Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110805031, 9789027918451

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University Series Maior, 8

RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND ANGLO-AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM A Comparative Study

by

EWA M. T H O M P S O N Indiana University

1971

MOUTON THE H A G U E * PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V. Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-165150

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

To Shep and Dorothy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Margaret Schlauch of the University of Warsaw who first pointed out to me the importance and scope of the language oriented study of literature. I am also grateful to Professor Andrej Kodjak of New York University and Professor John M. Aden of Vanderbilt, who gave the initial impulse for this study. I am indebted to Professor Rene Wellek of Yale for his excellent advice and conversations on modern criticism, and to Professor Zbigniew Folejewski of the University of British Columbia for enlarging my knowledge of Russian Futurism. Finally, my warm thanks go to Professor Horst Frenz of Indiana University who arranged my teaching schedule in the Department of Comparative Literature so as to give the opportunity for the discussion in the classroom of the problems considered below.

PREFACE

This book is concerned with two trends in twentieth-century literary criticism which began to emerge at approximately the same time (the second and third decades of this century) and were labelled "formalistic" by their contemporaries or by their adherents (in the case of Russian Formalism, the label became the name of the school). A casual acquaintance with the two movements may produce the impression that they are nearly redundant: both of them stress the dependence of thought on language and recommend a close reading of the literary text rather than historical or biographical investigations. A second look at these matters, however, reveals that these precepts can mean very different things; that the attitudes of the Russian Formalists and the New Critics sometimes represent a basic polarity within the contemporary language-oriented criticism. The book is organized as follows: Chapter One is a historical survey of the two movements, done with the comparative end in view. Chapter Two discusses the philosophical background and the main concepts of the Formalists and the New Critics. Chapter Three deals with the application of the general principles to the practical business of explicating the works of literature; the conclusions follow. The incompatibility of conditions in which the two movements came into being creates a considerable challenge for one wishing to trace the development of their critical ideas. The 1930's saw the enforced demise of Formalism in the Soviet Russia; at the same time, New Criticism was branching in all directions and affecting broad literary circles in the United States. As a consequence, the gestation of some of the Formalist ideas and their full meaning remained ambiguous: the Formalists were not able, or preferred not, or did not have enough time, to complete their lines of reasoning (I have tried to reconstruct some of the aspects of their theory which have escaped general opinion). The ambiguities are plenteous also in regard to the New Critics: due to the abun-

8

PREFACE

dance of language theories and the ensuing popularity of the 'close reading' idea, New Criticism has come to mean, in recent years, at least half a dozen different things. I have limited myself to the consideration of the most seminal, and chronologically the first, representatives of the trend.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

5

Preface

7

I. Marking the Boundaries 1. Russian Formalism 2. New Criticism II. The Development of the Principal Concepts .

11 11 33 .

.

.

1. The Idealistic Trend 2. The Neo-positivist Trend

54 55 87

III. From Causality to Purposiveness: A Story of Practical Criticism

Ill

IV. Recapitulation and Perspectives

146

Bibliography

153

Index

157

I MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

1.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM

In the second decade of the twentieth century, when the Formalists entered the literary scene, Russian criticism was heir to many orientations.The most resourceful was that generated by the enormously productive trend in Russian letters: Symbolism. Such Symbolist poets as Andrej Belyj (1880-1934), Aleksandr Blok, Vjaceslav Ivanov and Dmitrij Merezkovskij have left behind them a legacy of expository prose which has, at times, surpassed the value and popularity of their poetry. Their philosophical postulate - explicit or implicit, depending on the theoretical competence of a given critic - was the symbolic nature of man's knowledge of reality and, since art was considered a mode of cognition, of art. Their practical criticism upheld the inseparability of art and spirituality, and searched for the connections between the two in individual works. Belyj's Simvolizm (1910) and his earlier articles in the Moscow monthly Vesy (La Balance, as the French subtitle said) contain perhaps the most systematic exposition of the general principles of such criticism. Considering that the so-called symbolic theories of language began to spring up in European scholarship somewhat later, the title of Belyj's book may be misleading in its supposed reference to a literary trend. What Belyj is concerned with is, however, not only a school of poetry and a critical system but the fundamentals of human thinking. Therefore, he begins with a long epistemological treatise based on Kant and the neo-Kantian Rickert. As the book proceeds, he concentrates more and more on art (he acknowledges the influence of Schopenhauer, even though the salient features of his theory of art can be found already in Kant), and then specifically on literature. At the beginning of Simvolizm Belyj pays homage to Kant who, in his words, "was the first to recognize the absolute impossibility of

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MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

knowing the world in its essence".1 Kant's observations on time and space as two intuitive forms on which our perception depends, as well as on the twelve categories of understanding which condition our judgment, put decisive limitations on the cognitive possibilities of man. In Belyj's view, Kant established the foundations on which a theory of symbolism can be built. Since our knowledge of reality is never direct, but always occurs with the mediation of the basic 'forms' of intuition and understanding, it can be only a symbolic knowledge. We do not know reality except approximately, through symbols. What interests Belyj in particular is the same problem which later caught the imagination of Ernst Cassirer: the ways in which the forms of intuition and understanding combine into 'schemata' of which Kant spoke so ambiguously, and which consequently invite further speculations.2 The combinations of 'forms' constitute the grounds on which Belyj, later in the book, builds his theory of artistic and religious symbolism, and on which he asserts that literary criticism has to be preoccupied with the specific forms of artistic creativity. Kant created the methodology of the modes of cognition but did not go any further. According to Belyj, it was Heinrich Rickert who found the way out of the impasse by urging the undertaking of epistemological investigations oriented toward the notion of value. The fact that man seems always to possess some notion of value makes Rickert, and Belyj, accept this notion a priori. Value is thus for Belyj "the absolute boundary for the constructing of epistemological and metaphysical concepts". He repeats, after Rickert, that values exist in all areas of human activity: religion, state, custom, law, science, and the arts. They are basic to those activities. Like all knowledge of reality, they can be expressed only symbolically ("Value equals symbol"3). Belyj points out the origin of the word 'symbol': it comes from the Greek verb 'to throw together, join together'. What is joined in the symbol in a humanly inseparable way is form and content, the forms of our apprehension, both the intuitive and the rational, and whatever becomes of reality under the influence of these forms. A certain type of cognition is the result. In the process of finding forms we learn. Thus, artistic symbols are not merely emotional: "The meaning of beauty lies within the artistic 1

A. Belyj, Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), p. 24. See E. Cassirer, "Foreword", and Ch. W. Hendel, "Introduction", in E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven, Conn., 1953), pp. 1-114. ® Belyj, Simvolizm, p. 67. 1

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13

image, not in the emotion which this image evokes in us.. .".4 Important consequences for the literary critic follow. Reality is unapproachable for the artist except through forms (as his argument proceeds, Belyj does not speak any more of the basic Kantian forms: space, time and the twelve categories of understanding, but of the multiple specific forms of artistic creation). The study of forms is thus in order. Belyj hopes to learn something definite about creativity by the study of these multiple forms. He observes that the peculiarity of literature consists in that it (literature) is realized within both spacial and temporal elements, whereas other arts, such as sculpture or music, realize themselves within only one of these forms. The history of literature provides us with a panorama of changes of emphases: at certain times it is the spacial element that dominates literature, at other times the temporal. The ways of merging the two - the 'artistic motivation' are also subject to change. One 'form complex' is replaced by another. The specific 'motivation' of individual works, of authors and epochs, is to be discussed by the critic. On the other hand, reality as we know it in a non-aesthetic act of perception, appears to be different from that seen in a work of art. By everyday standards it is, in the second case, 'deformed'. This deformation occurs by means of certain specific constructive forms. The strategies of this deformation are to be investigated. From here, the path is straight to Formalist research. It goes without saying that the Formalists sometimes were not - or, perhaps, preferred not to be - fully aware of the philosophical arguments underlying the study of forms. It took an acute observer like Trockij to point out the dependencies and possible implications of such study, the implications hostile to the Marxist doctrine which assigned to literature a simplistically mimetic function. Trockij understood that the danger of Formalism did not lie in that the formal study divided the work of literature into form and content, and claimed that the beauties of form only are of interest. It was because such study sprang from the idealistic view of reality, and might arrive at the observation that "we see only through the glass darkly", that he was much irritated by the emergence of the Formalist school and devoted to it much polemic. The suspicions of the famous revolutionary, however, proved to be excessive: Formalism never fully developed in the idealistic direction. The Formalists' relation to Belyj was many-sided and full of inconsis*

Ibid., p . 1 4 3 .

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MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

tencies. They attempted to start where Belyj's philosophizing ended and tried to steer clear of an idealistic world view. Also, they were subject to other influences, which were sometimes poles apart from Belyj's premises. At the same time, it can readily be seen that their denunciations of Belyj sometimes sound too emphatic to be credible. The recognition of Belyj seeps through, again and again, in Formalist writings. In fact, of no other literary figure do the Formalist speak with greater respect, and in regard to nobody else's influence are they more in agreement (though they nearly always underline that the influence concerned the methods of criticism, and not philosophy). Sklovskij observes that Belyj was "the greatest writer of the generation".5 Ejxenbaum stresses the tremendous impact of Simvolizm on his contemporaries.· The most fruitful works of Tomasevskij owed its inspiration to Belyj, and Tomasevskij acknowledged it abundantly.7 Zirmunskij asserts a number of times that it was Belyj who introduced the Formalists to the problems of poetics. And in the Preface to his Problems of the Theory of Literature he states much more, and with bold directness: The study of historical and theoretical poetics was already earlier introduced into Russian scholarship by A. N. Veselovskij and A. A. Potebnja. But it was f r o m the theorists of Symbolism that the vital impulse came for methodical research in the area of literary form. They made us give a second look at the academic tradition of the study of poetics. First and foremost among them was Andrej Belyj: not only did he unexpectedly push forward the problems of verse theory but gave a new meaning to them. H e also was the first to criticize traditional eclectic devices of professorial 'literary history' and postulated a special discipline, devoted to the artistic peculiarities of poetic w o r k s . . . . The interest in problems of form was in accord with the general literary position of the Symbolists: their defense of the self-contained [samodovlejuscij] meaning of art, its 'autonomy' f r o m extra-artistic aims. This point of view brought some (e.g., Valerij Brjusov, in the first period of his activity) to formalistic aestheticism. The literary group of Acmeists, with their spontaneous gravitation toward classical forms and classical understanding of literary mastery, picked u p and continued this tendency. Others, like Vjaceslav Ivanov, Andrej Belyj, and those who shared their outlook, deepened the inherent romantic tendencies of Russian Symbolism by perceiving in the poetic work, a system of symbolic means of expression for the artistic intuition of the poet, and thus tried to establish a tie between philosophical, historical, and formal problems. I have always felt close to * V. Sklovskij, Pjaf Zelovek znakomyx (Moscow, 1927), p. 9. The context makes this statement refer to Belyj's writings in their totality, i.e., including his poetry and imaginative prose. • B. Ejxenbaum, "Teorija 'formal'nogo metoda'", Michigan Slavic Materials, 2 (1962), 3. 7 B. Tomaievskij, Ο Stixe. Stafi. (Moscow, 1929), pp. 139, 254.

MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

15

this outlook; the essay on Blok reprinted in this collection, is an attempt to establish a link between 'the feeling of life' and poetic craft.8 One has to remember, however, that Belyj and even the very term 'aesthetics' were dangerous allies and sometimes had to be debunked even at the expense of debunking the validity of Formalism itself. In the previously quoted "Theory of the 'Formal Method' ", Ejxenbaum repetiously says things which are nearly self-contradictionary, and which are contrary to what he asserted in Across LiteratureHe emphasizes that Formalism is independent of 'philosophical aesthetics' and 'ideological theories of art'. "We value theory only as a working hypothesis", he declares. By asserting the Formalists' impenetrability to any coherent outlook on literature, Ejxenbaum denies the movement any seriousness. At the same time, however, when he blasts the Symbolists for their philosophical preoccupations and declares that Formalism is independent of them, he admits that Belyj's Simvolizm had an impact on his generation that cannot be compared even with the 'principleless' and 'deprived of any point of view' monographs of academic scholars. These are thinly veiled inconsistencies indeed, and one wonders to what extent the exigencies of the political moment accounted for Ejxenbaum's article. The impact of Belyj and of other serious Symbolist theoreticians on the Formalist school appears to be indubitable. At the same time, the Formalists frequently and rightly denounce Symbolist criticism as such. The apparent paradox stems from the fact that Symbolist critics seldom had the solid philosophical preparation of Belyj or V. Ivanov, and could hardly assign to criticism a well-motivated role, let alone perform it. They acknowledged the fact that symbols are basic to art and that they lead to 'the world beyond', but theirs was an understanding that could not be translated into a logically persuasive argument. Thus, typical Symbolist criticism operated on a highly impressionistic level, similar to that Symbolist impressionism which T. S. Eliot censured in The Sacred Wood. The Symbolist critics were apt to speak of the genius of the creative poetic spirit, of the eternal struggle of Dream and Life, of the unrepeatable, mysterious poetic Event, without ever trying to explain how this eternal struggle is embodied in the flesh and bone of the poem. Their argument was frequently ad hominem since they were divided into groups and subgroups which tried to discredit one another, 8

V. Zirmunskij, Voprosy teorii literatury (Leningrad, 1928), pp. 8-9. • Cf. Ejxenbaum's Skvoz' literaturu (The Hague, 1962), pp. 7-11, with his "Teorija 'formal'nogo metoda'".

16

MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

even though fundamental differences in poetic outlook seldom separated them. It was apt to consider the poet rather than the poem, and was measled with metaphors. Whatever was lacking in the way of rational argument was replaced by emotional outcries. Not only the poets but also the critics were the voyants. The poet Blok thus writes about his contemporaries in the celebrated article "On the Present State of Russian Symbolism" (O sovremennom sostojanii russkogo simvolizma): We find ourselves as if in the immeasurable ocean of life and art, far from the shore already, where we mounted the deck of the ship; we still do not perceive the other shore, toward which our dream will lead us; we are few, and surrounded by enemies; at that great noontime we recognize each other more clearly; we exchange handshakes with our hands growing colder and colder; and we raise the banner of our native land on the mast.10 Symbolist criticism oscillated, then, between the systematic efforts of such people as Belyj, who were trying to provide an articulate philosophical argument for the tenets of art and its criticism, and 'the adventures of the soid among the masterpieces' whose interest to other souls was questionable. It is the latter tendency that the Formalists decisively repudiated. Immersed in the mystery that the mosaic of art covers, they argued, the critics lose from view their proper task. Having in their hands the artefact, they search for something that is beyond it before describing it with any accuracy. Their role is to describe the thing they hold in their hands, lay bare its architectonics and make known the secrets of the craft. As to the academic criticism in Russia, it was concentrated at that time not only in the two outstanding universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in the provincial ones, such as Kazan' and Xar'kov. The Formalists found much to censure in academic scholarship but they were not entirely outside its influence: they themselves went through the mill of university study. The names of two scholars: Potebnja and Veselovskij, appear in Formalist writings with a frequency testifying to their importance in molding the Formalist outlook, even though both scholars find only partial approval from their younger colleagues. Another name that can be encountered somewhat less frequently (it was related to the linguistically-oriented Formalists first of all) is that of Baudouin de Courtenay: in his case also only partial approval is granted. As to the rest of the scholastic world, including such popular 19 A. Blok, Sobranie socinenij, vol. 5 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962), p. 425. The article was first published in Apollon, 8 (1910).

MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

17

contemporary figures as Pypin and Skabicevskij, they are seldom mentioned and, if so, usually flatly rejected. I shall now try to outline the reasons for which the first three scholars mentioned gained a partial Formalist placet. A professor of Xar'kov university, A. A. Potebnja (1835-91) belongs to the Formalist heritage even though his influence was, like Belyj's, disclaimed on a number of occasions. As Victor Erlich noted, the Formalists owed more to Potebnja than they were willing to admit.11 Potebnja was a philologist and a folklorist, a man of deep scholarship and great modesty, always abundantly acknowledging the inspirations behind his own work (Wilhelm von Humboldt's, for instance). His poetic theory bears resemblance to the neoclassical theory of poetry and, at the same time, surpasses it. In Potebnja's view, literary activity is cognitive and tightly connected with its medium - language. It is different from scientific activity which is also cognitive but in another way. The first reaches its insight by means of intuition, the second, by means of conscious reasoning. Poetry is a form of thinking in images, the 'shape' of which is dependent on the linguistic features of a given language (here the influence of Humboldt shows itself).12 It was this unfortunate 'thinking in images' that brought repetitious attacks on Potebnja. Andrej Belyj denounced it in Simvolizm (the fact rarely noticed by the commentators on Potebnja who usually lump him and Belyj together);18 the Formalists did the same many a time. To reject Potebnja's 'images' became a custom among the Formalists, just as I. A. Richards' early theories have been habitually denounced after the appearance of Wimsatt's and Beardleys's "The Affective Fallacy". Potebnja's intended meaning was, however, different from that of, say, Dobroljubov, who similarly asserted that poets 'think in images'.14 From Lectures on Literary Theory (Iz lekcij po teorii slovesnosti) we learn that Potebnja's concept includes action: "Poetic image need not mean a static picture of something, it can also mean action."15 The image in a fable is the fable as a whole, with its actions and changes of situations, with all of the dramatic 'staircase structure' of which Sklovskij spoke. Potebnja attacks Dobroljubov precisely on the grounds 11

V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague, 1965), p. 23. 18 A. Potebnja, My si' i jazyk (Xar'kov, 1926). 13 Belyj, Simvolizm, p. 206. 14 N. Dobroljubov, "Luö sveta ν temnom carstve", Sobranie socinenij, vol. 6 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1963), pp. 289-364. 15 A. Potebnja, Iz lekcij po teorii slovesnosti (Xar'kov, 1894), p. 45.

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of substituting one aspect, or interpretation, of the poetic representation for all that it means. Dobroljubov, he says, spoke in relation to the play of Ostrovskij, of 'the dark kingdom' in Russia, thus substituting one usage of the image for all that the image contains." In the Lectures Potebnja further argues that images play a synthetic role in our thinking: they provide an econominal way to know and remember the concepts and arguments for which they stand. Thus the expression 'sour grapes' is a kind of 'thickening of thought' [sguscenie mysli]. Poetry strives to reduce the wide variety of complex phenomena to a small number of images. It plays the role of microfilm and stenography at the same time. It is not a mere ornament for thought; it manages to store many thoughts in one image. Since the basic role of poetry is thus to convey concepts or a reasoning in an abbreviated form, its main device is allegory [inoskazanie]. Potebnja investigates two types of inoskazanie: fable and proverb, and argues his point once more by showing how these genres compress various logical truths. Potebnja's argument, then, even though it sometimes comes close to describing poetic presentation as a unique form of symbolization (which is the way most literary theorists view it today), finally leads to a somewhat mechanistic belief that if only one had enough time and a sufficiently spacious memory, one could paraphrase this presentation through a very large - but always finite number of statements. Remembering Potebnja's views one can understand why Sklovskij in the Resurrection of the Word (Voskresenie slova) complained that words in their everyday use become algebraic signs and lose their image-like properties, and in "Art as Strategy" (Iskusstvo kak priem) launched an attack on the theory that art is 'thinking in images'. He did not want to view literature either as a conglomeration of algebraic symbols or a constellation of spacial images. He knew that literature uses different ways of conveying meaning. In general, Formalist disagreement with Potebnja concentrated on two points: (1) imagery is not the basic aspect of poetic craft - there is also sound, and (2) images (understood, in the neoclassical sense, as substitutes for logical concepts) are not the only means to convey meaning in a poetic work. As indicated above, this disagreement 18 Ibid., p. 125. It appears that Potebnja confused here Dobroljubov's famous articles about temnoe carstvo with Belinskij's article on Griboedov, where Belinskij spoke of art as 'thinking in images'. Obviously, Belinskij could not have discussed Ostrovskij's Groza (1860), since he died in 1848. For details see Potebnja's book.

MARKING THE BOUNDARIES

19

amounted to a misunderstanding to a large degree: Potebnja's images were not only spacial but also temporal. (One suspects here that some of the Formalists knew Potebnja's theories only second-hand.) At the same time, his notion that literature is genuinely cognitive, that artistic cognition differs from the scientific one, and that it is firmly embedded in language, was closely related to what Sklovskij and Ejxenbaum explicitly stated in the early period of their activity. Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929, a Pole and a descendant of the King of Jerusalem Baldwin I - hence the name), professor of Kazan', St. Petersburg and Cracow Universities, was a figure who exercised considerable influence on the linguistically-oriented Formalist and their sympathizers, from Jakubinskij and Vinogradov to Troubetzkoy.17 He taught linguistics to a number of future Formalists: Jakubinskij, Bernstein, Polivanov, Sklovskij. Baudouin de Courtenay was the creator of the so-called Kazan' school of linguistics and the first to formulate the concept of phoneme. He studied in Germany at the same time when the Junggrammatiker school was very strong there. As a result, his major works deal with the laws of phonetic change and comparative phonetics of Slavic languages. Jakubinskij's investigations of sound patterns in poetic language lie thus in the line of his teacher's work (Jakubinskij was, incidentally, the favorite student of Baudouin de Courtenay in St. Petersburg). Baudouin's phonetic orientation made him a concerned observer of the Futurist experimentation with the sounds of language (among the contemporary poetic groups the Futurists were the closest to the Formalists). His concern assumed finally the form congenial with his scholastic competence: in a number of articles he blasted them for the semantic confusions of their manifestoes and declarations.18 Baudouin's akinness to the neogrammarian school did not prevent him from exercising an impact on the group whose methods of research diverged in many respects from his own (although the two were less inimical than it might have seemed at the moment). He stimulated the Formalist interest in the sound stratum of poetry and prose, and contributed to a concern with the scientifically verifiable laws that regulate the usage and action of poetic strategies. (In this respect the Formalist effort parallels the concern of the positivist neogrammarians who tried to establish absolute laws of phonetic change.) It is significant that the one-time Formalist Roman Jakobson, in his recently published Selected Works, 17

N. Troubetzkoy, Osnovy fonologii (Moscow, 1960), pp. 10-11. J. Baudouin de Courtenay, "Slovo i 'slovo' "; "K teorii 'slova kak takovogo' i 'bukvy kak t a k o v o j ' O t k l i k i , nos. 7-8 (1914). 18

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grants partial approval to the neogrammarian concept of phonetic laws.1· The writings of A.N. Veselovskij (1839-1906), a professor of literature at St. Petersburg constituted another stimulus for Formalist research. Less philosophically oriented than Potebnja, Veselovskij was a man of broader scholarly interests: they ranged from Byzantine influences on the Eastern Slavs and comparative European folklore, to medieval epic and Italian Renaissance. In a positivist fashion, Veselovskij tried to discover the laws of development of literature through collection of an enormous amount of facts. He studied the migration of poetic themes and tried to explain it solely by means of historical conditions and social customs. His writings are frequently revealing for a student of literature, provided the causes of literary development of which he spoke are not accepted in an absolutist manner. A sample of his method: in Historical Poetics (Istoriceskaja poetika), he observes that animal epos of the Roman du Renard type did not develop in Russia because of historical situation.20 This kind of epos stemmed directly from the heroic national epic, such as La Chanson de Roland. Therefore, even though animal fables existed in Russia, they could not develop into animal epos: the epic poetry proper was lacking (The Igor's Tale was, for Veselovskij, a lyrical work). As to the development of epic poetry itself, Veselovskij credits it to the blending of classical (pagan) and Christian tradition in Western Europe. Their clash stimulated individual imagination and resulted in the development of individual poetic consciousness which is a condition indispensable for the rise of the epos. In Russia, everything was translated into Old Church Slavonic which was a poorly developed language. Thus, the literate Russian lacked the fine classical patterns to emulate, and was shielded from stimulating opposite influences. This type of criticism differed from the biographical or narrowly social concerns which an average academician cultivated in Veselovkij's time. It was historical and psychological but at the same time focused on the literary artefact. In On the Theory of Prose Sklovskij criticized Veselovskij's obstinate attempts to seek explanation of literary phenomena in social life rather than in artistic creativity; however, the older scholar's folkloristic knowledge and his preoccupation with themes and their formation, were not without influence on the same Sklovskij's study of plots and motifs as compositional units, and on the concept of 'staircase structure'. " 19

R. Jakobson, Selected Works, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1962), p. 2. A. Veselovskij, Istoriieskaja poetika (Leningrad, 1940), pp. 53-72.

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Apart from these three scholars, academic criticism of the time was held by the Formalists in little esteem. In "Theory of the 'Formal Method'", Ejxenbaum charged it with lack of scientific temperament and any consistent point of view, and asserted that the works written by non-professionals such as Belyj, Merezkovskij, V. Ivanov, K. Cukovskij and Brjusov, were more valuable for his generation of literary students than the learned dissertations of the academicians. His views on the subject are representative of the Formalist group as a whole. The third orientation in contemporary Russian criticism can be loosely described as social. It was remote from the preoccupations of the Formalist Opojaz but it had an impact on the demise of that group. It had always been strong in Russian letters and embraced a variety of shades: from the so-called civic critics of the 1850's and 60's calling for social utility of the artistic product, through the conscience-struck narodniks Mixajlovskij and Lavrov and emphatically anti-bourgeois Ivanov-Razumnik, to the more and more ideology-oriented critics of the beginning of the century, who took their inspiration from the first systematic Marxist critic in Russia, G. V. Plexanov (1856-1918). With the onset of Communist rule in Russia, politically-minded criticism became more and more prominent, even though in the first decade or so after the Revolution it was still split into more or less sophisticated factions, from the Proletarian Culture groups writing their nursery rhymes for adults, to one associated with the critic Voronskij and his magazine Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaja Nov'). All of these groups accepted ultimately the demand of Plexanov made in 1885: that the proletariat have its own literature, one that would express its hopes and demands.21 As their organizational unity and power were growing, that of the Formalists was receding. A hope of survival for the Formalists arose when the Futurist and, at the same time, Marxist organization Lef came into being; it grouped Futurist and their sympathizers (including a number of Formalists), and postulated that this new proletarian culture should follow the revolutionary methods of artistic creation employed by the Futurists. Lef and its successor Novyj Lef lasted, however, only two years each. They failed to convince the Party leaders of the lightness of their postulates. Futurism attracted the sympathy and attention of the future Formalists Sklovskij, Brik and Jakobson even before the Revolution. This 21

G. Plexanov, "Dva slova iitateljam-raboiim", G. B. kritik, ed. I.Ippolit (Moscow, 1933), pp. 25-32.

Plexanov-Literaturnyj

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trend in Russian poetry began, approximately, about 1909 and ended in 1928, with the dissolution of the last Futurist stronghold, Novyj Lef. The Futurists came forth with the concept of zaurn' (the trans-rational language) in which words, or rather sounds of language, were to be completely liberated from logic and traditional usage, and were to express the inner man without the aid of rational concepts. The Futurists approached the problem in the spirit of adolescent discovery, probably ignorant (with the exception of Xlebnikov) of any theory of language from Plato on. They announced that the future of poetry belongs to zaum' and that it is zaurn' that is the most appropriate means for the new Socialist poetry. The concept of trans-rational language differed from poet to poet: the Futurists hesitated between assigning to it a purely emotional value and saying that it goes beyond emotion toward asserting objective truth about man, impossible to express in logical language. Their manifestoes demonstrate the inability to conduct a coherent argument. Fortunately, manifestoes are not the only products of poetic schools, and some of the Futurists, like Xlebnikov, wrote interesting verse full of neologisms coined with great intuitive knowledge of the structure of Russian language. The Formalists took over the idea of zaum' and elaborated on it in the light of their early contestations that poetry is cognitive in a nonrational way. The idea of making poetry into an entirely non-conceptual way of expression seemed to some of them both feasible and attractive; it was also consistent with Belyj's opinions of the non-conceptual knowledge art gives. The first issue of the Formalist publication Collected Articles on the Theory of Poetic Language (Sborniki po teorii poeticeskogo jazyka) is devoted to the problems of poetic speech and its musical qualities, to the exclusion of poetry's 'paraphrasable content' (Ransom's phrase). The Formalists, who were more keen intellectually than their poetic friends, sought the help of scholarly authorities to confirm the Futurist intimations. Thus Sborniki contains also a section of Grammont's Le vers jrangais dealing with imitative harmony, i.e., onomatopoeic effects used by poets. The Formalist interest in the sound stratum of poetic language was also consistent with their scholarly ambitions: they planned a thorough investigation of the literary fact, and such investigation had to begin at the base. Symbolist impressionism making literary commentary into an introduction to mysticism, academic scholarship with its lack of vigor, and social studies having very little to do with the first two - these were the

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trends against which the Formalists reacted. The future Formalists were, shortly before World War I, students of St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities who, dissatisfied with the ways of studying literature in the academe, began to gather privately to discuss the problems of philology. These meetings resulted in the creation of the Opojaz (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The Opojaz dates back to 1914; it was dissolved in 1923. The MLC came to life in 1915 and remained active after Jakobson's departure for Prague in 1920 but, having lost its most talented member, it ceased to be a significant Formalist center. In the final account, its chief title to fame relates to linguistics rather than literary criticism: it could claim Roman Jakobson, one of the distinguished linguists of today, among its members. As a Formalist nucleus it played a secondary role: it never published anything on its own, while the Opojaz came forth with three issues of the Collected Articles in 1916, 1917 and 1919 respectively (in the last issue, the title was preceded by the word Poetika which subsequently came to be the title of another periodical publication connected with Formalism and published in the years 1926-9 22 ). These collections of essays made the Opojaz known and talked about. They constitute the main source of our knowledge about early Russian Formalism. The nucleus of the Opojaz was formed by Sklovskij, Ejxenbaum, Jakubinskij, and Brik.23 Apart from these, there were people who did not publish in the Opojaz's Collected Articles but who participated in its meetings and sympathized with it, such as Tynjanov, Vinogradov, Bernstein, Kazanskij. Some scholars outside the Opojaz, e.g. Propp, Skaftymov, or Baxtin, later came to be known as Formalists because of the closeness of their scholarly principles to those of the Opojaz.2* Eventually, as a result of personal contacts (the Muscovite Brik moved back to Moscow), the Petersburg and part of the Moscow group merged and began to be referred to as the Petersburg and Moscow Opojaz, the ö

Sborniki po teorii poiticeskogo jazyka, nos. 1-2 (Petrograd, 1916-17); Poetika. Sborniki po teorii poetiieskogo jazyka (Petrograd, 19191); Poetika. Sbornik statej. Nos. 1-5 (Leningrad, 1926-29). 23 Much of the preceding and following factual details about the Opojaz comes from V. Sklovskij's Zili-byli (Moscow, 1966), Vstreii (Moscow, 1965), Literaturnaja enciklopedija, ed. A. LunaSarskij, vols. 5 and 7 (Moscow, 1931 and 1934), and Kratkaja literaturnaja enciklopedija, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1962). It can be added that the Soviet publications do not abound in the information on the Formalist group. 14 Propp's works were published in the Formalist periodical Poitika and in the Formalist series Voprosy poitiki. See V. Propp, Morfologija skazki (Leningrad, 1928); "Transformacija volsebnyx skazok", Poetika, 4 (1928), 70-89.

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adherents of the 'formal' method - the label which some of the Formalists did not like. The first Formalist publications were the result of both intellectual and physical effort of young scholars. The Collected Articles were put together on a primitive machine for printing address cards. The philologists were typesetting them together with professional printers (perhaps for that reason the three published issues abound in misprints). In 1919 the group received official recognition as a learned society - which proved to be short-lived due to the mounting attacks on 'Formalist aestheticism'. When the Opojaz dissolved in 1923, its members attempted to continue their activity under another guise: that of a socially-oriented Left Front of Art (Lef, 1923-5). This organization attempted to be pro-Futurist, pro-Formalist (Majakovskij and Brik were among its organizers) and pro-Marxist (it included the Marxists Cuzak and Arvatov). It published the periodical Lef, the first issue of which abounded in Formalist criticism. Like the Opojaz, Lef worked in none-too-easy conditions: its headquarters were in the two-room apartment of the Briks. While Lef and, later, The New Lef (Novyj Lef) thus pushed uncertainly forward, the Formalists gained the protectorate of the literary section of the State Institute of Art History in Petrograd. The chairman of the literary section was Viktor Maksimovic 2irmunskij (1891-1971), a specialist in German philology by training and a sympathizer of Formalist pursuits. It was due to his help that the state publishing house Academia was opened to the group now loosely hanging together. Zirmunskij himself published in the Formalist Poetika*5 He wholeheartedly approved of the effort to study the peculiarities of the language of imaginative literature; he was aware, however, that such study should also strive to show how the literary strategies work together, how their synthesis is achieved. Like Sklovskij, he called for an inclusive understanding of the term 'strategy' (in his words, themes and ideas are also strategies). He also pointed out that Sklovskij's practical criticism tended to lose from sight the important synthetic principle. Zirmunskij was a man of diverse interest: while postulating the approach to literature indicated above, he also wrote such technical studies as Introduction to Metrics (Vvedenie ν metriku, 1925), and such philosophy-oriented ones as German Romanticism and Contemporary Mysticism (Nemeckij romantizm i sovremennaja mistika, 1914) or The 15

V. Zirmunskij, "Novejsie te&nija istoriko-Iiteraturnoj mysli ν Germanii", Poetika, 2 (1927), 5-28; "Problemy formy ν germanskomfcpose",Poitika, 4 (1928), 90-113.

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Rebuttal of Religion in the History of Romanticism (Religioznoe otreceme ν istorii romantizma, 1919). In his later years Zirmunskij frequently reverted to purely historical and folkloristic study.2« He was one of the most distinguished Russian literary scholars. His essay "On Classic and Romantic Poetry" (O poezii klassiceskoj i romanticeskoj) in his most Formalist-oriented volume Problems of the Theory of Literature (Voprosy teorii literatury, 1928)27 parallels closely Τ. E. Hulme's "Romanticism and Classicism" and shows Zirmunskij's blending of historical and textual interests at its best. He maintains there that irrespective of traditional divisions into literary periods, there have always existed two opposite currents in literature: the Romantic and the Classical. The Classical poet is an impersonal poet. His objective is to create a work of art and not to express his own private personality. Consequently, he does not attempt to 'adjust' the material in which he works to the demands of his private self. Nor does he treat the laws governing that material as something to be broken or disregarded if personal expression demands it. He respects the conventions within which he is free to create his vision of harmony and beauty. Homer, Shakespeare, Racine, Plautus and Moliere, Puskin's Poltava and The Stone Cuest, Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea are all examples of the Classical attitude. The Romantic poet begins with a different set of assumptions. He is more interested in himself than in the product of his poetic activity. He is not an artisan but a seer. He holds the material in which he works in little esteem and is all too ready to sacrifice it for the sake of personal expression. Therefore, his final product is frequently unfinished, fragmentary or otherwise irregular. Goethe and Fet provide a multitude of examples. This duality, maintains Zirmunskij, is accompanied by a similar duality in literary criticism. Lessing, a Classicist, evaluates the work of art from the viewpoint of its conformity to the objective canons of beauty: "A tragedy of Shakespeare lays its claim to perfection in that it achieves the objective of tragedy as well as an ancient tragedy does, though by different means." Contrary to that, the Romantic critic " V. Zirmunskij, Narodnyj geroiceskij epos (Moscow, 1962); Drama Aleksandra Bloka "Roza i krest" (Leningrad, 1964). 27 V. Zirmunskij, Voprosy teorii literatury, pp. 175-81. This essay of Zirmunskij as well as paralleling the "Romanticism and Classicism" of Τ. E. Hulme - further develops the thoughts of F. Schiller's "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" (1795). The three critics differ, however, in their evaluation of the types of poetry they discuss.

