FORMALISMS
Introduction
L
L
iterary critics and thinkers of various historical periods have placed emphasis on
the formal aspects of art and literature. Aristotle, ancient and medieval rhetoricians,
Kant, many of the Romantics, and writers in the nineteenth-century movements
of symbolism and aestheticism all placed a high priority on literary form. This
emphasis reached a new intensity and self-consciousness in the literatures and critical
theories of the early twentieth century, beginning with the Formalist movement in
Russia and with European modernism, extending subsequently to the New Criticism
in England and America and later schools such as the neo-Aristotelians. In general, an
emphasis on form parenthesizes concern for the representational, imitative, and cognitive
aspects of literature. Literature is no longer viewed as aiming to represent reality or
character or to impart moral or intellectual lessons, but is considered to be an object
in its own right, autonomous (possessing its own laws) and autotelic (having its aims
internal to itself ). Moreover, in this formalist view, literature does not convey any clear
or paraphrasable message; rather it communicates what is otherwise ineffable. Literature
is regarded as a unique mode of expression, not an extension of rhetoric or philosophy
or history or social or psychological documentary. Critics have variously theorized that
preoccupation with form betokens social alienation, a withdrawal from the world, an
acknowledgment of political helplessness, and a retreat into the aesthetic as a refuge of
sensibility and humanistic values. Such an insular disposition also betokens a retreat
from history and biography, effectively isolating the literary artifact from both broad
social forces and the more localized and personal circumstances of its author.
Russian Formalism
Along with movements in futurism and symbolism, the Russian Formalists were a
group of writers who flourished during the period of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
formalisms
The Formalists and the futurists were active in the fierce debates of this era concerning art
and its connections with ideology. The Formalists and futurists found a common
platform in the journal LEF (Left Front of Art). The Formalists, focusing on artistic
forms and techniques on the basis of linguistic studies, had arisen in pre-revolutionary
Russia but now saw their opposition to traditional art as a political gesture, allying
them somewhat with the revolution. However, all of these groups were attacked by the
most prominent Soviet theoreticians, such as Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1937),
Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), and Voronsky, who decried the attempt to break
completely with the past and what they saw as a reductive denial of the social and
cognitive aspects of art. V. N. Volosinov and Bakhtin later attempted to harmonize
the two sides of the debate, viz., formal linguistic analysis and sociological emphasis,
by treating language itself as the supreme ideological phenomenon, as the very site
of ideological struggle. Other groups, called “Bakhtin Circles,” formed around this
enterprise.
There were two schools of Russian Formalism. The Moscow Linguistic Circle, led by
Roman Jakobson, was formed in 1915; this group also included Osip Brik and Boris
Tomashevsky. The second group, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz),
was founded in 1916, and its leading figures included Victor Shklovsky, Boris
Eichenbaum, and Yuri Tynyanov. Other important critics associated with these movements
included Leo Jakubinsky and the folklorist Vladimir Propp.
It should be said that the Russian Formalists’ emphasis on form and technique was
different in nature from that of the later New Critics. The Formalists’ analyses were far
more theoretical, seeking to understand the general nature of literature and literary
devices, as well as the historical evolution of literary techniques; the New Critics were
more concerned with the practice (rather than the theory) of close reading of individual
texts. Though Russian Formalism as a school was eclipsed with the rise of
Stalin and the official Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism, its influence was transmitted
through figures such as Jakobson and Tzvetan Todorov to their own structuralist
analyses and those of writers such as Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette. Even
reception theorists such as Hans Robert Jauss have drawn upon Shklovsky’s notion of
defamiliarization.
Victor Shklovsky (1893–1984)
Having studied at the University of St. Petersburg in Russia, Shklovsky became a
founding member of one of the two schools of Russian Formalism, the Society for
the Study of Poetic Language, formed in 1916. His essay “Art as Technique” (1917)
was one of the central statements of formalist theory. Like others in his group, he was
denounced by Leon Trotsky for his formalist views.
It is in “Art as Technique”1 that Shklovsky introduces one of the central concepts
of Russian Formalism: that of defamiliarization. As our normal perceptions become
habitual, they become automatic and unconscious: in everyday speech, for example,
we leave phrases unfinished and words half-expressed. Shklovsky sees this as symptomatic
of a process of “algebraization” which infects our ordinary perceptions: “things
part viii: the twentieth century
are replaced by symbols”; we fail to apprehend the object, which “fades and does not
leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten.”
It is this process of algebraization or over-automatization of an object which permits
the greatest economy of perceptive effort, whereby objects are reduced to one salient
feature or function as though by formula (11).
Shklovsky quotes Tolstoy as saying that “the whole complex of lives of many people
go on unconsciously . . . such lives are as if they had never been.” Hence habituation
can devour work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. It is against this
background of ordinary perception in general that art assumes its significance: “art
exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to
make the stone stony . . . The technique of art 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. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (12).
Shklovsky even goes on to say that the meaning of a work of art broadens to the
extent that artfulness diminishes. Using Tolstoy as an example, he illustrates the ways
in which art removes objects from the automatism of perception. One of these is
a refusal to name the familiar object; another is to describe situations from an
unusual point of view, such as that of a horse; Shklovsky claims that defamiliarization
“is found almost everywhere form is found.” Art’s purpose is not to make us perceive
meaning but to create a specific perception of the object: “it creates a ‘vision’ of the
object instead of serving as a means for knowing it” (13–18). Shklovsky views the language
of poetry as a “roughened” language, which impedes and slows down perception.
The object is perceived not in its extension in space but in its continuity
(22). However, Shklovsky acknowledges that ordinary speech and poetic language
can often change places and metamorphose into each other. Should disordering of
rhythm become a convention, it would be ineffective as a device for the roughening of
language (24).
Hence Shklovsky’s formalism can possibly accommodate cultural change and the
relative status of radical innovation. But it is unclear to what extent his view of art as
transforming the perception of an object may have epistemological implications. For
example, if art represents the stone as stony, this surely implies that the quality of
stoniness is somehow an objective attribute which has faded from recognition owing to
automatism. But, to rediscover an attribute which convention has ignored is not necessarily
to offer a new perception; nor, for that matter, could such a recovery be formalistically
divorced from the meaning of the object.
Boris Eichenbaum (1886–1959)
Like Shklovsky, Eichenbaum was one of the leaders of the Russian Formalist group
known as the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916. Like others of
his school, Eichenbaum was denounced by Trotsky, and wrote an important essay,
“The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ ” (1926, 1927), expounding the evolution of the
central principles of the formalist method.
formalisms
Origins of Formalism and the Science of Literature
Eichenbaum begins by stating that formalism is “characterized only by the attempt to
create an independent science of literature which studies specifically literary material.”
And it is formalism’s insistence on “empirical study” which comprised its most significant
“quarrel with the old traditions.”2 The chief characteristic of the Formalists, says
Eichenbaum, was their rejection of all “ready-made aesthetics and general theories”
(103–104).
