Russian Formalism
Both American and Russian Formalists were concerned to
examine what was specifically literary about a text. As has been noted in the
Introduction to the present volume, defining ‘literariness’ has proved to be
virtually impossible, both because its attributes are not unique and because statements
which are true about all literary works are not, on the whole, very useful.
Early Formalism developed quite independently in America and Russia but it was Russian
Formalism, which flourished during the pre- and post-revolutionary period in
Russia, that had the more far-reaching effects.
As the name suggests, formalism, and especially Russian Formalism,
was more interested in analysis of form, the structure of a text and its use of
language, than in the content. Formalists wanted to establish a scientific
basis for the study of literature. The credo of the early Russian Formalists
was an extreme one: they believed that the human emotions and ideas expressed
in a work of literature were of secondary concern and provided the context only
for the implementation of literary devices. Unlike the New Criticism in
America, they were not interested in the cultural and moral significance of
literature, but wished to explore how various literary devices produced certain
aesthetic effects.
The Three Phases
It has been argued that there are three distinct phases in the
development of Russian Formalism which can be characterised by three metaphors.
The first phase regarded literature as a kind of machine with various devices
and functioning parts; the second phase considered it to be more like an
‘organism’; and the third phase saw literary texts as ‘systems.’ Particularly
influential in the early phase of Russian Formalism was Viktor Shklovsky.
Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984)
Shklovsky was the leading light in a group of literary
critics based in St Petersburg and known as ‘Opayaz’. They encouraged experimental
literature and art. Shklovsky’s essay Art as Technique, published in
1917, served as a manifesto for the group. In this essay several concepts were
formulated which are crucial to understanding the philosophical premises of Russian
Formalism. The first of these is ‘habitualisation.’This refers to the fact
that, as we become familiar with things, we no longer really perceive them:
‘…as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.’ Related to this idea
is what Shklovsky called the ‘algebraic’ method of thought. Through ‘habitualisation’we
come to think of things in only the most general way and conceive of them only
in ways akin to algebraic symbols. Thus a chair loses its individuality and becomes
just the thing we sit on. We no longer perceive its texture, its sheen, its
precise design etc. This leads to Shklovsky’s third and probably most famous
concept, that of ‘defamiliarisation’ (ostranenie which means literally
‘making strange’).This he considers the main function of art: ‘And art exists
that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things,
to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation
of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’ He then proceeds to
demonstrate how some great writers (Tolstoy and Pushkin) have consciously used
the technique of ‘defamiliarisation.’ It is also in this essay that we find the
famous formulation which makes clear the priorities of Russian Formalist aesthetics:
‘the object is not important.’
Theories of Narrative
Theories of narrative featured prominently in Russian Formalist
thought, especially distinctions between ‘story’ and ‘plot.’ This was not, of
course, new in the theory of literature. The distinction goes back at least to
Aristotle, for whom plot (mythos) or ‘the arrangement of the incidents’ was
clearly different to the story on which it was based. The time sequence of
events in a Greek tragedy, for example, is clearly different to that of the
events it relates. Usually the tragedy starts with a report of what happened before
and then the audience is plunged into the middle of events (in medias res),
with occasional references back to earlier stages in the story.
Boris Tomashevski developed further a concept that Shklovsy
had first formulated in his essay on the English author Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy. The basic material of the story was termed fabula.
Tomashevski contrasted this with suzhet, the story as it is actually
told. One fabula can provide material for many suzhet, a notion which
was taken up by later formalists and was also to provide a link with
structuralism. These formalist distinctions are not essentially a reformulation
of Aristotelian concepts because the Russian Formalists conceived the effects
and purposes of suzhet differently to those of Aristotle’s mythos.
For Aristotle, plot had to be plausible, have a degree of inevitability and
provide insight into the human condition. For the Russian Formalists, on the other
hand, the function of plot was to defamiliarise what we are observing, to make
us aware of the artificiality of the process of literary creation.
