Context
From Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language
Gerald L. Bruns
What I wish to come round to, however, as
a way of uncovering the subject of this chapter, is the fact that the
effort to define the literary utterance in terms of its difference from
or even opposition to ordinary speech—and, following from this, the
effort to define the nature of literature in terms of this
difference—is finally an identifiably modern phenomenon, at least in
the sense that such a definition, so far from receiving merely isolated
formulations, itself helps to define the position of a group of writers
who form what we might call the formalist (or perhaps
formalist-structuralist) tradition. Actually, this tradition is
composed, and roughly so, of three groups: the Russian Formalist
critics, who flourished during the second and third decades of this
century; the members of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, or Prague
Structuralists, who dominated European linguistics for nearly a quarter
of a century prior to World War II; and a number of contemporary French
literary critics, whose writings draw not only upon the Russian and
Slavic schools but upon a native formalist tradition whose daimon is Mallermé and whose master is Ferdinand de Saussure. The importance
of this so-called formalist tradition for the understanding of literary
language cannot be too greatly emphasized. Certainly, not since
classical rhetoric has the language of literature received the sort of
systematic attention that these writers have given it. What is more
important, however, is that these writers go far beyond the classical
tradition and tend to make of language a reality that transcends even
the reality of literature itself. Broadly speaking, the
achievement of Russian Formalist criticism lies in the development of
two related concepts: the so-called principle of perceptible form, and
the idea of the functional or structural significance of literary
content. These concepts received their earliest and perhaps most
important formulation in two studies by Viktor Shklovsky, Voskresenie slova [The Resurrection of the Word] (1914), a work composed to provide a theoretical ground for certain
experiments in verse attempted by a number of Russian Futurist poets,
and "Iskusstvo kak priëm [Art as Technique]" (1917), which is perhaps
the central document among those treatises composed between 1916 and
1919 by members of Opojaz, the Society for the Study of Poetic
Language, which Shklovsky helped to organize in 1914. Shklovsky’s
argument in these studies turns upon a distinction between
"automatized" and aesthetic forms of perception. "If we start to
examine the general laws of perception," he writes in "Art as
Technique," "we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes
automatic." Our daily lives, that is to say, are composed of repeated
and unnumerable encounters with the world, such that our perception of
the world in these encounters tends to become less than fully
conscious. Indeed, so habituated do we become to the presence of the
world, so familiar do we become with our environment and all that it
contains, that we fall into what Shklovsky calls an " ‘algebraic’
method of thought," according to which the world comes to be perceived
not as a world of objects but as a world of ciphers and outlines: Over
and against a life of prose perception, however, lies the world of art,
which "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." As it happens, however, Shklovsky is less concerned
with the end or purpose of art than with the way art accomplishes this
purpose; that is, he is concerned principally with the technique of art, whose function "is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged." Shklovsky’s discussion here takes a subtle but important
turn. The rediscovery of objects in their sensible form is made
possible through the process of defamiliarization, but for
Shklovsky this process transforms perception into a kind of
transcendent activity. Art itself, however much it may help us to
"recover the sensation of life," remains altogether unworldly. Or,
again, if art is a medium for an authentic perception of the world, it
paradoxically renders perception an intransitive act, precisely
to the extent that "the process of perception is an aesthetic end in
itself." Indeed, Shklovsky emphasizes this point by condensing it into
a formula: "Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." It
is worth inquiring here into the meaning of the word "artfulness." In
the French edition of Russian Formalist critical essays, Theorie de la littérature, Tzvetan Todorov translates Shklovsky’s formula as follows: "L’art est un moyen d’éprouver le devenir de l’object, ce qui est déjà ‘devenu’ n’importe pas pour l’art." Art is a way of experiencing the "becoming" of an object, which is to say its formation. We shall see in a moment the preeminence which this concept of the
experience of formation has in the poetics of Paul Valéry. In
Shklovsky’s case, the point to observe is that the process of
defamiliarization is one by which the object is lifted out of the field
of ordinary or prose perception and placed within a network of
relationships that constitutes the work of art. What is important to
understand, however, is that this is not a simple transposition but a
transformation of the object—indeed, a reconstitution of the object as
a formal element that has its own special function within the total
structure of the work. From one point of view, of course, the object
exists in the work as an image of what exists in the world of
experience, but against this view Shklovsky stands firmly opposed. His
essay is in part a polemic against the mimetic theory of art, or
against any theory which takes the image to be the basic constituent of
the work. For Shklovsky, the meaning of an image is not to be derived
from its relation to a world of objects; its meaning lies rather in its
relation to the work as a whole, in which it functions as a structural
device, a technique of formation, not as an instance of
representation. Accordingly, he observes that "poets are much more
concerned with arranging images than with creating them," for it is not
the content of images that is of principal significance but rather the
system of relationships into which they are organized. To the
extent, therefore, that imagery in a work of art assumes a formal
rather than strictly referential intelligibility, the act of perception
enters an unfamiliar and, on the face of it, hardly intelligible world.