Eichenbaum observes that, before the appearance of formalism, literary analysis had
been the province of academic research, marked by antiquated and unscientific aesthetic
and psychological attitudes. However, there was almost no struggle between formalism
and this theoretical heritage of conventional Russian scholars such as Alexander Potebnya
(1835–1891) and Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906). Instead, another avant-garde group
of theorists and writers, the symbolists, had appropriated literary-critical discourse,
transposing it from the academy to the journals. The symbolists, drawing inspiration
from their French precursors, had tried to revitalize Russian literature by emphasizing
aestheticism, the value of art for its own sake, and adopted an impressionistic and
highly subjective mode of criticism. It was at this juncture that the Formalists entered
the debate: they opposed the symbolists “in order to wrest poetics from their hands –
to free it from its ties with their subjective philosophical and aesthetic theories and to
direct it toward the scientific investigation of facts” (106).
According to Eichenbaum, the Formalists were aware that “history demanded . . .
a really revolutionary attitude . . . Hence our Formalist movement was characterized
by a new passion for scientific positivism – a rejection of philosophical assumptions, of
psychological and aesthetic interpretations, etc. Art, considered apart from philosophical
aesthetics and ideological theories, dictated its own position on things. We had to turn
to facts and, abandoning general systems and problems, to begin ‘in the middle,’ with
the facts which art forced upon us. Art demanded that we approach it closely; science,
that we deal with the specific” (106). It is clear from these lines that the ideology
behind formalism was positivism, an attempt to emulate the models and methods of
what is perceived as “science,” an attempt to focus on immediately given empirical
data rather than on general schemes or theories for uniting and understanding such
isolated information. It is hardly surprising that the spokesmen of the official Russian
aesthetic saw such a posture as reductive, tearing art from its historical and political
contexts, denying its ideological function, and attempting to view it as an independent,
autonomous domain. In the context of early twentieth-century Russia, Eichenbaum
evidently sees this strategy as revolutionary, as attempting to free art from serving
ideological and political ends.
The Independent Value of Poetic Sound
In impugning previous approaches to literature, says Eichenbaum, the Formalists sought
to isolate the study of literature from “secondary, incidental features” that might
belong to philosophy, psychology, or history (107). And it is this isolation that makes
the study of literature scientific. Eichenbaum quotes Roman Jakobson’s affirmation
that the “object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness – that is,
part viii: the twentieth century
that which makes a given work a work of literature” (107). Hence, says Eichenbaum,
instead of looking to these other disciplines, the Formalists focused on linguistics, a
science which borders on poetics and shares material with it.
This focus on linguistics was inspired in part by the studies of the Russian linguist
Leo Jakubinsky, who devised a basic principle of the formalist approach to poetics: the
contrast between poetic and practical language (108). In his essay “On the Sounds of
Poetic Language” (1916), Jakubinsky had argued that practical language contains a
linguistic pattern of sounds and morphological features that “have no independent
value and are merely a means of communication.” But in other linguistic systems, such
as those employed in poetry, the linguistic patterns of these elements “acquire independent
value” (108). A brief example might illustrate Jakubinsky’s claim: if I say to a
friend “There is a strong wind blowing,” my purpose is primarily to communicate
information, perhaps about weather conditions or my reaction to them. And the
various parts of my statement depend on one another for their meaning; they are
not independent. But when the poet Shelley states: “O Wild West Wind, thou breath
of Autumn’s being,” the purpose here is not merely or primarily to communicate a
message: as such, the various elements of this line (such as a consecutive stress on four
syllables, the alliteration of the “w” and “b” sounds) achieve an independence (a kind
of excess) over their merely communicative content. We value the sounds for their
own sake, not merely as they contribute to meaning. As Eichenbaum observes, Shklovsky
had even argued, in his essay “On Poetry and Nonsense” (1916), that “meaninglessness”
was “a phenomenon characteristic of poetry.” According to Shklovsky, “a great
part of the delight of poetry consists in pronunciation, in the independent dance of the
organs of speech” (109). Eichenbaum also cites Osip Brik’s essay “Sound Repetitions”
(1917), which had argued that sounds “are not only euphonious accessories to meaning;
they are also the result of an independent poetic purpose” (111).
The Formalists’ Redefinition of Form
Eichenbaum points out that the fundamental formalist distinction between poetic and
practical language led to the formulation of a whole group of basic questions. Potebnya
and others had presupposed the conventional notion of the harmony of form and
content; the Formalists rejected this notion, whereby form was viewed as an “envelope”
or vessel into which a liquid (the content) is poured. The new, formalist notion
of form required no correlative content; instead of being an envelope, form is viewed
as “a complete thing, something concrete, dynamic, self-contained” (112). Eichenbaum
cites Shklovsky’s definition of artistic or poetic perception as “that perception in which
we experience form” (112). This view represented a break from both symbolism, which
saw content as somehow shining through the form, and aestheticism, which isolated
certain elements of form from content (113). In the formalist view, form is itself
understood as content. The principle of perceptible form, the heightened perception of
form, results from “special artistic techniques which force the reader to experience the
form” (113). Eichenbaum notes that Shklovsky repudiated the principle of artistic
economy, opposing it with the principle of defamiliarization: instead of art abbreviating
and concentrating the process of perception, it should increase “the difficulty and
span of perception” (114). Eichenbaum points out that the major earlier achievements
formalisms
of the Formalists included examining the differing uses of poetic and practical language,
as well as replacing the notion of form (as bound to content) with the notion of
technique, the latter being more closely tied to the features that distinguish poetic and
practical speech (115).
Plot and Literary Evolution
The next phase of formalist studies, as Eichenbaum explains, attempted to move toward
a general theory of verse and the study of narrative plot and specific techniques (115).
He cites Shklovsky’s theory of plot and fiction which identified special devices of plot
construction. Most importantly, Shklovsky rejected the traditional notion of plot as a
combination of motifs (the smallest units of narrative); plot was no longer viewed as
synonymous with “story”; rather, it was viewed as a compositional device rather than a
thematic concept. In other words, plot comprised the distinguishing feature of narrative
art, and as such became an important focus of formalist inquiry (116). The idea of
“motivation” (the rationale behind the use and function of a given device) enabled
Shklovsky to distinguish between “story,” which was merely a “description of events,”
and “plot,” which was a structure. Techniques of plot construction, according to the
Formalists, included parallelism, framing, and the weaving of motifs. The story, on the
other hand, was merely “material for plot formulation,” material which also included
choice of motifs, characters, and themes (119, 122).
The Formalists – again, notably, Shklovsky – also rejected conventional accounts of
the evolution of literary form, such as Veselovsky’s view that “the purpose of new form
is to express new content” (118). Veselovsky’s critical enterprise was ethnographic,
aiming to explain literary devices in terms of their social and cultural backgrounds.