The Russian Formalists also had an idiosyncratic notion of
‘motivation’, using the concept not with the meaning of ‘intention, or
purpose’, but in relation to the structural concept of a ‘motif ’. Tomashevski
was the one to elucidate the distinction. It is a unit of construction: the smallest
unit of a plot, a single statement, or action, for example. Tomashevski
distinguished between ‘bound’ and ‘free’ motifs. A ‘bound’ motif is
necessitated by the original story (for example, the pact with Mephistopheles
in Goethe’s Faust) but a ‘free’ motif is not necessary in the same way.
It is part of the artifice of the work (for example, Goethe’s decision to set
the scene with a ‘Prologue in Heaven’ at the beginning of his play). The term
‘motif ’ came about because the Russian Formalists perceived the ideas and
themes of a work as secondary, as motivations (in the more usual sense) for the
literary devices. They argued that a constant awareness of the distinction
between ‘bound’ and ‘free’ motifs is necessary because, when an unfamiliar
device or ‘free’ motif is included, it serves for a while to make us aware of
the artificiality of the text but eventually it too becomes familiar or
conventional. For example, when playing with the time sequence became the norm,
both in literature and in the cinema, then that device could no longer have a
defamiliarising effect.
Jan Mukařovský
Jan Mukařovský is usually categorised among the
structuralists but his roots are in Russian Formalist thought and he is
certainly a significant transitional figure. He was a member of the Prague
Linguistic Circle, founded in 1926. He developed Shklovsky’s concept of
‘defamiliarisation’ more systematically, using the term ‘foregrounding’ instead.
He defines this as ‘the aesthetically intentional distortion of the literary
components’. For Mukařovský, ‘foregrounding’ has the effect of ‘automatizing’
other aspects of the text in close proximity to it. That is to say, it makes us
no longer sensitive to them. The other objects have become, to use Shklovsky’s
terminology again, overfamiliar to us. The term ‘foregrounding’ clearly comes from
the visual arts (painting and photography providing the clearest examples).
Through focusing (by means of perspective or adjustment of lens) upon figures
or events in the front (‘foreground’) of a picture, the ‘background’ is not subjected
to our conscious attention. ‘Defamiliarisation’ makes what is familiar appear
strange only but ‘foregrounding’ reveals the whole work to be a complicated and
interrelated structure. It is not surprising, therefore, that the concept was
taken up by more explicitly structuralist theorists. It can be compared to the
notion of the ‘dominant’ developed by Roman Jakobson.
Mukařovský, unlike earlier Russian Formalists, did not consider
the object, of which a literary work was a treatment, to be of secondary
interest. Indeed, he emphasized the dynamic tension between literature and
society in the creation of literature. He argued also that an object can have several
functions. Often the aesthetic function is just one of many. A simple and
obvious example is that a church can be both a place of worship and a work of
art. A speech can be political or legal rhetoric and also a work of art. (Arguably,
this is the case with many of Winston Churchill’s and certainly it is so with
several in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.) What is considered to be art
changes in close relation to the tastes and preferences of a given society. In Aesthetic
Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936), Mukařovský argued that
aesthetic function cannot exist in isolation from its place and time, nor
without considering the person evaluating it. He distinguished between the ‘material
object’, the actual book or other physical object, and the ‘aesthetic object’,
which can exist only in the mind of the person who interprets the ‘material
object’.
The Bakhtin School
The attribution of several important works to Mikhail Bakhtin
is disputed. Three theorists worked closely together and precise attribution
may never be obtained. The three associates were Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev
and Valentin Volosinov. As a student and teacher in the 1920s, Bakhtin began to
take a critical stance against Russian Formalism but the ideas of the three may
be considered formalist in their interest in the linguistic structure of
literary works. Also, the three men believed in the social nature of language
and reveal clear influence of Marxist thought. But they differed from orthodox Marxists
in their assumptions about the relationship between language and ideology. For
them, ideology is not a reflex of socio-economic conditions but is conditioned by
the medium through which it manifests itself: language. And language is a
material reality. The meanings of words change according to the different
social and historical situations in which they are used. Multiple meanings are
in fact the normal condition of language (‘heteroglossia’).The reflection of
social interaction (in the novel, for instance) reveals this ‘heteroglossia’.
The novel which embodies a single authorial voice is, in fact, a distortion of
natural language, imposing unity of vision where naturally there is none. The
monologue has always been an unnatural genre.