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Herder is more interested in the genesis of literature: for him, "Shakespeare and Sophocles represent two different spiritual worlds from which they came and which they express." Another exponent of Romantic attitudes, F. Schlegel, makes the case explicit by saying that, "The arbitrary rule of the poet will not suffer any law imposed upon him."28 According to the Formalist practice 2irmunskij, unlike Hulme, tried merely to describe, not to evaluate, these two types of literature and criticism, thus indirectly affirming that he represented another type of literary commentary: that which is devoted to the description of the literary artefact without relating it to historical events or passing a value judgment on it. Among the Opojaz members, Sklovskij and Tynjanov were the most creative in the area of theoretical criticism. Viktor Borisoviö Sklovskij (1893- ) is generally recognized as the spiritus movens behind the creation of the Opojaz and the Formalist publications. He studied history and philology at St. Petersburg University, but academic ways had little appeal for him. Among all critics of talent with whom I am familiar Sklovskij is the least academic. His style is intensely personal; he is a leisurely storyteller rather than a scholar. His paragraphs are short; they frequently amount to one sentence, in the biblical fashion. He jumps from subject to subject without providing customary links; he likes to quote and to get his point through by juxtaposing quotations rather than by commentary. His most significant remarks are dropped casually at the places one least expects them. No distinction can be drawn between the style of his criticism and of his personal memoirs. All these features might have been a total downfall of a lesser critic, but Sklovskij not only manages to remain pleasantly readable but also can be enlightening. His main work On the Theory of Prose (O teorii prozy, 1925)29 belies its title by its scope. It deals with fiction, poetry and non-fictional prose, and it contains many insights into the forms and laws of poetic distortion. Sklovskij delineates there a good deal of terminology that had become the small coin of Formalist discourse. Among these terms are priem (strategy, or device), ostranenie (defamiliarization), zatrudnenie (defacilitation), zamedlenie (retardation, or slowing down), stupencatoe postroenie (staircase structure), obnazenie priema (laying bare the strategy). The most ambiguous description of all Sklovskij gives to the word 'strategy': it is both any element of 'life' when the latter enters 18 M

Ibid., p. 178. Zirmunskij's quotation of F. Schlegel. V. Sklovskij, Ο teorii prozy (Moscow, 1925).

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art, and the formal principle according to which a certain part of the work is organized. Defamiliarization is a method of presentation of things and ideas; using it, we arrange the artistic elements in such a way as to make them represent these things or ideas to us with strange clarity. We thus make the familiar look unfamiliar: e.g., Tolstoj makes us 'experience' the scene of flogging in "After the Ball" by describing it as if seen for the first time by someone who does not know what flogging is. Defacilitation relates to the effort to arrange artistic elements in an intricate and difficult way, so that we have to attend to them more than if we met them in everyday life. Staircase structure is the phenomenon easy to observe in prose fiction which always consists of easily distinguishable compositional units - 'steps' or 'slow motions of a dance', based on the phenomena of parallelism and contrast. They lead to no didactic end, however, but contain their own content, being the only possible form to say what is being said. A critic has to 'lay bare' all these, and other, strategies, in his discussion of the literary work. On the other hand, the writer himself may lay them bare: thus does Sterne, for instance, when he playfully arranges the narrative units in Tristram Shandy contrary to the logically motivated sequence which a great majority of prose fiction works has accustomed us to expect. Sklovskij appears to have been the person whom the theories of his admired literary hero Belyj, and of other idealistic thinkers, such as Bergson, affected more than any other Formalist. His concept of literary work as the sum-total of forms is incontestably Belyj's and, ultimately, Kantian, and his theory of art as SEEING the world resembles the reasoning of Bergson in Le Rire, (therefore, Sklovskij sometimes resembles also Hulme who shared Bergson's views on art). It has to be added that in the 1960's, in his memoirs that emerged together with other works of the 'thaw', Sklovskij acknowledged the influence of Belyj perhaps more fully than ever before; he insisted, however, that the impact concerned purely technical matters, and that the Formalists were always clearly aware of the wrongness of the Symbolist Weltanschauung.39 Also, his derivations from Belyj did not diminish his full sympathy for the cause of social justice: as he worked on the concepts of defamiliarization and defacilitation, he also wrote articles and book reviews for Gor'kij's journals The Chronicle (Letopis', 1915-17) and The New Life (Novaja Zizn', 1917-18), until the latter was suppressed by Lenin. V. Sklovskij, Ze wspomnien, trans. A. Galis (Warsaw, 1965), pp. 138-39.

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During the 1930's Sklovskij concentrated more on the writing of novels than on criticism. He has never given up criticism completely, however, and a recently published collection of his essays The Artistic Prose (Xudozestvennaja proza, 195931), shows that his departure from the insights of his youth was never complete. It is interesting to note that some of his terms, such as ostranenie, have by now filtered down to popular usage in Russian literary study.32 Jurij Nikolaevic Tynjanov (1894-1943) was a critic, novelist, translator, editor and lecturer in Russian poetry at the Leningrad Institute of Art History. He was the most consistently theory-oriented among the Formalists, and his views anticipate most clearly the structural trend in literary criticism as it developed, for instance, in France. His work had greatest repercussions among literary critics outside of Russia, such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov and the Prague group. He advocated viewing literary works from the viewpoint of structure, not of meaning. Like Jakobson, he wanted literary criticism to become a scientific investigation of facts. Notwithstanding his theoretical bent, his discussions frequently relate to Russian poetry, especially of the Romantic period. His major works, The Problems of Language in Verse {Problema stixotvornogo jazyka, 1924) and Archaists and Innovators (Arxaisty i novatory, 1929) introduced a number of novel critical concepts, some of which gained acceptance among the Russian critics of today.33 For the student of Russian literary history he is the one who threw a new light on the development of Romanticism in Russia, pointed out Dostoevskij's grotesque use of Gogol's Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, and put to work Gor'kij's plan to publish the literary series Biblioteka poeta.34 He did most of his critical work in the 1920's. In the later period of his life he worked mainly as a novelist and editor. Boris Mixajlovic Ejxenbaum (1886-1959) was the oldest of the Opojaz critics and, in the initial period of his activity, as strongly influenced by the idealistic theories of literature as Sklovskij (he acknowl51

(Moscow, 1959). A. Kvjatkovskij, Poiticeskij slovar' (Moscow, 1966), pp. 188-89. 111. 33 Ju. Tynjanov, Problema stixotvornogo jazyka (Leningrad, 1924); reprinted The Hague, 1963; Moscow, 1965. Arxaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929); reprinted München, 1968. For the usage of Tynjanov's concepts see S. Bobrov, "Tesnota stixovogo rjada (opyt statistiöeskogo analiza literaturaogo ponjatija vvedennogo Ju. N . Tynjanovym)", Russkaja literatura, VIII, iii, 108-124. 34 Arxaisty i novatory, pp. 87-228 and 412-455. Tynjanov participated in editing about 60 volumes of the Biblioteka poeta series. 51

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edged them more explicitly than any other Formalist). His early essays repeat the tenets of the anti-positivistic trend in literary interpretation which emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, and which considered the Kulturwissenschaften as radically different from Naturwissenschaften. They also follow a thesis put forth among others by Belyj: that literature provides knowledge of a specific kind. In the essays written in the 1920's Ejxenbaum began to assert that Formalism is entirely independent of any philosophical and aesthetic theory and that it therefore cannot be accused of idealistic leanings.35 Ejxenbaum was not a creator of theories; rather, his important concern was the individual work of literature. He was the most talented practical critic among the Formalists. In his essays he managed to be precise and to mask it in the elegant style of a feuilleton writer. He examined the prose of Gogol' and Tolstoj, gave a lasting interpretation of skaz as a narrative technique and some successful Formalist reinterpretations of foreign masterpieces, e.g., of Schiller's Wallenstein. Like Brooks and Leavis in the English-speaking world, he undertook a reexamination of Russian poetic tradition from Deräavin to Axmatova. He popularized among the Formalists the terms Augenphilologie and Ohrenphilologie taken from the German philologist Sievers and Saran, and maintained that silent reading, practised by most people in the twentieth century, distorts literature; that the writer hears his works while he creates, and that some of his effects cannot be perceived except through loud articulation. He based his famous reinterpretation of Gogol' 's "The Overcoat" on the principle of recitation aloud.®* After the dissolution of the Opojaz group he continued to work as literary critic, editor and professor of literature. Jakobson, Tomasevskij and Vinogradov belong to the most scholarly oriented Formalists. All three have occupied places of prominence in contemporary linguistic and literary scholarship. Boris Viktorovic Tomasevskij (1890-1957) from the very beginning of his association with Formalism was a scholar given to analysis and description of verse and to theorizing about literature in general. His Theory of Literature is a pioneering work: it describes and classifies literature on the basis of its structural features without an inquiry into its genesis.37 Tomasevskij 35

The shift is dramatic when one compares the early essays from Skvoz' literaturu with the previously discussed "Teorija 'formal'nogo metoda' ". »« Molodoj Tolstoj (Petrograd, 1922); Lev Tolstoj, vols. 1-2 (Leningrad, 1928-31); Skvoz' literaturu (The Hague, 1962), pp. 171-95, 73-156. 37 B. TomaSevskij, Teorija literatury (Moscow, 1925).

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followed Belyj in using statistical methods in the investigation of the rhythmic characteristics of Russian verse and, like Brik, demonstrated that in Russian, the choice of words is dependent on the rhythmical structure of the line. He was the staunchest supporter of Belyj's thesis that Russian verse should not be looked upon from the perspective of metrical feet but from the perspective of line; the line of verse was, for him, the principal metrical unit.38 As editor, he gained recognition for his critical editions of Puskin's works and for editing the series Biblioteka poita. Viktor Vladimirovic Vinogradov (1895- ) is a critic of great profusion and broad scope. In fact, it is misleading to attach the Formalist label to him. He is the author of many books on literary theory and the Formalist sympathies of his youth provided for him a stimulus toward building comprehensive and eclectic theoretical systems.38 Already at the time of his association with the Opojaz critics Vinogradov made attempts to tackle basic literary classifications: for instance, in "Toward the Theory of Poetic Language" (K postroeniju teorii poMceskogo jazyka) he tried to establish new principles on which the divisions into genres could be made. The first dichotomy he saw among the works of imaginative literature was that of monologue versus dialogue; the second, poetry versus prose; the third, the works which can be fully appreciated only when they are articulated, and those which can be read silently (he returned here to the concepts of Augenphilologie and Ohrenphilologie of which Ejxenbaum spoke). These divisions were significant in relation to what Vinogradov had to say on the problem of skaz. In "The Problem of Skaz in Stylistics" (Problema skaza ν stilistike) he observed that there are two kinds of monologue.40 One is the customary 'omniscient' or 'selectively omniscient' or 'the first person' 41 points of view in a narrative; the other occurs when the author takes pains to create the impression that he merely records what someone else is saying. This orientation toward the manner of speaking, distinctly different from that of the writer, distinguishes skaz from other forms of imaginative literature. Vinogradov thus broadened the concept of skaz as it was known to Russian readers of the time from 18

Tomasevskij, Ο Stixe (Leningrad, 1929), pp. 37-62. " E.g., V. Vinogradov, Stilistika. Teorija poeticeskoj reci. Poetika. (Moscow, 1963). 40 V. Vinogradov, "K postroenii teorii poeticeskogo jazyka", Poetika, 3 (1927), 524; "Problema skaza ν stilistike", Poetika, 1 (1926), 24-40. 41 The terminology is taken from N. Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction", PMLA, LXX (1955), 1160-84.

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Ejxenbaum's essays. His "Problems of Skaz in Stylistics" belongs now to classical commentaries on this form of prose used so abundantly by Russian writers from Gogol' to Solzenicyn. To call Roman Jakobson (1896- ) a Formalist is, as in the case of Vinogradov, misleading. Jakobson's association with Formalism was for him a starting point to the research in linguistics for which he is now known. A member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and of a Futurist group Centrifuga, he gave an analysis of Xlebnikov's zaum' in The Newest Russian Poetry (Novejsaja russkaja poözija, 1921)42 where he also supplied a number of Formalist handy words and handy phrases, such as 'literariness', "poetry is language in its aesthetic function", and "poetry is the organized self-valuable word" (oformlenie samovitogo slova). In Prague, where he arrived in 1920, he received his doctorate and participated in the works of the Prague Linguistic Circle (1926-39). The Circle consisted of a number of linguists and literary theorists: among the latter were Mukarovsk^, Havrdnek and Trnka. It edited journals (Slovo a slovesnost) and books on linguistics and literary theory, consisting of the articles of not only the Prague scholars but also of their colleagues from Poland and Russia.43 The Circle kept in touch with N. Troubetzkoy, then holding a professorship in Vienna. The members of the Circle were affected by modern logicians; especially Bertrand Russell's work is mentioned in their writings as one of the sources of their theories. Thus it was not a mere coincidence that the development of this school of linguists and literary theorists coincided with the emergence of the Vienna Circle of neo-positivists, likewise indebted to Russell. In "Linguistics and the Ideological Structure of the Period" Trnka stated that "the model of modern linguistics as a science dealing with the signs of language is furnished by relational logic . . .'\ 44 Following the ideas of the symbolic logicians, the Prague scholars saw in language a system of relations which can be scientifically investigated. They conceived also of literary study as a part of semiotics. Literary works, Mukafovsk^ and Havränek maintained, are structures of elements; some of these are foregrounded, others are toned down. The 42

R. Jakobson, Novejsaja russkaja poezija (Prague, 1921). An extensive selection of linguistic papers of the Circle was republished in A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, ed. J. Vachek (Bloomington, Ind., 1964) and The Linguistic School of Prague, ed. Vachek (Bloomington, Ind., 1966). A selection of the articles on aesthetics can be found in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style, P. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), henceforth referred to as A Prague School Reader. 44 The Linguistic School of Prague, p. 159. 49

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investigation of the changes in the configuration of elements in the course of history belongs to the literary scholar. The views of the Prague theorists thus recall those of Tynjanov and anticipate those of Roland Barthes in the 1960's." To return now to the Formalists: as they conducted their work in the 1920's, one of their principal concerns was that of survival: the criticism directed against them was mounting in current literary and political publications. Among the voices raised against them, the most eloquent and, at the time it was raised, influential, was that of Leon Trockij. He expressed his denunciation of Formalism (coupled with a feeble praise) in Literature and Revolution. He observed there that, whether the Formalists liked it or not, the sources of their movement are in Kant's theory of forms. Knowing full well that one of the best methods to discredit something is to misrepresent it, he used this method in regrad to Kant and to another idealistic philosopher, Bergson. He ended his article with skillful turns of phrase from which many a lesser demagogue could profit: The Formalist school represents an abortive idealism applied to the questions of art. The Formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that "In the beginning was the word." But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic shadow.4· After Trockij, the 'Kantian accusation' became a standard one in regard to the Formalists, regardless of whether a particular person or work deserved it or not. It was usually posed in a misleading way. Literaturnaja enciklopedija, for instance, in a lengthy article devoted to Formalism, tells us of such partial truths as that of Kant's postulate that art is a play of imagination lacking any function: hence Sklovskij's comparison of art to a slow dance!47 Following such attacks, the Formalists either retreated into the field of creative writing or moved to editorial and professorial jobs or to safer subjects of research. Vinogradov, for instance, wrote in the 1930's a study of Puskin's language, and in the 1950's published the fourvolume Puskin Dictionary (in preparation of which the former Formalists Tomasevskij and Bernstein also participated, among others). This is a useful scholastic monument, but one wonders whether under diffe45 See the discussion of R. Barthes's Critique et verite (Paris, 1966) in Chapter Two. 46 L. Trockij, Literature and Revolution (New York, 1957), p. 183. 47 Literaturnaja enciklopedija, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1934), pp. 273-76.

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rent circumstances a creative linguist would devote years to prepare, say, a dictionary of Wordsworth's language. The person most attacked was Sklovskij: this was only to be expected, since he was perhaps the most conspicuous and militant figure in the Formalist group. It is understandable, therefore, that the most explicit renunciation of Formalist views had to come from Sklovskij, too. In the Literaturnaja gazeta of 1930, in a self-criticizing article, he asserted that, "Formalism is a thing of the past", admitted its serious error of trying to separate the social problems from the problems of literary analysis, and declared the necessity "to undertake a thorough study of the Marxist method in its entirety".48 In the 1950's and 60's one could observe the beginning of a vindication of the Formalist work. It was noticed by Soviet critics that, in the form it finally assumed, Formalist research is by no means hostile to the political system; that it had developed into something very remotely resembling the Kantian premises. Some of the Formalist studies (Tynjanov's Problems of Language in Verse, for instance) were reevaluated, accepted and republished. Some of the former Formalists came forth with publications relying on the previously rejected or neglected principles of analysis.49 Authoritative sources began to publish sympathetic reviews of Formalist achievement.50 Also, a revival of Formalist scholarship occurred in the West, sometimes in the form of stock-taking (Erlich's Russian Formalism), at other times as a stimulus for further study of literary forms (French structuralism).

2.

N E W CRITICISM

The phenomenon of New Criticism has received a great deal of commentary in English and American literary publications during the last thirty years. One of the reasons for its popularity as a discussion subject is its elusiveness. It has never been a school in the sense Russian Formalism 48 I was unable to consult this issue of Literaturnaja gazeta and took my information from Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism, 2nd ed., pp. 136-7. 49 V. Sklovskij, Xudozestvennaja proza. Razmyslenija i razbory. (Moscow, 1959); V. Vinogradov, Stilistika. Teorija poiticeskoj red. Poetika. (Moscow, 1963); B. Ejxenbaum, "Roman Lermontova "Geroj nasego vremeni", in M. Lermontov, Geroj nasego vremeni, ed. B. Ejxenbaum (Moscow, 1962), pp. 125-63. 50 V. Kozinov, "Poetika za pjat'desjat let", Izvestija Akademii Ν auk SSSR, Serija literatury i jazyka, XXVI, 5 (1967), 432-56.

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has and therefore its commentators could exercise pleasant freedom in singling out its characteristics and defining its boundaries. It is interesting to observe how the emphases in describing New Criticism vary. R. W. Stallman considers the concern with 'the dissociation of modern sensibility' to be the distinguishing mark of a New Critic. The growing disparity between scientific and aesthetic sensibility is, in his view, the fact which the New Critics attempt in various ways to counteract, or at least vividly to record.51 David Daiches regards New Criticism as an American phenomenon which arose on the basis of contemporary interest 'in myth and symbol' and in high standards of professional criticism. He observes that it has developed 'its own scholasticism' and 'its own technical jargon' which limit its appeal considerably.52 Ransom himself (whose central position in New Criticism nobody questions), in The New Criticism grouped together such disparate people as T. S. Eliot and Ch. Morris. Walter Sutton sees as the distinguishing feature of the New Critics "their practice of close textual analysis" and "the conservatism of their literary, social and political views".58 In addition to that one frequently hears of the 'new criticisms' in European countries. Le Sage's book The French New Criticism is an instance.54 Among the generally recognized facts concerning New Criticism are the following: it arose to prominence in the United States in the 1930's and 40's, partly as a reaction to the literary criticism of the time, more interested in the causes of literature and in the place it occupies among other activities of man than in pointing out the architectonics of literary ambiguities. A reaction against a similar situation had earlier set in also in England, and the Americans owed a great deal to the examples of I. A. Richards, Τ. E. Hulme and the expatriate Eliot. Critics associated with J. C. Ransom and the Kenyon Review form the nucleus of New Criticism in the United States. They are all concerned with the close reading of the literary text. It appears to me that the descriptions of New Criticism tend to be performed from two basic viewpoints. From the first one sees New Criticism as an atmosphere rather than a movement, an atmosphere 81 "The New Critics", Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), pp. 488-508. 51 D. Daiches, The Present Age (London, 1958), p. 121 f. 55 W. Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), pp. 98151. 54 L. Le Sage, The French New Criticism (University Park, Penn., and London, 1967).

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favorable to the intrinsic study and ill-disposed toward the extrinsic study of literature. This atmosphere developed not only in the English speaking countries but in European letters in general, following the intensified interest in the philosophy of language and literature displayed by a number of theorists toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the perceptive studies of poetic language undertaken by some of the Symbolist poets. If one follows the logical conclusions of this viewpoint, one may say that almost every European country had, or has, its 'new' critics; that at one time or another, almost every name in American criticsm was associated with the movement; and that the Russian Formalists are as much 'New Critical' as Gaston Bachelard or Roland Barthes in France, or J. C. Ransom and Allen Tate in the United States. The second viewpoint takes more into account the peculiarities of New Criticism as it developed in the United States. It limits New Criticism to the people closely associated with J. C. Ransom (they were chronologically the first to launch many of the New Critical tenets in American letters). The direct lineage of this group goes back to Τ. E. Hulme's view on poetry as intuitive but at the same time accurate and precise description of finite things, I. A. Richards's concern with technical criticism, and T. S. Eliot's sensitivity toward the characteristics of literature which go beyond technical description and pragmatism. More indirectly, this lineage goes back to Kant. If one follows the logical conclusions of this viewpoint one has to say that the combination of these traditions distinguishes Ransom, Tate and Brooks from other contemporary critics who also practise the so-called textual explication, or more broadly, intrinsic study of literature, but who do it from different standpoints and therefore arrive at different conclusions. It hardly needs emphasizing that the 'Ransom group' is by no means uniform: critics belonging here do vary in theory and practice. Still, as further discussion will attempt to indicate, they have enough in common to warrant treating them sometimes as a unity. In this study I shall follow the implications of the second viewpoint. It seems to me that the juxtaposition of Russian Formalism with the unambiguously defined New Criticism not only brings forth their complementary qualities and their differences, but also gives a good insight into the problems and directions of contemporary criticism in general. In turn, understanding the problems of criticism ultimately contributes to 'the elucidation of art and the correction of taste' in regard to literature itself.

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Having in mind the focus which a comparative study imposes I shall now try to outline the salient features of the movement which originated in England in the 1920's and came to full flourish in the United States a decade or so later. One of those features was excellently pointed out by W. J. Ong in "The Meaning of the 'New Criticism'"; 55 I shall therefore use his observations. Ong starts from the viewpoint of the philosophy of language. He observes that a certain view on man's mind had long been affecting our understanding of literature. Literary works were seen as being able to convey concepts and judgments with precision and exactness whose model can be seen in mathematical symbols. "The Cartesian-Kantian dualism had obscured the fact that concepts and judgments cannot be prepared in one mind and handed like tokens to another" says Ong. In his view, the New Critics deal with the inherent ambiguity of language. One recalls here Cassirer's observation on linguistics which, though it ultimately springs from a different way of viewing Kant, asserts a similar thing: that in the nineteenth century an attempt was made "to relate linguistics to natural science, to orient it by reference to the structure of natural science, in order to find the same inner certainty and to acquire a similar stock of exact and inviolable laws".88 The New Critics are preoccupied with showing the unavoidable ambiguity of language, the interrelation of the logical and the nonlogical. In doing so, they first point at the categories of language that can be paraphrased in logical terms, and then demonstrate that the interplay of these categories creates unities that cannot be 'retold' in logical discourse. They attempt to start with a scholarly, sometimes nearly linguistic, description of the literary work and then pass to a description of it which surpasses the rationality of scholarship. Cleanth Brooks put it this way: "But I do want to stress the fact that criticism and orthodox scholarship are not on principle inimical to each other, to emphasize the fact that they actually supplement each other, and to suggest that they can, ideally, coalesce with one another in the person of that fabulous monster, the perfect critic."57 One remembers here that the Russian Formalists were primarily interested in the scholarly part of the task which Brooks grants to the critic. The ambiguities of language which no scholar can precisely delin55

In Twentieth Century English, ed. W. S. Knickerbocker (New York, 1946), pp. 344-70. 56 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1953), p. 173. 57 C. Brooks, 'The New Criticism and Scholarship", Twentieth Century English, ed. W. S. Knickerbocker, p. 373.

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eate and at which a critic can hint in an imaginative phrase of his own, were the field on which the Formalists for many reasons did not care to tread. Thus it can be said that the New Critics have never aimed at being scholarly in the way the Russian Formalists did. They have always remained aware of the fact that the 'rhetorical wit' (Northop Frye's phrase) is necessary for the critic. Criticism's ultimate task is to elucidate the works of poetic imagination which cannot be paraphrased but which sometimes can be elucidated indirectly, through an illustrative rather than a rationally descriptive phrase. Except for the early works of Richards, the American New Critics and their English predecessors have never deemed it possible to make literary criticism into as exact a discipline as that which, in Tynjanov's view, would emerge out of his delineation of the relationship of factors and functions in a literary work. They thus parallel the efforts of such philosophers as Heinrich Rickert, who in Science and History (Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 1910) argued that the so-called cultural sciences can never be encompassed within the scholarly methods of natural sciences, that scientific exactness which the positivist thinkers assumed to be applicable to the study of all kinds of phenomena, can never be achieved in the study of the products that "embody human experience of value".58 It can be said, then, that like Rickert in philosophy, the New Critics in letters are a part of the twentieth-century reaction against positivism. The Russian Formalists, on the other hand, in their efforts to achieve scholarly standards in criticism (which sometimes led them to speak of 'literary science' rather than of criticism), have remained much more in the orbit of positivist ideas - and, one may add anticipating the argument of Chapter Two of this study - of the ideas of the neo-positivist thinkers of his century. The similarity between the tenets of New Criticism and the antipositivistic trends in philosophy is related to the New Critics' attitude toward the trends in criticism preceding them. It has frequently been said that they acted against the tendencies in American letters which had been cultivated by the New Humanists like P. E. More, interested rather in the vicissitudes of human history and their spiritual meaning than in the literary artefact. In a sense, such statements are true. The New Critics always start with the consideration of the verbal facts of the literary work. At the same time, however, they have been in sympathy with the postulates of Eliot's 'principled' essays more than 58

H. Rickert, Science and History: A Critique G. Reisman (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 19.

of Positivist

Epistemology,

trans.

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any other group of critics contemporary to them. It can be added that T. S. Eliot's admiration and respect for P. E. More made him participate in the famous Humanist publication in 1930: Humanism and America, and write a highly sympathetic essay upon More's death. Eliot admired in More the unrelenting search for permanent principles of literature and civilisation which did not stem from literature itself but from the nature of man and his relation to reality. On American grounds, the former Fugitives were not strangers to such concerns, as Eliot himself noted in After Strange Gods. Thus to see the New Criticism as a tendency counteracting on the whole front the tenets of the New Humanists is not accurate. The New Critics, from Eliot to Ransom, Tate and Brooks, do not merely investigate the ambiguities of language but also try to relate them to what is permanent and essential about man. Again, this aspect of critical work is absent in the Formalist studies. Related to this concern is the New Critics' insistence on literature's uniquely cognitive value. This cognition, they tell us, cannot be reduced to one available through textbooks of history or psychology; it is precise yet intuitive, like the knowledge available through art of which Kant spoke in the Critique of Judgement, and at which Coleridge hinted in his discussion of imagination and poetic activity. The New Critics tell us, in one form or another, that poetry enables man to grasp things which scientific analysis can never hope to grasp but which are nevertheless cognitively valuable and important. This metaphysical dimension which the New Critical studies contain (although critics like Brooks would probably refrain from using this word) is a factor which distinguishes their studies from many other varieties of the intrinsic study of literature in this century. It also constitutes the link between the New Critical theories, and Coleridge and Kant. This knowledge is valuable to man if he is to develop fully his human intelligence. The New Critics, then, do not formulate their concepts from the viewpoint of moral philosophy (like the New Humanists did) but from the viewpoint of the peculiar features of man's intelligence. As to the Formalists, the vicissitudes of their views on literary cognition were too complex to allow an easy summary; suffice it to say here that they varied from work to work, and that the lack of any well defined program in relation to literary cognition accounted partly for the tendency to avoid interpretation altogether, visible in many Formalist studies.

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I shall start reviewing the New Critical background with Τ. E. Hulme's Speculations. Few critical works written in the twentieth century fared so well as did this one. The essays of which it consists were written before World War I and published posthumously in 1924. Since then, they have been commented upon with a frequency testifying to the relevance of Hulme's concerns and to the inviting clarity of his style. Hulme wrote as much to investigate various concepts of fine arts and to expound the aims of imagism as to advocate new attitudes in the reception of literature. He ended, without knowing it, as one of the fathers of a critical trend. Among his essays, "Romanticism and Classicism" contains much of what later developed into the complexity of a critical movement. The essay starts with an explicit rejection of a certain attitude toward man which, via the Age of Enlightenment, found a strong formulation in the writings of the German Romantics and has been persistent since. Hulme defines this attitude, and its opposite, thus: Put shortly, there are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent.... The view that regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.59

Hulme's endorsement of Classicism had a bearing on his opinions about poetry. The Classical view, he argued, leads to poetry "always faithful to the conception of a limit", the Romantic one, to uncontrolled and undisciplined flights of emotions and metaphors: "Hugo is always flying over abysses, flying up into eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line." 80 Hulme believed that according to the law of diminishing returns, the period of Romantic attitudes in poetry which lasted over a century, is about to end. The period of Classical poetry would follow. New poets would disclaim the imagination which served the Romantics as a vehicle for expressing emotions and would turn to fancy which, in his terms, is a perfect tool for 'accurate, precise and definite description' of the world around us. For Hulme, as for Sklovskij and Bergson, the aim of poetry is to provide a precise description of the finite world and, by means of that, to make us see things stripped of the film of familiarity which the habits of life impose upon them. Poetry corrects and improves our insight muddled by these 58

Τ. E. Hulme, Speculations (London, 1924), p. 117. Ibid., p. 120.

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habits. How it does it should be the concern of the literary commentator. However, even though the Romantic inspiration in poetry is about over, critics persist in looking for, and praising, the sloppy Romantic flights of irresponsibility. Instead of searching for pseudoelevation and 'the resting places for one's emotions' (Ransom's phrase), they should turn their attention to the accuracy of word usage in poetry, to the correspondence between the world and its poetic presentation. Hulme was part of the New Critical tradition in several ways. First, his dislike of Romantic poetry reappeared, with a broader motivation, in T. S. Eliot's essays and culminated in such attacks on the real or alleged Romantic irresponsibilities as Brooks's "Notes for a Revised History of English Poetry". Brooks charged the Romantics with presenting a panorama of their emotions rather than 'precise and accurate' knowledge about the world. Second, Hulme's plea for restrained and responsible use of words in poetry anticipates the careful examination of words in a poem which the textual critics carried on with great success. Third, for Hulme, Romanticism and Classicism did not only represent literary schools: they were ways of life. His praise of what he called Classical attitudes made him a welcome figure for the Fugitives and their sympathizers. A man of letters who looms large in the New Critical tradition is T. S. Eliot (1882-1962). Eliot's expository prose is both unsystematic (Eliot represented the opposite of the Formalists' scholastic bent) and very broad in scope; he is a critic of culture, not only of literature. This survey will concern that part of his writings which is directly related to New Criticism. Eliot's first volume of essays: The Sacred Wood (1920), opens with an attack on old criticisms.61 Except for Coleridge whom he characterizes as "perhaps the greatest and, in a sense, the last" among English critics, he finds little praise for commentaries to literature contemporary to him, as well as for those preceding him. Arthur Symons is found to be an emotional impressionist, and impressions we do not need, for we have our own. Handing down literary precepts which one encounters in Horace and Boileau represents a narrowness which has to be rejected. The 'technical' critic is merely a cataloguer of rules (Eliot repudiates here the study of 'literariness' in its narrow version). 41

'The Perfect Critic" and "Imperfect Critics", The Sacred Wood (London, 1920), pp. 1-46.

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Those who treat literature as a product of a historical moment or a philosophical formulation should be called historians and philosophers. Getting back to a more personal level, Eliot censures the New Humanists More and Babbitt for too much moralizing, too much academicism and tendencies toward the German-style scholarship (ironically, the Humanists did not like the latter). Swinburne, on the other hand, is too undisciplined and impressionistic. The Frenchman Julien Benda has the beauty of style but lacks depth. All this Eliot communicates in an exquisitely articulate and condescending style (he advocated impersonal poetry but not impersonal criticism). In the course of censuring others Eliot did not lay precepts for criticism, apart from the general demands of sensitivity and learning. His Summa contra criticos, however, together with his and Hulme's rejection of vague emotionalism and verbal profusion of Romantic style, were the early expressions of the same critical spirit which dominated the New Critics in the United States. The demands they raised in regard to literature concerned, similarly, accurate usage of words, and in regard to criticism, the critic's preoccupation with literature rather than with the phenomena flanking it. Another essay of the collection, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" contains the thesis which can be found also in the works of Viktor Sklovskij, at approximately the same time: that the works of literature form an order which is changed slightly with the appearance of each new and significant work. The artist has a meaning only within that order. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is the first in the line of New Critical attempts to demonstrate an impersonal, non-biographical poetic continuity which later were undertaken, in regard to English poetry, by Leavis and Brooks. Eliot had a happy facility to transform complex philosophical concepts into untechnical phrases which, though they simplified matters, did not vulgarize them. His popularity as a critic rests to some extent on his coining very catchy phrases for certain literary phenomena. Among these are 'the objective correlative' and 'the dissociation of sensibility'. The first, expounded in the essay "Hamlet and His Problems" is Eliot's corrective to the Romantic view on poetry as a spontaneous overflow of emotions. Eliot does not deny that in poetry emotions enter the picture, but objects to the directness of this overflow. Life, emotions and feelings, he maintains, enter art only in the form of the objective correlative, i.e., of artistic correspondences which are 'formulas' of emotions but which are not identical with them. Such

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formulas are, in literature, 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events'. As soon as the objective correlative appears we can speak of the author's detachment from his personal life, of an escape from emotions. It may happen that the artist cannot find the correlative that would fully express a certain state of mind. This, maintains Eliot, happened in Hamlet: "Hamlet is dominated by the emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they may appear."®2 In Eliot's view, this constitutes the flaw of Shakespeare's play. Having such views on emotions in poetry, it is no wonder that Eliot dislikes the typical Romantic. From The Sacred Wood through Homage to John Dryden (1924) to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), he shows his

predilection for sixteenth-, seventeenth- and thirteenth-century poets, English and foreign, and finds praise for all of them - but none for Shelley or even Keats. It may seem that Eliot's remarks on the objective correlative come close to the theory of poetry as an expression (direct or indirect) of emotions, as conveying no objective truth. Eliot does not speak directly about poetic cognition, it is true; but the second handy phrase, and its discussion in "The Metaphysical Poets", corrects the impression concerning emotions and outlines Eliot's views on the uniquely cognitive value of poetry , es Eliot dislikes the Romantics not only because they speak of their emotions directly, but also because their verse deals almost exclusively with emotions. In the seventeenth century, maintains Eliot, the dissociation of sensibility occurred in English poetry and resulted in a split in poetic creativity. Poetry began to be written with the use of either the faculty of reasoning or that of feeling. Poets began to be either intellectual (Browning) or emotional (Shelley). In contrast to this state of affairs, the poets of the seventeenth century possessed 'the mechanism of sensibility' which could synthesize thought and feeling, argument and image, the rational and the non-rational. The highest poetry, maintains Eliot, always does this. Eliot's insistence on joining 'thought and feeling' as a characteristic of genuine poetry reappeared later in many New Critical essays, from Ransom's "Poetry: A Note in Onthology" through Tate's "Three Types of Poetry" to Brooks's 'The Heresy of the Paraphrase". In these and other works, the problem of joining what cannot be joined in logical discourse is considered in much greater detail and without the simplifications which Eliot's un62

T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems", Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 125. 63 T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets", Selected Essays, pp. 241-50.

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technical phrasing necessarily introduced. Nevertheless, his is the same concern with the peculiar kind of the workings of man's cognizing intelligence visible in poetry, which has permeated the writings of the American New Critics. Thus, Eliot's statement made in On Poetry and Poets: that he is unaware of any school of criticism stemming from him, has to be taken with reservation.84 Certainly, once popularized, the method of investigating concrete examples of the fusion of diverse elements of experience in poetry, resulted in some lemon squeezing. It is not in that, however, that all of its characteristics lie. The unparaphrasable texture of which the American critics speak arises as the result of what Eliot called 'feeling one's thought'. In addition to that, his dislike of sentimental poetry and respect for tradition are the characteristics which also the American New Critics share. Even the starched urbanity erf Ransom's The World's Body is reminiscent of Eliot's early essays. Finally, the representative, or symbolic, function of language of which Brooks spoke (following Urban in his phrasing) is closely related to the capacity for 'feeling one's thought' which Eliot pointed out in certain types of poetry. It may not appear so at first sight: this function, in Brooks's rendering, has nothing to do with emotion, and relates to the expression of truths of the non-rational type.65 However, it so happens that whenever one comes into contact with such messages one does not meet them in the unruffled state of mind accompanying his contacts with purely rational truths and situations. Again, it has to be underlined that Eliot's phrasing, deceptively simple and perhaps unsatisfactory for the philosopher, manages to convey the essential quality of good poetry for the poetry reader. It appears, therefore, that Eliot can rightly be counted among those who initiated and inspired New Criticism. To say the same about I. A. Richards (1893- ) is doubtlessly justified, yet it is one of the greatest sources of confusion in regard to this trend in criticism. Richards's philosophical competence, his 'knack for asking and answering the pertinent questions'ββ made him into a person who, in the English-speaking world, contributed perhaps more toward the unveiling of the intricacies of the language of poetry than 44

'The Frontiers of Criticism", On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1967), pp. 11334. «5 C. Brooks, "The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition", The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 252-66. «· W. J. Ong, "The Meaning of the 'New Criticism' ", Twentieth Century English, ed. Knickerbocker, p. 345.