Instead, Shklovsky had argued that the purpose of a new form is “to change an old form
which has lost its aesthetic quality.” This new formula was based on the view propounded
by the German aesthetician Broder Christiansen that art is characterized by
dynamism, by “repeated violations of established rules.” It was also based on an insight
offered by the French writer Ferdinand Brunetière, namely, that the most significant
influence in the history of literature “is the influence of work on work” (118). What is
being argued here is that literature has its own, relatively independent, history, and it
is this history – comprised by the interaction and influence between literary works
themselves, rather than “external” influences of society, morals, or manners – that is
the appropriate object of formalist analysis. Clearly, such a model of literary history
anticipates later theories such as those of Pound and T. S. Eliot; the latter saw works of
literature as forming an “ideal order” among themselves, an order that both influenced
new works and was in turn slightly modified by these new additions. As Eichenbaum
sees it, the Formalists realized that their study of theoretical poetics had to broaden to
include a study of literary history: “We found that we could not see the literary work in
isolation, that we had to see its form against a background of other works rather than
by itself. Thus the Formalists definitely went beyond ‘Formalism’ ” (119). Hence, while
formalist analysis in principle rejects the isolation of the literary artifact, an isolation
practiced later by the New Critics, their invocation of history is confined to the history
of literary form, to an autonomous historical development of literature abstracted
from all other influences and circumstances.
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Formalist Conceptions of Poetry
Eichenbaum observes that the Formalists insisted upon a clear demarcation between
poetry and prose, as opposed to the symbolists, who were attempting to erase this
boundary. The formalist position was first stated in Osip Brik’s “On Rhythmic-
Syntactic Figures” (1920), which argued that rhythm was not merely a “superficial
appendage” but rather the “structural basis” of verse; rhythmic patterns were indissolubly
connected with syntactical and grammatical patterns (124). In his own book Verse
Melody (1922), Eichenbaum had maintained that stylistic features were mainly lexical;
he also formulated the idea of the dominant, the chief element in a hierarchy of
compositional factors. On the basis of certain dominant elements, he distinguished
three styles of lyric poetry: declamatory (oratorical), melodic, and conversational (125).
The most fundamental point here is that poetic form was not understood as an outer
expression of a given content; rather, form itself was viewed as the “genuine content of
poetic speech” (127). Eichenbaum puts this another way: form is not dependent upon
content; it is self-sufficient and must be considered “in relation to its purpose” (130).
Eichenbaum himself had argued in his book on the Russian poet of that name, Anna
Akhmatova (1923), that words used in verse are “taken out of ordinary speech. They
are surrounded by a new aura of meaning and perceived not against the background of
speech in general but against the background of poetic speech.” He had added that
“the formation of collateral meanings, which disrupts ordinary verbal associations, is
the chief peculiarity of the semantics of poetry” (129). The suggestion here is that
poetry, or more specifically poetic form, comprises a kind of speech of its own, which
is cumulatively developed by a tradition of poets. Rhythms are developed that are
peculiar to poetry, and so are shades of meaning and syntactical structures. In this view
of poetic form, the notion of content or material, as explained in Yuri Tynyanov’s The
Problem of Poetic Language (1924), does not lie opposed to or outside of or beyond
form; rather, content is itself a formal element (130). Again, Eichenbaum stresses that
formalist advances in the study of poetry were enabled not by some rigid “formal
method” but by close attention to an appropriately isolated object of inquiry, by a
“study of the specific peculiarities of verbal art” (130). He reiterates his position that
the “ability to see facts” is “far more important than the construction of a system.
Theories are necessary to clarify facts; in reality, theories are made of facts. Theories
perish and change, but the facts they help discover and support remain” (125). Such
statements, one imagines, might tempt Hegel to rise from the grave.
Historical Criticism and Literary Evolution
As against the broad histories of the Russian academics and the effective rejection of
history by the symbolists, the Formalists adopted a new understanding of literary history
which rejected the idea of some overall unity, coherence, and purpose, as well as the
idea of historical “progress” and “peaceful” linear succession in some directly continuing
line. Rather, the Formalists saw literary tradition as involving struggle, a destruction of
old values, competition between various schools in a given epoch, and persistence of
vanquished movements alongside the newly dominant groups (134–135). The Formalists
insisted that literary evolution had a distinctive character and that it “stood alone,
formalisms
quite independent of other aspects of culture.” This evolution, moreover, they held to
be independent of biography and psychology: “For us, the central problem of the history
of literature is the problem of evolution without personality – the study of literature as
a self-formed social phenomenon.” This study focused rather on topics such as the formation
and evolution of genres (136). Such methods clearly anticipate certain tenets of
structuralism, such as the location of an author’s subjectivity within linguistic and
social structures. As a result of formalist inquiry, “many forgotten names and facts came
to light, current estimates were shown to be inaccurate, traditional ideas changed” (137).
At the end of his essay, Eichenbaum provides a useful and provocative summary of
the evolution of the Formalists’ method. Their initial distinction between poetic and
practical language led them to differentiate these in terms of their various functions.
Their new conception of “form” as dynamic, self-contained, and as not dependent
upon some external content led them to stress first the notion of technique, and then
the notion of function. Taking rhythm as an integral element in the construction of a
poem – as an element not extraneous to but intrinsically connected with syntax – the
Formalists viewed poetry as a special form of speech having its own linguistic (syntactical,
lexical, semantic) features (138).
Formalist analyses of prose fiction led in the same general direction. Eichenbaum
insists yet again that formalism is not “a fixed, ready-made system,” and that the
Formalists “are too well trained by history itself to think that it can be avoided” (139).
Yet a critic of this method might well argue that the “history” to which formalism
appeals is an abstraction, comprised by a series of literary forms embroiled in complex
mutual connections but dirempted, cut off entirely, from their broader contexts, in the
interests of isolating a specifically literary object of study. The method might be seen as
a kind of historical positivism or perhaps as a positivistic conception of history which
reduces the latter in two ways: firstly, by rejection of any data not perceived to be
immediate and of any purported schemes of historical unity; and secondly, by severing
all temporal and lateral connections surrounding the literary object so that the “history”
being addressed is effectively a series of static constructs laid out in mutual relations
frozen in the inertness of spatiality.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975)
Mikhail Bakhtin is increasingly being recognized as one of the major literary theorists
of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his radical philosophy of language,
as well as his theory of the novel, underpinned by concepts such as “dialogism,”
“polyphony,” and “carnival,” themselves resting on the more fundamental concept of
“heteroglossia.” Bakhtin’s writings were produced at a time of momentous upheavals
in Russia: the Revolution of 1917 was followed by a civil war (1918–1921), famine, and
the dark years of repressive dictatorship under Joseph Stalin. While Bakhtin himself
was not a member of the Communist Party, his work has been regarded by some as
Marxist in orientation, seeking to provide a corrective to the abstractness of extreme
formalism. Despite his critique of formalism, he has also been claimed as a member
of the Jakobsonian formalist school, as a poststructuralist, and even as a religious
part viii: the twentieth century
thinker. Bakhtin’s fraught career as an author reflects the turbulence of his times: of
the numerous books he wrote in the post-revolutionary decade and in the 1930s, only
one was published under his own name. The others, such as the influential Rabelais
and his World (1965), were not published until much later. After decades of obscurity,
he witnessed in the 1950s a renewed interest in his works and he became a cult figure
in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s his reputation extended to France and in the 1980s to
England and America.
