Context
Form and Material in Art
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Shklovsky was a leader of the
Russian Formalist movement in the early 1920s. His work has had lasting
influence on literary theory. “Form and Material in Art,” which
appeared originally in pamphlet form in 1923, gives a concise account
of the Formalist position. It is usually thought to be
obvious that every artist wishes to express something, to recount
something, and that this “something” is called the content of a work.
And the means by which this “something” is expressed—words, images,
meter in verse, color and line in a painting—are called the form of the
work. Nearly everybody distinguishes between these two aspects
of every work of art. People who want art to be of direct benefit to
humanity usually say that in art the most important thing is content,
i.e., what is said in it. The so-called aesthetes, lovers of
the beautiful, say that for them the important thing in art is “not
what, but how,” i.e., the main thing is form. Now let us calmly
attempt, without becoming involved in this dispute, to look detachedly
upon the object of the dispute. The problem concerns works of art. Let us begin with an analysis of musical compositions. Music A
musical composition consists of a series of sounds of different pitch
and different timbre, i.e., of sounds high and low following one after
the other. These sounds are combined into groups; the groups bear a
certain relationship to one another. Besides this, there is nothing in
a musical composition. Now what have we found in it? We have found, not
form and content, but rather material and form, i.e., sounds and the
disposition of sounds. Of course there may be people who say that in
music there is also content, namely a sad or a gay mood. But there are
facts which show that there is contained in a musical composition
neither sadness nor joy, that such feelings are not the essence of
music, and that its creators set no store by them. Hanslick, a famous
student of the theory of music, cites the example of how Bach wrote
indecent couplets to music which he had composed for psalms; the music
was just as suitable for the couplets. On the other hand, it is by no
means rare for many sects to use dance tunes for their hymns. Moreover,
to do this they had to overcome the traditional connection of these
tunes with the normal circumstances of their performances. This is why Kant defined music as pure form, i.e., denied the existence of so-called content in it. Painting Now
let us look at the so-called graphic arts. This name is inaccurate and
does not cover all phenomena involved. Decorative art obviously depicts
nothing. But in European art at least the graphic arts usually depict
the so-called external world, scenes of work, pictures of men and wild
animals. Scarcely anyone will dispute this, and moreover, we know from
the artists themselves that when they paint flowers or grass or a cow,
they are not interested in whether these have any practical use, but
only in how they appear, i.e., in color and line. For the artist the
external world is not the content of a picture, but material for a
picture. The famous Renaissance artist Giotto says: “A picture
is—primarily—a conjunction of colored planes.” The Impressionists
painted things as though they saw them without understanding—only as
spots of color. They perceived the world as if they had just suddenly
awakened. This is how the Russian “Itinerant” artist Kramskoy defined
the effect made on him by the Impressionists’ pictures. Another
realistic painter, Surikov, used to say that the “idea” of his famous
picture “The Boyar’s Wife, Morozova” occurred to him when he saw a
jackdaw on the snow. For him this picture was primarily “black on
white.” To anticipate a little, I will say that Surikov’s picture is
not merely the development of his impression of a color contrast; in
this picture we encounter a great many heterogeneous elements,
particularly in relation to meaning, but even meanings are used as
material for artistic construction. Thanks to such an attitude
toward “representation,” there is in art an inclination to transform
depiction, so-called organic forms, e.g., the outlines of a flower, a
wild animal, grass, a ram’s horn (as in Buryat designs), into an
ornament—a design which no longer represents anything. . . . All rug
designs, in particular the designs on Persian rugs, are the result of
just such a transformation of organic form into purely artistic form. This
transformation cannot be explained by religious prohibition (Islam
avoids depiction out of “dread of idolatry”), since there exist, during
all stages in the development of Persian tapestry, rugs depicting
entire scenes involving people and animals. This shocks nobody. We have
Persian miniatures which, it would seem, were influenced just as much
by religious prohibitions as tapestry. On the other hand, we know that