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any other critic of his generation. His popularity, however, does not match that of Eliot. He is the critics' critic, or even the textual critics' critic. C. S. Lewis and George Watson remarked about him that he is one of those difficult to imagine as reading poetry (a double irony, since Richards has written poetry himself).87 At least one of the reasons for this relative lack of popularity, it seems to me, is the fact that out of the subtle poetic structures which can be unveiled with the help of Richards's work from the 1920's, there emerges too little for the effort to unveil them to be worth while. In The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Science and Poetry (1926), Richards undertook a thorough examination of language and its functions, and then of poetic language and its characteristics. As a result of these investigations he came to the conclusion that the function of poetic discourse, contrary to that of the scientific discourse, is primarily emotive: poetry aims at the reconciliation of diverse emotions and impulses in man. He did not really go beyond this assertion in Practical Criticism where he remarked that no discourse is absolutely 'pure' and that one can distinguish four 'basic kinds of meaning': sense, feeling, tone and intention. Sense, in his terms, is the referential, or indicative, content of the utterance. Feeling concerns the speaker's attitude toward this sense. Tone is related to his attitude toward the listener, and intention to his conscious or unconscious aim in producing a given utterance.®8 These four types of meaning appear in all kinds of discourse in different proportions. In poetry, feeling predominates. One observes that among all these aspects of poetic discourse, however real and important they are, there is none which would account for the representational function of language (Brooks) or, more broadly, for the cognitive function of poetry of which the American New Critics and some of the Russian Formalists (Sklovskij, Ejxenbaum) spoke. Indeed, Richards asserts many a time that poetry does not have any cognitive value. According to him, all critical statements turn out, upon examination, to be the statements about poetry's emotional appeal. In Principles of Literary Criticism Richards affirms two functions of human speech: referential and emotive. The first is the domain of science, the second, of poetry: we can use language for the sake of reference to objects and situations, or for the sake of "emotions and • 7 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961), p. 10; G. Watson, The Literary Critics (London, 1962), p. 198. 68 I . A . Richards, Practical Criticism (New York, 1929), pp. 173-81.

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attitudes... it occasions".99 The poetic language, therefore, does not refer to real objects: poetic statements are neither true nor false. Shortly afterwards, Richards distinctly stated in Science and Poetry that poetry consists of pseudo-statements, i.e., statements that do not refer to actual objects.70 They can be most pertinently described in terms of their effects. These, for Richards, consist in the satisfaction of some of the reader's appetencies without the corresponding frustration of other appetencies. On this assumption Richards builds his pragmatic theory of value in poetry. A valuable poetic experience, he maintains, satisfies the maximal number of desires with the minimum of frustration. Therefore, 'the poetry of inclusion' is more valuable than 'the poetry of exclusion': the more complementary or even contradictory emotional impulses have been brought into play in a poem (or rather, BY a poem), the better the poem is. The written text is only a stimulant necessary for the real poem to arise in the experience of the reader. Whatever we experience in relation to the poem can be reduced to the emotional balance in which it puts us. Poems are thus substitutes for action: they contain diverse stimuli for our emotions, but contain them in such a way that we do not feel compelled to any kind of immediate action: they both stimulate and reconcile our emotions, in a way unique for the work of art.71 Richards's theory is doubtlessly true for certain poems or for certain readers. Nevertheless, it does not account for other types of poetry, those which fuse 'feeling and thought' and employ the symbolic function of language. Richards posed his theory in an absolutist manner, and it therefore was met with an absolutist refutation on the part of the American New Critics, the refutation culminating in Wimsatt's and Beardsley's "The Affective Fallacy". As to the sources of his theory, they seem to go back both to Coleridge's 'reconciliation of the opposites' achieved in the poem, and to the father of pragmatism, Charles Peirce. Peirce belongs to the positivistic tradition in the broad sense of the word because of the absolute trust he puts in logicality and clarity of thinking. As the next chapter will indicate, Richards parallels closely the most popular of Peirce's essays: "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". Richards's theory of poetry, then, bears an affinity to the reasoning of nineteenth-century scholars ie 70 71

Principles of Literary Criticism (New York, 1925), p. 267. Science and Poetry (New York, 1926). Principles of Literary Criticism, pp. 35-57.

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who were confident that they could eventually explain all phenomena they scrutinized, through the chains of scientifically definable causes and effects. In the course of his critical activity Richards came to regard the cognitive role of poetry with greater seriousness. His interest in Coleridge was instrumental in his gradual transformation: it is in Coleridge on Imagination (1934) that he first acknowledged the seriousness of Coleridge's observation that poetry provides an insight into Nature not ordinarily available.72 This fact Ransom, Tate and Brooks frequently emphasize when they write about Richards.78 It appears, however, that his primary contribution to New Criticism was done not so much through his later writings as through those of the 1920's, where he did pioneering work in discussing and defining basic critical terms, exposed some of the critical fallacies and provided valuable answers to the question of what to say about the poem without resorting to history or social sciences. Textual explications of Cleanth Brooks, even though they always aim at something surpassing the four aspects of meaning of which Richards spoke, are based, to a considerable degree, on the examination of them. Thus it can be said that Richards's attempts to work out the language in which critical concepts would have their definitions and cease to be treated in a subjective manner by individual critics, helped to clear the way for literary study that would be something different than a historical summary or an impressionistic judgment. J. C. Ransom, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks stand in the central point of the New Criticism as it developed in the United States. It has become customary to refer to them as to a kind of entity because they represent something next to an agreement on matters of literature, and because of personal connections. All of them were at one time students or teachers at Vanderbilt University and, with the exception of Brooks, members of the Fugitive group of sixteen Southern poets which met in Nashville, Tennessee, in the years 1915-28 (the life span of their magazine, The Fugitive was 1922-25). After the organizational demise of the movement, they continued editorial and critical work, and wrote poetry and fiction. Ransom edited the Kenyon Review from 1938, Tate the Sewannee Review from 1944 to 1946, Brooks (with Warren) the 78

Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1934), pp. 157-8. J. C. Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), pp. 83 ff.; Allen Tate, "Literature as Knowledge", Collected Essays (Denver, Colo., 1959), pp. 16-48; C. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (New York, 1965), pp. 39-53.

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Southern Review from 1935 to 1942. The last two also wrote the textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). Understanding Drama appeared in 1945, its authors being Brooks and Heilman. These books popularized the New Critical cause in university circles, and sometimes resulted in identifying New Criticism solely with textual explication (of which they are excellent examples). The oldest of the group is J. C. Ransom (1888- ), an exquisite stylist, poet, and critic. His The New Criticism (1941) was the first systematic attempt to show what the branch of contemporary criticism mentioned in the title is ultimately about. Ransom discussed there such diverse people as I. A. Richards, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks and Charles Morris, trying to establish what role they played in the movement. The common point between them was their concentration on the work of literature instead of other areas of human activity, when they professed to be discussing literature. Ransom approved of this many-sided effort to account for the characteristics of the literary works but observed that none of these critics succeeded in formulating the ontological status of their subject matter. One of them, Charles Morris, came close to doing it, but ultimately failed. Ransom devoted a considerable amount of polemics to Morris and, at the end, presented his own account of the nature of poetry. In his view, the poem consists of the rational stratum (the structure, or the paraphrasable argument, in the words of a later article74), and the non-rational one (the texture, or the unparaphrasable tissue of meaning). Ransom insists that the rational structure is essential to poetry. At the same time, he agrees that what makes poetry poetry, is its texture, a unique way of conveying meaning which merges the rational and the non-rational. Ransom's texture corresponds to Eliot's merging of thought and feeling, to Coleridge's reconciliation of the opposites and, ultimately, to Kant's aesthetical ideas which convey meaning impossible to grasp in the language of logical concepts. Thus, notwithstanding Ransom's insistence on logic as a necessary ingredient of poetry ('Poetry i s . . . a logical discourse, but an impure one', he says in "Poetry: the Formal Analysis"), he is well within the Kantian tradition in his views on poetry, a fact he acknowledges himself in "The Concrete Universal".75 He sees poetry as cognitive, the way Hulme and Tate do (he is closer to Hulme than to Tate, however, in his insistence that poetry recovers for 74 7t

"Poetry: The Formal Analysis", Kenyon Review, IX (1947), 441. J. C. Ransom, Poems and Essays (New York, 1955), pp. 159-85.

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us 'the homely fulness of the world' rather than the meaning of the two objects identified with each other in a single moment of action). His essay "Poetry: A Note in Ontology"76 is perhaps the most emphatic recognition of the fact that literature can give us knowledge of a special kind, unavailable through logical discourse. Ransom is the New Critic who discussed the problems of poetic cognition most thoroughly and who tried to systematize the postulates and achievements of New Criticism. Like Eliot, Allen Tate (1899- ) has expressed his amazement at being classified and told of his participation in a critical school. In the Preface to his Collected Essays (1959), Tate emphasizes that he is neither an aesthetician nor a systematic critic; he claims for himself the title of an essayist, with the rights and privileges appurtenant thereto. Indeed, Tate has practised the dying art of essay writing perhaps more consistently than any other New Critic. Instead of scholarly impersonality he offers an exquisitely articulate style - in that, he resembles Eliot. Like Ejxenbaum in the Russian Formalist school, he is not a creator of theories but a practical critic first of all. This does not mean that he avoids phrasing his basic critical views in unambiguous terms. He has long been arguing that literature provides knowledge, and that this knowledge "has no useful relation to the ordinary forms of action". What he says of the highest poetry - of Shakespeare, for instance, whom he considers the highest of all - and of the kind of synthesis which this poetry reaches and which is "forever unsusceptible of logical demonstration", relates closely to Kant's formulations about poetry as reaching beyond the bounds of reason and experience. Among the New Critics he is the one who most emphatically acknowledged the possibilities of the 'symbolic imagination' and of the symbolic function of language. His views on these matters appear to go even farther back into history than Ransom's, to the medieval notions of symbolism rather than to Kant's writings.77 Tate's long-lasting interest in Dante was probably instrumental in developing these views. The essay "The Symbolic Imagination", for instance, where he discusses with great perspicacity the truly synthetic images in poetry, is based on his reading of the Divine Comedy. Dante appears also in the most profound, and ™ J. C. Ransom, The World's Body, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge, La., 1968), pp. 112-42. I have in mind here the interpretation and enlargement of Kant's concepts in Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, containing an outline of the philosophy of language with which Kant was only marginally occupied. The medieval interest in symbolism parallels Cassirer's in several ways.

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most escaping popularization among his works: "Three Types of Poetry" where the problem of truly creative versus illustrative imagination is set forth with rare insight.78 Tate once remarked that by writing his essays he was conducting his education in public, contrary to scholars who wait "until they have made up their minds before they speak". (Tate is certainly very kind to scholars.) Indeed, his works do sometimes display the quality of eager participation in the battle of minds rather than complete scholarly description of the problems involved (e.g., his criticism of Morris in "Literature as Knowledge"). The reader may well be grateful for this incompleteness. The thoroughness of scholars sometimes proves to be misleading, whereas one can risk a statement that Tate does not mislead even when he is wrong, for he is well aware of the truth in Randall Jarrell's observation: "Critics have a wonderfully imposing look, but this is only because they are in a certain sense impostors: the judges' black gowns, their positions and degrees and qualifications, their professional accomplishments, methods, styles, distinctions - all this institutional magnificence hides from us the naked human beings who do the judging, the fallible creatures who are what the accidents of birth and life have left them."78 Mindful of this truth, Tate is, contrary to what a casual reading of his essays may suggest, always disputing, never asserting, judging or displaying 'the vanity of discovery'. Disputation always involves the explication of one's position, and he abundantly does that. This fact gives his essays a dramatic continuity and an inviting clarity. Among the New Critics, Cleanth Brooks (1906- ) is the one who most consistently shunned generalizations and devoted himself to the study of concrete poems. His Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947) have already become classic examples of how the principles of textual analysis can work in practice. The guidelines Brooks follows in his practical criticism have much in common with Richards's and Coleridge's concepts of poetry and poetic imagination. Brooks points this out himself in "Metaphysical Poetry and Propaganda Art". He observes there that Richards's poetry of inclusion which brings into play in the reader a number of diverse impulses and 'reconciles' them, teaches the reader to deal with them in practical life - derives from Coleridge's 'reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities' achieved by means of poetic imagination. Brooks 78

Allen Tate, "The Symbolic Imagination", Collected Essays (Denver, Colo., 1959), pp. 408-31; "Three Types of Poetry", ibid., pp. 91-114. 7 · R. Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York, 1959), p. 79.

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follows these reasonings himself when he speaks of good poetry as being able "to withstand ironic contemplation".80 This initial derivation notwithstanding, the insistence on irony as a necessary constituent of good poetry is Brooks's original contribution to contemporary theory of poetic analysis. Critics have traditionally viewed poems as sui generis affirmations of something; they stressed their assertive elements. Such was the Romantic comment on poetry as direct expression of emotions, or the Classical view of it as an ornamental expression of general ideas. However, poetry that strictly conforms to such precepts frequently "cannot bear an ironic contemplation", Brooks tells us. Its elements are too uniform, oriented toward only one aspect of experience. They have to be viewed in the right perspective if they are not to disintegrate under the scrutiny. Contrary to them, poems which carry within themselves the element of heterogeneity, of negating their own affirmation, are much better equipped for whatever treatment they happen to undergo. They have been, as it were, immunized against disintegration by the injection of the negative element. In this heterogeneity their value lies: they relate to one another the seemingly diverse elements of experience. The 'homogeneous' poetry, on the other hand, definitely excludes certain aspects of experience from its structure and from response. This makes also for the ambiguity of good poetry: the poem blurs the frontiers between the elements of experience divided and classified by reason, and integrates them in a way that defies reasoning. Keats's use of the two sets of associations of the word 'forlorn' at the end of the "Ode to a Nightingale" is thus ironic and complex in that it establishes a link between the seriousness of the 'remote' and 'utterly lost' lands of which the nightingale sings, and the 'pitiable' state of the speaker.81 Brooks's concept of irony merges with that of paradox. Poetic correspondences are, at times, of paradoxical nature, he suggests. In many cases, the goodness of the poem is built on a contrast between the thing represented and its representation. His analysis of Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" is a case in point.82 Brooks dismisses the attempts to account for the quality of the sonnet on the grounds of the 'nobility of sentiment' or 'brilliance of images'. What is brought to action here, he says, is a sense of incongruity between the grim and unattractive industrial city and 'the beauty of the morning', 'smokeless " Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 39-53. β» Ibid., pp. 30-1. Ibid., p. 107.

p. 117-22.

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speaks in Biographia Literaria. In order for experience to arise, there must be a thinking subject first of all, conscious of the 7 am': The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ι AM.11 The synthesis of sense-presentations and the forms of understanding (the domain of Kant's productive imagination) is a unity which, in Kant's words, is "deduced from the former", i.e., from the unity of apperception. This, again, is the coherent argument (concerning all types of cognition, not only the artistic one) behind the second part of Coleridge's sketchy exposition (oriented toward the ensuing explication of what makes poetry): The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition of fancy and imagination... The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding aihd retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities; of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects. . .12 Coleridge is ambiguous enough to allow for Richards's interpretation of these passages (Richards considered poetry as the unity in variety of psychological effects on the reader) and for the interpretation of the American New Critics who saw the reconciliation of the opposites as occurring within the poem itself, and based on this fact their 11

»

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Everyman's Library edition, 1962), p. 167. Ibid., pp. 167,173-4.

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view on the special ontological status of poetry. Notwithstanding these differences, the concepts which the New Critics formulate bring to a sharper focus Coleridge's meditations on poetic imagination - and ultimately describe a particular case of using what Kant termed the productive imagination. As to Belyj, his essay "The Symbolization of Meaning" (Emblematika smysla) goes back to Kant's discussion of the joining of the perceptual and the logical with the use of the schemata of understanding.13 Like Cassirer, Belyj formulated his concept of symbolism in relation to all modes of cognition, including art. As indicated in the previous chapter, he defined symbol as "the unity of form and content", "the unity of cognition in the forms of experience".14 The Formalist Sklovskij derived from it his argument about form AS content; he disregarded the context in which Belyj's views on form appeared, and thus introduced a great deal of confusion into his own work and the work of other Formalists who followed him. Critique of Judgement is another important source for the critical concepts of the two movements. In this work Kant made the famous statements concerning the organic structure of art work; the lack of purposiveness in art and the disinterested attitude of the art consumer.15 He was the first to assert unambiguously that in works or art, one observes 'purposiveness without purpose', a somehow meaningful arrangement of elements which is, at the same time, useless from the viewpoint of practical life. The artistic object possessed of such purposiveness stimulates 'disinterested contemplation' - that which is not directed toward an immediate practical end. These arguments have filtered down to other philosophers and to literary critics in an almost unchanged form (Schopenhauer, Henry James) or in a variety of disguises (the Formalist militant declarations that art has nothing to do with the pragmatic transmission of ideas, the Futurist self-valuable word, the New Critics' insistence on the autonomy of aesthetic experience). Kant's purposelessness, however, did not mean that the work of art has no humane purpose or value. Kant merely made a distinction between pragmatic and non-pragmatic values. Through the purposive arrangement of elements in a work of art we learn about reality things that cannot be known in the language of logical concepts. In Kant's view, art discovers for us the natural beauty and fullness of the world which 13 14 15

Simvolizm, pp. 49-143. Ibid., pp. 131-2. Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1966), pp. 38-9, 192 ff.

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constitutes part of our knowledge about it. This part of his argument resembles Sklovskij's, Ransom's and Bergson's views on art as providing us with the knowledge of the "homely fulness of the world" (Ransom's phrase). Kant further said, however, that among all forms of art, poetry in particular can create unities and present Ideas which "strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience. No concept can be fully adequate to them as internal intuitions."18 Thus far the anti-Symbolist Sklovskij would not go. In other words, poetry can furnish us with insights which go beyond the concepts of reason, which cannot be paraphrased in logical discourse: "The Idea of the imagination [i.e., the idea produced by the imagination] cannot be brought under a definite conception."17 Kant admits here the possibility of getting, by means of poetry, to know (or 'feel', if we take the word not in its purely emotional sense but in the one in which Eliot used it) things without the help of logical concepts. Here Kant takes a step in the direction later taken by Schopenhauer, who asserted that by means of art we can get to the essence of things, to the thing-in-itself which is, according to Critique of Pure Reason, unknowable. Andrej Belyj, who has declared that his views on art owe a great deal to Schopenhauer, continued this train of thinking to arrive at the conclusion that, ultimately, the meaning of art is religious. In Kant's view, the representation of the imagination which the work of art is, appears to us as unity in variety, as a microcosm built according to some sensible design. This design is never to be disclosed by reasoning. It "occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept being capable of being adequate to i t . . ,".18 Its design being dissociated from practical purposes, we take it as 'complete in itself'. Its dependency on other objects, its modality are, as it were, erased. It seems to stand 'by itself, its completeness and finishedness constituting its beauty.19 Allen Tate's views on poetry constitute perhaps the most emphatic parallel to this argument in the New Critical 'school'. Tate thus comw

Ibid., p. 157. In Kant's terms, "the faculty of aesthetic ideas can manifest itself in its entire strength" primarily in the work of the poet - i.e., in the form of art whose medium is language. 17 As Rene Wellek has observed, Kant's usage of the term 'Idea' is close to the modern usage of the term 'symbol'. See Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 1 (New Haven, Conn., 1955), p. 231. 18 Critique of Judgement, p. 157. " A good discussion of this part of Kant's Critique can be found in Edward Caird's The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, vol. 2 (Glasgow, 1889), pp. 465 ff.

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ments on a tragedy by Racine: "It proves nothing; it creates the totality of experience in its quality; and it has no useful relation to the ordinary forms of action."20 The knowledge which art provides and of which Tate speaks earlier in the same essay, strives 'after a maximum' like the knowledge of which Kant spoke later in the course of the same argument. Among the Russian Formalists, on the other hand, Sklovskij spoke in the following manner of the relation, or rather lack of it, between the work of art and the exigencies of practical life; "Art is not marching with a band but a dance in slow motion of which we are onlookers; or, more exactly, it is a motion created solely for the purpose of being apprehended."21 From the standpoint of common sense, the independence of the art object from 'life' is an illusion: we know full well from everyday practice that objects are dependent on, and related to, one another. Thus, there is something in the poem which defies common sense. The completeness within itself which we feel about a good poem, is a challenge to, and a denial of, our ordinary ways of understanding. On this basis Kant utters the statements concerning art's reaching beyond the world of phenomena, the world of appearances and ordinary human understanding: The poet ventures to realize to sense, rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, etc.; or even if he deals with things of which there are examples in experience - e.g. death, envy, and all vices, also love, fame, and the like - he tries, by means of imagination, which emulates the play of reason in its quest after a maximum, to go beyond the limits of experience and to present them to sense with a completeness of which there is no example in nature. 22

As mentioned before, Belyj follows the main line of this argument in Simvolizm. His idea of art as a form of complete knowledge (eventually becoming religious knowledge) lies at the base of his study of symbolic forms. This part of his reasoning was paralleled in the early phase of Formalism. As time went on, however, the Formalists began to avoid statements about the peculiarity of artistic cognition: such statements would be at odds with the simplistically mimetic concept of art advanced by the Party theoreticians. Eventually, the concept of art as knowledge disappeared from their writings completely, not only because of political pressures but because of other influences - that of modern logic, for example, and of the same Belyj's trust in the possibilities of !0

" n

A. Tate, Collected Essays, p. 113. V. Sklovskij, Ο teorii prozy, p. 28. Critique of Judgement, pp. 157-8.

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rational investigation of literary 'form complexes'. In Skvoz' literaturu, however, Ejxenbaum still wrote: "The essence of poetic creativity does not lie in imitating its age or in emotional comprehension [vcuvstvovanie], but in artistic cognition which leads the poet on all the roads through the realities of his empirical world."48 Infrequent as such assertions were in Formalist writings, they did not escape the perspicacious eye of Trockij who rightly saw the idealistic core of the early Formalist writings. Among the New Critics, the idea of poetry as a type of knowledge has been generally acknowledged with enthusiasm (Tate) or in a more moderate tone (Ransom). In fact, there is hardly a volume of New Critical studies in which the paraphrase of "poetry provides a special kind of knowledge" would not occur. As mentioned before, Allen Tate's argument in "Literature as Knowledge" is perhaps the most explicit acceptance of Kant's cautions, statements about artistic knowledge being genuine and going beyond the knowledge acquired by means of sensuous experience or logical reasoning. I shall now return to Russian criticism and discuss in greater detail the twisted way the idealistic concepts travelled there. I shall start with Belyj, since he was partially responsible for this situation. In his essay "The Symbolization of Meaning" (Emblematika smysla), Belyj observes that if reality is unknowable in its essence (and according to Kant, it is), then cognition is not a reflecting process but a creative reconstruction of the data of perception. Consequently, the artistic act is creative in that it does not reflect reality but creates concrete symbolic forms under which reality can be known. Reconstruction of the perception data in literature is thus both creative and cognitive. Once we give a certain form to our experience (and whenever it is expressed it is formalized - oformlennaja), it cannot be separated from this form. Form cannot exist without content. The artist labors over form, not over content, and it is his success in regard to form that determines the richness of content in his work. "In the work on form the meaning of art is contained."24 Content thus consists of forms; it is "the way forms act upon us".25 With all his modern understanding of the problem of artistic symbolism, however, Belyj also inspired the Formalists to seek clearcut rational 23 24 25

Skvoz' literaturu, p. 9. Italics Ejxenbaum's. A. Belyj, "Simvolizm", Vesy, 12 (1908), 31. A. Belyj, Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910), pp. 175-6.

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answers to the problems of literary forms. How did it happen? It appears to me that Belyj was not quite consistent in his argument. The unconvincing part of the philosophizing began when he stated in "The Meaning of Art" (Smysl iskusstva) that, ultimately, art has no meaning except the religious one.26 (He thus went further than Kant who spoke of art as SOMETIMES venturing into the area of ideas about the 'invisible beings'.) Κ we speak of knowledge in regard to art, warned Belyj, and separate this knowledge from religion, we reduce art to the status of a science. On the other hand, if we do not want to speak about religion or to reduce art to science, we can speak only of concrete literary forms, i.e., we limit ourselves to aesthetics. Belyj does not define clearly what he means by these 'concrete' forms, even though he emphasizes that to equate 'form' and a 'technical device' is inadequate.27 He says that the concept of form is precisely what waits for definition. The innumerable specific forms should be investigated, and the acquaintance with them should serve as a means to establish the principles of poetic creativity. He even goes so far as to say that it is possible to make aesthetics into an exact science investigating these multiple forms.28 According to Belyj, then, poetics as a scholarly discipline should be preoccupied with the ways in which the symbolic knowledge can be acquired and expressed in literature. Since these ways are nothing else than literary strategies, a poetics of strategies (devices) is in order. As he stated already two years before the publication of Simvolizm: "Future aesthetics should have, at its basis, the laws of creative processes, together with the laws of how these processes become the flesh and blood of form, i.e., the laws of literary technique."89 Time and space should be the key concepts in formal poetics. This discipline should investigate the relation of poetry to both of them. The temporal element manifests itself in rhythm. In certain periods of literary history, rhythm is the dominating factor of verse; in others, it gives way to the spacial element, i.e., imagery (one remembers here that Tynjanov modified this statement by saying that rhythm is always THE constructive factor of verse). The changes of emphases in regard to both of these factors should be investigated in individual authors and historically. The changes of correlation between the two are like the physical changes of one form of matter into another: one 'form complex' becomes another, matter can be » " 18 28

Ibid., pp. 195-230. Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 234. A. Belyj, "Simvolizm i russkoe iskusstvo", Vesy, 10 (1908), 40.

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changed into energy, but the sum total of substance, the internal coherence and richness of forms, remain the same.30 Notwithstanding his insistence on the scientific character of such investigations, as he goes on in Simvolizm, he continues to assert that in the artistic symbol, "its formal elements cannot be separated from its content; they, in fact, create it". Thus it inevitably follows that it is the formal elements - figures of speech, rhythm and euphony of word sequence (instrumentovka) that constitute, in their multiferous connections, the poetic message. An emphatic statement to this effect we find also in Zapiski cudaka: A subjectively important event lies usually at the basis of a novel. This event is not repeated in the plot. It is transformed into the architectonics of the story and into what is called the style of the book. Thus the foundations of the plot lie in the relevant experience of the soul, shaped into the style of the book. As the book arises, little remains of the direct presentation of this fundamental experience. However, the critics keep looking for an idea, and look for it in the wrong place.81 Thus, Belyj rightly asserted in "The Symbolization of Meaning" that all knowledge is symbolic. He divided all forms of symbolization into those pertaining to science and religion. Art, according to him, conveys meanings. They are not scientific meanings, for these escape logical definition; therefore, they must be religious ones. Belyj could not admit of the type of symbolism that would be neither religious nor scientific; in "The Meaning of Art", he furthermore dismissed the possibility of criticism that would investigate all aspects of art's allegedly religious symbolization; that would be neither religion-oriented nor purely technical. In his practical criticism he sometimes did more than his program from "The Meaning of Art" promised; in many cases, however, he became so immersed in the naming and classification of those aspects of symbolization which can be described rationally, that he lost from sight the unity of the symbol and its content. Thus the Formalists inherited from Belyj their meticulous devotion to the study of concrete linguistic forms appearing in a literary work. At the same time, they took from him the slogan "content equals the sum-total of forms", which sprang from the idealistic view on the nature of reality and art, entailing the belief in the realities outside the empirical and rational world, cognized through intuition and symbols. Without the philosophical context, the above slogan (first formulated in Sklovskij's 50

Simvolizm, pp. 530-35. Zapiski cudaka (Moscow-Berlin, 1922), p. 62. Belyj resembles here Eliot's remarks on the objective correlative. 31

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Rozanov, then repeated in On the Theory of Prose and in other Formalist publications) sounds immature in its apparent denial of the obvious. If one remembers, however, from what philosophical argument it derives, its meaningfulness is by all means surpassed by the less complicated statements about the necessity to study concrete linguistic forms. All in all, Belyj's influence led the Formalists in both the idealistic and the positivistic direction. All kinds of obstacles prevented the work of Belyj from being absorbed and continued by Russian criticism in a more consistent way.32 Among those obstacles were Belyj's association with the Symbolist school in poetry, reaction against which was fashionable in the second decade of this century (thus, to pursue his Symbolist concepts was not a thing to do for the programmatically anti-Symbolist group; Belyj's personal infatuation with anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner, which was taken by many to be a sign of intellectual unreliability; and, finally, the political realities of the day. All these factors account for the heterogeneity and incompleteness of some of the arguments of the Formalists. In particular, they account for the fact that the Formalists did not fully spell out the implications of the 'form is content' slogan. The first and third of these factors also accounted for very scarce indications, in the Formalist writings, of the philosophical and critical works of idealistic leanings (other than Belyj's) which served them as sources of critical inspiration. Some of them can be detected, however, simply by reading Formalist texts. Apart from at least indirect acquaintance with Kant, one can observe a familiarity with Bergson (again, Trockij was the only commentator on Formalism to point out the movement's connections with the vitalistic philosophy of the day33). I shall now briefly point out the parallels between the views on art held by Bergson and by some of the Formalists and the New Critics. Such critics as Ransom and Sklovskij frequently speak of artistic cognition as consisting in knowing the fullness of the world (Ransom), in seeing the world instead of merely recognizing it (Sklovskij).34 The idea of art as instrumental in seeing the world constitutes the core of Henri Bergson's theorizing on the subject in Le Rire.35 Bergson was a 31

Belyj himself was not quite consistent, and it would have been the task of his successors to refute some of his concepts and further to develop others. 33 Literature and Revolution,-p. 183. 34 J. C. Ransom, the Preface to The World's Body (Baton Rouge, La., 1968), pp. vii-xi; V. Sklovskij, "Iskusstvo kak priem", Ο teorii prozy, pp. 5 ff. 35 H. Bergson, Le Rire (Paris, 1964). Bergson's seeing, however, was non-linguistic whereas for Sklovskij and Ransom the poetic discoveries of the world were made through language.

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teacher of Hulme; this predecessor of New Criticism devoted considerable space in his essays to the expounding of his master's theories. On the other hand, even though Sklovskij does not mention Bergson directly in his writings, the parallels between the two are too close to be accidental. Bergson held that the exigencies of life induce us to action rather than to contemplation. For the purposes of action we classify things according to the characteristics relating to their usefulness, and treat them only as representatives of a class. Thus we cease to see their particularity, and develop stock responses as opposed to perspicacity in seeing the essence of things. Art counteracts this habitual blindness which man's practical life necessarily develops. It breaks stock responses and makes us 'stand and stare' at things in their individuality. We thus gain knowledge about the world, knowledge that falls beyond the concepts of practical thinking. Bergson thus goes further than Kant in asserting that art enables us to know the essence of things. However, it has to be remembered that according to Kant art deals, sometimes, "with things of which there are examples in experience" and gives us an insight into their essence. Thus the core of Bergson's argument already appears in the Critique of Judgement. As Ransom and especially Sklovskij sound at times strikingly parallel to Bergson rather than to Kant, it is likely that this particular thinker also contributed to the forming of their literary theories. Sklovskij's best known essay: "Art as Strategy" (Iskusstvo kak priem) is an example of these parallels. The schematic summary of this essay looks as follows: art is not 'thinking in images' as Potebnja and popular Symbolist opinion maintained. The aim of art is not to create symbols (Sklovskij's meaning here, as appears from the context, is that of an algebraic symbol: a precise replacement of a rational concept), not to provide scientific cognition, not to find logically accurate description of the phenomena of life. The aim of art is to make us see things instead of merely recognizing them. Like Bergson, Sklovskij argues that everyday life brings automatization of perception. In the course of living we cease to see objects, we only recognize them. "Automatization eats up things, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war." Eventually, this process of automatization would lead us to the loss of authentic contact with the outside world, would reduce us to beings possessed only of conditional reflexes. But here art comes to help us, to destroy automatic reflexes and skin-deep perceptions. Art achieves this by isolating phenomena from their usual context and moving them into

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unusual ones. It deforms objects, defacilitates perception and, as the final result, makes us see these objects better. Defacilitation and defamiliarization (ostranenie and zatrudnenie) are part and parcel of artistic presentation. When an object or an idea looks strange, unknown and difficult, we begin to 'attend to it' (Ransom's phrase), to enter into active contact with it, really to see it. In the course of his argument Sklovskij refutes the ideas of English and Polish positivist thinkers (Spencer and Petrazycki) concerning the law of the preservation of energy, according to which man always uses least effort in doing or expressing something. This is not true in art, maintains Sklovskij: here, the law of defacilitation rules, and the perception is made purposely difficult. Sklovskij brings in the examples of Russian folk poetry where, according to recent investigations, liquids difficult to pronounce tend not to be dissimilated but are used in their ancient hard-to-pronounce configurations. Sklovskij's concept of ostranenie (making it strange) introduced in the same essay, is the literary critic's continuation of the basic premises of his theory of art. It is related to the idealistic theories of language. I shall point that out by juxtaposing Sklovskij's concept with those of Belyj and of the idealistic philosopher Urban. Sklovskij maintains that the artist makes the 'materials' of art 'look strange'. He achieves this objective by removing things from their customary contexts and putting them into unexpected configurations. Thus proceeds Tolstoj when he "does not call the t h i n g . . . by its proper name but describes it as if seen for the first time; or, in the case of an event, as if it were the first one of its kind".36 In order to bring back to life the phenomenon of ownership and greed, for instance, Tolstoj in "Xolstomer" makes an old horse monologize upon human and equine affairs, and thus achieves an intensity unlikely to be achieved in a customary monologue. He manages, by means of 'strange' arrangement of elements, to express something that would not be otherwise expressed and perceived. His presentation "occasions much thought, without, however, any definite thought", one would like to repeat after Kant. "Xolstomer" is a presentation of a Kantian 'aesthetic idea' of greed and ownership, of the uselessness of selfish life, of life's sadness in general. Kant's concept might not have been familiar to Sklovskij in its original version; the latter argues, however, along Kantian lines. Belyj's views concerning symbols in literature expressed in "The Symbolization of Meaning" bring into focus the problem of defamiliari"

Ο teorii prozy, p. 12.

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zation in philosophical terms. By creating verbal symbols we cognize artistically something that reaches beyond symbols, something of which symbols are only an indication, says Belyj in the essay. To use Sklovskij's example, the symbol of ownership created in Tolstoj's "Xolstomer" teaches us - by 'strange' means - something about the problem of ownership which could not be learnt from economic treatises. The genuine seeing of physical objects or ideas of which Sklovskij speaks, and the knowing of things at which Kant hinted, and which Belyj acknowledges in his argument, are closely related. It is considering a full-fledged idealistic theory of symbolism in language side by side with Sklovskij's ostranenie, however, that one can best observe the idealistic element in Sklovskij's assertions. Wilbur Urban's views exposed in Language and Reality are a good example of such theory.37 Urban remarks that the concept of distortion has always been central to the idealistic theory of symbolism. Aesthetic symbol does not bring cognition in the scientific sense, nor is it merely an expression of our attitude toward things and ideas. It stands for things not otherwise expressible. In order to express these things (which elude description in rational language) one has to present objects and phenomena known from previous experience in a distorted, strange way. The symbol always contains some element of untruth, in order for the truth to be present there, too. Without this untruth there would be no truth conveyed. In Sklovskij's words, without making the thing look strange we would fail to SEE the theater stage or the phenomenon of private property as Tolstoj felt it. The capacity of language to convey meanings which cannot be reduced either to emotions or to rational concepts, Urban and some of the New Critics call the representational function of language. As it will be pointed out throughout this study, the lack of a clear recognition of this function in the Russian Formalist school was closely related to the limitations and confusions of some of its members and sympathizers. (Tynjanov, for instance, when he had to say in the course of his argument what literature expresses, resorted to the old staple answer that literature expresses emotions.38) In the 37

W. Urban, Language and Reality (London-New York, 1939), pp. 471-5 and 582-5. See also K. Vossler, The Spirit of Language in Civilization, trans. O. Oeser (New York, 1932), p. 233. 38 Problema stixotvornogo jazyka (Moscow, 1965), pp. 120-32. Tynjanov is critical in regard to 'naive psychological approach' to poetric semantics, which looks directly for the emotional associations of words used in poetry; he maintains, after Wundt, that emotions can be spoken of only by considering the objective relations of the elements in the work of literature. He does not, however, propose any corrections upon Wundt's and Alfred Rosenstein's definitions of the emotional content of poetry.