Born in the town of Orel in Russia, Bakhtin subsequently obtained a degree
in classics and philology from the University of St. Petersburg (Petrograd) in 1918.
St. Petersburg at this time was the locus of heated literary-critical debate involving
the symbolists, futurists, and Formalists. Bakhtin was influenced by figures such
F. F. Zelinski, a classicist, and the Kantian thinker Vvedenski.3 Fleeing the ensuing civil
war, Bakhtin moved to Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher. It was here that the
first “Bakhtin Circle” convened, including such figures as the musicologist (and later
linguist) Valentin Volosinov, the philologist Lev Pumpianskij, and the philosopher
Matvej Isaic Kagan. In 1920 Bakhtin moved to Vitebsk, a haven for many artists, where
Pavel Medvedev joined the Circle. He married and returned with his wife to
St. Petersburg in 1924. His “Circle” now included the poet N. J. Kljuev, the biologist
I. I. Kanaev, and the Indologist M. I. Tubianskij. In 1929 Bakhtin’s first major publication
appeared, entitled Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, which formulated the concept of
“polyphony” or “dialogism.” In the same year, however, Bakhtin was sentenced to ten
years’ imprisonment for alleged affiliation with the underground Russian Orthodox
Church; mercifully, the sentence was commuted to six years’ exile in Kazakhstan. In
1936 he obtained a teaching position at the Mordovia State Teachers’ College in Saransk;
but the threat of more purges prompted him to resign and to move to a more obscure
town. Afflicted by a bone disease, on which account his leg was amputated in 1938, he
did not subsequently procure a professional appointment. After World War II, in 1946
and 1949 he defended his dissertation on Rabelais, creating an uproar in the scholarly
world; the professors who opposed acceptance of the thesis won the day, and Bakhtin
was denied his doctorate. His friends, however, procured him a teaching position in
Saransk, as Chair of the Department of Literature. These colleagues – comprising a
third “Bakhtin Circle” – included scholars at the University of Moscow and the Gorkij
Institute, such as V. Kozinov, S. Bocarov, and the linguist V. V. Ivanov. The final years
of Bakhtin’s life brought him a long-elusive recognition. His book on Dostoevsky, republished
in 1963, was a success, as was the volume on Rabelais, appearing two years later.
Bakhtin’s major works as translated into English include Art and Answerability:
Early Philosophical Essays (1990), Rabelais and his World (1965; trans. 1968), Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929; trans. 1973), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1930s;
trans. 1981), and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). His important early essay
“Towards a Philosophy of the Act” (1919) was not published until 1986. This and
other early writings, such as “Art and Responsibility” and “Author and Hero,” are
Kantian in orientation, offering a phenomenological account of the intersubjective
connection of human selves in language. Bakhtin’s interest in the nature of language
was formed in part by members of his Circle. Indeed, the authorship of some of the
Bakhtin Circle’s publications is still in dispute: two books, Freudianism (1927) and
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929, 1930), were published under the name
formalisms
of V. N. Volosinov. A further title, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928),
was published under the name of P. N. Medvedev. The dispute was provoked by the
linguist V. V. Ivanov, who claimed that these texts were in fact written by Bakhtin.
Bakhtin himself refrained from resolving the matter, and the debate continues. It may
well be, in any case, that these texts were collaboratively authored or that they express
to some extent the shared ideas of members of the Circle.
Bakhtin’s major achievements include the formulation of an innovative and radical
philosophy of language as well as a comprehensive “theory” of the novel (though
Bakhtin’s work eschews systematic theory that attempts to explain particular phenomena
through generalizing and static schemes). The essay to be examined here, “Discourse
in the Novel,” furnishes an integrated statement of both endeavors. Indeed, what
purports to be a theory of the novel entails not only a radical account of the nature
of language but also a radical critique of the history of philosophy and an innovative
explanation of the nature of subjectivity, objectivity, and the very process of
understanding.
At the outset, Bakhtin states that his principal object in this essay is to overcome the
divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally abstract “ideological”
approach to the study of “verbal art” (here referring to the language of poetry and the
novel). He insists that form and content in discourse “are one,” and that “verbal
discourse is a social phenomenon” (DI, 259). Bakhtin’s point is that traditional stylistics
have ignored the social dimensions of artistic discourse, which has been treated as a
self-subsistent phenomenon, cut off from broader historical movements and immersion
in broad ideological struggles. Moreover, traditional stylistics have not found a
place for the novel, which, like other “prosaic” discourse, has been viewed as an “extraartistic
medium,” an artistically “neutral” means of communication on the same level
as practical speech (DI, 260). He acknowledges that in the 1920s some attempts were
made (he appears to be thinking of the Russian Formalists) to recognize “the stylistic
uniqueness of artistic prose as distinct from poetry.” However, Bakhtin suggests that
such endeavors merely revealed that traditional stylistic categories were not applicable
to novelistic discourse (DI, 261).
Bakhtin lists the stylistic features into which the “unity” of the novel is usually divided:
(1) direct authorial narration, (2) stylization of everyday speech, (3) stylization of
semiliterary discourse such as letters and diaries, (4) various types of extra-artistic
speech, such as moral, philosophical, and scientific statements, and (5) the individualized
speech of characters. His point is that each of these “heterogeneous stylistic unities”
combines in the novel to “form a structured artistic system” and that the “stylistic
uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these
subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities . . . into the higher unity of the
work as a whole.” Hence the novel can be “defined as a diversity of social speech types
(sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically
organized” (DI, 262).
It quickly becomes apparent that Bakhtin’s view of the novel is dependent upon his
broader view of the nature of language as “dialogic” and as comprised of “heteroglossia.”
In order to explain the concept of dialogism, we first need to understand the latter
term: “heteroglossia” refers to the circumstance that what we usually think of as a
single, unitary language is actually comprised of a multiplicity of languages interacting
part viii: the twentieth century
with, and often ideologically competing with, one another. In Bakhtin’s terms, any
given “language” is actually stratified into several “other languages” (“heteroglossia”
might be translated as “other-languageness”). For example, we can break down “any
single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional
jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, . . . languages of
the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions . . . each day has its own
slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases.” It is this heteroglossia, says Bakhtin,
which is “the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre” (DI, 263).