in Greece, where there were no religious prohibitions of this kind, a
geometrical style developed (there is a vase in this style in the
Petersburg Hermitage), and during this phase the way the human body was
depicted vividly recalls the rendering of stylized deer in tapestry. The
entire history of written languages illustrates the struggle between
the ornamental principle and the representative principle. It
is, moreover, curious to note that written languages at the first
stages of their existence, and among many peoples, even to the present
day (Turks, Persians), fulfilled decorative purposes. The
divorce of the letter or ideograph from its conventional function is a
result not only of the technique, but also of the stylization of
writing. . . . The letter is an ornament. The artist clings to
depiction, to the world, not in order to create a world, but rather to
utilize complex and rewarding material in his art. This break with
representation, this transformation of picture into calligraphy, occurs
more than once in the history of art, but artists have always returned
to representation. But the artist needs the world for his
picture. There is a Greek anecdote about an artist: people came up to
him at an exhibition and asked him to remove the cloth from his
painting. “I cannot do that,” said the artist. “My painting depicts a
painting covered with a cloth.” In analyzing a painting, people who
wish to go beyond its limits, who talk about demons in connection with
Picasso, about war in connection with all of cubism, who wish to
decipher paintings like a rebus, want to deprive a painting of its form
in order to see it better. Paintings are not at all windows onto another world—they are things. Literature It is in literature that the view of the separation between form and content seems most plausible. And
in fact, a great many people suppose that the poet possesses a specific
thought, a thought about God, for example, and expounds this thought in
words. These words may be beautiful, and then we say that the
work’s form, sound-form or image-form, is beautiful. This is what most
people think about form and content in literature. But first of
all it cannot be affirmed that there is content in every work of art,
since we know that in the first stages of its development poetry
possessed no precise content. For instance, the songs of the
Indians in British Guiana consist of the exclamation: “Heya, heya.” The
songs of the Patagonians, the Papuans, and certain North American
tribes are also senseless. Poetry appeared before content. The
singer’s task was not to render in words some thought or other, but to
devise a series of sounds possessing a definite relationship one to
another, which is called form. These sounds should not be confused with
sounds in music. They have not only an acoustic but also an articulated
form: they are produced by the singer’s vocal organs. Perhaps in a
primitive poem we are dealing not so much with an ejaculation as with
an articulated gesture, a sort of ballet of the speech organs. Even in
modern poetry, the act of speaking it may have, in varying degrees, the
same sensuous effect on us “the sweetness of verses on the lips.”. . . A line of verse quite often appears in the poet’s mind as a definite patch of sound not yet verbalized. . . . Alexander Blok used to tell me about this phenomenon as he had observed it in himself. Victor
Hugo used to say that what was difficult was not finding a rhyme, but
“filling the spaces between rhymes with poetry,” i.e., fitting the
“image” aspect to the already existing sound aspect. In short, the deeper we go into the study of verse, the more complex become the phenomena of form which we discover within it. But
poems are formal throughout and it is unnecessary for us to change our
methods of investigation. What is called the image aspect is also not
intended to be depictive or explanatory. Potebnya’s notion that the image is always simpler than the concept it replaces is absolutely incorrect. There
is a line in one of Tyutchev’s poems saying that flashes of heat
lightning are “like deaf and dumb demons conversing with each other.”
Why is the image of the deaf and dumb demons simpler or more obvious
than the lightning flashes? In erotic poetry we generally find
that erotic objects are designated by various “image” names. The “Song
of Songs” is an extended series of such comparisons. Here we are
dealing not so much with imagery as with what I call “estrangement,” in
the sense of making things strange. We live in a poor and
enclosed world. We no more feel the world in which we live than we feel
the clothes we wear. We fly through the world like Jules Verne
characters, “through outer space in a capsule.” But in our capsule
there are no windows. The Pythagoreans used to say that we do
not hear the music of the spheres because it goes on uninterruptedly.