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case of ostranenie, the lack of recognition of this function resulted in gradual cessation of pursuits related to this critical concept. Notwithstanding all the idealistic derivations of Sklovskij, it must be emphasized that he seldom brought his arguments to their logical conclusions. He was a great master in blurring the consistency of these arguments. His discussion of material and strategy is an example of such procedures. Sklovskij was the one who popularized this pair of concepts among the Formalists; at the same time, he left them vague enough to make possible various usages of them. In On the Theory of Prose he stated that the material of the literary work consists of the facts of life, the sounds of language, thoughts and feelings. Strategy is a way to view a given artistic material, a means to distort it in order to see it anew. Sklovskij wants us to believe that it is more than a rhetorical device: in Five Men I Knew (JPjaf celovek znakomyx) he quotes with wholehearted approval the words of Belyj about transforming some significant event into the architectonics of the story instead of meditating upon it directly.89 He insists that it is the sumtotal of strategies that makes the content, which is a way of paraphrasing what Belyj had said on the architectonics of the story. Yet he never is quite succesful in convincing his readers that forms, or strategies, indeed make the content. As Zirmunskij rightly pointed out, Sklovskij's practical studies often consist in singling out devices in such a way that they appear to be merely rhetorical tricks. His description of the strategies used in Don Quixote or in certain fairy tales, for instance, is a demonstration of a pattern of repetitons, inverted parallelisms, retardations, accoustic similarities, inserts, frame effects, etc. etc., all of which, however real and however ingeniously pointed out, do not quite constitute the content of the tale. This is the great weakness of Sklovskij's analyses of concrete works. Even though he asserts, theoretically, that themes and ideas are also strategies, that form is identical with content, he does not prove it in his practical criticism. Since he never discussed these topics exhaustively in his theoretical essays either, he can be charged with incompleteness. It is no wonder, then, that standing halfway between the idealistic and positivistic tendencies and not drawing the logical conclusions from either, he could not retain for long the position he occupied in the Formalist movement at its inception. In spite of his publishing and editing, he did not remain the central figure M V. Sklovskij, Pjat' (elovek znakomyx (Moscow, 1927), p. 9. See also fn. 31 of this chapter.

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among the Formalists as time went on. He had to cede his place to positivistically-oriented people like Tynjanov. As the Marxist critics accused him of idealistic leanings, his fellow Formalists Ejxenbaum and Zirmunskij tried to defend him, and themselves, by propounding that the slogan 'art as strategy' is to be viewed not as a statement trying to say something about the nature of art, but as a methodological principle for scientific research.40 This defense, however, was performed only in partial correspondence to facts. During certain periods of their activity, all three of them did subscribe to the view that, to use the words of Belyj, "the relevant experience of the soul" is in literature transformed into the architectonics of the story. Sklovskij's theorizing from the period of On the Theory of Prose, like a charade, remains incomplete until it is juxtaposed with the philosophical parallels from which it derived. These parallels fill the gaps in the theory with a precision impossible to one treating the theory as only a collection of methodological principles for mechanistic research. Sklovskij's relation to Futurism is another example of the route the idealistic concepts travelled in Russian Formalism. The beginnings of his critical activity are tightly connected with this clamorous poetic movement. His first essays are devoted to the defense of the zaum', or the trans-rational language, of which the Futurist spoke and which they tried to use in their poetry, and of the artistic validity of glossolalia and children's talk. Such phenomena were excellent proofs of the statement that all form is content: they did not say anything having any logical content, and yet they did say something. In The Resurrection of the Word (Voskresenie slova) Sklovskij deplores the fact that words, in their everyday usage, becomes as colorless as algebraic signs.41 The restitution of the freshness of language can be brought about by the artist's free play with the resources of language, by creating neologisms and distortion of the already existing words. In "The Premises of Futurism" (Predposylki futurizma) he maintains that automatization of speech destroys the nonconceptual meanings of words; therefore, it becomes essential to create and use zaum'*2 The Futurist poets declared similar things in their manifestoes. In 1913, Krucenyx wrote: "Thoughts and speech cannot catch up with the emotional experience of someone inspired; therefore, the artist is free to express himself not only in a common language (concepts) but 40

B. Ejxenbaum, 'Teorija 'formal'nogo metoda'"; V. Zirmunskij, "K voprosu ο 'formal'nom metode' ", Voprosy teorii literatury, pp. 154-74. 41 Voskresenie slova (St. Petersburg, 1914). 41 "Predposylki futurizma", Golos zizni, 18 (1915), 6-8.

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also in a private one, as well as in a language that does not have a definite meaning, that is trans-rational."43 Notwithstanding Krucenyx's semantic imprecisions we can see that his, as well as Sklovskij's, assertions amount to making the units of zaum' into symbolic correlatives of the experience of the poet, impossible to express in logical language. It should be emphasized that there was no single conception of zaum' among the Futurists. The most interesting one was offered by Xlebnikov. When we consider it in juxtaposition with Plato's theory of language, its idealistic quality becomes evident. Xlebnikov believed that at the beginning of human history, language was 'pure' and consisted of the 'tissue of the units of mind' (than' iz edinic uma).u Later, the exigencies of practical living caused various 'practical' (bytovye) meanings to be attached to words. Words began to designate objects, to be divided into sound units; they became an automatized system. The work of the poet is to rediscover the basic units of mind which, like Plato's ideas, cannot be expressed adequately in language as we know it. These basic units can be hinted at with greater precision by the sounds of language rather than by words. Dictionary meanings are thus of no use to the poet; he has to use zaum'. Xlebnikov's 'tissue of mental units' which constitutes zaum' reveals its idealistic lineage when juxtaposed with the concept of language expressed in Plato's Cratylus. In this Dialogue Plato repudiates the naive assumption that words somehow naturally correspond to things and meanings. Words change, and are imprecise. However, pure concepts still exist, and their meaning is fixed. They are not identical with words and cannot be encompassed by them in toto. Words only point toward them. The difference between Xlebnikov's and Plato's theories was, first, that Plato assigned a definite ontological status to his ideas, whereas Xlebnikov did not delve into ontology. Second, Plato did not propose a creation of pure language which could represent these ideas precisely; Xlebnikov did. At the same time, the concept of the ideal 'units of mind' makes the supposed prehistorical zaum' expressive of non-rational truths, and thus a variation of the idealistic conception of language. Zaum' was, then, not just a nonsense language, as the popular belief 43

A. Krucenyx, "Deklaracija slova kak takovogo", trans. V. Markov in his Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 130-1. 44 V. Xlebnikov, Ucitel' i ucenik (Xerson, 1912); N . Stepanov, "Tvoriestvo Velimira Xlebnikova", in V. Xlebnikov, Sobranie soiinenii, vol. 1 München, 1968), pp. 31-66. Cf. these with Plato, Cratylus, in The Works of Plato, vol. 3, ed. G. Burges (London, 1912), pp. 283-396.

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would have it. Nor was it a concept inimical to the postulates of the articulate Symbolist theoreticians of poetry. In spite of the Russian Futurists' loud insistence that they differ very much from the Symbolists, theirs was the same effort to find the means of symbolization for human experience inexpressible in the language of concepts, which also characterized the Symbolist poets. The Futurists, the Symbolists, indeed all poets have frequently felt that "the thought, when spoken, becomes a lie" (Tjutöev), that the ideal way of expressing oneself would be 'the expression without words' (Fet). The difference between Russian Symbolists and Futurists consisted, then, not in the latter's lack of awareness that poetic expression is symbolic but in the different ways of symbolization they proposed. Blok and Brjusov used the resources of conventional morphology and syntax, while Xlebnikov and Krucenyx sought the 'universal language' of vowels and consonants. It goes without saying that in their declarations, the Futurists avoided the word 'symbol' and its derivatives, because the associations of this word pointed toward the literary school which they hoped to supersede. As indicated earlier, in relation to Symbolist literary theory the same was true of the Formalists. It appears, then, that much of the Futurists' and Formalists' insistence that pure eloquence is the only content of the literary work, was but a way to say that literary content is conveyed not by means of logical statement but otherwise. Since, however, there was no agreement among the Futurists themselves as to the meaning of their concepts (some of them were saying that the poetic zaum' expresses meanings other than emotions; others were inclined to limit its content to emotions), and no explicitly acknowledged consciousness of the tradition behind them, these concepts soon started to be taken at their face value and, to a contemporary student of Russian literature, they may at first sight appear as original as they are unconvincing. It can be added here that the Futurist concept of zaum' was a way to handle the function of language which Brooks and Urban call representational. In their zeal to be different, the Futurists lost from sight the fact that ordinary words are capable not only of referring to objects and expressing emotions, but also of representing meanings that cannot be encompassed either in referential or in emotional speech. To express these meanings one does not need zaum', Brooks and Urban would say: the conventional vocabulary, plus poetic sensitivity and intelligence, would do. For Xlebnikov, however, as well as for Sklovskij in the early period of his critical development the, 'mental units' called for an artificial language.

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To return now to the development of Formalist theorizing: as indicated earlier, Sklovskij's observations on material and strategy display incompleteness, which was the result of his only partial absorption of idealistic sources from which these concepts came. Sklovskij's incompleteness explained why, as time went on, people like Tynjanov, independent of idealistic influences (he paralleled Belyj only at the point where the latter spoke of the possibility of making aesthetics into a science) and offering a coherent theory of literature and criticism, overshadowed Sklovskij. At the same time, the neglect to argue idealistic concepts to their logical end facilitated the gradual shift of meaning of some of these concepts, which occurred within the Formalist movement itself. This shift can be seen in Ejxenbaum's and Zirmunskij's defense of Formalism which was mentioned before. Zirmunskij's writings related to Formalism also contain other instances of this shift, and these are discussed below. In the previous chapter I pointed out Zirmunskij's explicitly stated agreement with Belyj on matters of merging 'philosophy and form' in a critical discussion. In the same book where he expresses such views, Zirmunskij praises the value, and insists on the necessity of, the science of the 'formal poetics' which should investigate the complexities of verbal strategies but which, in his view, would not be able to reach the ultimate meaning of the literary work. One observes here the same dichotomy which is visible in Belyj's work: on the one hand, the consciousness of the fact that literary content is, ideally, not paraphrasable; on the other, the hope that the 'forms' constituting it can somehow be described in their entirety in a scientific manner. Thus Zirmunskij states that, "Poetics is the scholarly discipline concerned with poetry as art." Its task is "to study in a systematic way the literary strategies, to describe them and to classify them".45 Poetics should be based on linguistics, since literary strategies are nothing else than particular ways of using diverse verbal forms. Zirmunskij praises Jakubinskij and Jakobson for doing this type of research, and points out that the Opojaz members in general contributed to the development of the consciousness that poetics as a science has its important place in the study of literature. At the same time, he emphasizes that poetics has nothing to do with any world view. Those who charge the authors of form-oriented investigations, of pursuing their topics on the basis of a particular Weltanschauung, are wrong. Poetics is not mechanistic in 45

Voprosy teorii literatury, p. 17.

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the way the neogrammarian linguistics was, but it is not philosophical either. One can point out the teleology of the linguistic occurrences in literature without mixing philosophy into it. Together with such declarations come Zirmunskij's statements that poetics alone cannot explicate the work of literature in its entirety, and that it is something entirely different from 'philosophical aesthetics'. The 'moral atmosphere' captured in Puskin's Captain's Daughter or in a tragedy of Racine, are of no concern to poetics. There is more to literature than the strategy, or even the unity of strategies and "If the strategy is not the only element of the poetic work, then it is not any more the sole factor of literary development"4" (here Zirmunskij refutes Sklovskij's views on the development of literature as consisting in the change of strategies). Thus, Zirmunskij saw the inadequacy of poetics as the sole means of explicating the literary work, and realized that the boundary between it and rhetorics is faint. His writings, however, testify also to the fact that he did not see, or did not want to see, the holistic premises behind Slovskij's "content equals the sum total of strategies",47 and that he took this statement to be a methodological principle more mechanistic than the rationale behind the pursuits of poetics. Zirmunskij also tried to discredit two other key concepts of Sklovskij's theory: defamiliarization (making it strange) and defacilitation. He argued that these concepts are wrong historically: Goethe's Götz, for instance, made the 'strange' impression only on the readers accustomed to French Classical tragedies and to Lessing; for Goethe, Götz was "the simplest and absolutely adequate expression of his artistic taste and feeling about the world". For one familiar with Sklovskij's argument about 'making it strange', Urban's notion of distortion and Brooks's discussion of paradox, this argument misses the point: certainly, Götz was for Goethe the absolutely adequate symbol of what he wanted to express, but being a symbol, it necessarily had to contain the elements of falsity (strangeness, paradox) and of truth. Familiarity or unf amiliarity with its dramatic convention might facilitate or defacilitate its reception only to a certain degree. Sklovskij's concept of making it strange refers to the unparaphrasable impression it leaves of Goethe's 'feeling of the world', not to the 'strangeness' of one of the conventions per se. Finally, Zirmunskij put an equation mark between the Kantian formula of 'pure beauty' and of 'purposive purposelessness' and the » 47

Ibid., p. 162. V. Sklovskij, Rozanov,

p. 4.

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concept of cognitive meaninglessness. In his presentation, the Kantian concept of literature as pure form (espoused by Belyj and, incompletely, by Sklovskij) means merely that no thematics is to be enjoyed in it; that it has to be reduced to the play of 'pure forms' of symmetry and rhythm. In doing so, he stated something contrary to what he said earlier in "The Tasks of Poetics": In fact, the division into what and how is a conventional abstraction. Love, sadness, tragic facts within the soul, philosophical ideas, etc., exist in poetry not per se but in the concrete form which they assumed in a given w o r k . . . . Any new content inevitably appears in art as form. That content which has not been reincarnated in form, i.e., one that has not found its expression, does not exist in art. By the same token any change in form is, at the same time, a discovery of new content. There can be no "empty" form, since form, by the definition we accepted, is an expressive device in relation to any content. 48

It is difficult to understand how Zirmunskij, holding such views, managed not to notice the latent holistic premises in Sklovskij's work, but on the contrary, declared it to be even narrower in scope than poetics. The fact that he did so reveals the confusion in regard to the idealistic sources even among the Formalists themselves. Summing up, Zirmunskij's essays in Problems of the Theory of Literature contain a number of curious shifts. Having praised Belyj in the Preface for his ability to make the study of literature formal and philosophical at the same time, and declaring himself a follower of this view, Zirmunskij then does not want to see that the statements of Sklovskij concerning art as strategy, defamiliarization and defacilitation, stem from the source familiar to him, and that the Kantian concepts were at the base of Belyj's philosophizing. He denounces those elements in Formalism which can be traced back to idealistic tradition. On the other hand, he declares that poetics is a science having nothing to do with philosophy or, even more narrowly, aesthetics, and praises some Formalists for practising the scientific description of the teleology of the facts of language. Thus, he gives praise to the positivistic tendencies in Formalism and argues down the twisted version of the idealistic ones, having at the same time declared that he is in sympathy with the latter. One conclusion that can be drawn out of the perusal of Zirmunskij's reasoning is that, being aware of the inquisitory finger of Party theorists pointed at the idealistic sources of Formalism, he tried to dissociate himself from them; at the same time, he could not go entirely against Voprosy teorii literatury, pp. 20-1.

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his convictions and inclinations as a student of literature; hence his homage to Belyj and the observation that literary criticism goes beyond poetics. To conclude: an acquaintance with Belyj and with the work of the Russian Formalists leaves no doubt that many Formalist concepts go back to the theorizing that can be found in Simvolizm and in other essays of Belyj. Belyj himself derived from Kant - it is upon a Kantian basis that he built his theory of symbolic forms, and asserted that content is 'the way forms act upon us". At the same time, he deemed it possible to build an aesthetic science devoted to the investigation of concrete specific forms of literature. Both tendencies found their reflection in the work of the Formalists; the second merges with the positivistic trend in the movement. Among other idealistic parallels of Formalism we find Plato and Bergson. It is indubitable that the striving toward an ideal language (Xlebnikov, Sklovskij) the idea of art as pure form (Sklovskij), were sometimes advanced without the realization of what they ultimately referred to. The Formalists have seldom directly pointed at the idealistic sources of their theories. Not all of them were aware of these sources, or perhaps they simply preferred, sometimes, not to be aware of them. It is because of the ambiguities perpetuated by the Formalists themselves, as well as the power of ascendancy of the positivist tendency voiced much more eloquently and clearly by such Formalists as Tynjanov and Jakobson, that the idealistic current in Formalism did not fully develop. Before dealing with the evolution of Formalism in the positivistic direction, I shall now return to the idealistic current in New Criticism. The New Critics did not face the extraliterary pressures to which the Russian Formalists were subjected; this is one of the reasons why their arguments about the ontological and epistemological matters were more straightforward and complete. They did a great deal of theorizing in which they expressed in no ambiguous terms their indebtedness to Kant and Coleridge, and where they battled with the reduction of poetry to a kind of lightning rod for the writer's and reader's emotions and attitudes. (This generalization leaves out the particular cases where Coleridge would be censured for lack of explicitness and clarity in his philosophizing about poetry, or a positivist philosopher like Morris would be praised for the serious concern he gave to the problems of poetic ontology.) The writings of the New Critics oscillate around the problem which

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can be called, after Coleridge, the reconciliation of the opposites in poetry, and after Eliot, the modification of thought by sensibility. The New Critics argue, first, that the literary works in which the merging of thought and sensibility occurs represent the highest achievement of literature; second, that the knowledge they thus provide is genuine, and cannot be reduced to an effect on man's emotional or rational capabilities. This argument appears, in diverse forms and on diverse occasions, in the writings of Eliot, Ransom, Tate and Brooks. Arguing thus, the critics in question admit that not all poetry displays the truly synthetic, or truly cognitive quality. J. C. Ransom remarks: "There is probably a poetry of feeling as much as there is a poetry of knowledge; for we may hardly deny to a word its common usage, and poetry is an experience so various as to be entertained by everybody."49 And Allen Tate says in the title of one of his most significant essays that there are "Three Types of Poetry".50 Two of them, as we learn from the essay, are not cognitive in the artistic sense. The opinions of the New Critics thus parallel Kant who also did not maintain that all works of art reach 'beyond experience' in their cognitive value, but said that some of them tend to do so. Throughout the writings of T. S. Eliot one finds the praise of the poetry in which there is no dissociation of sensibility to be observed and where the Coleridgean reconciliation of the opposites occurs. Eliot's remarks on the subject, however, are as sketchy as they are frequent. This fact does not warrant the usefulness of an attempt to trace their philosophical basis in detail. In spite of his majoring in philosophy and a dissertation devoted to a major nineteenth-century idealist Bradley, Eliot was too much of an essayist to theorize extensively in what he wrote about literature. J. C. Ransom is the person who interprets most explicitly and extensively the Kantian postulates in the New Critical movement. In "The Concrete Universal" he acknowledges that his views on poetry were influenced most by Kant. One can observe this influence both in Ransom's continuous interest in the ontology of poetry and in the conclusions to which his ontological pursuits lead him. His first volume of criticism contains the essay "Poetry: A Note in Ontology" which is one of the most representative expressions of his views on the nature and quality of various kinds of poetry.51 He observes *» J. C. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 179. 80 A. Tate, Collected Essays, pp. 91-114. 51 The World's Body, pp. 111-142.

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there that one can divide poetry into that dealing with things (Physical Poetry), with ideas (Platonic Poetry), and with ideas and things at the same time (Metaphysical Poetry). The first two types are the easiest to observe, and many critics never go beyond the distinctions between the two. The poetry of things - e.g., Imagist verse - seems at first sight very 'physical': it deals with three-dimensional objects possessed of concrete particular qualities, and with nothing else. But the lack of ideation in such poetry is an illusion. First, the conventions of meter and rhyme introduce into it the intellectual element, 'the sense of human control'. Second, each supposedly particular property of the object described is at the same time a universal property (in a sense, everything that is named is universalized). Thus Physical poetry manages to merge matter and sense to some degree, and thus does not lack the quality of heterogeneity which, as observation teaches us, the good poetry always possesses. At the same time this poetry, in spite of its 'physical' quality, stands in direct opposition to the claims science has on the world of physical objects. Each property of the objects of which such verse speaks, comes in the company of many other properties which the object displays, and which the lines of verse simultaneously actualize. These properties may not be interesting if considered one by one; together, however, they form a manifold of properties which is unique and can be arresting even if its elements are not. Such assemblage cannot be accomplished by science, which deals with its objects by isolating their properties and speaking about them in a sequence, dealing with them one by one. Poetry, in its ability to make us contemplate many properties at the same time, creates unique particulars out of the generals. In this its value lies. This quality of poetry was realized by the authors of Imagist manifestoes which repeatedly assert that "Imagism is motivated by a distaste for systematic abstractness." 52 Thus, Physical poetry is genuine poetry in that it does accomplish a feat of synthesis, even though it limits itself to the presentation of the 'thinginess' of things. Platonic poetry is verse 'translatable at every point into ideas'. A Platonist poet has a thought to express, and instead of saying it plainly he illustrates it by images. Therefore, Platonist poetry frequently imitates the Physical in that it is packed with references to things that can be smelled, seen, heard or touched. It is based on loose associationism rather than on a solid realized metaphor. Tennyson and the Victorians **

Ransom's description. Ibid., p. 117.

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in general cultivated this kind of poetry very persistently. One may add here that Ransom's Platonic poetry corresponds to what Tate called poetry of the will, and what the Formalists censured and unanimously rejected as 'thinking in images'. Having described the two, Ransom then passes to the third kind, the most elusive and profound, which he calls, after Dryden and Dr. Johnson, Metaphysical. He observes that there is a way to merge the Physical and the Platonic element, and thus achieve the synthetic poetry of which Eliot and Coleridge spoke. This merging is frequently achieved by a kind of 'letting go' of metaphor. This happens when the poet pushes the metaphor to its logical extremes, 'realizes it' (Jakobson's phrase) instead of timidly treating it as a simile and never exhausting all of its comparative potentialities. Thus a conceit is born: it is nothing else than a metaphor started perhaps for the sake of illustrating an idea, but continued to such an extent that it begins to give a new dimension to that idea, changes it, and finally identifies itself with it. In The New Criticism Ransom argues a similar point without trying to establish the precise frontiers as to where the synthetic poetry ends and the Platonic one begins.53 He speaks there simply of poetry. He observes that one can abstractly divide the 'material' of the poem into rational argument and the particular metre in which the argument is to be accommodated. In other words, the poet starts with the 'Determinate Metre' and 'Determinate Meaning'. The two affect one another in a way that changes them both. The texture of the poem is the result - the undefinable 'tissue of meaning' in which the rationality of both ingredients is distorted. The 'Indeterminate Metre' and 'Indeterminate Meaning' which constitute this texture are unique, as are all particulars. An accurate description of texture lies beyond the possibilities of language. In Ransom's words, it is not even necessary: 'human usefulness' of such description might be 'brought into question'. The texture expresses itself in the most adequate way possible. Like Eliot and Tate, and like Ong in his description of New Criticism, Ransom is of the opinion that the last few centuries have witnessed the development of a distrust toward the powers of the 'mythical imagination', toward the merging of matter and sense. Ransom attributes the present form of this distrust to "the tyranny of that modernism, technically to be defined as scientific positivism"54 which took much of its impact from a certain type of the interpretation of Kant. He deplores M

"

The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), pp. 279-336. The World's Body, p. 292.

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the situation and undertakes the polemics with one of the contemporary representatives of scientific positivism, Charles Morris. In particular, he takes issue with Morris's articles "Science, Art and Technology" and "Esthetics and the Theory of Signs".55 Ransom's polemics with Morris is one of the most characteristic examples of the New Critical position, and I shall therefore deal with it in some detail. Elaborating upon the ideas of Peirce, Morris saw poetic discourse as consisting of 'iconic signs' - i.e., of signs that refer to something that is general and depict something that is particular. What they depict is, in Morris's words, 'human experience of value'. Artistic signs are iconic in regard to value; at the same time, they are self-valuable, for they contain both the image of value and the general concept of it. For the value contained in the iconic sign does not extend to the outside world, the non-aesthetic world. It follows that literature is 'self-contained' and autonomous - the view to which the New Critics generally subscribe. They do not subscribe to it, however, on the same grounds as Morris. Ransom points this out very emphatically in The New Criticism. He takes issue with Morris's concept of value.56 He points out, first, that Morris's interpretation of the iconicity of the poetic sign is vague. He does not make clear HOW the iconic signs embody value. Second, the values Morris speaks of are highly subjective. For instance, gaiety portrayed in a literary work will not contain an objective value for every reader. In the final account, Morris's theory is an affective one: it does not say anything about the values which surpass pragmatic application, and which are present in the literary work independently of the impression this work makes on the reader. Ransom's counter-argument can be summarized as follows: all art is iconic, that is, it deals with, and imitates, the particulars, These particulars have many properties, and hence many values. Only the paraphrase "offers the single value system - the work itself goes into the realm of individual objects and concrete situations, which are many-valued".57 Ransom's values, then, are not purely aesthetic. In counterdistinction to Morris's, they resemble those of which Rickert spoke in Science and History. They have extra-aesthetic validity and are prior to the work " Ch. Morris, "Science, Art and Technology", Kenyon Review, I (1939), 409-23; "Esthetics and the Theory of Signs", The Journal of Unified Science, v m (1940), 131-50. »« The New Criticism, pp. 279 ff. " Ibid., p. 293.

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of art. On the other hand, they do not fulfill any moralizing role in the poem, since they are presented here independently of their moral aspect, as sometimes opposite elements of a manifold. Thus, Ransom's poetic manifolds are self-contained and autonomous, and yet they are not iNTEREST-manifolds. They are valuable independently of whether they undergo the process of being perceived or not. In "The Concrete Universal" Ransom observes even more emphatically that the elements of the poem are valuable for their own sake and not as the agents of utility, just as the elements of nature form the manifolds which are beautiful only when their 'purposelessness' is taken into account. Ransom is thus aware that the texture of poetry is unparaphrasable and that it reaches both beyond conception and the pragmatic attitude. The unparaphrasable texture of which he speaks echoes Kant's aesthetical idea defined in the Critique of Judgement thus: "And by the aesthetical idea I understand that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language."58 Ransom is sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the great symbolic perspectives which the modern theorists of language assign to poetry; at other times, a bit schoolmasterish in the attention he devotes to poetic structure. He always admits, however, that poetry differs from scientific or practical discourse in some 'revolutionary way', that it rediscovers for us 'the homely fulness of the world', 'the world's body'. Because of the range of the problems he speaks about, the methodical and thorough discussion he devotes to them and the views he expresses in this discussion, he can well be regarded as the chief spokesman of the New Criticism. Allen Tate is the critic who had really gone the whole way in admitting the reality and significance of the highest (and perhaps rarest, one might add) type of poetry: that created by the 'symbolic imagination'. To account for the Kantian postulate that poetry "goes beyond the limits of experience", he makes a distinction between the poetry of 'practical will' and that of 'imagination'. Like Ransom, Tate is aware of the fact that during the last few centuries poetry of the will began to gain prominence, at least in European letters. In this type of poetry, says Tate in "Three Types of Poetry", one can often observe the forcing of a poetic figure, or trope, to serve a more or less conscious M

Critique

of Judgement,

p. 157.

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intention of the author. Such verse relies on rhetorics which is "the pseudo-explanation of unimaged material".59 In the Middle Ages this rhetorics frequently took the form of allegory or abstraction whose rational meaning was clear from the outset or was unambiguously revealed in the course of the work. As the allegorical and abstract forms of poetry began to be looked down upon in the epoch of Romanticism, new means of writing 'poetry of the will' were devised. Instead of figurative conveyance of the message, the reader got direct statements about it. The Romantic speaks straightforwardly of the fact that he falls on the thorns of life and bleeds. His argument, like that of the allegorist, reveals 'imperfect inspiration' in that it is everywhere 'translatable into ideas' (Ransom's phrase). The ease with which the poet slips into using 'the imagination of the will' accounts for the prevalence of such poetry throughout the ages. It can be called Platonic poetry, whether it is religious or psychological or moralistic or Marxist. It can be ironic in the Romantic way (the poet experiences the frustration of the efforts of his will and ironizes upon it) or grave in tone; in both cases it will amount to a more or less ingenious outcry of the will. The other, and rarer, kind of poetry is that in which everything is imagined to the very end, so to speak, and is 'not susceptible of logical demonstration'. It is the poetry in which the extension, or denotation, of the words used, and their intension, or connotation, form a unity in which a logical scrutiny cannot discover inconsistencies. Such poetry is not an instrument 'for the mastery of the world' but an aim in itself. This does not mean that we do not get out of it anything except some nebulous arrangement of elements; we have, however, to approach it in disinterested spirit to get something out of it. Tate wisely notes that most commentators on literature treat the literary works as a means of paraphrasing ideas, of taking a stand. This treatment is given both to the poetry of the will and the poetry of imagination in Wilson's Axel's Castle, for instance. In "Three Types of Poetry" Tate expresses a nostalgia for the type of reading that would convey the essence of the literary work, even though he knows that nostalgia can never be fully satisfied, that 'the crudely practical reader' will always continue to 'abstract' certain ideas from the work, and will content himself 'with the illusion that they are the total meaning of the work'. Tate, it appears, is always on the verge of saying that "literary criticism is perpetually necessary and perpetually impossible". 59

A. Tate, Collected

Essays, p. 94.

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Tate fails to say what he probably knows very well: that the shortcuts to literary appreciation of which he speaks in a censuring manner are, for the majority of readers, the necessary steps in developing their literary sensivity. In the contemporary world, one is likely first to develop one's capacity for using fancy (to employ Coleridge's terms) rather than imagination. In spite of the impracticality of the best solutions in regard to literary criticism, however, it is always important to have the men of letters who remind the rest of us about these solutions. Therefore Tate's essays will, I believe, remain permanently rewarding for those interested in seeing literary criticism at its best. Cleanth Brooks's opinions on poetry are usually expressed in the course of discussing some concrete poems - as is the case also with T. S. Eliot and Roman Jakobson. Brooks is most explicit on the matters of theory in the first two essays from Modern Poetry and the Tradition and in the Appendices to The Well Wrought Urn. The first of these volumes opens with a condemnation of the neoclassic and Romantic poets' view on metaphor. Dr. Johnson, who censured the metaphysical poets for yoking heterogeneous ideas together, and Coleridge, who likewise condemned their "apparent reconciliation of widely different and incompatible things", are basically in agreement as to the false poetic quality achieved by those who use too striking metaphors. Brooks disagrees; in his opinion, metaphor may be used "for contrast as well as for comparison" and, as long as it is poetically revealing, it need not follow the catalogued canons of taste and custom.60 By using striking metaphors, seventeenth- and twentieth-century poets have achieved the intensity and insight which come only as a result of the fusion of the apparently heterogeneous and irreconciliable. It is evident that Brooks's disagreement with Coleridge's practical criticism is here a matter not of principle, but of taste in regard to the details of the usage of poetic imagination. In the poems of the seventeenth-century 'metaphysicians' Brooks sees the imaginative unity which Coleridge failed to see. In matters of theory, however, Brooks is in agreement with his predecessor - in fact, he follows him closely in spite of occasional differences in terminology. His argument concerning metaphor in "Metaphysical Poetry and Propaganda Art", for instance, resembles that of Coleridge's concerning the imagination in Biographia Literaria. In this essay Brooks observes that Richards in Principles of Literary C. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, pp. 1-17.

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Criticism elaborated on Coleridge's theory from the viewpoint of a psychologist. While the Romantic spoke of the qualities of the external world and the attitudes of the human soul, Richards speaks of human appetites and impulses. In Richards's view, these impulses are frequently discordant or opposite; they are also, for the most part, unconscious. The goodness of the poem depends on how many impulses it brings into play and reconciles. According to Brooks, the principle of inclusion is valid (as a side proof of validity, he notes that it was recognized by two quite diverse personalities: Richards and Eliot); having made this observation Brooks proceeds to elaborate upon this idea on his own. In the process of so doing, he sometimes by-passes the terminology of Richards and reverts to that of Coleridge. The poetry of synthesis has its origin in the imagination of the poet. By means of this faculty, the poet "remakes the world - by relating into an organic whole the amorphous and heterogeneous and contradictionary".61 In doing so, the poet defies the principles of logic and reason. The unity he creates 'makes sense' in a non-logical way. Trying to create such unity, the poet risks a failure: it may happen that his attempted reconciliation of the opposites will bring instead an awkward yoking together. But this uncertainty he must face, if he is ever to deserve the name of a true creator. The 'synthetic' poetry is essentially unsentimental. Sentimentalism appears in the poetry of exclusion: such poetry orients itself in only one direction - that of emotionalism - and thus excludes other elements of human experience from the picture of the world it presents. An opposite situation takes place in an ironic poem. Here, a certain experience is presented in a witty and not-quite-so-serious way. The experience may be tragic, emotional, serious; yet, the ironic setting puts the seriousness to question, contains a denial of it, adds to sentiment its negation. Thus, the poem brings into play the opposite qualities. The reader is given both the tragedy and the irony. Such a poem openly acknowledges diverse attitudes and experiences, and thus is richer than the poem which deals with only one kind of experience. In The Well Wrought Urn Brooks enlarges upon similar postulates. The language of poetry, he says, is frequently paradoxical, for it may affirm by negating and extol by deprecating. In Donne's "Canonization", "the lovers in rejecting earthly life full of splendors and vanities . . . actually win to the most intense life".62 Instead of the world, " «

Ibid., p. 43. The Well Wrought Urn, p. 15.

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"they have gained the world in each other". In Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the series of paradoxes concerning the silent urn and the violent scenes painted on it, prepare the reader to accept the final paradoxical unity of truth and beauty. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth's readiness to 'dash the brains out' of her own baby, paradoxically informs us of her profound failure; for the baby is also, in the play, the symbol of the future which she so much wants to possess. It is easy to observe that Brooks's meditations consist in the detailed discussion of what Tate named the poetry of imagination, and Ransom the Metaphysical poetry. Ultimately, they have as their 'ghostly paradigm' the observation of Kant upon the completeness within itself of the poetic work, and the fact that this work is able to convey meanings impossible to express in the language of concepts. It is by means of intricate metaphors and parallels (some of which Brooks points out in his analyses of concrete poems in The Well Wrought Urn), that these meanings are hinted at by poets. Brooks, and the New Critics generally, surpass Kant in their assertions concerning the symbolic usage of language: while Kant saw human language primarily as an effort at conceptualization, and spoke of poetic insights only marginally, the New Critics emphatically recognize language's ability to represent, in a schematized and approximate way, the truths (in Kant's language, the aesthetical ideas) which are neither emotional outcries nor empirical facts nor the results of using the transformation rules of a given language. The fact that literary works are, at their best, ABOUT these truths, requires that the literary critic deal with them. If he merely describes the relation of the literary work to practical life (byt), or relates to us the usage of the rules and possibilities of language, he misses what is the ultimate justification for literature. In order to deal with the 'metaphysical' entities which the work represents, he has not only to describe but to perform the synthetic acts of interpretation. This is what the New Critics do in their theoretical and practical criticism. They are aware that, in the final account, one can only hint at the meaning of the poem, never encompass it in the rational language, but they are also aware that these hints have to be made or criticism will cease to fulfil its vital role. In the acknowledgment, implicit or explicit, of such opinions, consists the principal link between such diverse personalities as Eliot, Tate, Brooks and Ransom. This metaphysical dimension is lacking in Russian Formalism. It has been noted several times in this study that notwithstanding the initial impulses for their activity which came from such idealistic philosophers

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of language as Belyj, the Formalists stopped short of recognizing the symbolic function of language. They also investigated the language of the poem, but did it in a different way.·3 It has been suggested by some researchers that the Formalists simply were not interested in semantics:·4 this, in my opinion, is a misleading way to put it. The basic reason for the semantic paucity of their writings was the gradual abandonment of the view that literature at its best is capable of providing the unique knowledge which cannot be identified with the factual knowledge offered by science, and the espousal of the view that it either expresses emotions or is a particular case of the usage of transformation rules of the language. The New Critics soon repudiated the attempts to 'scientifize' the literary commentary in its entirety, whereas the Russian Formalists finally accepted these attempts wholeheartedly. The next section of this chapter will deal with these occurrences in some detail. 2.

THE NEO-POSITIVIST T R E N D

'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'85 'At a time when metaphysical tendencies and dogmatic constructions dominated German philosophy, the members of the Vienna Circle were doing philosophy in a scientific spirit. They cultivated their studies in the spirit of clarity, thoroughness and solidity which is demanded by the scientific method, in contrast to the usual vagueness and instability of philosophical claims; that their approach had a scientific soberness about it instead of appealing to the heart and fulfilling secret wishes, was indeed inevitable. Imaginative conceptual poetry is surely more interesting for the average person, and the wisdom of a great personality surely has more significance for human life. Yet, they are subjective, matters of opinion, unverifiable. Lacking universal validity, they are matters of personal conviction, but do not represent knowledge.'6»

These words of Wittgenstein (a major influence on the Vienna Circle) and of Kraft (a member of it) are an appropriate commentary on a large part of Russian Formalist study and a certain part of the New Critical tradition. Perusing the writings of Tynjanov on 'the literary fact', the studies of Jakobson founded on his linguistic knowledge, the scholarship 63

Roman Ingarden might say that they investigated only some of his strata. See the beginning of Chapter Three. 64 K. Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance (The Hague, 1968), p. 27. • 5 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears and Mc Guinness (London, 1963), p. 151. »« V. Kraft, The Vienna Circle, trans. A. Pap (New York, 1953), pp. 192-3.