“Dialogism” is a little more difficult to explain. On the most basic level, it refers
to the fact that the various languages that stratify any “single” language are in dialogue
with one another; Bakhtin calls this “the primordial dialogism of discourse,” whereby
all discourse has a dialogic orientation (DI, 275). We might illustrate this using the
following example: the language of religious discourse does not exist in a state of
ideological and linguistic “neutrality.” On the contrary, such discourse might act as
a “rejoinder” or “reply” to elements of political discourse. The political discourse
might encourage loyalty to the state and adherence to material ambitions, whereas
the religious discourse might attempt to displace those loyalties with the pursuit of
spiritual goals. Even a work of art does not come, Minerva-like, fully formed from the
brain of its author, speaking a single monologic language: it is a response, a rejoinder,
to other works, to certain traditions, and it situates itself within a current of intersecting
dialogues (DI, 274). Its relation to other works of art and to other languages
(literary and non-literary) is dialogic.
Bakhtin has a further, profounder, explanation of the concept of dialogism. He
explains that there is no direct, unmediated relation between a word and its object:
“no living word relates to its object in a singular way.” In its path toward the object,
the word encounters “the fundamental and richly varied opposition of . . . other, alien
words about the same object.” Any concrete discourse, says Bakhtin,
finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications,
open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or, on
the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is
entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and
accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-
filled environment . . . it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue . . .
The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction
within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. (DI, 276–277)
Offering a summary of his view, Bakhtin states that the “word is born in a dialogue as
a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien
word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a
dialogic way” (DI, 279). The underlying premise here is that language is not somehow
a neutral medium, transparently related to the world of objects. Any utterance, whereby
we assign a given meaning to a word, or use a word in a given way, is composed not in
a vacuum in which the word as we initially encounter it is empty of significance.
Rather, even before we utter the word in our own manner and with our own signification,
it is already invested with many layers of meaning, and our use of the word
must accommodate those other meanings and in some cases compete with them. Our
formalisms
utterance will in its very nature be dialogic: it is born as one voice in a dialogue that is
already constituted; it cannot speak monologically, as the only voice, in some register
isolated from all social, historical, and ideological contexts.
We might illustrate this notion of dialogism with an example taken from the stage of
modern international politics. Those of us living in Europe or America tend to think of
the word (and concept of ) “democracy” as invested with a broad range of positive
associations: we might relate it generally with the idea of political progress, with a
history of emancipation from feudal economic and political constraints, with what we
think of as “civilization,” with a secular and scientific worldview, and perhaps above all
with the notion of individual freedom. But when we attempt to export this word, this
concept, to another culture such as that of Iraq, we find that our use of this word
encounters a great deal of resistance in the linguistic and ideological registers of that
nation. For one thing, the word “democracy” may be overlain in that culture with
associations of a foreign power, and with some of the ills attendant upon democracy
(as noted by thinkers from Plato to Alexis de Tocqueville): high crime rates, unrestrained
individualism, the breakdown of family structure, a lack of reverence for the
past, a disrespect for authority, and a threat to religious doctrine and values.
What occurs here, then, is precisely what Bakhtin speaks of: an ideological battle
within the word itself, a battle for meaning, for the signification of the word, an endeavor
to make one’s own use of the word predominate. The battle need not occur between
cultures; it can rage within a given nation. For example, a similar battle could exist
between conservative religious groups and progressive groups in either America or
Iraq. Similar struggles occur over words such as “terrorism,” welded by the Western
media to a certain image of Islam, and qualified in the Arab media with prefixes such
as “state-sponsored.” In such struggles, the word itself becomes the site of intense
ideological conflict. We can see, then, that according to Bakhtin’s view of language,
language is not some neutral and transparent expression of conflict; it is the very
medium and locus of conflict.
In formulating this radical notion of language, Bakhtin is also effecting a profound
critique not only of linguistics and conventional stylistics but also of the history of
philosophy. He sees traditional stylistics as inadequate for analyzing the novel precisely
because it bypasses the heteroglossia that enables the style of the novel. Stylistics views
style as a phenomenon of language itself, as an “individualization of the general language.”
In other words, the source of style is “the individuality of the speaking subject”
(DI, 263–264). In this view, the work of art is treated as a “self-sufficient whole” and
an “authorial monologue,” whose “elements constitute a closed system,” isolated from
all social contexts (DI, 273–274). Bakhtin sees such a view of style as founded on
Saussure’s concept of language, itself premised on a polarity between general and
particular, between langue (the system of language) and parole (the individual speech
act). This notion of style presupposes both a “unity of language” and “the unity of an
individual person realizing himself in this language” (DI, 264). Such a notion leads to
a distorted treatment of the novel, selecting “only those elements that can be fitted
within the frame of a single language system and that express, directly and without
mediation, an authorial individuality in language” (DI, 265). Stylistics, linguistics, and
the philosophy of language all postulate a unitary language and a unitary relation of
the speaker to language, a speaker who engages in a “monologic utterance.” All these
part viii: the twentieth century
disciplines enlist the Saussurean model of language, based on the polarity of general
(language system) and particular (individualized utterance) (DI, 269).
Bakhtin’s essential point is that such a unitary language is not real but merely posited
by linguistics: “A unitary language is not something given . . . but is always in essence
posited . . . and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of
heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presence felt as a force for
overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain
maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, although still relative,
unity – the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, ‘correct
language’ ” (DI, 270). Hence, when we speak of “a language” or “the language,” we
are employing an ideal construct whose purpose is to freeze into a monologic intelligibility
the constantly changing dialogic exchange of languages that actually constitute
“language.” In this respect, the historical project of literary stylistics, philosophy, and
linguistics has been one:
Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church, of “the
one language of truth,” the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical
universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a “universal grammar”), Humboldt’s insistence on
the concrete – all these, whatever their differences in nuance, give expression to the same
centripetal forces in socio-linguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same
project of centralizing and unifying the European languages. (DI, 271)
Bakhtin sees this project as deeply ideological and political: it was a project that
entailed exalting certain languages over others, incorporating “barbarians and lower
social strata into a unitary language of culture,” canonizing ideological systems and
directing attention away “from language plurality to a single proto-language.” Nonetheless,
insists Bakhtin, these centripetal forces are obliged to “operate in the midst
of heteroglossia” (DI, 271). Even as various attempts are being made to undertake
the project of centralization and unification, the processes of decentralization and
disunification continue. As Bakhtin puts it, alongside “the centripetal forces, the centrifugal
forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work” (DI, 272).
This dialectic between the centripetal forces of unity and the centrifugal forces of
dispersion is, for Bakhtin, a constituting characteristic of language. Every utterance, he
says, is a point where these two forces intersect: every utterance participates in the
“unitary language” and at the same time “partakes of social and historical heteroglossia.”
