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
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:
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."
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.
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