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of Tomasevskij and Propp, or even the early theories of Richards, one becomes aware that these critics give us an insight into the literary work, not necessarily claiming that this insight be exhaustive, but always insisting that it is objective and scientifically verifiable. This tendency I have previously named neo-positivistic, thus suggesting its connection with the neo-positivist trends in contemporary philosophy. Two objections may be raised here. First, there appears to exist a chronological inconsistency: logical positivism as a movement came into being in the 1920's, with the development of the Vienna Circle,67 slightly after the publication of the first works of Jakobson, Tynjanov and Richards. Thus one may speak of the influence of the Vienna philosophers on Troubetzkoy, the linguist whose ideas were close to Jakobson's and who held a professorship at Vienna at the same time when the Schlick Circle held its meetings there. One might investigate whether the presence of Carnap in Prague, where he held an assistant professorship in the years 1931-5, was of consequence to the Prague Linguistic Circle. The tie between the Schlick group, the Formalists and Richards, however, appears to be out of the question. 67

The name 'the Vienna Circle' refers to a group of philosophers and logicians inspired by the works of Wittgenstein, Russell, Whitehead and Frege, which was formed in the 1920's around Morris Schlick, professor of philosophy at Vienna. Following Wittgenstein, it rejected metaphysics as a philosophical pseudoproblem, and postulated that philosophy can, and indeed should, be as scientific in its methods and results as exact sciences. It can do so, for its task is to investigate the language of the natural sciences, and the structural rules of language in general. The members of the group soon made themselves known in international philosophical circles through their journal Erkenntnis and through personal contacts: as Rudolf Carnap moved around Europe, for instance, he came into contact with Ch. Ogden and Ch. Morris in England, and with Ph. Frank in Prague. Thanks to the initiative of the Vienna Circle, the International Congress of Scientific Philosophy was organized in 1935 at the Sorbonne; another congress 'for the unity of science* followed the next year in Copenhagen. These and later congresses have turned the Circle into an international philosophical movement, which the members themselves called NeoPositivism or Neo-Empiricism. After the Nazi invasion of Austria, the center of neo-positivism moved to the United States, where Carnap, in collaboration with Ch. Morris and other scholars, began to edit, first The International Journal of Unified Science, then The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Carnap acknowledged the proximity of his and the American semantician's views in his Autobiography, where he wrote: "In Chicago, Charles Morris was closest to my philosophical position. He tried to combine ideas of pragmatism and logical positivism." The same Morris, one remembers, published in the first issues of the Kenyon Review, and was repetitiously discussed and criticized by the New Critics. Thus, while the Prague Linguistic Circle and the Russian Formalists parallelled the Vienna philosophers in investigating the constructional rules of concrete languages and of the literary works, the New Critics found in the writings of the neo-positivists a direct stimulus for the structural study of poetry and for terminological precision.

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On the other hand, it was indicated previously that Belyj, at whom I pointed as a major source of idealistic concepts in early Formalism, was not at all immune to the idea that literary study should be scientifically verifiable. The answer to these points is as follows: in suggesting a parallel, I am interested first of all in its elucidatory possibilities. The Vienna philosophers formulated with clarity and comprehensiveness the ideas which appeared earlier in the writings of their predecessors, the neorealist Bertrand Russell and the mathematical logician Gottlob Frege. The Russian Formalists attempted to apply some of these ideas to literary criticism, probably without direct acquaintance with the works of the two logicians. Certain Viennese philosophers, like Carnap, elaborated upon the problems of universal grammar in a way partly reminiscent of the First and Fifth Investigations of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, with which the Formalists were indirectly familiar (it has to be remembered, however, that the premises of these philosophers were different: while Husserl was a searcher of essences, Carnap investigated verbal tautologies).68 All in all, the premises of the Viennese philosophers sometimes derived from the same sources as the premises of the 'positivist' formalistic critics. Chronologically, the neo-positivism of Tynjanov and Jakobson was avant la lettre. The actual gestation of their concepts in the 1920's involved the works of the predecessors of the Vienna Circle rather than the Viennese philosophers themselves. Since the literary critics seldom formulate their premises in their entirety,

M In the First Investigation, "Expression and Meaning", Husserl discussed the relation between meanings and signs, and emphasized the differences between the two. He noted the disparity between meaning and object: diverse expressions may have the same meaning and refer to different objects, or diverse meanings may have the same object. 'Objectlessness' does not entail 'meaninglessness': there are signs which have the designatum but not the denotatum (i.e., can be described in terms of qualities they possess, but they have no counterpart in the world of the actually existing objects). In the Fourth Investigation, "The Distinction of Independent Meanings and the Idea of Pure Grammar", Husserl divided all meanings into simple and compound, and sketched out the concepts of language and metalanguage (although he did not use these terms). H e pointed out that there are a priori laws of meaning which distinguish sense from nonsense. The concept of such laws led him to the concept of universal grammar. Such grammar, according to him, would derive from certain a priori laws concerning the essential forms of meaning, their arrangements and modifications. The questions such grammar would ask would be: how do diverse languages express the plural, the negation, probability, how do they modify concepts, etc. For an introduction to Husserl's Investigations see M. Faber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass., 1943). On the Formalists' acquaintance with Husserl, see V. Erlich, Russian Formalism, pp. 62, 65.

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I suggest here a parallel with the works which contain a comprehensive exposition of the principles of the Formalist 'scientific' research. As to Belyj's suggestion that poetics may become a science, it appears to be an offshoot of the rationalistic tendency of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to which tendency Belyj was not quite immune, in spite of his deep interest in the theory of symbolism. This postulate of his weakened the already fragmentary idealistic tendencies in Formalism, and linked the people who represented them (e.g., Sklovskij) to those who, like Tynjanov, were from the beginning concerned with description only, not with interpretation. In regard to the humanities, the postulates of the Vienna philosophers differed from those set forth in the nineteenth century by Dilthey, and elaborated in detail - with the concept of a priori values emphasized by such neo-Kantians as Heinrich Rickert. To make the difference more clear, I shall briefly go through the argument of Rickert concerning humane sciences, and then return to the neo-positivists. In Science and History (Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft), Rickert observes that the philosophical foundations of what he calls cultural sciences (here he includes theology, law, history and philology) have been weak, in comparison to those of natural sciences. Yet, the difference in material and method between the two is so great that the first require a separate set of philosophical principles. The observations made about the second can scarcely be applied in regard to the first. Cultural sciences deal with the products of man's spirituality (therefore, they are sometimes called Geisteswissenschaften), whereas the natural ones, with nature. Naturwissenschaften proceed by the discoveries of natural laws, Geisteswissenschaften deal with unrepeatable events. [Rickert obviously was not familiar with modern linguistics.] Rickert opposes nature and culture; the term 'nature', according to him, refers to the products that grow out of earth; culture, to the products of man 'acting according to valued ends', or those fostered for the sake of values.69 Values and culture are inescapably connected; nature is 'devoid of value'. The concept of value Rickert accepts a priori and does not spend much time discussing it. For him, values are intertwined with man's spiritual nature, and inevitably cognized by man without the need for further explanation. Thus Rickert draws a sharp line of demarcation between what cultural sciences can say, and what can be learned using the methods of natural sciences. " H. Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist G. Reisman (Princeton, 1962), pp. 19-33.

Epistemology,

trans.

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The philosophers from Vienna were in strong opposition to such views. In their opinion, no precise division can be made between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, the sciences dealing with culture and with nature. There is only one type of science - the 'unified' one (that is why the publications of the logical positivists bore the titles Journal of Unified Science and International Encyclopedia of Unified Science). They proposed two criteria of meaningfulness: sense experience and concordance with the logical principles set beforehand. Richard von Mises, one of the foremost contemporary positivists, put it this way: The present stage in the development of positivism is governed by an idea first enunciated by L. Wittgenstein, though in a slightly different form, and advanced with particular emphasis by the so-called Vienna Circle. It is the conception according to which all meaningful statements . . . have to be divided into two groups: those expressing a state of fact which can be tested by experience, and those which, independently of all experience, are true or false by virtue of their wording. Statements of the second kind are called 'tautological" in the first instance and "contradictory" in the second. Tautological sentences form the content of logic, of pure mathematics, and of all other axiomatically formulated scientific theories.70

Having adopted such criteria of what is scientific and meaningful, the logical positivists had no use for such concepts as Rickert's Kulturwissenschaften, or values. They would simply deny that one can speak of such matters in a scientifically valid way. Indeed, Wittgenstein had observed that most of traditional philosophy (including Kant) was completely invalidated by the adoption of the new criteria of what can be discussed in a scientific manner. And Carnap wrote of Otto Neurath, a foremost spokesman of the Circle, thus: The sharp distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften (humanities) which was strongly emphasized in contemporary German philosophy, was in his view an obstacle on the road toward our social goal, because it impeded the extension of the empiro-logical method to the social sciences.71

The name which the Vienna philosophers liked to apply to themselves: the logical positivists, was thus a corrective upon traditional empiricism which claimed that only that is science and knowledge R. von Mises, Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 114. 71 R. Carnap, "Intellectual Autobiography", The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. Schüpp (London, 1963), p. 23. 70

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which can be experienced by the senses. Carnap and others proposed another area of knowledge and science: that which is valid on logical grounds. Thus, the school is both a partial confirmation and an extension of nineteenth-century positivism, which attempted to scientifize all areas of human activity. Since apart from empirical facts, all other knowledge was but a "reformulation or recasting of arbitrarily fixed linguistic rules",72 the philosophy of language occupies an important place among the works of the logical positivists. Its aim is not to parallel linguistics but to clear up the problems of philosophical investigations; the latter, according to Carnap, are analogical to the syntactic problems. Philosophical statements, like the statements of mathematics, are tautological, and are invalidated once the incorrectness of the tautology has been proven. Hence the necessity to understand the workings of language. The problems of language have been dealt with in great detail by Rudolf Carnap. He approached language as a system of signs, parallel in many respects to other semiotic systems. The signs of language mean something - they refer to concepts or propositions. At the same time, they enter into multiple relations among themselves. If we investigate the first problem, we are dealing with semantics; in the second case, we are dealing with syntax. In both cases, the investigation can tell us something about the structure of our thought. Carnap began his study with the syntactical problems (in The Logical Syntax of Language, 1934) and then moved to semantics (in Introduction to Semantics, 1942). He dealt with the model language which he constructed himself out of logistic symbols, in contradistinction to the linguists who deal with concrete, empirical languages. He investigated transformation rules for sentences, the rules of derivation, and other fundamental linguistic operations. As stated earlier, Carnap's objective was not to challenge linguistics; indeed, he himself admitted that the logical transformation rules which he investigated do not by any means cover the problems of the really existing languages which include the rules worked out empirically.78 Nonetheless, it is significant that the philosophical investigations of the type he performed so successfully, stimulated the research in linguistics done by the Prague Linguistic Circle, a group which had close ties with Russian Formalism. A leading member of the Circle, B. Trnka, in 78

Von Mises, op. cit., p. 114. R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (London, 1949), pp. 1-9.

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"Linguistics and the Ideological Structure of the Period" asserted that, even though the linguists deal with 'empirical reality' and not with abstract systems, "the model of modern linguistics as a science dealing with the signs of language is furnished by relational logic, closely related to the philosophy of mathematics".74 Trnka believed that "Linguistics may entrust itself to this current without any fears for its autonomy, formerly menaced by psychologism, because relational logic and allied currents of thought teach it to rest on its own basis and to start from the minimum number of further analysable prerequisites in short, provides it, just as it does for instance in psychology — only with a model of its procedure."75 The works of the Russian Formalists anticipate the development of this type of study not only in linguistics but also - and primarily - in literature. The Formalists declared that literary science should be concerned with 'literariness", i.e., the facts of language that are peculiar to aesthetic verbal structures (Jakobson); that the literary 'system of functions' gains extra-syntactical (to use an analogy with Carnap's language) meaning only when related to other systems (Tynjanov); that one can lay bare the structure of genres by pointing at their invariant elements and the relations of these elements (Propp). The coherence between the principles of the logical positivists and Russian Formalists had been partly prepared by the fact that the rupture between the Formalists and the nineteenth-century positivistically-oriented Russian and Polish literary scholarship had never been complete. It is not accidental that the names of Veselovskij and Baudouin de Courtenay appear in the Formalist works now and again. These two scholars held to the positivistic belief that the facts of theme migration (Veselovskij) and of phonological change (Baudouin de Courtenay) can ultimately be encompassed by logic, by the discovery of scientific laws which admitted of no exceptions. This belief was not quite alien to Formalist thinking, and it gained in prominence as the Formalists were dissociating themselves from the idealistic premises. Indeed, the concept of sound laws (introduced by the neogrammarians, with whom Baudouin de Courtenay had much in common) is not entirely rejected by Jakobson as a linguist in 1962, as the Preface to his Selected Works states. The only change that is made in its formulation is that these laws must not be regarded as mechanistic (as the nineteenth-century

74 75

The Linguistic School of Prague, ed. J. Vachek (Bloomington, 1966), p. 159. Ibid., p. 152.

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scholars believed). They are now looked upon as purposive, as leading to some end.7· Jakobson's first substantial work of scholarship, The Newest Russian Poetry (Novejsaja russkaja podzija, 1921)77 best represents the trend in Formalism which I prefaced with the discussion of logical positivism. From the viewpoint of chronology and method, it is the first work in the Russian Formalist school decisively to declare the necessity of the scientific principle behind the study of literature, and the importance of not going beyond its premises. From the viewpoint of achievement, it still remains the best commentary on Xlebnikov. It was conceived as a discussion of Xlebnikov's poetry, but its scope is larger than that. Jakobson makes here a number of programmatic pronouncements. At the outset, he observes that the novel qualities of a literary work are relative phenomena. Puskin's iambs, deprived of caesura, gave the impression of 'defacilitated form' to his contemporaries; today, their quality of zatrudnenie (defacilitation) is lost, and we perceive them as 'smooth and light'. Jakobson thus asserts that from a scientific viewpoint, evaluating and interpreting a given literary phenomenon is a futile occupation. Only the description of it is valid; all value judgments are subjective, a matter of taste and historical moment. He thus makes a step dissociating him from Sklovskij, who did not look at defacilitation and defamiliarization only in terms of their being noticeable in one epoch and unnoticeable in another, but also in terms of their ontological significance. Sklovskij considered it worthwhile to preface all his discussions of the methods of 'bringing together' the elements of a literary work, with an exposition of what artistic representation is ultimately about. For Jakobson, such considerations are irreconcilable with the aims and methods of literary science. In the same work, he made the famous comparison of the irrelevant in the literary study to a life situation: Until now, the historians of literature were like policemen anxious to arrest a suspect; to make sure they would not miss him, they jailed all the inhabitants of the house as well as the passers-by.78

Poetry is 'language in its aesthetic function', 'expression oriented utterance'. In poetic language, in contradistinction to the emotive and practical one, the communicative function is reduced to a minimum. The eloquence of the utterance is the subject-matter of literary study 76 77 78

R. Jakobson, Selected Works, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1962), p. 2. R. Jakobson, Novejsaja russkaja poizija (Prague, 1921). Ibid., p. 11.

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and appreciation. Jakobson points out that in poetry, only words and the 'renewal of form' matter; 'soul' and 'spiritual realms' are a somewhat forced addition. After the programmatic introduction, Jakobson points out various ways of employing the conventions of language in a simple folk tale and in a story of Gogol'. They consist in the reversal of the subjectobject relation. Instead of the woman making the bread, we have the bread making the woman in the folk tale; instead of a man walking on a sidewalk, we have sidewalks carrying a man in Gogol's "Nevskij prospekt". Both cases of distorting the convention prove to be similar upon examination, but the motivations for their introduction vary: in Gogol', it is emotion, in the folk story, humor. In Jakobson's view, the diverse and multiple implications of these psychic phenomena are of little interest to the literary researcher; what matters is pointing out the phenomenon of distortion in itself and establishing the possible motivations by means of which it can be introduced into literary structures. Also, the thoughts expressed in a literary work must under no circumstances be taken as a personal expression, as the poet's giving way to his own intellectual or spiritual experiences: "To intimate that the poet actually gave expression to ideas and feelings is as absurd as the behavior of a medieval public, beating the actor who played the role of Judas, or blaming Puskin for the death of Lenskij." 79 At this point we come across a misleading similarity with what I named the idealistic tendency in New Criticism. For instance, Allen Tate, discussing Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress", or W. K. Wimsatt commenting on a play by Shakespeare, seem to have said the same. Tate observed that a crude moralist would be quick to condemn Marvell for advocating immortality, since the summary of the poem is carpe diem.*0 In Tate's view, what we get in the poem is a representation of a certain human attitude, i.e., of an entity that surpasses the concerns of linguistics and of meaningfulness as it was defined by the neo-positivists. What we get in poetry generally is not instant morality or instant immorality, not a preaching of views, but an insight into, and better understanding of, something that is intrinsically human. Wimsatt put it this way: What is celebrated in Anthony and Cleopatra is the passionate surrender of an illicit love, the victory of this love over practical, political, and moral concerns, and the final superiority of the suicide lovers over circumstance. ™ Ibid., p. 17. 80 A. Tate, Collected

Essays, p. 83.

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That is a crudely one-sided statement which makes the play as plainly immoral as it can be made. There is of course far more - the complex, wanton, and subtle wiles of the voluptary queen, her infinite variety which age cannot wither nor custom stale, the grizzled and generous manhood and the military bravery of Anthony - the whole opulent and burnished panorama of empire and its corruption. Such intricacies and depths surely at least add to the interest of immorality and - without making it any more moral - yet make it more understandable, more than a mere barren vileness, a filthy negation. Even though, or rather because, the play pleads for certain evil choices, it presents these choices in all their mature interest and capacity to arouse human sympathy. The motives are wrong, but they are not base, silly, or degenerate. They are not lacking in the positive being of deep and complex human desire. If one will employ the classic concept of "imitation," the play imitates or presents the reasons for sin, a mature and richly humane state of sin.81 Tate and Wimsatt, then, even though upholding the separation between poetry and morals of which Jakobson also speaks, do not consider it necessary for the researcher to suspend his beliefs in some value system in order to ascertain the autonomy of literature. Jakobson asserts that the critic, as well as ordinary reader, should not be concerned with what a piece of literature might communicate 'for real' about matters of general humane interest. Poetry communicates nothing, in terms of objective truth: its aim is 'to orient the utterance toward eloquence'. In terms of Jakobson's colleague from the Prague Linguistic Circle, Mukarovsky, its aim is to present a maximum foregrounding of the utterance and to make us contemplate this utterance without trying to interpret it as an act of saying something seriously and without passing a value judgment on it. To return now to Jakobson's analysis: we enter with him into the structure of metaphors, negative and transformed parallelisms, puns; he points out for us the 'realized verbal structures' such as realized metaphors, hyperboles and oxymorons - i.e., figures of speech extended into spacial images (we observe in Xlebnikov and Majakovskij the quality so much advocated by the New Critics: pushing the metaphor to its logical conclusions). An example: Ί ran like a curse; the other leg is just catching up with me in the next street.' (Majakovskij) We observe the temporal shift in Xlebnikov's "Mirskonca" ("The Worldbackwards") where the story goes backward, or in "Ucimica" 81 W. K. Wimsatt, "Poetry and Morals", The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954), pp. 96-7. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Kentucky Press.

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("The Studier") where the heroes belong to two different historical epochs, or in "Ka" where the main character swings through diverse moments of time 'as if rocking himself in a rocking-chair'. Jakobson shows how Xlebnikov breaks up our automatic perception of words, phrases, metaphors, facts; how he mixes the customarily unmixable, sprinkles his poems with lapsus linguae, metatheses, incorrect (from the standpoint of normative grammar) epithets and predicates. How he creates neologisms out of common roots, prefixes and suffixes, without any communicative end, just to foreground the structural and associative possibilities of language. How he plays with synonyms and various kinds of sound repetition. What Jakobson did in The Newest Russian Poetry in regard to concrete poems was later put in a theoretical study of Mukarovsk^, thus: In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself. The question is then one of how this maximum of foregrounding is achieved in poetic language. 82

Jakobson spelled out the 'foregroundings' done by Xlebnikov without trying to interpret them. Among the Russian Formalists Tynjanov is probably closest to Jakobson in his views on literature (the two even wrote articles together83). Like the rest of the positivistically-oriented Formalists, Tynjanov wants to perform the critical tasks 'in the scientific spirit' of which Kraft spoke in his characterization of the Vienna Circle. His work is not uniform, however. He evolved from the attempts to define the literary work as a balance of psychic and material factors, to structuralism pure and consistent. The Problems of Language in Verse represents his early attitudes.84 It opens with the consideration of two kinds of literary study: that discussing 'literary materials', the occurrences of everyday life (byt) reflected in a given work, and that concerned with the principles of literary construction. Unlike Sklovskij, he draws a sharp line of demarcation between the materials of a work of imaginative literature, and the principles which give form to those 82

J. Mukafovsk^, "Standard Language and Poetic Language", A Prague School Reader, trans. P. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), p. 19. 83 R. Jakobson and Ju. Tynjanov, "Problemy izuöenija literatury i jazyka", Novyj Lef, 12 (1928), 36-7. 84 Ju. Tynjanov, Problema stixotvomogo jazyka (Leningrad, 1924).

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materials. If we occupy ourselves in our study with byt, i.e., with the facts of life not yet given literary form, we forget that in the works of imaginative literature, words in their practical meanings are frequently misused. Some aspects of these words may be suppressed, others set forth with disregard for everyday usage. And, if we discuss constructional principles, the danger is that we treat them as static, embracing the equally static semantic material. In reality, both the semantic material and the constructional principles are dynamic. Their synthesis is a constant, in the sense that it is always based on multiple tensions and parallels which hold various aspects of the work together. The ways to achieve these multiple tensions, and through them the fusion, are dynamic. If this dynamism did not exist, soon permanent automatization would set in and the raison d'itre of literature would disappear. In his first volume of criticism Tynjanov appears to rely considerably on the ideas of the nineteenth-century German psychologist Wundt whom he quotes copiously and whose concept of the two types of factors he uses in his own area of research. Speaking about languages in his Völkerpsychologie, Wundt asserted that in language formation, there exist constant interactions between phonetic laws and the psychological mechanism of associations; between mechanistic natural laws and psychic principles.85 Scientifically explicable laws of sound production (of which the neogrammarians spoke) and the phenomenon of verbal associations not so neatly curbed into laws, are in constant interaction. The two are so intimately connected that their separation is impossible; the existence of the factors of the first type is a sine qua non for the existence of the factors of the second type, and vice versa. Tynjanov applies the same idea in his discussion of the literary work. Like Wundt he speaks of the 'constructional factors' in literature. He observes that among the factors synthetized in verse, rhythm and rhyme stem from physical laws, and semantics from the psychic laws. The psychic and physical groups of factors are inescapably intertwined Some of the factors of both groups are usually foregrounded, others are toned down. The most foregrounded factor in a given work or genre is called the constructional principle. In poetry, it is rhythm. It can be apprehended not only in actual lines of verse, but also in the lines consisting of suspension marks, so frequent in Romantic poetry. This 'mute' rhythm is not deprived of semantics; in the context, it can express various « W. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, vol. 1 (Die Sprache) (Leipzig, 1904), p. 369. See also E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, pp. 172 ff.

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emotional attitudes. Thus the only condition which must be fulfilled in order to produce the impression of rhythm in the reader is the apprehension of unity of a certain semantic group. Rhythm is thus omnipresent in verse; it appears in vers libre and in pauses, as well as in the most elaborately organized lines. This omnipresence is apprehended through tension that binds a rhythmical unit (a line, a poem) together. Another 'verse factor' of considerable prominence is rhyme. In regard to rhyme, tension arises between its two components: the progressive and the regressive part. The unfinished quality of the first ('progressive') rhyming syllable creates suspense which is resolved in the second syllable. This fact bears on semantics which can either go together with it or contradict it. 'Acting together' or counteraction of rhyme and semantics also occur in regard to the units of rhythm, such as a line or several lines, or the whole poem. Therefore, if one destroys the division of verse into lines (rhymed or unrhymed, regular or irregular), one destroys verse: the units of sense are no longer in counteraction with the units of rhythm, and without this relation there is no poetry. The interaction, and the corresponding tension, between rhythm and semantics occur also when the run-on lines, caesurae, sound repetitions of diverse kinds, produce rhythmical units which may either clash or go together with semantical units. In various epochs the same rhythmical occurrence may produce effects of different potency; in eighteenth-century France, for instance, the run-on lines were used so infrequently that they produced a stronger effect on semantics than in the Romantic epoch. Among the multiple and overlapping kinds of tension and unity in poetry there is also one achieved by the foregrounding of certain meanings and associations of words at the expense of others. Each word has the primary dictionary meaning, or meanings, and the 'oscillating secondary meanings', i.e., associations. In a given context, a certain meaning, or meanings, of a word are foregrounded. Other meanings are pushed aside, but not entirely: they 'glitter' through the foregrounded one. Since a word in poetry is never used in the customary way and the proportions between its secondary and primary meanings are new, dynamic tension arises; the use of the word is sufficiently new each time to guarantee it. [Tynjanov is obviously speaking here of an ideal situation.] The final result of these accumulated interplays and tensions is an effect on our emotions rather than a cognitive offering. Words in a poem are deprived of semantic meanings, their configurations evoke the

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readers' attitudes and do not furnish knowledge. The poem stirs up emotions and attitudes not because of its genuine semantic content (it has only 'make-believe' semantics) but because of the correlation of various 'poetic factors'. The literary work acts on our emotions through its 'equivalents of meaning' and the dynamism of rhythmical units.8« In asserting that the semantics of the literary work is a make-believe semantics Tynjanov approached the argument of the early Richards and proved himself to be poles apart from the idealistic sources of Formalism. It is important to observe that when he uses the common Formalist phrasing, his meaning is usually different from Sklovskij's. E.g., deformation, or making something strange, is for Tynjanov not a means to cognize the world outside the work of art (as it was for Sklovskij) but a phenomenon occurring when various constructional factors are deformed by one another. It is worth seeing for its own sake, as an expression of the possibilities of language; it is not a means to cognize the world. In the volume Archaists and Innovators Tynjanov expands his theories to embrace all literature, not only poetry. In the essay "The Literary Fact" ("Literaturnyj fakt") 87 he states that literary works are dynamic verbal structures; this is the only constant of which we can speak in relation to literature. The dynamism consists in that the configurations of elements change from epoch to epoch, from work to work. While in certain periods regular patterns in verse, or the story element in prose fiction, are foregrounded, in others the apparent structural disorder is brought forth. Also, various epochs perceive the works of the past in diverse ways: one epoch is sensitive, for instance, to the Romantic elements in Tjutcev's poetry, another to those elements of it which relate him to Derzavin. In view of this, it is evident that literary terms are imprecise to say the least, and that they need scientific redefinition. The concept of genre is particularly vague, for every significant work is a violation of a static conception of genre, 'a shift in the system'. Tynjanov therefore proposes a new scientific literary terminology based on such notions as artistic material (imaterial), constructional factor (konstruktivnyj faktor), constructional principle (konstruktivnyj princip), constructional function (konstruktivnaja funkcija), and tries to define them.88 The first two terms that undergo the process of defining are con84 87 88

See fn. 38 of this chapter. Ju. Tynjanov, Arxaisty i novatory (München, 1967), pp. 5-29. "O literaturnoj evoljucii", Ibid., pp. 30-47.

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structional factor and the material of art. According to Tynjanov, this material is different in regard to prose and poetry. Semantic groups are the material of poetry; they are organized by the constructional factor of rhythm. In prose, the opposite is the case: here, the material is the rhythmically diverse verbal mass, and thematics plays the role of the constructional factor. Introducing these distinctions Tynjanov indirectly says that all aspects of language are equal for artistic purposes: euphony, meanings of words, sentences and larger semantic units, point of view. What matters is their unique arrangement which may stir up our emotions, not the semantics of such arrangement. The constructional principle Tynjanov describes as the author's intention and the point of view. He does not consider it as the aspect of the work which INFORMS the whole semantic pattern existing in that work. He sees it as one more element which contributes to the 'makebelieve' semantics in a given work. This constructional principle, he says, is the one causing automatization and wearing out of certain artistic patterns. It tends to make the relation between material and the constructional factor static (authors usually develop a certain manner of presentation, a certain point of view, and adhere to it). In the course of literary evolution the constructional principle changes - sometimes radically, abruptly and unexpectedly - by the appearance of the authors who are first considered the destroyers of tradition, and who later develop a tradition themselves. Accidental happenings may contribute to the changes of the constructional principle: e.g., sonnets published in collections contributed to the emergence of longer lyrical genres because they made people accustomed to longer lyrical works. By the same token, elements of everyday life contributed the form of a letter to literature: hence the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century or the collections of letters of famous litterateurs treated as literary works, very popular and much discussed in Russia. This exchange between life and literature goes both ways: a constructional principle may enter life. For instance, the principle of dynamism in prose fiction was taken over by the journalists of our day and has served to make their reallife stories more arresting. Thus literary facts are dynamic; they may leave literature and enter life or vice versa; they may pass unnoticed in one epoch and be extolled in another. Variability is their feature. At this point Tynjanov raises the question of the scientific method in literary study: how can this study be made into a scientific one if its subject is so variable? He answers this question by proposing that the

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study of literature consists not of static description of literary facts but of pointing out the evolution of them. A literary work is a system and so is the whole of literature. If we assume as a working hypothesis that each literary element is somehow related to others, a vast field of research opens. Tynjanov thus reasons as if the modern concept of semiotics were familiar to him (this is why the critics and semioticians associated with the French periodical Communications acknowledge him so often as their predecessor89). The constructional function, the last among Tynjanov's terms, is the way in which an element in a literary work correlates with other elements and with the whole literary system. Like all aspects of the literary work, this function is variable. The constructive function of archaisms may be the creation of the atmosphere of high style (Lomonosov), of irony (Puskin), of intellectual meditation (Tjutiev). In relation to this function one can say that verbal elements seldom disappear altogether from literature: what happens is that, due to the phenomenon of automatization, their function changes. In Archaists and Innovators Tynjanov repeats the remarks of his previous volume on the concept of the dominant (dominanta). He probably took the concept from Ejxenbaum and later 'passed it over' to the Prague Linguistic Circle where it reappeared in Mukarovsk^'s 'foregrounding'.90 He thus says that in a literary system (be it a single work or a group of works belonging to the same period or school), certain elements are foregrounded, others toned down. The ones that are prominent are the 'dominant' elements. Presenting matters thus, Tynjanov displays a considerable affinity to those twentieth-century researchers in the humane sciences who pose as their first and foremost postulate the type of verifiability of their investigations and results which is identical with that demanded by exact sciences. "In order for the history of literature to become a science, it must begin to assert its objective reliability", writes Tynjanov in "The Literary Evolution" ("O literaturnoj evoljucii").91 To achieve this objectivity he entirely abstracts from the concept of value understood not only as an entity related to the hierarchy of human ends, but also as a measure of richness and variety of the work's 'literariness'. He points out that if we start evaluating literature from any viewpoint our study β» Tz. Todorov, Communications, 8 (1966), 125. 90 Arxaisty i novatory, p. 41. Victor Erlich points out that the Formalists probably took the concept from Broder Christiansen. See Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 199. 91 Arxaisty i novatory, p. 31.

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will become a history of the generals, and the G.I.'s will not be mentioned in it at all. His system is thus little concerned with excellence and much more with the statistical prevalence of certain phenomena in a given literary epoch or work. It is indeed perfect in its objectivity and can serve as a model for those researchers who strive after a similar type of perfection. Tynjanov's and Jakobson's theories were assimilated by such Russian scholars as Propp and Skaftymov. They also had repercussions among Czech, French and Bulgarian literary scholars long after Russian Formalism disintegrated as a movement. The aestheticians and linguists of the Prague Linguistic Circle: Mukarovsk^ and Havränek, took from the Russians the concepts of automatization and foregrounding, of the dominant and function. A foremost aesthetician of the Circle says in a representative article: "The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance."· 8 The aim of this foregrounding is not to communicate something but to place "in the foreground the act of speech itself". This train of thinking clearly follows what Jakobson said in The Newest Russian Poetry. On the other hand, Mukafovsk^ goes in a direction different from Tynjanov's (Tynjanov spoke of the literary work as expressing emotions) and asserts, like Jakobson and like Charles Morris in the United States, that the ultimate meaning of the literary work lies in the work itself, in the utterance, to use his and Jakobson's words.*8 Another group of literary researchers that owes much to the Formalist writings is that of the French and Bulgarian structuralists of the 1960's. In the Introduction to his structural analysis of Liaisons dangereuses Tzvetan Todorov repeats almost word by word the postulates of Tynjanov.·4 The work of Roland Barthes is also close to these postulates, although it is bolstered by the thirty years of linguistic and semiotic research accomplished after Tynjanov wrote his studies.·5 82

J. Mukarovsk^, "Standard Language and Poetic Language", A Prague School Reader, p. 19. es J. Mukafovsk^, ibid.; R. Jakobson, Novejsaja russkaja poizija, p. 9; Ch. Morris, "Science, Art and Technology", Kenyon Review, I (1939), 409-23. This concept can be traced back to Kant's 'disinterested contemplation'; Jakobson and Mukafovsk^, however, fail to persuade me that the subject oi this contemplation as they present it (the possibilities of language) can have the validity ascribed by theorists as well as by common experience, to the verbal art at its best. M Tz. Todorov, "Les categories du recit litt6raire", Communications, 8 (1966), 125-51. M Barthes first wrote Le Degre zero de l'icriture (Paris, 1953) where he summarized various linguistic theories of the last hundred years, from de Saussure to

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In Critique et verite, Barthes asserts like Tynjanov the relativity of meaning of the literary work.·® He observes that the works of literature can be viewed as symbols of something or as structures of symbols. He declares his preference to study 'the logic of symbols', not the symbols themselves, and explicitly asserts that there is a basic difference between literary criticism (which deals with meanings) and literary science (which deals with 'the logic of men' as demonstrated in the literary work). The business of criticism is always relative (meanings vary from epoch to epoch according to the changing point of view of the critic), whereas literary science provides sure knowledge (of the type the Vienna Circle postulated, one may add). Criticism investigates chains of symbols, literary science, links between symbols. For a scientist, the literary work has no 'content'; it is a semiotic system. The critic remakes the work, the scientist describes it. Armed in his linguistic knowledge which he displayed before he wrote Critique et verite (in Le Degri zero de l'ecriture), Barthes asserts that all semiotic systems are probably regulated by the same laws. Hence it follows that literary study can derive its concepts from linguists, for the relations between parts of sentences and parts of discourse are analogical.97 A story can be analysed somewhat like a sentence. There are in it both the part described and the part describing; the passive and active parts; subject and verb (i.e., things and actions, or situations and actions); auxiliary parts (all kinds of secondary aspects of the story) and main parts (the basic plot). Thus, stories can be divided into those in which the described element prevails (stories of psychological analysis) and those dominated by the describing element (action stories). Another analogy can be drawn between the structure of the story and the structure of human activities as expressed in language. Thus, the elements of the described part of the story fall into certain classes which correspond to three basic types of human activity: desire, communication and fight. These three form an analogy to de Saussure's langue, whereas the individual stories are paroles. In view of this analogy, one can also say that literary study is similar to the study of complex clauses. A similar case for literary research was made in Todorov's "Les cate-

Hjelmslev, and then proceeded to critical theory proper in Critique et verite. »· Critique et verite (Paris, 1966). 87 R. Barthes, "Introduction ä l'analyse structurale des recits", Communications, 8 (1966), 1-27.