The environment of an utterance is “dialogized heteroglossia.” Hence the utterance
itself – any utterance – consists of “a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two
embattled tendencies in the life of language” (DI, 272). What is fundamental to Bakhtin’s
view of language, then, is that no utterance simply floats in an ideally posited atmosphere
of ahistorical neutrality; every utterance belongs to someone or some class or
group and carries its ideological appurtenance within it. As Bakhtin states: “We are
taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language
conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view” (DI, 271). In contrast,
the disciplines of linguistics, stylistics, and the philosophy of language have all been
motivated by an “orientation toward unity.” Given that their project must occur amid
the actual diversity, plurality, and stratification of language, i.e., amid heteroglossia,
formalisms
their project has effectively been that of seeking “unity in diversity,” and they have
ignored real “ideologically saturated” language consciousness (DI, 274). They have
been oriented toward an “artificial, preconditioned status of the word, a word excised
from dialogue” (DI, 279).
Bakhtin’s own view recognizes that the actual word in living conversation is
“directed toward an answer . . . it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures
itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in the atmosphere of the already spoken,
the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said” (DI,
280). Bakhtin here draws attention to the temporal nature of language, to the fact that
the word exists in real time, that it has a real history, a real past, and a real future (as
opposed to the static time constructs posited by linguistics), all of which condition its
presence. His views bear comparison to Bergson’s views of language as a medium that
is essentially spatialized and that has contributed to our conceptual spatializing of
time, rather than dealing with real time or durée. What Bakhtin, like Bergson, is doing
is reconceiving not merely the nature of language but the act of understanding itself:
this, too, is a dialogic process. Every concrete act of understanding, says Bakhtin, is
active; it is “indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or
disagreement . . . Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding
and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is
impossible without the other” (DI, 282). This “internal dialogism” of the word
involves an encounter not with “an alien word within the object itself ” (as in the
previously explained level of dialogism) but rather with “the subjective belief system of
the listener” (DI, 282).
What Bakhtin appears to be saying is that the clash of different significations
within a word is part of a broader conflict, between subjective frameworks, which is
the very essence of understanding. Using this model, Bakhtin emphasizes that the
dialogic nature of language entails “a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view”
(DI, 273). Every verbal act, he explains, can “infect” language with its own intention;
each social group has its own language, and, at any given moment, “languages of
various epochs and periods of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another . . . every
day represents another socio-ideological semantic ‘state of affairs,’ another vocabulary,
another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of assigning blame and
praise” (DI, 291). The point, again, is not just that language is “heteroglot” and stratified;
it is also that “there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms – words and forms that can
belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions
and accents” (DI, 293). Moreover, it is not merely that language is always socially
and ideologically charged and is the locus of constant tension and struggle between
groups and perspectives: in its role of providing this locus, it also furnishes the very
medium for the interaction of human subjects, an interaction that creates the very
ground of human subjectivity. For the individual consciousness, says Bakhtin, language
“lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half
someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own
intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word” (DI, 293). Prior to this
moment of appropriation, the “word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language”;
rather, it is serving other people’s intentions; moreover, not all words are equally
open to this “seizure and transformation into private property . . . Language is not a
part viii: the twentieth century
neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s
intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others” (DI, 294).
Bakhtin’s account of language as constitutively underlying the interactions of
human subjects bears a certain resemblance to Hegel’s account of the formation of
the human subject in interaction with others; whereas Hegel sees subjectivity as a
reciprocal effect, arising from the mutual acknowledgment between the consciousnesses
of two people, Bakhtin’s exposition explicitly posits language as the medium of such
interaction, and hence sees subjectivity as a linguistic effect, though no less reciprocal
and dialogic. As Bakhtin puts it, consciousness is faced with “the necessity of having to
choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively
orient itself amidst heteroglossia” (DI, 295).
Given these political and metaphysical implications of Bakhtin’s views of language,
it is clear that for him, the study of works of literature cannot be reduced to
the examination of a localized and self-enclosed verbal construct. Even literary language,
as Bakhtin points out, is stratified in its own ways, according to genre and
profession (DI, 288–289). The various dialects and perspectives entering literature
form “a dialogue of languages” (DI, 294). It is precisely this fact which, for Bakhtin,
marks the characteristic difference between poetry and the novel. According to Bakhtin,
most poetry is premised on the idea of a single unitary language; poetry effectively
destroys heteroglossia; it strips the word of the intentions of others (DI, 297–298).
Everything that enters the poetic work “must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its
previous life in any other contexts: language may remember only its life in poetic contexts”
(DI, 297). In other words, the language of poetry is artificial; the meanings and connotations
of words are accumulated through a specifically literary tradition insulated
from the life of language beyond this self-enclosed system (T. S. Eliot’s notion of
literary tradition as an “ideal order” might fit very neatly into Bakhtin’s conception).
The language thereby built up is a language that, according to Bakhtin, has largely
bypassed the heteroglossia and dialogism of language as used in other registers. Everywhere
in poetry, says Bakhtin, “there is only one face – the linguistic face of the author,
answering for every word as if it were his own.” Such a treatment of language
“presumes precisely this unity of language, an unmediated correspondence with its
object” (DI, 297–298). Another way of characterizing this “project” of poetry is to say,
as Bakhtin does, that the poetic image carves a direct path to the object, ignoring the
numerous other paths laid down to that object, and the meanings previously attached
to it, by “social consciousness” (DI, 278).
In the novel, on the contrary, this dialogization of language “penetrates from within
the very way in which the word conceives its object” (DI, 284). In the novel, the actual
dialogism and heteroglossia of language are fundamental to style; they comprise the
enabling conditions of novelistic style, which thrives on giving expression to them.
Poetic style extinguishes this dialogism or, at least, does not exploit it for artistic purposes
(DI, 284). For the poet, language is an obedient organ, fully adequate to the author’s
intention; the poet is completely “within” his language and sees everything through it
(DI, 286). Heteroglossia can be present in poetry only as a “depicted thing,” seen through
the eyes of the poet’s own language. The novel, on the contrary, integrates heteroglossia as
part of its own perspective; it will deliberately deploy alien languages, and the heteroglot
languages of various social registers (DI, 287). Words for the novelist are regarded as
formalisms
“his” only as “things that are being transmitted ironically” (DI, 299n). Indeed, the
“stratification of language . . . upon entering the novel establishes its own special order
within it, and becomes a unique artistic system . . . This constitutes the distinguishing
feature of the novel as a genre” (DI, 299–300). Hence, any stylistics capable of dealing
with the novel must be a “sociological stylistics” that does not treat the work of literature
as a self-enclosed artifact but exposes “the concrete social context of discourse” as the
force that determines from within “the entire stylistic structure of the novel” (DI, 300).