For the meaning of the work must assume, on this basis, a problematical
character. As Shklovsky puts it, "The meaning of a work broadens to the
extent that artfulness and artistry diminish." Now it is upon this
axiom—this idea of the opposition between form and meaning—that
Shklovsky balances his conception of poetic language. For Shklovsky,
meaning is a function of the prose utterance: it is a process of
abstracting the known from the perceived—of recognizing the "essences"
of words as distinct from their sensible form. The function of the
poetic utterance, by contrast, is to disrupt this process of
abstraction. "The language of poetry," Shklovsky says, "is . . .
difficult, roughened, impeded language." Or, again, "We can define
poetry as attenuated, torturous speech. Poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech—economical, easy, proper, the goddess of prose [dea prosae]
is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the ‘direct’ expression
of the child." The point is that our experience of language, quite as
much as our experience of the world, is habitual and to that extent
tends to be automatized. But poetry is a use of language which is not
automatized, because it is a deviation from the norm, or from that
system of expectations which supervises the use of language in everyday
speech. Poetry is defamiliarized language, whose formations, so far
from being simply formations of meaning, are aesthetic structures—a
system, that is to say, of intransitive relations. The
implication here, of course, is that in poetry the aesthetic experience
is finally an experience of language itself. It is this idea of poetry
which was taken up and developed on a systematic basis by the Prague
Structuralists, who extended the traditional theory of linguistic
functions or purposes (referential, conative, emotive) so as to include
those utterances in which language is used intransitively. In place of
Shklovsky’s ambiguous distinction between prose utterances and poetic
speech (that is, between "tortured" and "easy" discourse), the Prague
Structuralists, particularly Bohuslav Havránek and Jan Mukarovsky´,
formulated a distinction between those utterances in which language is
"automatized" according to the economy of everyday speech, and those in
which language is "foregrounded." Foregrounding, according to Havránek,
is "the use of the devices of the language in such a way that this use
itself attracts attention and is perceived as uncommon, as deprived of
automatization, as deautomatized, such as a live poetic metaphor (As
opposed to a lexicalized one, which is automatized)." Thus, for
example, Noam Chomsky’s happy line, "Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously," is a foregrounded utterance. Although, as it happens, the
sentence is perfectly grammatical—Chomsky composed it to show that
meaning is not a necessary effect of "grammaticalness"—it is afflicted
or, like many lines of poetry, blessed with a dissonance between
lexicon and syntax that renders it impervious to whatever effort we may
make to impose an interpretation upon it. The structure of words by
which Chomsky’s utterance is constituted occupies, that is to say, that
"foreground" of the utterance that is ordinarily the special domain of
meaning. The idea of foregrounding is not only important as a
linguistic concept; it pushes linguistics to the brink of a poetics.
According to Mukarovsky´, "The function of poetic language consists in
the maximum foregrounding of the utterance." More than this, "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." Just so, the first
principle of Paul Valéry’s poetics—indeed, the theme which he
relentlessly pursues in almost all of his writings on poetry—is that
"ordinary language is a practical tool. It is constantly solving
immediate problems. Its task is fulfilled when each sentence has been
completely abolished, annulled, and replaced by the meaning.