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gories du recit litteraire".98 We find there the same belief that literary study can be scientific in the sense attributed up to the twentieth century to exact sciences, and that the only absolute meaning that a literary work has lies in its relation to other semiotic systems. Thus, the meaning of Madame Bovary lies in its opposition to Romantic literature. As to the interpretation of this book, it varies according to epoch and critic, i.e., it is a relative matter. The Russian Formalist school, then, proved to be a carrier of literary ideas which had their generalized parallels in contemporary philosophy. The members of the Vienna Circle wanted to limit philosophy to symbolic logic, and some of the Formalists wanted the literary study to become the establishing of the changes in the configurations of literary elements. Similar tendencies appeared later in Czech and French literary groups. The contribution of researchers of this type can be viewed from several viewpoints. First, in its professed belief in the relativity of meaning of the literary work (Tynjanov, Barthes, Todorov), it witnesses a scepticism toward values and meanings which literature carries in a non-relative way. Second, in its occasional assertions that the value of literature is contained in the utterance itself (Jakobson, Mukarovsk^), it certainly reduces literature to the interplay of language rules, and dismisses its cognitive aspect. The perusal of the practical studies done by the critics who adhere to such programmatic pronouncements, however, proves that 'objective' research has much to offer in showing the most basic structure of literary texts. It represents a renewed kind of rhetorical study which operates a large set of new rhetorical terms derived from linguistics or, more generally, from semiotics. It assists the reader in grasping the intricacies of the use of signs in the work; the reader can proceed hence to analysis of the cognitive processes which occur in relation to the work. As to the New Critics, their stand in regard to the 'scientifizing' of the literary study has been in the main negative. Eliot, Ransom and Tate have been outspoken adversaries of positivistic thinking in regard to humanities. One of the predecessors of American New Criticism, I. A. Richards, has, however, displayed in his criticism an attempt to rationalize the problems pertaining to literature in a way which bears considerable similarity to the attempts of the Formalists. ·»

Communications,

8 (1966), 125-51.

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In his works of the 1920's Richards maintained that poetry is ultimately an expression of emotions and that it orders in a certain sense the emotions of the reader. His explanation of the process aims at being scientific by bringing into discussion the laws of psychology. Thus Richards's intention, like that of the Formalists, is to be scientific. He chooses a different road to do so and his results are therefore different. The attempt at an absolute and rational system, however, is there as it was in the case of Tynjanov. The way Richards came to believe in the possibility of such rationality in literary criticism can be better understood if one begins one's acquaintance with him from his and Ogden's The Meaning of Meaning. Before he stepped forth with a theory of literary criticism, Richards demonstrated there his familiarity with the current trends in thought. The book is a survey of contemporary philosophical theories and contains, among others, the discussion of the works of Husserl, Frege, Russell and Peirce. In Principles of Literary Criticism one observes the effort at systematization and rational explication of literature which appears to be influenced by familiarity with these logicians. In particular, the central thesis of the Principles·, the recommendation that poetry be viewed in terms of its effects, finds its close philosophical parallel in one of the essays of Charles Peirce, the father of both semiotics and pragmatism (a philosophy related to logical positivism by the great trust it puts in logical reasoning and the lack of interest in ontological problems). In the famous essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1878 and republished many times since, Peirce expounded a theory of viewing phenomena in terms of their effects. The essay opens with the repetition of a thesis set up in an earlier article: that "the action of thought is excited by the irritation or doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought".·· Peirce asserts that after belief has been produced the appropriate habit follows: man, having rationally come to hold a certain set of convictions cannot but act accordingly to these convictions. Since "the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action... what a thing means is simply what habit it involves. . . . Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other, we deceive ourselves, and mistake

»· Ch. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear", The Philosophy of Charles Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. J. Buchler (New York, 1940), p. 26.

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a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself."10« Richards reasons along the same lines. He sees the poem as communicated experience. This experience is communicated in such a way that it stirs human impulses and attitudes without any one of them becoming frustrated, in case some of them are contradictory. The poem offers a unique way of reconciliation; such is a characteristic of aesthetic discourse.101 One observes at this point a certain similarity between the postulates of Richards and those of Coleridge, who saw the poem as a 'reconciliation of the opposites'. Richards, however, elaborates on Coleridge's theory from the viewpoint of a psychologist. While the Romantic spoke of the qualities of external world and of human soul, Richards speaks of the appetites and impulses which arise in psychic life. Thus, in Richards's terms, these impulses are frequently discordant or opposite; they are also, for the most part, unconscious. Following the utilitarian notion (he even quotes Bentham) that "Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency",102 he comes to the conclusion that poetry in which diverse and discordant appetencies are brought into play and somehow reconciled, is better than poetry which satisfies only homogeneous impulses. The first he calls the poetry of inclusion, the second, the poetry of exclusion. The reconciliation and appeasement of the reader's appetencies reached by means of the first kind of poetry, is accomplished with the use of the poetic faculty in man. This faculty is therefore valuable; it serves man's welfare. (Richards demonstrates here an adherence to the utilitarian concept of value.) Richards's theory is an eloquent expression of what came to be known among the New Critics as the affective fallacy. A refutation of this fallacy can be found in Wimsatt's and Beardsley's "The Affective Fallacy". The counter-argument here is based on the notion that poems do say something genuinely valid about objects, not merely about our attitudes to them and the effects they have on us.10S As mentioned before, Richards has steadily evolved away from seeing the poem merely in terms of its effects. However, the impact of, and interest in, »·« Ibid., pp. 30-1. 101 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, pp. 35-57. Ibid., p. 58. IOS The Verbal Icon, pp. 21 -40.

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his affective theory has been persistent enough to warrant the lasting relevance of Wimsatt's and Beardsley's essay. As for the American critics, Ransom, Brooks and Tate have shunned the influence of either pragmatism or positivism. Allen Tate in particular has stood in fiery opposition to these trends in thinking. An eloquent exposition of his stand can be found in the essay "Literature as Knowledge" where he refutes the arguments of the pragmatist philosopher Morris (the same of whom Ransom wrote in The New Criticism).104 Morris's argument in regard to literature runs parallel to the postulates of logical positivists concerning the tautological quality of scientific statements. In a number of articles Morris maintained that aesthetic signs are iconic; yet, their iconicity does not point outside of the sign but toward it; aesthetic signs are iconic of themselves.106 Like Richards's pseudo-statements, then, Morris's iconic signs of poetry do not refer to anything outside of them but express themselves. These iconic signs, according to Morris, are carriers of values. The values of which he speaks have nothing to do with the absolute values of which Rickert spoke. They are interest values; they point to some pattern of behavior in real life, and thus have pragmatic utility. We perceive these values in the iconic art object. Tate answers this argument by saying that value cannot be an object of perception. It can be known-but that implies a knowing mind, which is an entity for which the positivist thinker offers no explanation, for to discuss it would mean to step beyond the boundaries of logic. In Tate's view, such critical attitudes exclude all talk about meaning and cognition and reduce meaning to 'operational validity', to a rule of language. Thus the basic facts of poetry are missed: for poetry gives us the non-conceptual knowledge about the world which is the most complete knowledge one can have. To use Todorov's example, the meaning of Madame Bovary does not lie in its opposing the Romantic conventions; it consists in an idea which the reader gains, of a certain type of human personality, of its tragic though petty desires. In the work of Tate the positivistic trend visible in the early phase of New Criticism is very emphatically repudiated. Thus one can observe a criss-crossing of tendencies in both Russian Formalism and New Criticism. In the first of these movements the beginnings are marked both by nineteenth-century positivistic beliefs 104 105

A. Tate, Collected Essays, pp. 16-48. "Science, Art and Technology", Kenyon Review, I (1939), 409-23.

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and by the idealistic literary theories of Belyj. As time went on, the idealistic trend faded away and the 'scientific' (in the sense the neopositivists used the term) tendency began to gain more and more ground, to finish by taking over the field completely. In the course of this development, the theses put forth by the Russian Formalists and their successors, Czech, French and Bulgarian structuralists, began to parallel more and more closely the postulates of twentieth-century logical positivists. Doubtlessly the fact that among the Formalists there were many linguists contributed to this development: in twentiethcentury linguistics the scientific principle has been applied with persistent success. Those who knew linguistics professionally: Jakobson, Tomasevskij, Vinogradov, and others, began to apply their knowledge of the principles of semiotics to the study of literature. In doing so they demonstrated that a certain type of 'scientific' literary study is not only possible but also useful. It is only at the point when some of them speak of the make-believe literary semantics that, in my opinion, their argument loses its validity.106 New Criticism owed much of its vitality to the anti-positivists Eliot and Hulme, and some of its familiarity with the contemporary theories of language, to the positivistically-oriented Richards and Morris. In the final account, the American New Critics have been in opposition to anything that smacked of the 'scientese' (Tate's neologism) in regard to literature. It is characteristic that even the most structure-oriented among them, Cleanth Brooks, has been writing in recent years studies which are more concerned with the problem of humane values than with atomizing the literary text in the search for the secrets of literary representation. The New Critics have asserted that literature provides a kind of knowledge (Ransom) or the most complete kind of knowledge (Tate). This knowledge is said to be independent of human attitudes and appetencies; it points at the objects themselves, not at our attitudes toward these objects. It is inseparable from language. The New Critics have tried to indicate this cognitive value of literature through textual analyses which aimed at the explication of individual facts rather than at establishing the laws of literary evolution, and which were meant to go farther than those of the positivistically-oriented critics, so far as the literary cognition was concerned. Not all explications de textes, then, can be said to parallel New 108

I object here not to the assertion that the semantics of literary statements differs from the semantics of the prose of discourse, but to the assertion that literary semantics is not cognitive on any level.

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Critical theories: the dismantling of a poem by a critic conscious of the semiotic rules may not be so, if it does not end in an act of interpretation of the cognitive meaning of the poem. However, pure dismantling attempted by critics holding that literary commentary is a science, and therefore can deal only with scientifically verifiable entities, sometimes ends up in a synthesis: the critic actually may do more than his theory promises. Also, it must be stressed that no guarantees that one's practical criticism will be either enlightening or wasteful, can be found in the adherence to either tendency. The following chapter consisting of examples of criticism inspired by tendencies dealt with in this chapter, will serve as a validation of these statements.

III FROM CAUSALITY TO PURPOSlVENESS: A STORY OF PRACTICAL CRITICISM

Concentration on the literary artefact which all the concepts outlined in the previous chapter have in common, entailed the belief that explication of concrete literary texts is an important critical area. This explication differs from one practised by the history- or biography-oriented researcher. Instead of digging for historical information about the reasons for which Puskin wrote I remember the wonderful moment... (Ja pomnju dudnoe mgnovenie...) and explaining it line by line in terms of Puskin's life situations; instead of searching for the sources, personal and literary, of Coleridge's "Road to Xanadu", the critics in question try rather to explain how the elements of a poem fit in the total design of it, how the internal coherence of the poem is reached, how the symbol (to use the New Critical vocabulary) is structured. In the area of practical criticism, it is this examination of the verbal facts and their purposiveness that the Russian Formalists and the New Critics have in common - although it should be clear from the previous chapter that the understanding of what constitutes the verbal fact is not uniform among the critics of both trends. To introduce a certain order into this survey I shall base it on a slightly modified version of the literary stratification proposed by Roman Ingarden in Das literarische Kunstwerk (1931).1 In this pioneering theoretical study Ingarden examined the essential ingredients of the literary work from the viewpoint of the phenomenologist philosopher. He observed that four elements are essential to any work of literature: sounds, meanings of words and sentences, the objects presented, and the 'schematized appearances' ('wygl^dy uschematyzowane') 1

R. Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931). I have used the second edition, revised and enlarged by the author, in Polish: Ο dziele literackim, trans. M. Turowicz (Warsaw, I960). The modifications concern the fifth stratum, which in Ingarden's book, is very sketchily described (primarily in terms of what it is not), and which I treat as related to Kant's concept of the aesthetic idea, with the understanding that Ingarden's concept is narrower than Kant's.

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of these objects. Thus, the literary work can be divided into four 'layers'. The first is the layer of sounds. Here, to proceed beyond Ingarden's theoretical formulations, we encounter the phenomena of rhythm, rhyme, intonation and sound repetition. The second layer consists of meanings of small semantic units, such as words and sentences. It is already on this level that we begin to encounter the phenomenon of word associations. The third is the layer of the 'objects presented'. Here belong the most self-evident facts of the work: characters, physical objects, moods and situations described explicitly, plot - all that a naturalist writer or critic would recognize as the content of the work. A crude mimetic theory of art will stop at this point. The fourth is the layer of the 'schematized appearances'. This concept of Ingarden refers to the innumerable 'looks', or 'appearances', of things and characters as they emerge from a particular manner of describing these things and characters. We would not come into contact with the objects presented were it not for these appearances. We 'hear' the characters speaking {i.e., we get the auditory appearances), or 'see' them {i.e., we get the visual appearances), or have their inner life described {i.e., get their psychic appearances). The author always selects and interprets these appearances for us: in that consists the point of view. It appears to me that Ingarden's appearances can be explicated from still another angle. In everyday speech we can say we smell a rose or an odor; we see a table or a patch of brown color. In other words, we can say that we perceive objects or their properties. The clusters of our sense data, when interpreted by the mind, form certain constructs. Now if we consider these properties, or attributes, as not only physical but also psychical; and if we consider them not in relation to life objects but in relation to the imaginary world of a work of literature, we shall get to Ingarden's schematized appearances, the imaginary looks based on the properties of no less imaginary objects and characters appearing in the third layer of the work. These looks reflect the point of view of the author: he endows the objects described with the qualities that suit his conscious or unconscious design. It can be mentioned here that structuralist criticism pays much attention to this layer of the literary work; it investigates the structure of those 'schematized appearances', isolating them one by one and pointing out links between them. Finally, there is in the work what may be called its fifth layer, although Ingarden does not name it so. He merely states that literary work culminates in evoking what he calls 'metaphysical qualities'. He describes them as follows:

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There are certain simple or complex qualities, such as the sublimity (of somebody's sacrifice), the baseness (of somebody's treachery), the tragedy (of someone's defeat), the frightfulness (of someone's fate); that which is profoundly shaking, incomprehensible, or mysterious; the demonic quality (of somebody's action or someone per se); the saintliness (of someone's life), or its opposite: the sinfulness, or "hellishness" (of a vengeance), the ecstatic quality of the highest admiration, the peace (of the ultimate consolation), etc. Here belong also such qualities as the grotesque quality of some phenomenon or person, the pathos of somebody's behavior, the solemnity of a ritual, the lightness and grace of a girl's movement or its opposite, the seriousness and stateliness of somebody's manner or way of life.2

It is important to note that, in Ingarden's interpretations, these qualities are neither attributes of objects nor psychic states. They reveal themselves in human actions, in complex life situations, in historical events. When we encounter them in real life we usually are too busy acting to contemplate them. It is only in art that we can meet them in peace, so to speak. Since our longing for a contact with them is a matter of common experience, the ultimate value of literature consists in providing us with these contacts. Ingarden's metaphysical qualities thus seem to be a narrow version of Kant's aesthetical ideas (although each of these philosophers assigns a different ontological status to the entities they speak of, or rather, Ingarden does not speak about ontology at all). They are realities of mind which cannot be rationally described and which the literary work is so uniquely able to communicate. It hardly needs emphasizing that this stratification is done in the abstract, that in every good work the five layers coexist one THROUGH another. The merit of the practical studies of the critics in question frequently consists in pointing this out. Ingarden's stratification is a convenient starting point for the type of survey which shall follow because it provides points of reference in grouping certain types of interpretation together. Some critics may deal, for instance, primarily with the problems of auditory repetitions in verse, others, with objects presented. Ingarden's strata suggest also a certain hierarchy according to which the particular interpretations can be arranged. In particular, his 'metaphysical qualities' being a partial counterpart to what the New Critics said about the poetry of imagination and what Kant had said about the boundaries of art, constitute the 1

Ibid., p. 368. The multiplicity of examples indicates that Ingarden hoped to outline his idea through illustrations rather than through generalizations; that is, that it defied full intellectualization.

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most complex and most serious subject with which a critic can deal. The presence of absence of this subject in the writings of a critical school is an indication of its scope (though not of its excellence within that scope). I shall start the survey with the works which deal primarily with the sound layer. Studies concentrating on it loomed large, especially in the Russian Formalist school. They can be grouped around four problems: rhyme, sound repetitions, rhythm and intonation. Russian and American critics attempted to broaden the traditional understanding of rhyme as nearly devoid of meaning and consisting of phonemic repetitions valuable mainly as ornaments. Zirmunskij's detailed book Rhyme, Its History and Theory (Rifma, ee istorija i teorija)3 demonstrates how rhymes can place words in the center of attention and, by doing so, bring forth or tone down the meanings of other words and their associations. 2irmunskij points out that the lexical, syntactical and morphological characteristics of the rhymed words juxtaposed with one another contribute to the development of tension in the poem. In Puskin's "The Bronze Horseman" the rhymed words belong to different grammatical categories and, contrasting with one another, create the effect of tension. On the other hand, Lermontov's Demon uses rhymes in which cases and parts of speech coincide. This fact helps to make its style 'emotional and lyrical'. Rhymes can also contribute to comic effects: examples of these Zirmunskij takes from Byron's Don Juan, Heine's satirical poems and Puskin's "A Cottage in Kolomna". It can be added here that similar functions of rhyme were observed in Wimsatt's "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason".4 Wimsatt asserted there that deprived of semantic meaning, rhyme loses its sense. One of its functions is to serve as a basis of comparison between words and emphasize the syntactical and logical differences between them. A particular case of such usage is the pun, where juxtaposition of words or sounds produces a comic effect. Wimsatt substantiated this thesis by a number of examples from Pope and Chaucer. All in all, his essay explicates the same problems which are so thoroughly discussed in Zirmunskij's book. Jakubinskij's "The Accumulation of Identical Liquids in the Practical and Poetic Languages" ("Skoplenie odinakovyx plavnyx ν prakticeskom * *

V. Zirmunskij, Rifma, ee istorija i teorija (Petrograd, 1923). The Verbal Icon, pp. 153-68.

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ί poeticeskom jazykax"5) investigates a particular case of sound repetitions. It attempts to establish one of the rules separating these two types of the use of speech. Jakubinskij maintained that in practical speech, sounds are merely vehicles by means of which rational meaning is conveyed. Therefore, practical language tends to use clusters of sounds that are relatively easy to pronounce, and to dispose of the difficult ones through assimilation or dissimilation. The situation in poetic language is different. Here sequences of sounds have value per se and follow artistic laws rather than practical reason. Jakubinskij's case in point is the situation of liquid consonants in everyday Russian language and in poetry. Accumulation of liquids slows down the stream of speech; they are difficult to pronounce. Hence, the tendency of practical language is to eliminate them. This phenomenon is known to linguists as dissimilation of liquids. However, when practical reasons disappear, as it happens in the 'transrational' language of poetry, clusters of liquids appear frequently. Zukovskij, for instance, was fond of adjectives like serebrorunnyj, serebrjannyj, belogolovyj, which contain several liquids. Russian folk poetry preserved the verb falaleit' which otherwise disappeared from the language. Popular speech, on the other hand, dissimilated the identical liquids of Merkurij into Merkul. Some Formalists attempted to classify all sound repetitions according to the arbitrarily chosen criteria. In "Sound Repetitions" ("Zvukovye povtory"®) Brik tried to establish a pattern of repetitions that appears in all poetry, without specifically pointing at the relation of this pattern to semantics. Studying Puskin, Lermontov and other major Russian poets Brik discovered in their verse the existence of sound repetitions which extended beyond the limitations of rhyme and which were too complex to be called alliterations. The repetitive units, he observed, consisted of a single consonant or vowel or, quite frequently, of clusters of unstressed consonants 'framed' by different vowels and occurring regularly at the beginning and end of a line; at the end of one line and the beginning of the next; at the beginning of two neighboring lines; at the end of two neighboring lines. Brik presented this phenomenon in the form of schemata such as AB... AB...; ABA... ABA...; ABBA... ABBA...; CBA... CAB... etc. In his view, the importance of these repetitions for the musicality of the poem had long been overlooked. He proposed the following order of importance among all sound repetitions: (1) accented vowels, or assonances (2) stressed con5 Sborrtiki, 2 (1917), 15-23. • O. Brik, "Zvukovye povtory", Sborniki, 2 (1917), 24-62.

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sonants, or alliterations (3) unstressed consonants, or sound repetitions (4) unaccented vowels, or musical background. In "Rhythm and Syntax" ("Ritm i sintaksis"7) Brik used the same principle of investigation in relation to rhythm and syntax. He argued there that rhythm in poetry is frequently influenced by 'rhythmical and syntactical figures', i.e., by word combinations following the same grammatical pattern, which found permanent habitat in the verse of certain epochs. In poetry, the clash of the prosodic pattern and live sequence of words, of movement and semantics, produces a game of subtle variations in accentual texture. Some of these variations tend to become constants for a given poet or epoch. Thus appear rhythmic and syntactical units. In Russian Romantic poetry, for instance, the cluster: Pronoun plus Adjective plus Noun (ABC), all in the same case, was common: moi studenceskie gody. Variations of this pattern: lanity svezie tvoi (CBA), kipucej mladosti tvoej (BCA). Other patterns common in the same period were: Noun in Nominative plus Adjective in Genitive plus Noun in Genitive: krasa polunocnoj prirody, poryvy bujnye strastej; Preposition bez plus Noun: bez upoenij, bez zelanij; conjunction i plus an adverb, twice repeated: i nedovercivo i zadno, i celomudrenno i smelo. Such units account partly for the unity of style of a certain epoch. On the other hand, they contribute to the automatization of this style and its subsequent replacement by another style. Brik was not the first in Russia to do this type of study. In "Lirika i eksperiment" Andrej Belyj analyzed in a similar manner the rhythm of iambs of Lomonosov, Derzavin, Kapnist, Zukovskij, Puskin, Fet, Nekrasov, Blok - in fact, of all major and some minor Russian poets.8 He noted the repetitious omissions of accents in certain places in the line, in the poetry of a given poet, and coined names for various verse irregularities. He called them rhombus, roof, square, ladder, angle, and illustrated them by drawings and statistical tables (for instance, the 'square' appears when the first and last syllables in the line, among those that should have been accented, remain unaccented). On the basis of a great amount of facts Belyj made an interesting conclusion: that certain poets, or certain epochs, display an amazing regularity in the deviations from meter. The omission of accent in the first 'twosyllable foot' in a line is a characteristic of Romantic poets (e.g., Batjuskov), while the neoclassical poets (e.g., Lomonosov) omit the accent in the second two-syllable foot. Belyj called this phenomenon 7 8

O. Brik, "Ritm i sintaksis", Novyj Lef, nos. 3-6 (1927). Simvolizm, pp. 231-85.

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acceleration. Thus the Romantic poets tend to accelerate the beginning of the line, while the neoclassical ones, the middle of it. Another conclusion of his research was the statement which gained considerable notoriety among the Formalists: that the rhythm of the poem can be most accurately described not by metrical schemata but by deviations from them. Tomasevskij's "Pjatistopnyj jamb Puskina" follows the method of research of "Lirika i eksperiment" even more closely than Brik's study.9 Tomasevskij takes a close look at the changes in Puskin's iambic pentameter. He notes that its accentuation displays considerable deviations from prosodic pattern in various periods of Puskin's creativity. He tries to explicate why in certain years the 'irregularities' of accentuation tended to be constants. His reasoning runs along the following lines: Iambic pentameter came to Russia from France. In its original borrowed form it had caesura after the fourth syllable. In his early poetry Puskin followed the French pattern. In Boris Godunov (1826), the first pentameter lines without caesura appear. From 1830 on, caesura is persistently absent; after 1835, Puskin returns to it. Since Russian words vary in their accentuation, iambic structures favor 'iambic' words and avoid the trochaic and dactyllic ones. Tomasevskij remarks that, in a sense, in Russian every foot has its natural vocabulary, its limitations in the usage of words. Iambic structures which have caesura will tend to use an even more limited set of words. Thus when Puskin wanted more freedom in the choice of words - as it happened when he was writing the jocular "Domik ν Kolomne" - he removed caesura. His middle period is therefore the richest from the viewpoint of vocabulary. When he wanted to strengthen rhythm, he reintroduced caesura and limited the vocabulary. This variety notwithstanding, Tomasevskij proved statistically that accents in Puskin's verse in general come, on the average, every 2.8 syllables, which is also the average length of Puskin's words. He therefore concluded that to speak of feet in this verse, and in Russian poetry in general, is incorrect: accentuation clearly follows the number of words rather than of syllables in a line. Therefore, it is more logical to speak of verse lines. The Russian Formalist studies considered up to now have a scholarly bent; they deal with the elements of verse which can be investigated • B. Tomasevskij, "Pjatistopnyj jamb Puäkina", Ο Stixe. Stat'i. (Leningrad, 1929), pp. 138-253.

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logically and sometimes employ statistical methods to verify their points. They seldom, however, touch upon the meaning of the phenomena under discussion. In contrast to that, the New Critics tend to focus on the total meaning of the poem even when they speak of the sound stratum. Examples from The New Criticism and The World's Body will illustrate this point. In The New Criticism Ransom asserts that verse is a compromise between meaning, metre and euphony.10 This does not mean that sense is in any way reduced because of the necessity of fitting it into a metrical pattern. Verse contains not only 'Determinate Meaning' and 'Determinate Metre' but also 'Indeterminate Meaning' and 'Indeterminate Metre', and the last pair is more important than the first. 'Indeterminate Meaning' may be mere 'inaccuracy and confusion' which characterizes a bad poem; it may also open 'a new world of discourse', enrich the initial meaning, give it a new dimension. Ransom's analysis of the rhythmical properties of Milton's Lycidas applies this theorizing in practice.11 Ransom carries out the analysis of prosody as a support for his initial statement about Milton's struggle with material similar to that which the modern poet undertakes. Milton was aware that "metre is fundamental in the problem posed to the artist as poet". Without the discipline it imposes, the poet would have difficulties in achieving the artistic detachment and impersonality necessary to create a work of art. On the other hand, strict regularity in metre and rhyme sometimes brings monotony and thus may fail to keep the reader alerted toward other beauties of the poem. Milton, Ransom suggests, was aware of both sides of the problem and coped with them successfully. He proved himself a disciplined artist in that he maintained, with very few exceptions, perfect regularity in the length of lines. He also displayed his rebellion against the canons of the epoch by using unrhymed verse and adopting an irregular stanzaic pattern. Ransom suggests that the first draft of Lycidas was perfectly smooth, i.e., that its lines and its rhymes were perfectly regular. Then, as 'the gesture of rebellion against the formalism of his art', Milton changed certain rhymed lines into the unrhymed ones. This defiance is the defiance of the modern poet who, no matter how well trained in tradition he may be, wilfully seeks escape from the boundaries which he finds too narrow for himself. 10

The New Criticism, pp. 280 ff. J. C. Ransom, "A Poem Nearly Anonymous", The World's Body, 2nd ed. pp. 1-28. The application of the theory precedes here the theory itself, at least in print.

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Intonation is the aspect of the sound stratum of literature which the New Critics have disregarded and to which the Formalists, familiar with the plea of Sievers and Saran to develop Ohrenphilologie rather than Augenphilologie, devoted considerable attention. Foremost among the students of intonation was Ejxenbaum. In "The Illusion of Skaz" ("Illuzija skaza") and other essays, he maintained that many works of prose and poetry have to be read aloud to be fully understood and that a good deal of literature was written by authors conscious of the intonational potentialities of words.18 Using copious examples from Russian prose, he argued that the audial style is by no means on the decline: Leskov, Gogol' and Remizov are among its successful practitioners. Ejxenbaum calls this orientation toward spoken intonation, the skaz technique. Armed with the concept of skaz, in "How Gogol's Overcoat' Is Made" ("Kak sdelana 'Sinei" Gogolja") Ejxenbaum set out to restore the unity of Gogol's story disrupted by the commentary of most Russian critics who considered it inconsistent from the viewpoint of mood it evokes. In fact, there is no shift in the narrative focus of the story, argued Ejxenbaum. "The Overcoat" is not partially realistic and partially fantastic but uniformly grotesque. Irony underlies the whole narration: whatever seems to be serious or sentimental is, in fact, an understatement whose irony becomes evident only when the story is read aloud. The narrator is equally ironic at the beginning when he seems to pity Akakij Akakievic, and at the end when he shifts to grim fantasy. The correct interpretation of "The Overcoat" requires that it be read aloud, so that its intonational qualities can be brought forth. Thus, concludes Ejxenbaum, the meaning of the story is contained not only in its written text but also in its potential intonations. This study of Ejxenbaum is one of the most valued among those written by the Formalists. Having in view Ingarden's stratification described at the beginning of this chapter, as well as the epistemological views expressed in Ejxenbaum's early studies, one can better understand why: the essay manages to relate very closely two strata which are perhaps the most difficult to relate in a work longer than a sonnetlength poem: the sound layer and the layer of the 'metaphysical qualities'. It can be added here that the phenomenon of skaz was widely discussed by Russian critics of Formalist orientation. In "The Problems 12 "Illuzija skaza", "Kak sdelana 'Sinei" Gogolja", "Nekrasov", "O zvukax ν Stixe", Skvoz' literaturu (Leningrad, 1924).

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of Skaz in Stylistics" Vinogradov took issue with Ejxenbaum's notion of the term.13 He contended that to see skaz as a presentation of 'live' monologue is inaccurate. There are forms of monologue that are not skaz (e.g., the monologue in Turgenev's story "The Jew") and forms of skaz which are not monologues. For Vinogradov, skaz involves the narrator proper, the person whose words the narrator records, and the listener. This kind of monologue entails a particularly careful selection of words and syntactical structures on the part of the narrator: he has to imitate someone else and yet remain himself. Skaz thus conveys not only the story proper but the characteristics of the 'narrator behind the narrator' and the slant the latter gives to the story. Vinogradov concluded that the 'collision' of various levels of meaning constitutes the main characteristic of the skaz type of narrative monologue. Baxtin, a continuator of the Formalist research on the types of narration in prose, connected the phenomenon of skaz with the 'artistic and linguistic phenomena' of stylization, parody and dialogue. Following Vinogradov, he maintained that skaz is not some kind of orientation toward oral expression which escapes a more exact definition. It is a form of stylization, or a form of parody. Like all forms of stylization and parody it is 'an orientation toward the speech of someone other than the author'.14 An emphasis is put on the slant given by this someone to the story, contends Baxtin. A piece of narration is stylized whenever the person whose mind serves as the filter to the story is a clearly distinguishable personality. He gives the story an interpretation of his own. He need not be a participant; indeed, he has more narrative possibilities if he is not. The way he tells us about the events delineates him for us. Therefore, one cannot speak of the skaz technique in an omniscient novel or story: such narratives are oriented toward the story to the exclusion of the distinguishable personality of the narrator. Since the problems and events in a stylized narrative are not seen directly but through the mind of some distinct personality, a 'hidden dialogue' quality is achieved there; the reader gets the story itself and also the characteristics of the person whose mind serves as a filter to the story. To give it the form of a paradox: the story describes both the narrator and itself. In Baxtin's opinion, this 'hidden dialogue' frequently appears in the prose of Dostoevski]'. The argument of Baxtin goes far beyond the sound stratum of the literary work; it also contains a novel way of looking at the point of view in fiction. In that it parallels the concern 13 14

V. Vinogradov, "Problema skaza ν stilistike", Poetika, 1 (1926), 24-40. M. Baxtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1963), p. 247.

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with the consistency of the point of view exhibited in the writings of such precursors of New Criticism as Henry James. What James wanted to achieve was to filter the story through the mind of a single narrator, and thus to enable the reader to watch not only the story but also the workings of the narrator's mind. Unlike Baxtin, James maintained that the first-person narrative must necessarily deprive the story of one of the prisms through which it passes before it reaches the reader, and thus simplify as well as distort it. "The double privilege of subject and object", said the author of The Ambassadors, is a mode of action which has "the merit of brushing away questions at a sweep".15 James's discussion of the problem was contained in the Prefaces which preceded the novels published in the New York complete edition of his works (1907-17). The Prefaces were edited and republished in a separate volume in 1934 by Richard Blackmur. They proved to be one of the most interesting books of criticism written in this century and inspired a great deal of commentary in and outside the New Critical movement. The concerns of James reappeared, for instance, in Brooks's and Warren's Understanding Fiction, in the form of the sensitivity toward the point of view in narrative prose, and the sympathy toward those authors who keep it consistent throughout the story.16 A review of the studies concentrating on the sound stratum of the literary works proves, then, that such studies may sometimes lead to the insights which embrace more than the initial area of concern (e.g., the skaz problem) and which synthesize several strata of the literary work (Zirmunskij, Ejxenbaum, Ransom). On the other hand, even when these analyses do not explicitly integrate Ingarden's 'layers' into a mutually dependent unity of elements, they provide unquestionable information about the literary work, and thus have potential usefulness for a future synthetic approach. The studies of Zirmunskij, Brik, Ejxenbaum, Vinogradov, Baxtin, Jakubinskij and Tomasevskij further indicate that 'euphonic' criticism occupied a position of importance in the Russian Formalist school. In some cases, the Formalist achievement in this area is of a pioneer quality. The same cannot be said about the New Critics. With few exceptions, they occupied themselves only marginally with this type of criticism, even though theoretically they have acknowledged its importance. In view of the two dominating tendencies outlined in the previous 15

H . James, The Art of the Novel (New York, 1937), p. 321. C. Brooks and R. P. Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York, 1959), pp. 659-64. le

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chapter, the reasons for this divergence of interests are clear. It is less convenient to proceed with the discussion of the symbolic function of the literary work if one starts with the very base of verbal facts: their auditory qualities. It appears from the explications de textes done by the New Critics that they would without much regret relegate the investigation of the sounds to linguists. In the Formalists' unflinching interest in the basic facts of language one sees their desire to conduct literary study in an orderly and scientific way, starting with the least complex characteristics of the literary work. The Russian Formalists practised also the method of explication that came to be called the 'structural' method of literary analysis. It was postulated by Tynjanov in his theoretical works and, later, upheld and developed by some members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. At present, it is practised by such excellent structuralists as Tzvetan Todorov.17 The essence of structuralism lies in the examination of the architectonics of PROPERTIES of the imaginary objects evoked in the literary work; it therefore relates to Ingarden's 'schematized appearances' or the fourth layer of the poem. The Formalists started looking at the compositional units first in regard to individual works, having in view the explication of the meaning of these works (Sklovskij, Ejxenbaum). It was somewhat later that the structural viewpoint was used in relation to the whole genres in an interpretation-free description of these genres (Propp). The following examples will include the works of Sklovskij, Ejxenbaum, Skaftymov, and Propp. In "How Don Quixote Is Made" ("Kak sdelan Don Kixot") Sklovskij maintains that Don Quixote was originally conceived as a foolish character: "Sun would have melted the hidalgo's brains had he had them", quotes Sklovskij from the beginning of the novel.18 Gradually, Cervantes began to use his comic cavalier as the vehicle for witty and profound monologues which he wanted to accommodate in the novel. Accordingly, Don Quixote's wisdom (displayed in his speeches) and his foolishness (displayed in his actions) began to alternate: he became a double. To add to the ambiguity, the problem of delusion was brought in: at the beginning, Quixote himself is 'in delusion', i.e., he is foolish. Then, the author makes other characters cheat Don Quixote so that it becomes disputable whether the hidalgo is merely foolish or a victim of the mockery of others. In like manner, Sancho Panza gradually begins 17 18

See Chapter Two fn. 98. Ο teorii prozy, p. 70.

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to serve as the 'motivation' for the introduction of another kind of wisdom: his monologues are full of the 'stringing together' of popular proverbs. It is through him that we learn a number of folk sayings of the period. Thus, Sklovskij comes to the conclusions about the changes in Don Quixote's personality through the examination of the properties of Don Quixote's speeches and actions, and their arrangement in time. At the end, Sklovskij asserts that Don Quixote as a character should not be regarded as the result of the author's initial intention to create this particular type of man. He emerged in the process of the construction of the novel, out of the 'stringing together' of innumerable strategies that constitute it. The architectonics of the novel determined the characters that appear in it. Thus Sklovskij in his essay tried to discover the meaning of the novel by demonstrating how various elements of it were 'strung together'. He failed: the meaning which he proposed is an accidental cluster of properties of the chief characters, plus a sampling of the 'bookish' and 'folk' wisdom. Clearly, the investigation of the novel's composition did not lead, in this case, to a total interpretation. One may add that, judging by the available documentation, it seldom leads to it directly. This limitation notwithstanding, it provides a solid basis against which the critic's further meditations may lean. Unlike Propp, who did not try to interpret at all, and unlike Skaftymov and Ejxenbaum, who struck a happy medium between structural description and its possible conclusions, Sklovskij set out to do more than a structural analysis might do. Ejxenbaum's study of Schiller's Wallenstein (a part of his discussion of Romantic tragedy) is a pre-structuralist work which attempts to join an insight into the architectonics of the play with interpretation. Ejxenbaum asserts that the play presents the conflict between nature and the will of man. Dealing with this type of conflict it is hard to avoid lyricism; yet Schiller avoids it quite successfully. Ejxenbaum quotes from Schiller's On the Art of Tragedy: "The most perfect tragedy is one which evokes pity as much by means of its content as by means of successful application of the form of tragedy." 1 · Thus Schiller's Wallenstein is in verse, and its principal hero, though deriving from the material provided by the life of the real Wallenstein, is not meant to be a portrayal of a real person but a mask - paralleling the ancient tragedy which did not strive to portray real people but used masks. Such masks "

"O tragedii i tragiieskom", Skvoz'

literaturu, p. 76.