Bakhtin acknowledges that in actual poetic works, it is possible to find “features
fundamental to prose,” especially in “periods of shift in literary poetic languages” (DI,
287n). Heteroglossia can exist also in some of the “low” poetic genres. In general,
however, the language of poetic genres often becomes “authoritarian, dogmatic and
conservative, sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects,” and
fostering the idea of a special “poetic language” (DI, 287). He also acknowledges that
“even the poetic word is social” but poetic forms reflect lengthier social processes,
requiring “centuries to unfold” (DI, 300). Bakhtin sees the novel’s history as far lengthier
than conventional accounts, deriving from a variety of prose forms, some of which
reflect his notion of “carnival” as elaborated in earlier works such as Rabelais and his
World. His account is worth quoting at length:
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under the
influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, the
novel – and those artistic prose genres that gravitate toward it – was being historically
shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was
accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-
ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the
stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded
forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaux
and Schwanke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-center
at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the “languages” of poets, scholars,
monks, knights and others, where all “languages” were masks and where no language
could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.
Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was . . . consciously opposed to this
literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official
languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized. (DI, 273)
It might be objected that Bakhtin’s conception of poetry is narrow; that some species
of poetry do indeed enlist heteroglossia and are politically subversive; it might also be
urged that the novelistic form per se may not be subversive, that some novelists express
deeply conservative visions. But clearly, in the passage above, Bakhtin sees the genres
of poetry and the novel as emblematic of two broad ideological tendencies, the one
centralizing and conservative, the other dispersive and radical.
It may even be that “poetry” and “novel” are used by Bakhtin as metaphors for these
respective tendencies: thus poetry can indeed be radical, but inasmuch as it challenges
official discourses, it enlists attributes of language that are typically deployed by prose.
What is interesting is that for Bakhtin, the ideological valency of any position is
intrinsically tied to the particular characteristics of language deployed. The “novel”
embodies certain metaphysical, ideological, and aesthetic attitudes: it rejects, intrinsically,
part viii: the twentieth century
any concept of a unified self or a unified world; it acknowledges that “the” world is
actually formed as a conversation, an endless dialogue, through a series of competing
and coexisting languages; it even proposes that “truth” is dialogic. “The development
of the novel,” says Bakhtin, “is a function of the deepening of dialogic essence . . . Fewer
and fewer neutral, hard elements (‘rock bottom truths’) remain that are not drawn
into dialogue” (DI, 300). Hence, truth is redefined not merely as a consensus (which
by now is common in cultural theory) but as the product of verbal-ideological struggles,
struggles which mark the very nature of language itself.
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)
The work of Roman Jakobson occupies a central and seminal place in the development
of formalism and structuralism. Essentially a linguist, Jakobson was born in Moscow,
where he co-founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915, which also included Osip
Brik and Boris Tomashevsky. Along with Victor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum, he
was also involved in a second Russian Formalist group, the Society for the Study of
Poetic Language, formed in 1916. The Formalists were in some ways precursors of
structuralism: in 1926 Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which engaged
critically with the work of Saussure. And, fleeing from Nazi occupation, he moved to
America in 1941 where he became acquainted with Claude Lévi-Strauss; in 1943 he
co-founded the Linguistic Circle of New York. His ideas proved to be of greatest
impact first in France and then in America.
In his paper “Linguistics and Poetics” (1958) Jakobson argues that, since poetics
concerns the artistic features of a “verbal message,” and linguistics is the “global science
of verbal structure,” poetics is an integral part of linguistics. His point here is that
poetic elements belong to the science of language as a whole; indeed, they belong to the
yet broader field of semiotics or theory of signs since they are not confined to verbal
art.4 Jakobson insists that “literary criticism,” which often evaluates literature in subjective
terms, must be distinguished from “literary studies” proper, which engage in
“objective scholarly analysis of verbal art” (LL, 64). Like linguistics, literary studies,
whose focal point is poetics, are concerned with problems of synchrony and diachrony.
Synchronic description views the various elements of a literary tradition as they occur
at a given point in time; these elements will include, however, literary values and
figures whose influence has persisted. A diachronic study would analyze the various
changes in a given tradition or system over a period of time (LL, 64–65).
Jakobson urges that the poetic function of language must be situated among the
other functions of language, which he schematizes as follows:
CONTEXT
ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE
CONTACT
CODE
In any act of verbal communication, the “addresser” sends a message to the “addressee”;
the message requires a “context” that is verbal or at least capable of being verbalized; a
formalisms
“contact” which is a physical channel or psychological connection between them; and
a “code” that is shared by them (LL, 66). Jakobson explains that each of these factors
determines a different function of language, and that the verbal structure of any given
message depends on the predominant function. For example, many messages are
oriented primarily toward the “context” and the predominant function here will be
referential or cognitive or denotative. However, while Jakobson accepts that language
is primarily concerned with the transmission of ideas, he cautions that the “emotive”
elements of language cannot be excluded from linguistic study. Verbal messages usually
do not fulfill merely one function, and other, accessory functions will contribute
to the message. For example, the emotive or expressive function is focused on the
“addresser,” and will convey the speaker’s attitude, which itself may convey some
information (LL, 66). A message that is oriented toward the “addressee” will have a
“conative” function, which finds its purest expression in the vocative and imperative
uses of language, which address people or things directly or issue commands (LL, 67–
68). Such sentences differ from normal “declarative” sentences in that they have no
relation to truth-value.
The three functions of language so far mentioned by Jakobson – referential, emotive,
and conative – belong, as he notes, to the traditional model of language as formulated
by the German psychologist Karl Buhler. Jakobson suggests that this model can be
augmented to include additional verbal functions. One of these might be a “magic,
incantatory” function, where the person addressed in a conative message would be an
absent or inanimate third person, as in prayers or supplications to various forces
considered to be divine (LL, 68). There are also messages whose main function is to
establish or prolong communication (“Hello, do you hear me?”); this is the “phatic”
function, which might involve an exchange of “ritualized formulas.” This, says Jakobson,
is the first verbal function acquired by infants (LL, 68–69). The third additional function
is metalinguistic. Jakobson notes the distinction made by modern logicians between
two levels of language: “object language,” which speaks of objects and events, and
“metalanguage,” which speaks about language itself (LL, 69).
What distinguishes the poetic function from the others mentioned above is that it
focuses on the “message” for its own sake (LL, 69); this function is by no means the
sole function of “verbal art” but it is its dominant function, whereas in most verbal
activities it is merely an accessory function. Hence the poetic function, by “promoting
the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” And
the poetic function extends beyond poetry itself into many uses of language, as in the
American election campaign slogan “I like Ike,” which presents a “paronomastic image
of the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function
of this campaign slogan reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy” (LL, 70).