In the same way those who live by the sea do not hear the noise of the
waves. We do not bear even the words we speak. We speak a pitiful
language of incompletely uttered words. We look one another in the face
but do not see one another. The Renovation of Form In
his diary, Tolstoy wrote ”. . . I dusted off the sofa and couldn’t
remember doing it. . . . So if I did dust it off, I did it
unconsciously. . . . If someone had seen it consciously he could have
reconstructed my action. . . . And our entire life, lived through
unconsciously, is all as if it had never been.” Perhaps mankind
began using reason too early. With its reason it jumped forward out of
turn, like a soldier from the ranks, and began running amok. We
live as if coated with rubber. We must recover the world. Perhaps all
the horror (which is little felt) of our days, the Entente, the war,
Russia, can be explained by our lack of feeling for the world, by the
absence of an extensive art. The purpose of the image is to call an
object by a new name. To do this, to make the object an artistic fact,
it must be abstracted from among the facts of life. We must
first of all “shake up” things. . . . We must rip things from their
ordinary sequence of associations. Things must be turned over like logs
in a fire. . . . The poet removes the labels from things. . . .
Things rebel, casting off their old names and taking on a new aspect
together with their new names. The poet brings about a semantic
dislocation, he snatches the concept out of the sequence in which it is
usually found and transfers it with the aid of the word (the trope) to
another meaning-sequence. And now we have a sense of novelty at finding
the object in a fresh sequence. This is one of the ways of
making things tangible. In the image we have the object, the
recollection of its former name, its new name, and the associations
connected with the new name. . . . One device in modern
artistic prose is very curious. To create an unusual perception of
things in modern prose there is a widely used device which has never
been described and which I would define as the “recurrent image.” In
Russian literature it is represented by Dostoevsky, Rozanov, Andrei
Bely, Zamyatin and also by the Serapion brothers. It consists in using
a certain word (usually such a word is “orchestrated” by means of
repetition or else an exotic word is chosen) and then equating all the
other matter in the work of art to this word. . . . Andrei Bely in his reminiscences of Blok (Epopeya,
Book Two) notes that Merezhkovsky wore shoes with pompons on them.
These “pompons” rapidly come to define Merezhkovsky’s entire life. He
speaks with pompons, he thinks with pompons, etc. In this case we seem
to have a certain mechanization of the imagery device. The word
deprived of sense is constantly associated with a number of other
words, which are thus removed from the way they are usually perceived.
I cannot trace the history of this device outside Russian literature,
but I think that perhaps Dostoevsky borrowed it from Dickens, who was a
great devotee of it. In Little Dorrit the governess Mrs.
General advises the young ladies in her charge, to give a pretty shape
to their lips, to constantly pronounce “prunes and prisms.” For Dickens these “prunes and prisms” soon become a distinct condition of the newly rich Dorrits’ life. Dickens writes of “the heaps of prunes and prisms” which had filled the Dorrits’ life to overflowing. In Our Mutual Friend the same use is made of the conversations about lime, with which at
first the detectives concealed their real intentions, but which later
became for them a sort of game. . . . It seems clear to me that
for a writer words are not at all a sad necessity, not just a means by
which something is said, but are rather the very material of the work.
Literature is created from words and takes advantage of the laws by
which they are governed. It is true that in a work of
literature we also have the expression of ideas, but it is not a
question of ideas clothed in artistic form, but rather artistic form
created from ideas as its material. In verse, rhyme is opposed
to rhyme, the sounds of one word are connected by repetitions with the
sounds of another word and form the sound-aspect of the poem. In parallelism, image is opposed to image and forms the image-aspect of the work. In
the novel, thought is opposed to thought, or one group of characters to
another, and this constitutes the meaning-form of the work. Thus in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the Karenin-Vronsky group is opposed to the Kitty-Levin group. It
was this that entitled Tolstoy to say that he had no use for “those
sweet and clever little fellows who fish out individual ideas from a
work,” and that “if I had wanted to say in one word everything that the
novel was intended to express, then I should have had to write the
novel all over again, and if my critics understand it and can put down
in a review everything I meant, then I congratulate them and can say
without hesitation that they are capable of much more than I.” In
a work of literature it is not the idea that is important but the way
ideas are combined. Again I quote from Tolstoy: “the combination itself
is made not by means of thought (I think), but by something else, and
it is impossible to express directly the basis for this combination. It
can, however, be expressed indirectly by the description of images,
actions, situations in words.” Consequently, the ideas in a
literary work do not constitute its content but rather its material,
and in their combination and interrelations with other aspects of the
work they create its form.