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are less likely to evoke pity directed toward them personally; rather, they evoke attitudes toward the whole class of happenings of a certain kind. Schiller wants to effect this not by means of showing the tragedy of a person called Wallenstein but by a skillful use of the compositional principles of tragedy. He knows that these principles require that every happening presented be provided with a 'motivation' and that, in order to unfold any plot, the strategy of zamedlenie (retardation, slowingdown) must be used. He therefore employs the psychology of the hero to impede the flow of action. Like Hamlet, Wallenstein is a procrastinator: this feature of his 'motivates' the slowdowns in action. Ejxenbaum says: "We think naively that the artist writes in order to 'depict' a bit of psychology or a character.... In fact, the artist depicts no such thing, because his occupation is not with the problems of psychology. We, too, do not go to see Hamlet in order to learn psychology - it is only dull books and essays that taught us to speak in these terms." "Indeed", declares Ejxenbaum, "the stream of action in the tragedy slows down not because Schiller wanted to analyse the psychology of a procrastinator. The opposite is true: Wallenstein procrastinates because the compositional principles of tragedy require a slowing-down of the stream of action."20 Ejxenbaum points out the distribution of the units of action in the play and shows how these units are possessed of the properties of being 'slow' or 'fast'. It is the pattern of these properties that Schiller wanted to depict, not a lyrical individual and his psychology. Thus, Schiller was basically an eighteenth-century man: he did not want to present a tragedy of an individual but skillfully to construct an art work according to the rules that govern it.21 In The Poetics and Genesis of Bylina (Poetika i genezis bylin22) Skaftymov discusses the architectonics of the bylina, the Russian counterpart of the folk ballad. He asserts that bylina's structure stems from the effort to create and maintain suspense. Thus, the exposition adopts the point of view of a minor character; it undervalues the hero, who is declared too young, inexperienced or stupid, and overrates the enemy. The hero is subsequently warned about the danger by his mother, friends, or the narrator himself. The ensuing fight proves to be » Ibid., pp.78, 81. " According to our stratification, then, Ejxenbaum states that the play aims at the 'metaphysical quality' of 'conflict between nature and the will of man'. He shows that the arrangement of the attributes of the 'objects presented' supports this initial thesis of his - that it is not the emotional states of the individual that Schiller wanted to display, but something surpassing them considerably in scope. " (Saratov, 1924).

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surprisingly easy for the hero: he wins without the slightest trouble. After the description of the fight bylina ends rather abruptly, without wasting time on ornamental conclusions: the suspense is over, so there is not reason to continue. As he proceeds, Skaftymov proposes a solution to the problem that long occupied the investigators of bylina: why Prince Vladimir (a Ruthenian prince beloved by folk tales) occupies so modest a place in this genre. Vladimir emerges out of bylinas as a passive and greedy person and sometimes even a coward. Some researchers considered this feature of bylina an influence of Asian folk tales where the ruler was frequently presented in a negative light. Skaftymov points out that the non-sympathetic treatment given to Vladimir is a matter of composition. The bylina centers around one character, a bogatyr': it is easier to maintain suspense that way. If the character of the Prince were given attention equal to that bestowed upon the hero, and his bravery and nobility matched that of the hero, the compositional balance of the poem would suffer and the effect produced by it would be less striking. Propp's The Morphology of the Fairy Tale (Morfologija skazki2S) represents best the meaning of the structural study. Propp points out that traditional scholarship divided folk tales into fairy tales, tales of everyday life and animal tales. Thus, the principle of division was the kind of characters the tale used. However, this pattern of division was confusing: fairy tales, for instance, are frequently full of animals. Classifications according to the plot were unsuccessful, too: 'plot' is an ambiguous word to begin with. When one starts splitting the plot into motifs (the narrative units impossible to divide further, in the terminology of Veselovskij), one is faced with the choice of treating descriptions of qualities, actions, or objects, as motifs. Propp proposed a different principle of investigation. He wanted to start with the function of a hero, a situation, a plot - not with the hero, situation, plot as such. He observed that various dramatis personae fulfill the same function in different tales. E.g., in order that he may be able to travel, the hero may be given an eagle, a horse, a boat, or a wonderful ring. The function of a deity may be played by the deity himself, an angel, a saint. The function of the frightful obstacle may be performed by a witch, a bear, a wood goblin. Propp enumerated the functions which, in his opinion, are essential to the fairy tale, then proceeded to show how these functions can be 23

Morfologija skazki (Leningrad, 1928); V. Propp, Morphology trans. L. Scott (Bloomington, Ind., 1958).

of the

Folktale,

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arranged in individual tales, and reached the conclusion that the same structure can be observed in all fairy tales. Among the functions he mentioned (before describing them he gave their definitions in one word) there are absence, interdiction, reconnaissance, delivery, villainy. These examples indicate that Propp's functions are QUALITIES which a dramatis persona, a situation, an object must possess in order to make the story a fairy tale. Propp is thus more explicitly concerned with the structure of Ingarden's 'schematized appearances' than any other Formalist. The Russian Formalist school, then, can be credited with giving the first impulse to the type of study described above. As to the New Critics, this kind of objective research almost entirely deprived of interpretation was conspicuously absent in their works. Textual explications investigating the second and third, and occasionally the fifth, of Ingarden's layers constitute the essence of the practical studies of the New Critics and occupy a position of some importance among Formalist works. It is characteristic that in the Russian Formalist school such analyses were performed by those who had some ties with the idealistic background of Formalism outlined in the preceding chapter. The explications of poetry done by these critics, as well as by Tate, Ransom and Brooks in the New Critical movement, will serve as examples. Zirmunskij's analysis is declared to be an illustration of the theory he expounded in "The Objectives of Poetics" ("Zadaci poetiki"). He stated there that General, or theoretical, poetics should be preoccupied with the devices of poetry, their comparative study and classification. Theoretical poetics should construct, on historical grounds, a system of scientific terminology needed by the historian of literature for the solution of individual problems. Since the material of poetry is words, the basis of systematic poetic theory should be the classification of the language facts with which linguistics can provide us. All of these facts, subject to artistic aims, become artistic strategies.24 Among the 'language facts' Zirmunskij lists sounds, syllables and their accentuation, verbal instrumentation or the arrangement of sounds from the viewpoint of their euphonic qualities, intonation, unusual grammatical usages ('the whiteness of arms' instead of 'white arms'), syntax, semantic qualities of words (thematology, the use of tropes, semantic repetitions, contrasts, parallelisms) and, finally, the arrange14

V. Zirmunskij, Voprosy

teorii literatury,

pp. 7-8.

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ment of semantic sequences (problems of composition, literary genres). Naturally, there was no poetics (nor is there any in view now, one might add) which would neatly and unambiguously classify and describe the above list of 'language facts'. Unabashed by the situation, Zirmunskij in the latter part of the essay sets out to explain several poems and a piece of prose, using his critical intelligence instead of the resources of some perfect poetics. One of the poems he analysed was Puskin's Ola beregov otcizny dal'noj / Ty pokidala kraj cuzoj ... (For the shores of your distant home / You left the alien country . . .). 2irmunskij scrutinizes the poem's prosody and contends that its syntactical units run parallel to the units of rhythm. Ends of lines bring termination of phrases; ends of stanzas coincide with the ends of sentences. Thus the poem uses rhythmical and syntactical parallelisms. As for the figure of speech most commonly appearing in it, it is metonymy. After these preliminary remarks 2irmunskij proceeds to a line-by-line analysis. The opening phrase contains a contrast between the associations of the word otcizna (homeland) and dal'njaja (distant); the first suggests closeness, the second, remoteness. The phrase stands in contrast to the phrase kraj cuzoj (alien country) which juxtaposes kraj and cuzoj (country and alien, kraj in Russian having more and warmer connotations than the English country), i.e., it is a kind of inversion of the preceding phrase. The third line: V das nezabvennyj, ν das peöal'nyj (In the unforgettable time, in the sorrowful time) consists of a repetition which would not appear in the everyday economical language. Prosodic stress does not fall on cas but the logical stress does; this occurrence breaks rhythmical monotony. The type of repetition which the above phrase contains is common in the poem and adds to its languid quality. Zirmunskij proceeds in this manner to the end of the poem. He concludes with the observation that the poem lacks 'personal tone' even though it represents 'a concrete situation of parting and death of the beloved'. By using words which in their combinations cancel out the personal tone, the poet succeeds in presenting only the general, typical aspect of experience; he holds his emotions in check. The poem's impersonality is strengthened also by the fact that no names of heroes, or countries from which they come, are given. "The poet replaces the exact words by metonymic periphrases", which was a customary thing to do in neoclassical poetry. In another essay Zirmunskij deals with two twentieth-century poets: Anna Axmatova and Aleksandr Blok.25 They were contemporary with 25

"Dva napravlenija sovremennoj liriki", Voprosy

teorii literatury,

pp. 182-89.

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each other but represented entirely different approaches to poetic material. Russian lyric poetry of the last few decades followed the Symbolist tradition, maintains Zirmunskij in the opening section of his essay. Recently, however, there appeared a new generation of poets, one that 'disavowed Romantic indefiniteness' and replaced it by Classic precision. Poets who belong here are known as Acmeists. They have a great deal in common with French Parnassianism. Thus, Blok and Axmatova stand to each other in an opposition resembling that between Verlaine and Gautier in France. To substantiate this statement 2irmunskij comments upon Blok's "In a Restaurant" and Axmatova's "In the Evening". The paraphrasable arguments of both poems are very much alike. The respective speakers describe an amorous rendezvous in a cafe. Music and a suburban park are the main components of the scenery. However, here the similarity ends. Blok presents a 'mystical event' full of 'transcendent qualities', whereas Axmatova speaks of a 'simple, ordinary life encounter' which lays no claims to universality even though it is subjectively significant. These two different effects, states 2irmunskij, are achieved by means of different poetic strategies. The opening phrase of "In a Restaurant" is as follows: "I will never forget (has it ever happened, / This evening) . . T h i s phrase determines the tone of the whole poem. It puts the emphasis on the uniqueness and the extraordinary quality of the love encounter. It also creates ambiguity: the poet doubts whether the event took place at all. Contrary to that, Axmatova's meeting is firmly set in reality: "The smell of oysters served on ice was fresh and piercing." Following the initial statement, Blok introduces into his poem the symbol of dawn 'animated' by metaphorically used verbs. Dawn appears several times in the poem and creates its frame effect. The frame effect appears also in Axmatova, but here it is achieved through purely sensuous means: "Sorrowful sound of a fiddle following in the footsteps of a ribbon of smoke". A fiddle appears also in Blok: here, it is accompanied by the words 'somewhere' and 'something' and thus is associated with the unknown and the indefinite. In Axmatova we have straightforward exactness instead: "Music was heard in the park", and it was just the music of the fiddler, nothing else. The situation is clear, symbolic overtones are lacking. The presentation of lovers in both poems is different, too: Blok's "Unknown Lady" appears in a mist of images and metaphors which make her into an unreal creature; one can sense 'the anxiously whispering silk of her dress' and her 'breathing perfume', but one can hardly

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come into contact with her as an ordinary human being. To describe her lover, Axmatova uses colloquial words in their everyday sequences: he is just a 'faithful friend'. The touch of his hands is ordinary, too: "This is how one touches chicken or birds." These two poems, concludes Zirmunskij, are characteristic of the recent developments in Russian poetry. The Romantic tradition which found its apogee in the Symbolist poetry of Blok, is now on its wane. The new generation of poets favors the Classical tradition with its tendency to overt statements and images unburdened with manifold symbolic meanings. In Ingarden's terms, the study of Zirmunskij explicates the semantics of words and phrases, describes the 'objects presented' and emotions associated with them. Zirmunskij, however, makes no distinction between the states of mind the poem evokes, and the objects it describes; this feature is visible in the first of his analyses in particular. Insofar as he is an 'affective' critic (although his critical talent and sensitivity keep him away from a crude version of the affective fallacy), Zirmunskij passes over in silence the stratum of the 'metaphysical qualities' which the first of the poems he analysed might possess. Ejxenbaum looks at the poetry of Nekrasov in a seemingly identical way. The starting point of his "Nekrasov" is the status quo of Russian poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century.28 The contemporary situation called for radical changes in literary techniques: the poetic language of Romanticism was well on its way toward becoming a collection of cliches. "It was necessary to look for new strategies and new methods both in the realm of verse and of genre, to create new poetic language and new poetic forms. Art lives through readers' perception, and Thebaldos and Veronicas had already ceased to affect." 87 Ejxenbaum contends that Nekrasov satirized Romantic verse forms and metaphors. Line by line, he compares Nekrasov's "A Woman of Our Time" with Puskin's descriptions of Tatjana in Eugene Onegin: his conclusion is that Nekrasov consciously ridiculed Puskin's metaphors and symbols, as well as the inner qualities of his heroine. The same is true in regard to the rhythmic, syntactic and semantic forms of Zukovskij and Lermontov: the parodic quality of Nekrasov's verse becomes evident when we compare some of his poems with the poems of these two prominent Russian Romantics. As far as Romantic imagery is concerned, Nekrasov 'defamiliarized' it by twisting its conventional M

"

B. Ejxenbaum, Skvoz' literaturu, pp. 233-79. Ibid., p. 239.

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meaning. His presentation of St. Petersburg, for instance, lacks the traditional references to the city's glorious past and to the splendor of the court life. Instead, the poet speaks of 'the grim shelters of misery' and 'the sick days' of its obscure inhabitants. Nekrasov also replaced the lyric speaker by a down-to-earth epic narrator who either dispassionately reports about events or comments upon them in a sarcastic manner, using colloquial vocabulary and sometimes even resorting to slang. All this makes Nekrasov's poetry seem 'ugly'. This ugliness, however, is not a result of the poet's inability to manipulate the conventionally pretty imagery and language. It stems from his desire to discard the worn-out literary strategies and, with the use of new ones, to provide new possibilities of perception for the reader. Ejxenbaum concludes that, contrary to popular opinion, Nekrasov is not immune to the Formalist method. He is not just discoursing on social issues. His apparent simplicity of form and his social slant are not of the type that can be met in scientific treatises. They are the means to defamiliarize poetic form and, in so doing, 'to create a new apprehension' of the seemingly familiar world. This 'new apprehension' of which Ejxenbaum speaks makes a difference between his and Zirmunskij's analyses: the latter explicated the literary text but ultimately saw the poems in terms of the impressions and emotions of the reader, the writer or the speaker. He did not make a distinction between what is comprehended through the poem and who comprehends it. Ejxenbaum, who shortly before he wrote 'Nekrasov' asserted in another essay that literature gives us a specific form of knowledge of reality - here, too, distinguishes between the object apprehended and the mind apprehending. He states that the knowledge the poem conveys does not concern the state of mind in the reader but the objects independent of this state of mind. In doing so, Ejxenbaum displays greater critical depth than Zirmunskij. An interesting attempt to explicate the peculiar features of Rozanov's The Fallen Leaves (Opavsye list'ja) is Sklovskij's Rozanov Ρ What the author tries to do there is to point out how Rozanov achieves 'the new apprehension' of the seemingly familiar world. Sklovskij avoids, however, the word 'symbol' and its derivatives, and therefore makes his task much more difficult than it could have been had he adopted the well-established terminology. He observes that Rozanov mixes in his work short meditations on profound themes with notes of similar length ίβ

V. Sklovskij, Rozanov (Petrograd, 1921).

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concerning the pettiest trivialities of life. Rozanov writes of friendship, in relation to his wife; of politics; of the universe; of literary craftsmanship; of insignificant everyday occurrences; of positivism; of the Jews; he also includes some letters. Had he introduced links between all these topics, contends Sklovskij, he would have written a novel. He took great care, however, to do the opposite: he left all these fragments 'unmotivated', compressed together seemingly without any guidelines. What he thus achieved was a defamiliarization effect stronger perhaps than a novel might have achieved (especially after Dostoevskij, one might add). He put all that he wrote about, the banal and trivial as well as the profound, into a new perspective. The value of this perspective, apart from providing a remarkable plasticity of each individual topic, consists in evoking a moment of reflection upon the closeness of the sublime and the vulgar. To use the vocabulary which Sklovskij avoided: Rozanov succeeded in creating a symbol of certain qualities of human life which cannot be described with equal plasticity by anything short of that symbol. Sklovskij's explication, then, even though it stays within the limitations of the semantic analysis of Ingarden's second and third strata, has implications surpassing these strata. It points at the uniquely cognitive value of Rozanov's work, and thus reaches toward the fifth layer of the literary work. Like the Formalists, the New Critics start their studies with a close look at words and phrases of the literary text. In the analysis of his own poem, "Ode to the Conferderate Dead" (his only attempt at literary self-analysis), Allen Tate says that the poem is concerned with a certain form of solipsism, or narcissism.2® The Confederate dead and narcissism are 'yoked together' in the Ode (Tate uses the same oxymoronic effect here as did Rozanov in his Fallen Leaves). This yoke is brought about by making a passer-by, a man of the contemporary world, stop by a Confederate graveyard. The indirectly presented meditation of this man follows. The imagery revolves about two major symbols: the crab and the jaguar, both of which suggest a certain manner of life. The blind crab is a creature that has mobility; it is a blind mobility, however. He suggests the contemporary intellectual man, cut off from the world of 'active faith', immersed in his own 'fragmentary cosmos'. The jaguar, whose image ends the meditation, 'leaps for his image in the jungle pool' and is an even more explicit narcissistic symbol. An actualization of another aspect of the conflict is offered in the image of the serpent, the traditional symbol of the all-devouring time. Sym26

A. Tate, Collected

Essays, pp. 248-64.

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bols of Becoming, of life, are lacking: the realm of the crab, the sea, generates only 'the lowest forms of life-halfway between life and death'. Becoming - life - are, like heroism, beyond the reach of the speaker. The problem is left unsolved: the poem is not a philosophical proposition but an actualization of a conflict. The rhythm and vocabulary of the poem, says Tate, received much of the poet's conscious attention. The rhythm, based on iambic pentameter, is a succession of 'modulations' from 'formal regularity for the heroic emotion' to 'broken rhythm for the failure of that emotion'. Unfinished lines are introduced to indicate the shift from one emotional situation to another. More subtle shifts, such as those of customary caesura, fulfill the same role. To reinforce an image, a rhyme is unexpectedly repeated for the third time; to strengthen the feeling of 'bewilderment and incompleteness' of the man at the gate, echo-rhymes (i.e., rhymes separated by as many as seven lines) are introduced. Tate's analysis, then, touches upon the three basic strata of the literary work, but as a whole it is oriented toward the experience which the poem conveys in a symbolic manner rather than toward the analysis of poetic strategies. As mentioned before, this orientation is a characteristic of all textual explications done by the New Critics. While Russian Formalism did occasionally produce the explications similar to those discussed above,30 its main thrust was toward pure description, not toward description and interpretation.31 Thus Tate's explication belongs to the most typical products of New Criticism. Ransom's essay "The Poet as Woman"32 was prompted by a book on Edna St. Vincent Millay, enthusiastic over the nobility and beauty of Millay's poetry. Ransom points out that Miss Millay's verse is so truly an expression of her femininity (read: emotionalism) that it had abandoned almost entirely the intellectual concerns. Therefore, her 'triumphs in the treble' are of little relevance in our intellectual age. Poem after poem Miss Millay attempts to evoke pretty and melancholy feelings in the reader; she does not aim at, nor achieve, anything else. If we refuse to be passively led by the emotionalism of her phrases and try to see what actually she is saying, we discover that we are led by means of adjectives such as 'lovely' or 'delightful' or 'sorrowful' or 'sweet', which attach meanings to situations from without, so to speak. We are seldom struck by the poetic situation being meaningful from se 51 32

Cf. Sklovskij on Rozanov and Ejxenbaum on Nekrasov. Cf. the variety of analyses of the sound stratum at the beginning of this chapter. J. C. Ransom, The World's Body, pp. 76-110.

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within and thus not in need of qualifying adjectives. Ransom points at a number of such adjectives which, to him, sound flat and pretentious. In the poem "Heart, have no pity on this house of bone" Miss Millay makes the hero of the poem be 'blind to moonlight' and 'deaf to gravel'; we encounter further the pair of the 'delightful youth' and 'molestful age', and then, another pair: the 'vulgar Latin' and the 'sound advice'. These instances of the lack of the objective correlative happen in Miss Millay's poetry too often to make this poetry something more than an emotional outcry. This type of verse sounds false to a mature ear, especially in that it sometimes shows its stitches in the form of words used apparently only for the sake of rhyme or rhythm. Ransom's example comes from "The Return" in which the last line referring to the cruel yet innocent Mother Earth runs as follows: "Comfort that does not understand". On the basis of the context Ransom remarks that it would have been much better for this otherwise good poem if instead of the word 'comfort', 'comforter' had been used. However, the rhythm required a trochaic word and apparently decided about the choice of this particular one: an example of Miss Millay's intellectual inconsistencies. Ransom does acknowledge that some of her poems work through images rather than through qualifying adjectives: "The Return", on the whole, does this. Here the personified Earth is presented as a busy mother of innumerable men and animals. She is too busy to take care of all of them and to understand why so many of them have failed. This bold metaphor of Earth being the uncomprehending comforter and giving shelter to 'the wounded lynx' and 'the wounded man' is an instance of poetic naming which goes beyond the dictionary meanings and associations of words and creates a new vision of the problems involved. Pointing out these qualities of "The Return" Ransom went beyond the semantic analysis which he performed in regard to the less successful poems of Miss Millay, toward the layer of Ingarden's 'metaphysical qualities'. Foremost among the textual explicators associated with New Criticism is Cleanth Brooks. Through semantic analysis in which the consideration of word associations plays a big role, Brooks shows "the pattern of tensions in the work and the way in which they are resolved, or the failure to resolve them".3* Two essays taken from The Well Wrought Urn are examples. " C. Brooks, "Foreword", Critiques and Essays in Criticism, (New York, 1949), p. xx.

ed. R. W. Stallman,

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The first deals with Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". 34 The quality of the poem, maintains Brooks, is achieved through the original use of the conventional. Images and emotions expressed in the Elegy are anything but new: Gray uses personifications, age-old metaphors and rustic setting, all of which belonged to the conventional poetic workshop of the eighteenth century. The configuration of these elements, however, is worth close study. Gray achieves dramatic tension by juxtaposing the humble churchyard and the 'animated busts' in the church. Personifications, such as Ambition, Pride, Grandeur, introduced in connection with the church tombstones, carry ironic implications. They are contrasted with the unspectacular 'joys of the poor' and this comparison renders them futile and meaningless: the reader sees clearly that pride and poverty come to the same end. The conflict between the graveyard and the church also carries within itself an element of integrity: the poor, too, have their memorials, rhymes, and sculpture, even though they are 'frail', 'uncouth' and 'shapeless'. Ά basic human impulse' to save as much as possible from oblivion, manifests itself both in the graveyard and in the church. The conflict is intensified when the problem of choice of the way of life appears in the poem. "The Proud, who chose, but chose in vanity" are contrasted with the poor who "could not choose". The tension is brought to a solution by the speaker, who 'is able to choose', and chooses the 'neglected spot' after all. His gesture, however, is not heroic: he is human enough to ask for 'some kindred spirit' who 'shall inquire his fate' some time in the future. Thus, concludes Brooks, the Elegy is by no means a straightforward sequence of statements as many commentators wanted it to be. "It is a 'storied urn' after all, and many of us will conclude that like Donne's, it is a 'well wrought urne\ superior to the half-acre tombs of the Proud." 35 Brooks's interpretation of the "Ode on the Grecian Urn" by Keats is oriented toward finding the poetic justification for the apparently incongruous statement 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' placed at the end of the poem. The Ode, Brooks maintains, "is intended to be a parable on the nature of poetry, and of art in general".3« It progresses through a series of paradoxes which culminate in the final paradox about beauty and truth. The poem opens with a mildly paradoxical statement that the urn is silent and yet a historian (who presumably speaks); also, the " C. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, pp. 105-23. μ Ibid., p. 123. »· "Keats's Sylvan Historian", ibid., p. 153.

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silence of the urn is contrasted with the violent action presented in the carvings that adorn it. The expression 'Sylvan historian' is paradoxical: one expects historians to be matter-of-fact rather than 'Sylvan'. The series is continued in Stanzas Two and Three where "Action goes on though actors are motionless". What Kenneth Burke in his interpretation of the Ode described as "the state just prior to fulfillment",37 Brooks sees as the state of continuous paradox: the fulfillment is there, and yet it is suspended by the stillness of the urn and the impossibility of consummation on the earthly level. In Stanza Four, there occurs a shift in the speaker's concerns. He moves from the personal and the earthly to the spiritual. This stanza "emphasizes not individual aspiration but communal life". The paradoxical quality of the narration is preserved. The little town whose inhabitants left it empty by coming to the sacrificial altar, is presented as one that would puzzle a chance visitor: "not a soul to tell / Why art thou desolate". Still, we know that this situation cannot happen, for the town has only an imaginary existence, and its townsfolk are only carvings on the urn. Paradoxes usually contain a certain measure of irony. In this case, irony arises as a kind of flux between the two poles: that of the lively action portrayed in the carvings, and that of the stillness and silence of the vase itself. Irony is also implicit in the expression 'Cold Pastoral': we usually think of pastorals in terms diametrically opposed to 'cold'. Thus, Brooks asserts, the last statement of the poem appears to be a culmination of the long line of paradoxes with their implicit irony and ambiguity. It also accords with the quality of beauty which the urn represents. In Brooks's terms, this beauty arises through 'imaginative perception of the essentials' and not through empirically or logically provable perfection of the carvings on the vase itself. Similarly, the truth which the poet likens to beauty is not the empirical or logical truth of the exact sciences but the intuitive knowledge of what perfection means. As it was the case with other New Critical analyses, those of Brooks terminate with hinting at the unique type of knowledge which literature conveys. This knowledge may be related to a certain historical event (Tate), to a general human situation (Ransom, Brooks), to the 'perception of the essentials' (Brooks). It matters little, however, in what way we shall define this knowledge in the language of concepts: ultimately, 57

K. Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats", The Grammar of Motives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1945), pp. 449-50.

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it is unparaphrasable. The New Critical explications, though they usually start with the second and third of Ingarden's strata, reach (if the quality of the work under discussion allows) to the most elusive entities which literature conveys and which Kant called the aesthetic ideas and Ingarden, metaphysical qualities. Revaluations of national literary histories have been performed by both the New Critics and the Russian Formalists. These revaluations are grounded in the consideration of all of Ingarden's strata, with particular attention paid to the first three. The fact that the critics of both groups undertook such fundamental tasks as this one testifies to the serious differences which, in their opinion, separated them and the critics of the preceding generation. The Russian Formalists and the New Critics agree that literary works form an order among themselves and that the principles of this order are to be found in literature itself, not in the areas flanking it. Two quotations, from T. S. Eliot and Viktor Sklovskij, will illustrate this point. In "Tradition and Individual Talent" Eliot wrote: The necessity that he [the poet] shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which precede it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.38

And Sklovskij in "Literature Outside the Plot", in the same year: I add, as a general rule: a work of art is perceived on the background of, and through the association with, other works of art. A specific artistic form is defined by its relation to the artistic form from which is proceeds. . . . . a work of art is created as a parallel, and at the same time an opposition, to some kind of pattern.®»

The reasons for stressing the autonomy of literature are clear when one remembers the epistemological views behind such arguments: if literature provides unique knowledge, as most of the New Critics and some of the Formalists maintained; or if it amounts to a unique way of communicating emotions, as Richards argued and as Tynjanov ac»8 "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Selected Essays, pp. 4-5. '· V. Sklovskij, Ο teorii prozy, p. 26. See also Sklovskij, Xod konja (MoscowBerlin, 1923), p. 122.

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knowledged passim; or if it is 'pure expression' as Jakobson said - its ways of expression are sui generis and the references to the world outside literature cannot fully explicate them. Therefore, the critics of both groups looked at the relationships of poems rather than of personalities, qualities of poems rather than their reception or genesis. In "Literature Outside the Plot" and in other essays40 Sklovskij sketched out the principles of the Formalist reexamination of literary history. He contended that in each literary epoch labelled by historians as Classicism, Romanticism, etc., several stylistic tendencies exist simultaneously. The most popular one is considered THE style of the epoch. Others form the undercurrent. In the early part of the nineteenth century, for instance, such a relationship existed between the poetry of Puskin, who represented the 'canonized style', and that of Kiichelbecker, who belonged to a minor one. In the course of time, one of the minor styles takes over; the strategies it uses become the standard literary strategies of the new period. The 'defeated' style becomes, in turn, a part of the literary undercurrent. Writers who use it may be called epigones. Eventually, when it acquires the appearance of novelty due to its long being out of use, it may win the priority again. The way Sklovskij speaks about literary strategies becoming fashionable and getting out of use in the course of time, sometimes creates the impression that the 'style' which he thus defines is a conglomeration of devices not organically connected with one another and with what is expressed through them. The mechanistic tendencies of Sklovskij (pointed out previously in relation to his comments on Don Quixote) overshadow the initial impulse for his system which can be found in the idealistic theory of language of Belyj. In its positive aspect (i.e., in that it contains the guidelines for the intrinsic study of literature), Sklovskij's system is a theoretical summary of what Ejxenbaum did in relation to concrete poems and epochs of Russian literary history. In The Melodies of Russian Lyric Poetry (Melodika russkogo liriieskogo stixa) and other essays41 Ejxenbaum asserted that regardless of traditional divisions into literary periods, there have existed three styles in Russian lyric poetry: the singable (napevnyj), the rhetorical (oratorskif) and the conversational (govornyf). The first of these goes back to Romantic poets such as Zukovskij. It was continued by the late Romantics, such as Fet, and found its apogee in Symbolist poetry 40

V. Sklovskij, Ο teorii prozy, pp. 162-78; Rozanov, pp. 5-8. Melodika russkogo liriceskogo stixa (Petrograd, 1922); Anna Axmatova analiza) (Petrograd, 1923); Skvoz' literaturu (see below). 41

(Opyt

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faithful to Verlaine's De la musique avant toute chose (Bal'mont and Blok). This style takes full advantage of poetry's akinness to music. Its chief concern is the musicality of poetic phrase (its dominant strategy) and the variations in intonation. It frequently employs musical structures such as cadenzas and varieties of the ABA pattern in the arrangement of stanzas. Intonational diversity and symmetry are also achieved by copious use of interrogatory and exclamatory sentences. Poets who belong here are particularly sensitive to the possibilities contained in sound repetitions, differences in pitch, rhythmical values of phrases. In brief, "The singable lyrical poetry treats speech intonations as material to create a melody."48 Another tendency can be perceived in the neoclassical poetry of Derzavin and Tretjakovskij. In the nineteenth century it was continued by Puskin whose poetry "was not a beginning but an end of a long road travelled by the eighteenth century poets". In the twentieth century this tendency manifests itself in the rhetorical verse of poets such as Mandel'stam. This style is characterized by preference for overt statements, exactness of epithets, rhetoric question-answer units. It strives after the regularity of the rhythmical pattern rather than after musical effects. Some poets, e.g., Tjutcev, belong to this tradition only partly: Tjutcev is a 'rhetorician' in that he preserves rhetoric titles and exclamations, pays more attention to rhythm than to melody, uses oratorical lexicology. The most distinct representative of this tendency is Derzavin. The conversational style began with Nekrasov and his consciously 'unpoetic' poetry, and was continued in the post-Symbolist verse of the twentieth century. It is the style which frequently incorporates the strategies of the skaz technique into poetry. Nekrasov's "Who Can Be Happy in Russia", for instance, introduces the narrator who tries to abolish the distance which poetry usually keeps from common speech by using colloquial intonations and vocabulary. In the twentieth century, similar tendencies can be perceived in the poetry of Anna Axmatova. Ejxenbaum's discussions of Russian lyrical poetry take a broad sweep through Russian literary history. They take into consideration accoustics, semantics and architectonics of the works in question and entirely disregard the race, milieu et moment factors, as well as the narrowly formal principles of classical poetics, such as genre and meter. Among the American New Critics, Cleanth Brooks was the one who " - Skvoz' literaturu, p. 213.

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most explicitly voiced the need to revise the traditional views on English poetry as divided into chronological epochs and into some trends of secondary importance within these epochs. In Brooks's opinion, a review of poetic works from the viewpoint of their cognitive value and the strategies connected with that value, may be more enlightening than historical divisions. Since the poems which join thought and feeling are the most valuable cognitively, the tradition of such poetry should be pointed out; and accompanying it, various traditions of 'exclusion' (to use Richards's term). In "Notes for a Revised History of English Poetry" Brooks expands on the guidelines of Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets".48 Eliot maintained that seventeenth-century poets were able to 'feel their thought' as acutely as they were able to experience emotions. In the period succeeding the two generations of the 'metaphysical' poets, a dissociation of sensibility developed. Poetry began to express either emotion or thought, but not both simultaneously; poets became either sentimental or intellectual. Continuing this train of thought, Brooks asserts that the traditional distinction between the school of John Donne and the school of Ben Jonson in the seventeenth century has a very limited value. The first third of the century is characterized by the tradition of wit which involves the use of elaborate conceits and represents an advanced stage in fusing emotion and thought together. This tradition permeated all kinds of poetry: 'dramatic and nondramatic, secular or religious, light or serious, successful or unsuccessful', as well as the contemporary prose. The later seventeenth century brought a change in poetic attitudes. The tradition of wit was either relegated to satire and light verse (Pope) or replaced by the new tradition of sentimentality. Thus, the tradition of wit was realized only in minor poetic forms, in vers de societe which, because of the strict classical rule of the separation of genres accepted by the. contemporary poets, were not incorporated into the major forms of poetic expression. This fact accounts for the relatively narrow scope of eighteenth-century poetry. Pope and the pre-Romantic poets were 'descriptive and didactic'. They used 'the very minimum of metaphor'.

43

T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 141-50; C. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, pp. 219-44. A similar revaluation was performed in F. R. Leavis's Revaluation (London, 1936). Ultimately, the views expressed by these authors follow the opinions of Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism (1919)- one more proof that the New Critics and the New Humanists were not so widely apart as a schematic survey might suggest.

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With the exception of Keats and Coleridge, the Romantics, too, did little to reinvigorate the complex poetic forms of the seventeenth century. They 'distrusted the intellect' and 'the subtleties of wit'. Poets like Wordsworth and Shelley are guilty of 'poor craftsmanship', of 'loosely decorative . . . metaphor'. Victorian poetry followed the same tradition. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the appearance of such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, was the Victorian tradition surpassed and 'vigorous metaphor' and 'dramatic shifts in tone' reinstalled among the strategies of poetry. This tradition is continued in twentieth-century English and American poetry. In fact, it is this recent poetry that compelled Brooks to undertake the task of surveying poetic history: "I have asserted that the work of the modern poets already discussed implies a critical revolution in the light of which the current conception of the history of English poetry must be revised."44 Brooks here proves to be in full agreement with Eliot's notion of the 'ideal order' among the monuments of literature which undergoes change when the 'really new' work appears. Regardless of whether the particular classifications Brooks performs here are arguable or not (Brooks himself admitted some thirty years later that they were, at times, incorrect), they emphasize the value of poetry which goes beyond the referential and emotive use of words toward the 'representational' one. Such poetry integrates rational thought and feeling, expresses 'an ideal content not otherwise expressible' and has unique cognitive value. Brook's review of poetry goes further than Ejxenbaum's in that it includes the consideration of how poetry reaches not only the unity of style but also the level where it begins to express the unparaphrasable 'aesthetic ideas', or 'metaphysical qualities'. In the opinion of Brooks, as well as of the other New Critics, seventeenth-century English poetry customarily reaches this level, and does it by means of elaborate metaphors in which tenor and vehicle add new dimensions to one another and ultimately fuse together. It would be an exaggeration to say that were it not for the metaphysical poets, New Criticism would not have developed. Nevertheless, the existence of this school of poetry facilitated the growth of the New Critical sensitivity toward the truly unparaphrasable layer of the literary work and its unity with language. Metaphysical poetry served the New Critics as a point of reference in explicating the verse written in other ages and in describing the qualiModern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 219.

