet he conferred upon his illustrious predecessor: Enlightener. New York University 95

The Selected Writings of Roman Jakobson

SW I. SWII. SW III.

SW IV. SW V. SW VI. SW VII.

Selected Writings I: Phonological Studies (second, expanded edition; The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1971). Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1972). Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (The Hague-Paris-New York: Mouton, 1981). Selected Writings IV: Slavic Epic Studies (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1966). Selected Writings V: On Verse, Its Masters and Explorers (The Hague-Paris-New York: Mouton, 1979). Selected Writings VI: Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads (Berlin-New York-Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984). Selected Writings VII: Contributions to Comparative Mythology. Recent Studies in Linguistics and Philology. Retrospections. Bibliography (Berlin-New York-Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984).