Bakhtin, in particular, developed these ideas in relation to
literary texts, principally in three works: Problems of Dostoievsky’s Art,
the revised version Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963) and Rabelais
and his World (1966). He argued that all language artakes of the nature of dialogue. Every
speech is inspired by a previous utterance and expects a future response. And
the language always seems to encourage reflection on its own nature. In this
respect, Bakhtin is still essentially a formalist. In From the Prehistory of
Novelistic Discourse (probably written in 1940 but first published in
Russia in 1967) he wrote: ‘To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a
dialogized system made up of the images of “languages”, styles and consciousnesses
that are concrete but inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only
represents, but itself serves as the object of representation. Novelistic discourse
is always criticizing itself.’
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)
Roman Jakobson was a bridge between Russian Formalism and
Structuralism. He was a founder member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and all
his writings reveal the centrality of linguistic theory in his thought and
especially the influence of Saussure (see chapter 3). He was also an enthusiastic
supporter of experimental poets. In 1920, he moved to Czechoslovakia and helped
to found the influential Prague Linguistic Circle. With the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1939, he left the country and finally settled in the USA in 1941.
Apart from his linguistic research Jakobson gained respect
for his very precise linguistic analyses of classic works of literature. He and
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, were also colleagues at the New
School of Social Research in New York from 1941.They collaborated on an
analysis of Baudelaire’s poem Les Chats, which not only became famous as
a typical structuralist analysis but also drew much negative criticism. Jakobson
attempted the daunting task of trying to define ‘literariness’ in linguistic
terms. His paper Linguistics and Poetics, delivered at a conference in
1958 and published as Style in Language in 1960, provides the clearest
expression of his ideas on the topic. Even when we transpose a work of
literature, he argues, from one medium to another (eg a novel into a film, an
epic into a comic book) certain structural features are preserved, ‘despite the
disappearance of their verbal shape’. Many features of a work are not limited
to the language in which it is expressed. The ‘truth value’ of a work, for example,
or its significance as a myth are obviously ‘extralinguistic entities’. Such
aspects ‘exceed the bounds of poetics and of linguistics in general’.
It would seem that Jakobson is here going beyond a purely
formalist approach but, while revealing his awareness of such dimensions, he is
firm in restricting himself to the purely linguistic: ‘…no manifesto, foisting
a critic’s own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute
for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art.’ Another idea of his which
proved to be especially relevant to modern literary theory was the postulation
of two fundamental poles of organising discourse that can be traced in every
kind of cultural product: metaphor and metonymy. This idea was developed as a
result of investigating the mental disorder of aphasia (expounded at length in Fundamentals
of Language, 1956, which he published together with Morris Halle). In the
sentence ‘The ship crossed the sea’, the sentence can be made metaphorical by
selecting a different verb, for example by comparing the motion of the ship to
that of a plough (‘The ship ploughed the sea’). Metonymy is the use of an attribute
of something to suggest the whole thing. For example, deepness can suggest the
sea (‘The ship crossed the deep’). Metaphor depends on the combination of things
not necessarily associated or contiguous, whereas metonymy utilises closely
associated attributes.
This led Jakobson to make some interesting characterizations
of different literary schools according to their positions on the
metaphor-metonymy axis: ‘The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary
schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it
is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which
underlies and actually predetermines the so-called “realistic” trend, which
belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the
rise of symbolism and is opposed to both.’
Jakobson developed the concepts of ‘defamiliarisation’ and ‘foregrounding’
further to characterise whole schools of critical and literary thought. In the
dynamic system of a work of literature elements are structured in relation to each
other as foreground and background. A foregrounded element was referred to by the
later Russian Formalists as ‘the dominant.’ Jakobson regarded ‘the dominant’ as
one of the most important late formalist concepts. He defined it as ‘the
focusing component of a work of art; it rules, determines and transforms the
remaining components’. Literary forms change and develop as a result of a ‘shifting
dominant’. He believed that the literary theory (or poetics) of a particular
period might be governed by a ‘dominant’ which derives from a non-literary
system. For example, the theory of Renaissance poetry was derived from the
visual arts and that of Realism from verbal art. The basic elements of the
system do not change (plot, diction, syntax etc) but the functions of the
elements do.
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