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ties of ideal poetry. It is largely thanks to Donne and his followers that the New Critics have not limited their explications to the descriptions of the grammatical or, more broadly, stylistic features of the works in question but always hinted at the 'representational' value of poetic unities. Russia did not have its metaphysical poets, and the truly imaginative quality in other types of poetry was perhaps less easy to indicate and 'lay bare'. Thus, in addition to the reasons outlined in the previous chapter, this point also contributed to the fact that Formalist analyses usually stop short of asserting unambiguously the unique 'representational' unity possible to achieve in literary works. Accordingly, Ejxenbaum's «interpretations are based on singling out the accoustic, semantic and architectonic qualities of poems and discussing them in their mutual relations, without a clear indication whether the unity of style is purely emotional or also cognitive. It has been stressed previously that not all of the textual explications done by the Russian Formalists isolate one or two of Ingarden's strata and dwell exclusively on them. Some of the Formalist studies are not purged of metaphysical concerns; accordingly, the difference between the New Critics and the Formalists, so far as the practical studies are concerned, is not neat and unambiguous. Nevertheless, a critic explicitly aware of the capacity of language to present the 'aesthetic ideas' usually is more persistent in showing how literary works go beyond the referential and emotive use of words, than the critic who does not clearly see the qualitative difference between the above two and the 'representational' use of language. I have therefore chosen a few examples of the New Critical analyses particularly successful in explicating the entities which escape logical paraphrase, and going further than a scientific analysis of the literary fact. My examples shall be taken from Ransom's "Shakespeare at Sonnets", Tate's "Tension in Poetry" and "Yeats's Great Rooted Blossomer" by Brooks. The first essay shows the characteristics of the 'symbolic imagination' through its failings.45 Ransom maintains that Shakespeare's imagination was of the kind which worked best at the large designs of dramas. In the case of small lyrics such as sonnets, it sometimes proved 'defective' in its timidity to pursue all the possibilities of a metaphor. In a number of his sonnets Shakespeare introduced several metaphors, instead of «

The World's Body,

pp. 270-303.

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using one figure and reinforcing it throughout the poem. Unlike the metaphysical poets, he "will not quite risk the power of a single figure but compounds the figures". The metaphors within one poem sometimes have little connection with one another; they cannot withstand an intellectual contemplation, to paraphrase Brooks. Such poetry pretends to be well-organized and precise by preserving a strict metrical schema (as Shakespeare's sonnets do), but in fact it is 'wonderfully imprecise'. In its less successful versions, it furnishes 'indulgences to the feelings' and 'little food for the intellect'. It does not combine 'intellect and passion' and thus does not lead to poetic cognition. It is loosely associationist and it distrusts 'the validity of the imaginative organ'. Ransom (who at that point is not referring to Shakespeare but to the inferior types of 'wonderful imprecisions' - Miss Millay's, for instance) observes that this distrust is characteristic of modern man in general, and that it promises to destroy "what is most peculiarly human in our habits of mind". He does find the sonnets of Shakespeare where the 'metaphysical image' is realized: among his examples, there is Sonnet 73 where Shakespeare draws a bold parallel between the state of mind of the speaker and the splendid image of the late autumn's barren trees. In many cases, however, the disparity between the associations evoked by several metaphors appearing in the same sonnet, destroy, or at least damage, the final symbolic effect. Tate concludes his essay with a consideration of a tercet from Canto Five of Dante's Inferno where Francesca tells the narrator that she was born near the place where the river Po unites with its 'pursuers' (i.e., tributaries) and falls into the sea: Siede la terra dove nata fui Sulla marina dove il Po discende Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.4e At first glance, this fragment is merely a piece of information concerning the earthly residence of Francesca. Tate points out, however, that the wording of the passage makes it into a perfect example of the poetic enrichment of the descriptive message. Francesca 'fuses herself' with the river Po; the pursuing tributaries thus become identified with 'the winds of lust' from which there is no escape - for Francesca is in hell. Also, the tributaries and Po become one, at a certain point, just like Francesca had become one with her sin, according to the medieval 4β

A. Tate, Collected Essays, pp. 88-90. Like Tate, I could not find a translation that would render this tercet adequately into English; therefore, I repeat Tate's quotation of the Italian text.

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visualization of the damned in hell as 'incarnations of the sin that has put them there'. Finally, the abundance of sibilants in the lines describing Po creates an auditory image of the wind of lust. "The river is thus both a visual and an auditory image, and since Francesca is her sin and her sin is embodied in this image, we are entitled to say that it is a sin that we can both hear and see."47 The essay of Brooks explicates Yeats's "Among School Children".48 The poem begins with 'watching the children' in a classroom, to the accompaniment of the words of their nun teacher. In the second stanza, the sixty-year-old speaker switches abruptly to the announcement Ί dream of a Ledaean body'. The switch, Brooks observes, is not an indecorous thought of an old man: the speaker sees his Leda telling him a tale of her childhood; the swan by her carries the same associations as the 'yolk and white of the one shell' to which the speaker (paraphrasing Plato) compares himself and the 'Ledaean body'; and the egg image brings us, through the association with the fledgelings, back to the children in the classroom. Parallel to the motifs of the young birds and youth in general, there appear the motifs of old age, of the 'scarecrow' and the 'old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird'. The poet persistently dwells upon the contrast between old age and the 'Ledaean kind', between the 'common earthiness' and the beauty of the Ledaean woman, and thus touches upon the familiar mystery of 'birth and growth and decay'. As he presents the human 'world of becoming', he juxtaposes it with 'the world of being' in which the objects are forever fixed and perfect. These objects inhabit human dreams; Yeats calls them 'Presences'. They are known through 'passion, piety or affection'. They 'know no development' and 'experience no old age'. They mock 'man's enterprise' by their perfection. On the other hand, they do not know the values and pangs of growth which man can experience. In the images of the mother's dream about the perfection of her child and the 'old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird', the poet shows the beginning and end of the process of 'giving form' to the 'shape' on the mother's lap, and the intermixing of the natural and the supernatural in man's existence. This inevitable human situation is the ultimate object of the poet's observations. It makes him ironic (the irony is reinforced by the use of colloquialisms like 'scarecrow' or the child's 'bottom' while dealing with a profound philosophical topic). " 48

Ibid., p. 90. The Well Wrought Urn, pp. 178-91.

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The natural cannot be transcended, 'the dance' and 'the dancer' cannot be separated; 'the great rooted blossomer' consists of the flower, the bole and the roots. Decay follows birth-but 'the great rooted blossomer' is in between. The experience of these facts is what the poem conveys. Brooks shows that the HOW of the process of conveying this experience is to a certain degree demonstrable, that it need not be relegated to the undefinable poetic talent. More generally, that literary study can profitably go beyond history, biography, interpretation-free technicalities and impressionism. The explication of the workings of the 'symbolic imagination' which is able to bring together 'various meanings at a single moment of action' (Tate's phrase) is, then, the ultimate concern of the New Critics. They have not attempted fully to logicalize the language of criticism. They have remained sensitive to what Eliot untechnically called the merging of thought and feeling. They have asserted that literary works are valuable as providing a certain kind of cognition. Consequently, their practical criticism abounds not only in the scrutiny of the elements of the poem which can be dealt with by logic, but also in their interpretation. The way they proceed in their practical studies consists, roughly speaking, in examining the wording of the poem and pointing out the elements of imagery and structure which add a new dimension to the paraphrasable idea of the poem and not merely illustrate it. If they miss the intensity of the 'felt thought' in a certain work or a certain epoch, they consider this work or epoch inadequate. In particular, Ransom and Tate are of the opinion that a great deal of poetic production does not employ the powers of imagination to the full and satisfies itself with providing "many charming resting places for the feelings to agitate themselves".49 The critics in question may be too absolutistic in their implied demand for classifying all poetry in which the present age does not perceive the imaginative quality as second-rate. Notwithstanding the objections which may be taken with particular instances of their judgments on concrete literary works, their continuous insistence on the superior value of truly imaginative poetry and their demonstrations how the imaginative quality is achieved in language, provide lasting guideposts for literary criticism. The Russian Formalists, on the other hand, have devoted relatively little attention to the synthetic powers of poetic imagination. They were the technicians of literary structure, so to speak. They delineated their 49

J. C. Ransom, The World's Body, p. 291.

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area of research within a different set of Ingarden's strata and followed the boundaries of it very consistently. Their principle: to keep their investigations scientifically verifiable, direct them into the area of inquiry where strict logicality could be used with success. The approach they adopted would not admit of programmatic discussion of such unverifiable entities as Kantian aesthetic ideas, or Ingarden's metaphysical qualities, or poetic epistemology in general. Some of the Formalists those who preserved the idealistic leanings, be it in a fragmentary form - would sometimes touch upon such matters in their criticism. It would happen, however, outside the basic framework of Formalism which, in the main, entailed separation between 'literariness' and 'philosophical aesthetics'. Instead, the Formalists are much more insistent than the New Critics in calling the reader's attention to the auditory aspect of the literary work and to the structure of properties of the objects, persons and situations presented in it - i.e., to the first and fourth of Ingarden's layers.

IV RECAPITULATION AND PERSPECTIVES

Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism are parts of a twentieth-century phenomenon which can be called literary criticism's rise to importance. Strengthened by the new theories put forth by linguists and philosophers of language, with a considerable audience if not of general pubUc then at least of that residing in the ever-growing universities and colleges, literary criticism now seems to occupy, in the area of humanities, a position stronger than ever before. With melancholy, Randall Jarrell called ours 'the age of criticism' and remarked that in contemporary literary periodicals, one encounters a few poems and a piece or two of fiction; THE REST IS CRITICISM.1 It can be added that together with the proliferation came a certain narrowing of scope. It is not just any scholarship or meditation prompted by literature that fills out the pages of journals, but mainly that which professes to be occupied with the verbal facts of the literary work. This tendency parallels very emphatically the contemporary theories of language of either idealistic or neo-positivistic orientation: all of them tell us that our thinking is inescapably connected with language. It follows that the literary critic will do well to start with the wording of the poem rather than with the reasons for, and circumstances of, the poem's coming into being or the characteristics of its reception. Russian Formalism and New Criticism are thus within the mainstream of the most general tendencies of twentieth-century commentary on literature. The words of the poem, however, are by no means a homogeneous and easily defined object of scrutiny. Words have the accoustic dimension and the semantic dimension; the latter includes the denotational and connotational aspect (words denote objects and connote meanings). Theorists like Ingarden emphasize also that words can symbolize entities which escape logical definition and which he calls metaphysical qualities. 1

R. Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York, 1955), p. 64.

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The critics in question adopt diverse views as to which of these strata of words should be dealt with by the literary commentator. In some cases, they do not try to assert, or assert very sketchily, their beliefs as to what is the ultimate meaning or role of literature, and simply start with systematic study of some of Ingarden's strata. This situation frequently took place in Russian Formalism: a number of the Formalists investigated the organization of the first and fourth of these strata without relating them in an explicit manner to the meaning of the work-e.g., Brik's classification of sound repetitions or Propp's structuralist study of the fairy tale. Theoretical criticism of Tynjanov belongs here, too: it asserts that what literature says is perfectly relative, a matter of looking at the literary works from the viewpoint of another semiotic system. The achievement of the interpretation-free criticism is substantial: it named and classified a large number of verbal facts which had previously escaped the attention of the most scholastically-oriented critics. Other critics assert explicitly that language has two aspects: referential and emotive, and that literature deals primarily with the second (Richards, Jakubinskij in the 1920's and earlier). Richards's theoretical and practical criticism does not consider literary cognition as something real: what literature says consists in a therapeutic appeal to our emotions and attitudes. By working on the terminology of textual explications and by many examples of such explications, Richards urged for, and succeeded in introducing, more precision into the dealings of the critics with the semantic aspect of the literary text. In the 1920's and 30's Jakobson, and following him the Prague aesthetician Mukarovsk^, stress the fact that, in a sense, words in literature 'denote themselves', that they are their own referents. Ideally, in a work of literature we contemplate the act of expression itself. This idea appears in the concept of foregrounding which Mukafovsk^ took from the Formalists, in Jakobson's thesis that poetry is utterance oriented toward eloquence, and in Tomasevskij's statement that in literature, "Eloquence is an inseparable part of the information conveyed."2 In the United States, Charles Morris provided a persuasive philosophical counterpart to these pronouncements in the articles where he upheld the 'self-contained' quality of aesthetic discourse. As Tate observed, however, the seemingly self-contained message of Morris's vision of poetry can be shown to be an emotive one. (It appears to me 1

B. TomaSevskij, Teorija literatury (Moscow, 1925), p. 9.

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that the same can be said of the recent argument of Jakobson on the same topic, the argument whose embryo appears in his early The Newest Russian Poetry.3) In the final account, then, the type of selfcontainedness of literature which the critics of this type assert, does not essentially differ from what Richards had been saying in Principles of Literary Criticism. Critics of that type conduct their practical studies within the first four of Ingarden's strata with the objectivity and thoroughness that often produce valuable results. Lastly, there is a group of critics who explicitly maintain that the function of the literary work is the conveying of a specific type of cognitive message. This group is very varied: it includes Τ. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot as well as J. C. Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and, in the early period of their activity at least, Viktor Sklovskij and Boris Ejxenbaum. The cognitive message may be called the precise and accurate description of finite things (Hulme); the knowledge of the 'homely fulness' of the world (Ransom); 'seeing' things and ideas (Sklovskij); the non-logical knowledge (Brooks); the special, unique, and complete knowledge (Tate and Ejxenbaum). However much these critics differ in their wording and in their focus, they all strive to assert the uniquely cognitive value of literature. Few of them attempt to give to this concept its full philosophical justification; some of them, however, adopt the terminology of idealistic philosophers of language to account for it. Thus following Wilbur Urban, Cleanth Brooks speaks of the symbolic, or representational, function of language (in addition to the referential and emotive). In his view, language can express in-

5

In "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", Jakobson distinguishes six functions of language. The first is referential or denotative or cognitive; it focuses on the referent, or the context of the message. The second is emotive; it focuses on the speaker and expresses attitudes. The third is conative; it focuses on the addresser, and its most distinct form is the imperative. The fourth is phatic; its aim is to establish or prolong communication; its set is contact. The fifth is metalingual, and it is used to discuss the language itself. The sixth is poetic; it focuses on the message itself. All these functions, except the poetic, elaborate upon the basic distinction between the emotive and referential functions of language: numbers one and five contain an 'objective' message, numbers two, three and four are tinted with emotions and wishes. The poetic function is described basically in the same terms as in the Newest Russian Poetry, i.e., not in terms of WHAT can be expressed making use of it but in terms of the subject's attitude toward what is expressed. Thus, in Jakobson's terms, the poetic function is not related to a specific form of cognition; if it were, then the most general features of the 'content' of the poetic message would have to be mentioned in a delineation of that function. See Style in Language, ed. Th. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 350-76.

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tuitions that escape paraphrasing in logical discourse, that lie beyond the bounds of reason or of empirical truth, and which nevertheless form part of what man is capable of comprehending. It is on the basis of the representational function that we can convincingly speak of the texture of the poem as unparaphrasable and, at the same time, providing genuine knowledge. In their practical studies, the critics who lean toward such views treat rather casually the first of Ingarden's layers, start their description with the second of them and proceed toward interpretation which concerns, in the most general sense, the fifth layer of the literary work. It appears that the Kantian concept of the aesthetic idea, as well as narrower concepts, such as Ingarden's metaphysical quality, are entities which become available through literature precisely because it utilizes in a very intense way this symbolic function of language. However important is the description of the layers of the literary work with which the critics mentioned earlier deal, this description alone does not give us any hints as to what literature is ultimately about. Implicit or explicit acknowledgment of the symbolic function and the ensuing orientation toward the most elusive stratum of the literary work, is the reason for bracketing certain critics of both movements in the idealistic and neo-positivistic groups. If one wanted to classify matters further, one might say that by and large the Formalists represented the neopositivistic tendency, and the New Critics the idealistic one. The salient features of the two tendencies can be summarized as follows: The idealistic tendency consists in affirming the cognitive value of literature; the cognition is sui generis, and cannot be fully demonstrated either empirically or by a logical paraphrase of the poetic message. It assigns to criticism the task of describing the aspects of poetic language that can be described, and on this basis to interpret their representational value. It maintains that literary cognition is inseparably connected with the language in which it is expressed. It puts much emphasis on the description of language structures as manifested in literary works; it is, however, the concern with interpretation that makes a critic belonging to this tendency scrutinize the verbal facts of the poem. Cleanth Brooks has remarked: "Our concern with structure springs from our concern with the structure of meanings."4 This tendency has in the background the interest in the 'realities of mind' of which the idealistic philosophers speak in one form or another5 (the 4 5

Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 2nd ed., p. xii. See R. F. Hoernle, Idealism as a Philosophy (New York, 1927), pp. 45-78.

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interest is modified by stressing the inseparability of language and idea). Critics belonging here are aware of the distinction between the object of knowledge conveyed by the poem, and the mental states of the writer or reader. The positivistic tendency either passes over in silence the problem of poetic knowledge or reduces it to the properties of psychological states. It either asserts that the poem, ultimately, conveys emotions, or that it conveys the message to be contemplated for its own sake (it does not indicate, however, that this message is generically different from that conveyed in other types of discourse), or simply limits itself to the scrutiny of the logically describable verbal facts of the work. As was the case with the idealistic tendency, critics belonging here emphasize the necessity to scrutinize the verbal facts of the poem. Many critics belonging to this trend believe that literary study can be as fully logicalized as any other discipline of science is. An act of interpretation, which cannot be ultimately validated logically, they consider as not belonging to literary commentary sensu stricto. Precise description of the literary fact is the objective of this group. It affirms that one dedicated to literature has to get through a maze of technicalities to achieve full familiarity with the subject. Critics influenced by such framework sometimes say that literary criticism and literary scholarship should amount to the same thing. In view of such postulates one can say that never before did literary criticism show such reverence for the scientific spirit, and never before was such a full-scale attempt made to demonstrate that, contrary to what Rickert maintained at the beginning of the twentieth century, exact and humane sciences can share common methods of research. This trend started with the singling out of literary strategies in the Russian Formalist school, and later grew into the method of analysis called structuralism. The achievement of the critics of this trend consists in the broadening of what had been hitherto considered the logically discernible structure of the literary work. Critics who devote themselves to the 'technical' study and assume that the rest is a matter of relating the literary phenomenon to another semiotic system, fulfill a vital role in clearing up the muddled grounds on which interpretations are sometimes made. Realizing the play of grammatical categories which Jakobson points out for us in Anthony's speech adds to our grasp of Shakespeare's play.« It was Tynjanov's objective research that clarified •

R. Jakobson, Style in Language, ed. Th, Sebeok, pp. 375-77.

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151

the base on which the literary judgments concerning the period of early Russian Romanticism can now be grounded.7 Such criticisms increase our articulatedness about the poem and thus contribute to the better understanding of it. Also, it has to be stressed that technical criticism is still in its infancy: full-fledged analyses of the structure of longer fiction, for instance, are still scarce.8 From what it has done until now, it appears that technical criticism can play a considerable role in strengthening our awareness of certain layers of meaning that literature contains. From the viewpoint of total appeal, however, this type of criticism is sorely insufficient. It by-passes what is of greatest importance to the reader: literature's uniquely cognitive value. Criticism which affirms the representational function of language has to step in where the purely technical one left off. If it does not, the reader is apt to remark with C. S. Lewis: But you cannot go 'explaining away' forever: you will find that you explained the explanation away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.»

The high demands which critics of the idealistic type put before literature entails the fact that they have little to say about works which do not display the truly imaginative quality, or whose imaginative quality they do not notice. It goes without saying, too, that they have little sympathy toward the shortcuts to literary appreciation in the form of hasty biographical or historical surveys (this feature they share with all critics discussed in this study). The above characteristics are neither shortcomings nor virtues, it appears to me: the danger of this type of criticism lies rather in that it rests, in the final account, on the intelligence of the individual critic, as does impressionist criticism. After the verbal analysis has been made, an act of interpretation has to rely on critical intelligence and intuition. This is an unavoidable danger, and it reminds one that literary criticism oriented toward the close reading of the text, cannot but voyage between the Scylla of scientism and 7

Ju. Tynjanov, "Arxaisty i novatory", "Puskin", Arxaisty i novatory, pp. 87-291. Tz. Todorov, "Les categories du recit litteraire", Communications, 8 (1966), 125-51. 9 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1944), p. 40. 8

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Charybdis of impressionism. As practice indicates, the voyage, though difficult, can be made, to the advantage of a general understanding of literature. The simultaneous study of Russian Formalism and the New Criticism, then, shows that behind their apparently similar programmatic declarations about the autonomy of literature and the necessity to focus literary commentary on the literary fact, there is a considerable divergence of principles. In a sense, the two 'schools' stand at opposite poles within the language-oriented criticism so productive and so much discussed in recent years. Inspection of the differences and complementary features of Russian Formalism and the New Criticism thus offers an insight into the most germinal and influential of the developments in twentiethcentury criticism.

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Eliot, Τ. S., The Sacred Wood (London, 1920). . Selected Essays (New York, 1932). , After Strange Gods (New York, 1934). , On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1967). Erlich, Victor, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague, 1955; 2nd rev. ed., The Hague, 1965). Faber, Marvin, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass., 1943). Friedman, Norman, "Point of View in Fiction", PMLA, LXX (1955), 1160-84. Garvin, P. L., ed. A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style (Washington, D.C., 1964). Havränek, Bohuslav, "The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language", A Prague School Reader, ed. P. L. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), pp. 3-16. Hoernli, R. F. Α., Idealism as a Philosophy (New York, 1927). Hulme, Τ. E., Speculations (London, 1924). Ingarden, Roman, Das literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931), 2nd rev. ed., Ο dziele literackim, trans. M. Turowicz (Warsaw, 1960). Jakobson, Roman, Novejsaja russkaja poizija (Prague, 1921). , "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", Style in Language, ed. Th. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 350-76. , Selected Works, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1962). Jakubinskij, Lev, "O zvukax stixotvornogo jazyka", Sborniki po teorii poeticeskogo jazyka, 1 (1916), 16-30. , "Skoplenie odinakovyx plavnyx ν praktiieskom i poetiöeskom jazykax", Sborniki, 2 (1917), 15-23. James, Henry, The Art of the Novel (New York-London, 1934). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London-New York, 1956). , Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1966). Kraft, Viktor, The Vienna Circle, trans. A. Pap (New York, 1953). Krieger, Murray, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956). Kryhski, Adam, "2ycie i prace J. Baudouina de Courtenay", Ρrace linguistyczne ofiarowane Janowi Baudouinowi de Courtenay, ed. A. Krynski (Krakow, 1921). Leavis, F. R., Revaluation (London, 1936). Lemon, L. and Reis, Μ., trans. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965). Le Sage, Laurent, The French New Criticism (University Park-London, 1967). Markov, Vladimir, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1968). von Mises, Richard, Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding, trans. J. Bernstein and R. G. Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1951). Morris, Charles, "Science, Art and Technology", Kenyon Review, I (1939), 409-23. , "Esthetics and the Theory of Signs", The Journal of Unified Science, VIII (1940), 131-50. Mukarovsk^, Jan, "Standard Language and Poetic Language", 'The Esthetics of Language", A Prague School Reader in Esthetics, ed. P. L. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), pp. 17-70. Ong, W. J., "The Meaning of the 'New Criticism' ", Twentieth Century English, ed. W. S. Knickerbocker (New York, 1946), pp. 344-70. Peirce, Charles, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. J.Buchler (New York, 1940). Plato, Cratylus. The Works of Plato, vol. 3, trans. G. Burges (London, 1912), pp. 283-396. Poetika. Sborniki po teorii poeticeskogo jazyka (Petrograd, 1919). Poetika. Sbornik statej. Nos. 1-5 (Leningrad, 1926-9).

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INDEX

Affective fallacy, concept of, 17, 45, 106-8

Axmatova, Anna, 29, 127-8, 138 Babbitt, Irving, 41, 139n Bachelard, Gaston, 35 Bal'mont, Konstantin, 138 Barthes, Roland, 28, 32, 35, 103-4, 153 BatjuSkov, Konstantin, 116 Baudouin de Courtenay, J. N., 16, 1920, 93, 153 Baxtin, Mixail, 23, 120-1, 153 Beardsley, M. C„ 17, 45, 107-8 Belinskij, Vissarion, 18n Belyj, Andrej, 11,12-15, 17, 21, 27, 2930, 54, 56-7, 60-2, 63-5, 66, 68-71, 74, 76-7, 87, 89-90, 109, 116-7, 137, 153 Benda, Julien, 41 Bergson, Henri, 27, 31, 39, 61, 66-7, 77, 153 Bernstein, S. I., 19, 23, 32 Blackmur, Richard, 121 Blok, Aleksandr, 11, 15-16, 25n, 73, 116, 127-9, 137, 153 Bobrov, S., 28n Bochenski, Innocenty, 153 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 40 Brik, Osip, 21, 23-4, 30,115-6, 117, 121, 147, 153 Brjusov, Valerij, 14, 21, 73 Brooks, Cleanth, 29, 35-6, 38, 40, 42-4, 46-7, 49-53, 55-7, 73, 84-6, 108-9, 121, 126,133-5,138-40, 141-2,143-4, 148-9, 153, 156 Browning, Robert, 42 Burke, Kenneth, 135, 153 Byron, George, 114 Caird, Edward, 61n, 153 Carnap, Rudolf, 88-9, 91, 92, 93, 153

Cassirer, Ernst, 12, 36, 56, 58, 60, 98n, 153 Cervantes, Miguel de, 122-3 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 114 Cognition, literary, concepts of, 12, 18, 22, 27, 38, 39, 42, 46, 48, 52, 56, 63, 69, 76, 86, 95-6, 99-100, 105, 109, 140-1, 144-5, 148,149-50 Coleridge, S. T., 38, 40, 45-7, 49, 54-6, 58-60, 77-8, 80, 84-5, 107, 111, 140, 153 Constructional factor (konstruktivnyj faktor), concept of, 98, 100, 101 Constructional function (konstruktiv naja funkcija), concept of, 100, 102 Constructional principle (konstruktivnyj princip), concepts of, 98,100,101 tukovskij, Kornej, 21 Daiches, David, 34, 153 Dante, Alighieri, 48, 142-3 Defacilitation {zatrudnenie), concept of, 26^7, 68, 75-6, 94 Defamiliarization (ostranenie), concept of, 26-8, 68-70, 75-6, 94,100, 129 Derzavin, Gavril, 29, 100, 116, 138 Dickinson, Emily, 140 Dissociation of sensibility, concept of, 42, 139 Dobroljubov, Ν. Α., 17-8 Donne, John, 85, 134, 139, 141 Dostoevskij, Fedor, 28, 120 Dryden, John, 41, 80 Ejxenbaum, Boris, 14-5, 19, 21, 23, 289, 30, 33n, 44, 48, 54, 63, 71,119-20, 121-2, 123-4, 129-30, 132n, 137-8, 140-1, 148, 153 Eliot, T. S., 15, 34-5, 37-8, 40-3, 47-8,

158

INDEX

52, 61, 65η, 78, 80, 84-6, 105, 109, 136, 139-40, 144, 148, 153 Empson, William, 47 Erlich, Victor, 17, 33, 102n, 153 Evolution, literary, concept of, 102,109 Exclusion, poetry of, 45, 107

Jakubinskij, Lev, 19, 23, 79,114-5, 121, 147, 154 James, Henry, 60, 121, 154 Jarrell, Randall, 49, 146 Johnson, Samuel, 80, 84 Jonson, Ben, 139

Faber, Marvin, 89n, 154 Fet, Afanasij, 25, 73, 116, 137 Foregrounding, concept of, 96-7, 99, 102-3, 147 Frank, Phillip, 88n Frege, Gottlob, 88n, 89, 106 Friedman, Norman, 30n, 154 Frye, Northrop, 36 Futurism, 21, 31, 71-3

Kant, Immanuel, 11-2, 31, 35-6, 38, 478, 54-7, 58-9, 60, 61-2, 63-4, 66-8, 76-8, 80, 82, 86, 90-1, 103n, 11 In, 113, 136, 154 Kapnist, Vasilij, 116 Keats, John, 42, 50, 86, 134, 140 Kosny, W., 155 Koiinov, V., 33 Kraft, V., 87, 97, 154 Krieger, Murray, 53, 154 KruCenyx, A. E., 71-3 Küchelbecker, Wilhelm, 137 Kvjatkovskij, Α., 28

Garvin, P. L., 3In, 154 Gautier, Theophile, 128 Goethe, J. W. von, 25, 75 Gogol', Nikolaj, 28-9, 31, 95, 119 Gor'kij, Maksim, 27-8 Grammont, Maurice, 22 Gray, Thomas, 134 Griboedov, A. S., 18n Havränek, Β., 31, 103 Hegel, G. W. F., 56 Heilman, R. B., 47 Heine, Heinrich, 114 Hendel, C. W., 12n Herder, J. G., 26 Hoernl6, R. F., 149n, 154 Homer, 25 Hopkins, G. M., 140 Horace, 40 Hugo, Victor, 39 Hulme, Τ. E., 25-7, 34-5, 39-40, 41, 47, 67, 109, 148, 154 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 17 Husserl, Edmund, 89, 106 Inclusion, poetry of, 45, 56, 107 Ingarden, Roman, 51, 87n, 111-4, 1212, 126, 129, 136, 141, 145-7, 149, 154 Intonation, concept of, 26, 119, 137-8 Irony in poetry, concept of, 50, 134-5, 143 Ivanov, Vjaieslav, 11, 14-5, 21 Ivanov-Razumnik, 21 Jakobson, Roman, 19-21, 23, 29, 31, 69, 77, 80, 84, 87-9, 93, 94-7, 103, 105, 109, 147-8, 150, 154

Language functions, concepts of, 43-5, 69, 72-3, 82, 94, 97, 103, 140-1, 147, 148-9 Lanson, Gustave, 51 Lavrov, P. L., 21 Leavis, F. R., 29, 139n, 154 Lemon, L., 154 Lenin, V. I., 27 Lermontov, Mixail, 33n, 114-5, 129 Le Sage, L„ 34, 154 Leskov, Nikolaj, 119 Lessing, G. E., 25, 75 Lewis, C. S., 44, 52, 150 Literature and life, relation of, 18, 27, 39, 41-2, 44, 60, 62, 69, 95-6, 97-8 Lomonosov, Mixail, 102, 116 Lunacarskij, Α., 23n Majakovskij, Vladimir, 96 Make-believe semantics, concepts of, 100-1, 108-9 MandelStam, Osip, 138 Markov, Vladimir, 72n, 154 Marvell, Andrew, 95 Merezkovskij, Dmitrij, 11, 21 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 132-3 Milton, John, 118, 142 Mises, Richard von, 91, 154 Mixajlovskij, Ν. K., 21 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste, 25 Moore, P. E., 37-8, 41 Morris, Ch. W., 34, 47, 49, 77, 81-2, 88n, 103, 108-9, 147, 154

INDEX Moscow Linguistic Circle, the, 23, 31 Motivation, literary, concept of, 13, 95, 124, 131 Mukafovskf, Jan, 31, 96-7, 102-3, 105, 147, 154 Nekrasov, Ν. Α., 116, 129-30, 132n, 138 Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker), 19-20, 93 Neurath, Otto, 91 Objective correlative, concept of, 41-2, 52, 65n Ogden, Charles, 88n, 106, 155 Ong, W. J., 36, 43n, 55, 57, 80, 154 Opojaz, 23-4, 26, 28, 74 Ostrovskij, A. N., 18 Paradox in poetry, concept of, 50, 56, 85-6, 134-5 Peirce, Charles, 45, 81,106-7, 154 Plato, 22, 72, 143, 154 Plautus, 25 Plexanov, G. V., 21 Poetics, concept of, 14, 64, 74-5, 76, 93 Polivanov, E. D., 19 Pomorska, Krystyna, 87n Pope, Alexander, 114, 139 Potebnja, Α. Α., 14,16-9, 20, 67, 155 Prague Linguistic Circle, the, 28, 31, 121 Propp, V. I., 23-4, 88, 93, 103, 122-3, 125-6, 147, 155 PuSkin, Aleksandr, 25, 32, 75, 94-5, 102, 111, 114-7, 127, 129, 137-8 Pypin, A. M., 17 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 25, 62, 75 Ransom, J. C., 22, 34-5, 38, 40, 42-3, 46, 47-8, 55, 61, 63, 66-8, 78-82, 83, 86, 105, 108-9, 118, 121, 126, 132-3, 135, 141-2, 144, 148, 155 "Realised" metaphor, concepts of, 80, 142 Reis, Μ., 154 Remizov, Aleksej, 119 Renard, G., 51, 155 Retardation (zamedlenie), concept of, 26, 124 Richards, I. Α., 17, 34-5, 37, 43-6, 47, 49, 52, 59, 84, 88, 100, 105-8, 109, 136, 139, 147-8, 155 Rickert, Heinrich, 11-2, 37, 81, 90, 108, 150, 155

159

Rozanov, Vasilij, 120, 130-1 Russell, Bertrand, 31, 88n, 89, 106 Saran, Franz, 29, 119 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 103 η, 104 Schiller, Friedrich von, 25η, 29, 123-4 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 26 Schlick, Morris, 88 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 56, 60-1 Sebeok, Thomas, 148n, 155 Shakespeare, William, 25-6, 42, 95, 141-2 Shelley, Percy, 42, 140 Sievers, Eduard, 29, 119 Skabiievskij, A. M„ 17 Skaftymov, A. P., 23, 103, 122-3, 124-5, 155 Skaz, concept of, 30-1, 119-21, 138 Solzenicyn, Aleksandr, 31 Sophocles, 26 Staircase structure (stupencatoe postroenie), concept of, 20, 26-7 Stallman, R. W., 34, 133n, 155 Stepanov, Nikolaj, 72, 155 Sterne, Laurence, 27 Strategy (priem), concept of, 26-7, 64, 67, 70-1, 74, 123, 137 Stratification, literary, concept of, 1114, 121, 136, 140-1, 145-7, 149 Striedter, J., 155 Structural method, concept of, 122-5, 150 Structuralism, 33, 102, 103-5, 122 Structure, poetic, concepts of, 47, 124, 144 Sutton, Walter, 34, 155 Swinburne, A. Ch., 41 Symbolic form, concepts of, 12, 15, 57, 60, 65, 69, 77, 82, 86, 144, 149 Symons, Arthur, 40 Sklovskij, Viktor, 14, 17-21, 23-4, 26-8, 32-3, 39, 44, 57, 60-2, 66, 67-72, 73, 74-5, 76-7, 90, 94, 100, 122-3, 130-1, 136-7, 148, 155 Tate, Allen, 35, 38,42, 46-7, 48-9, 61-3, 78n, 80, 82-4, 86, 95-6, 105, 108-9, 126,131-2, 135, 141,142-3,144,1478, 155 Tennyson, Alfred, 80 Textual explication, concepts of, 51, 109, 122, 126-9, 141, 147 Texture, poetic, concept of, 47, 56, 80, 82

160

INDEX

Tjutöev, Fedor, 73, 100, 102, 138 Todorov, Tzvetan, 28, 102n, 103, 104-5, 108, 122, 150n, 155 Tolstoj, Lev, 27, 28, 68-9 Tomaäevskij, Boris, 14, 29-30, 32, 57, 88, 109, 117, 121, 147, 155 Trans-rational language (zautri), concept of, 22, 31, 71-3 Tretjakovskij, Vasilij, 138 Trnka, B., 31, 92-3, 155 Trockij, Leon, 13, 31, 62, 66, 155 Troubetzkoy, N. S., 19, 31, 88 Turgenev, Ivan, 120 Tynjanov, Jurij, 23, 26, 28, 32-3, 37, 64, 69-71, 74, 77, 86-90, 93, 97-103, 1056, 122, 136, 147, 150, 156 Urban, Wilbur, 43, 69, 73, 75, 148, 156 Vachek, Josef, 31n, 93n, 155-6 Van Tieghem, Philippe, 156 Verlaine, Paul, 128, 138 Veselovskij, A. N., 14, 16, 20, 93, 156 Vienna Circle, the, 31, 87, 88, 89, 91, 97, 104-5

Vinogradov, Viktor, 19, 23, 29, 30-1, 32, 33n, 109, 120, 121, 156 Voronskij, A. K., 21 Vossler, Karl, 69n Warren, R. P., 121 Watson, George, 44 Wellek, Rene, 61n, 156 Wilson, Edmund, 83 Wimsatt, W. K„ 17, 45, 56, 95-6, 107-8, 114, 156 Winters, Yvor, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 87-8, 91 Wordsworth, William, 33, 50-1, 140 Wundt, Wilhelm, 69n, 98 Xlebnikov, Velemir, 31, 72-3, 77, 94-7, 156 Yeats, W. B., 141, 143 Zirmunskij, Viktor, 14-5, 24-6, 70-1, 747, 114, 121, 126-9, 130, 156 2ukovskij, Vasilij, 114, 116, 129, 137