Comprehension is its end. But on the other hand, poetic usage is
dominated by personal conditions, by a conscious, continuous, and
sustained musical feeling." This "musical feeling" transforms the whole
structure of language, and indeed its whole function, for in poetry
"language is no longer a transitive act, an expedient. On the contrary,
it has its own value, which must remain intact in spite of the
operations of the intellect on the given propositions. Poetic language
must preserve itself, through itself, and remain the same, not to be
altered by the act of intelligence that finds or gives it a meaning."
The poetic act, that is to say, has for its purpose the creation of
what Valéry variously calls "the universe of language," "the musical
universe," or the "poetic state"—a world of words whose intelligibility
is not semantic but formal, in the sense that words no longer function
as differentiations of meaning but as "units of sonority [that] tend to
form clear combinations, successive or simultaneous implications,
series, and interactions," in short a system of pure relations, as
against a system of syntactical relations that one finds in ordinary
linguistic constructions. Like Shklovsky, Valéry thus conceives
the structure of poetic language in terms of an opposition between
meaning and form, but in Valéry’s analysis this opposition provides a
way of describing the peculiar dynamism of poetic speech. For Valéry,
poetry is a system of departures and returns, in which language
functions essentially as a point of repose: Think of a pendulum oscillating between two symmetrical points. Suppose that one of these extremes represents form: the concrete characteristics of language, sound, rhythm, accent, tone, movement—in a word, the Voice in action. Then associate with the other point, the acnode of the
first, all significant values, images and ideas, stimuli of feeling and
memory, virtual impulses and structures of understanding—in short,
everything that makes the content, the meaning of the
discourse. Now observe the effect of poetry on yourselves. You will
find that at each line the meaning produced within you, far from
destroying the musical form communicated to you, recalls it. The living
pendulum that has swung from sound to sense swings back
to its felt point of departure, as though the very sense which is
present to your mind can find no other outlet or expression, no other
answer, than the very music which gave it birth. Understood in
this way, the opposition between meaning and form in poetry is
harmonized—although not, as the axiom that form and content are
indissolubly one would have it, abolished. For poetry thus conceived
becomes a use of language in which a set of semantic components takes
on structural value, or in which a set of semantic components takes on
meaning precisely as it communicates the form by which it is
articulated. This formulation is actually less paradoxical than it
seems. It is true that all utterances, all uses of language, involve in
some sense a synthesis of phonetic and semantic components, but it is
Valéry’s point that in poetry this synthesis is finally of a different
order from the kind ordinarily accomplished in acts of speech. It is a
synthesis achieved on behalf of language itself. Language, of course,
is not simply a system of sounds but a system of signs, but in poetry
these signs no longer function simply in a process of signification but
rather in a process of formation in which phonetic and semantic
components, sound and sense, possess equal value and, so to speak,
become mutually symbolic. They become mutually symbolic, that is, in
the sense that words in poetry not only mean, but that meanings in
poetry refer back to the words themselves, so that, as Valéry puts it,
"at each line the meaning produced within you, far from destroying the
musical form communicated to you, recalls it"—recalls it, thus to
establish it as the very subject of the poem, the very reason for the
being of the poem, which is to say its motivation.
By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only
as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their
entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We
see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it
is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object,
perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not
even leave a first impression. . . . The process of "algebraization,"
the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of
perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper
feature—a number, for example—or else they function as though by
formula and do not even appear in cognition.
All life, in other words, is a life of "prose perception." Things
are known, even as the meanings of words are gleaned from an utterance
in prose; but things are not perceived: they are like words which
disappear before the meanings they transmit. To put it another way, our
world is a world of essences abstracted from a sensible landscape. So
automatic is this process of abstraction that the world of things no
longer registers upon our senses. "And so life is reckoned as nothing,"
Shklovsky goes on to say, and, in a wonderful aperçu, he adds: "Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war."