In poetry itself, diverse genres employ the other verbal functions along with the
poetic function. For example, epic poetry involves the referential function; lyric, the
emotive. Here is how Jakobson schematizes the various functions:
REFERENTIAL
EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE
PHATIC
METALINGUAL
part viii: the twentieth century
What is the distinguishing feature of poetry? To answer this, Jakobson reminds us that
the two basic modes of verbal arrangement are selection, which is based on verbal
relations of equivalence, similarity, or synonymy; and combination, whereby a sequence
of words is built up on the basis of contiguity. The poetic function, he says, “projects
the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (LL,
71). This difficult sentence might be interpreted as follows. In a non-poetic use of
language, where we simply intend to communicate information, we might choose
between a number of different words for “child”: we might use “tot,” “toddler,” or
“infant,” words which are equivalent to one another. In other words, we are using the
principle of equivalence to make our selection. Our next step will be to combine this
word with another word which we also select on the basis of equivalence. For example,
we might use one of the following words which are equivalent to one another: “sleep,”
“doze,” “nap.” Hence our combination will be something like: “The child sleeps.” What
Jakobson appears to be saying is that we use the principle of equivalence at the level of
combination: we make one combination equivalent to another. In other words, regardless
of the different meanings of various combinations, we make them formally
equivalent, in terms of features such as their metrical stress and pattern. Another way
of reading Jakobson’s statement might be to say that poetry will not merely select from
a number of possible equivalent terms but will combine them, maximizing focus on
the message for its own sake. Poetry, however, is not a form of metalanguage: in poetry
the equivalence is used to build a sequence whereas metalanguage uses the sequence to
build an equation (LL, 71).
Jakobson’s essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”
(1956) suggests that language has a bipolar structure, oscillating between the
poles of metaphor and metonymy. This dichotomy, he urges, “appears to be of primal
significance and consequence for all verbal behavior and for human behavior in general”
(LL, 112). The development of any discourse takes place along two different semantic
lines: one is metaphoric, where one topic leads to another through similarity or substitution.
The other is metonymic, where one topic suggests another via contiguity
(closeness in space, time, or psychological association). In normal behavior, says
Jakobson, both processes operate, but one is usually preferred, according to cultural
and personal conditions (LL, 110–111). In verbal art, also, while the two processes
richly interact, one is often given predominance. Jakobson notes that the primacy of
metaphor in literary Romanticism and symbolism has been widely acknowledged. What
has been neglected, he thinks, is the predominance of metonymy in realism: the realist
author often “metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the
characters to the setting in space and time” (LL, 111). He is also fond of synecdochic
details such as “hair on the upper lip” and “bare shoulders” that are used to express
character.
Jakobson notes that a competition between metaphoric and metonymic devices occurs
in any symbolic process. In analyzing the structure of dreams, for example, the decisive
question, he says, is “whether the symbols and the temporal sequences are based on
contiguity (Freud’s metonymic ‘displacement’ and synecdochic ‘condensation’) or on
similarity (Freud’s ‘identification and symbolism’)” (LL, 113). Here Jakobson anticipates
Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s contrast between condensation and displacement in terms
formalisms
of metaphor and metonymy. In general, Jakobson holds that poetry is focused upon
the sign and is based on the principle of similarity; thus poetry in general leans toward
metaphor. Prose, on the other hand, is focused primarily upon the referent, and is
based on contiguity; hence its underlying strategy is metonymy. Yet this bipolarity of
language has actually been reduced, thinks Jakobson, to a unipolar scheme since the
study of poetical tropes has been directed primarily toward metaphor while metonymy
has suffered an undue neglect (LL, 113–114). What Jakobson effectively does here is to
introduce an opposition between two terms which had been thought to cohere in
traditional rhetoric.
The New Criticism
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, the predominant critical modes were
biographical, historical, psychological, romantic, and impressionistic. Liberal critics
such as Parrington and F. O. Matthiessen employed a historical approach to literature
but Matthiessen insisted on addressing its aesthetic dimensions. This formalist disposition
became intensified in both the New Criticism and the Chicago School. The term
“The New Criticism” was coined as early as 1910 in a lecture of that title by Joel
Spingarn who, influenced by Croce’s expressionist theory of art, advocated a creative
and imaginative criticism which gave primacy to the aesthetic qualities of literature
over historical, psychological, and moral considerations. Spingarn, however, was not
directly related to the New Criticism that developed in subsequent decades. Some of
the important features of the New Criticism originated in England during the 1920s in
the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as in seminal studies by I. A. Richards
and William Empson. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) advanced literary-
critical notions such as irony, tension, and balance, as well as distinguishing between
poetic and other uses of language. His Practical Criticism (1929), based on student
analyses of poetry, emphasized the importance of “objective” and balanced close reading
which was sensitive to the figurative language of literature. Richards’ student William
Empson produced an influential work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which was
held up as a model of New Critical close reading.
Across the Atlantic, New Critical practices were also being pioneered by American
critics, known as the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians, who promoted the values
of the Old South in reaction against the alleged dehumanization of science and echnology
in the industrial North. Notable among these pioneers were John Crowe Ransom and
Allen Tate, who developed some of the ideas of Eliot and Richards. Ransom edited the
poetry magazine the Fugitive from 1922 to 1925 with a group of writers including Tate,
Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson. Other journals associated with the New
Criticism included the Southern Review, edited by Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks
(1935–1942), the Kenyon Review, run by Ransom (1938–59), and the still extant Sewanee
Review, edited by Tate and others. During the 1940s the New Criticism became institutionalized
as the mainstream approach in academia, and its influence, while pervasively
undermined since the 1950s, still persists. Some of the central documents of New
part viii: the twentieth century
Criticism were written by relatively late adherents: W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley’s essays “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949)
(it is worth noting, in this context, the enormous influence of E. D. Hirsch’s book
Validity in Interpretation, published in 1967, which equated a text’s meaning with its
author’s intention); Austin Warren’s The Theory of Literature (1949); W. K. Wimsatt’s
The Verbal Icon (1954); and Murray Krieger’s The New Apologists for Poetry (1956).
Some of these documents can now be examined.
John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)
The seminal manifestos of the New Criticism, however, had been proclaimed earlier
by Ransom, who published a series of essays entitled The New Criticism (1941) and an
influential essay, “Criticism, Inc.,” published in The World’s Body (1938). This essay
succinctly expresses a core of New Critical principles underlying the practice of most
“New Critics,” whose views often differed in other respects. As Ransom acknowledges,
his essay is motivated by the desire to make literary criticism “more scientific, or
precise and systematic”; it must, says Ransom, become a “serious business.”5 He urges
that the emphasis of criticism must move from historical scholarship to aesthetic
appreciation and understanding. Ransom characterizes both the conservative New
Humanism and left-wing criticism as focusing on morality rather than aesthetics. While
he accepts the value of historical and biographical information, Ransom insists
that these are not ends in themselves but instrumental to the real aim of criticism,
which is “to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature.” In
short, Ransom’s position is that the critic must study literature, not about literature.
Hence criticism should exclude: (1) personal impressions, because the critical activity
should “cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject” (WB, 342);
(2) synopsis and paraphrase, since the plot or story is an abstraction from the real
content of the text; (3) historical studies, which might include literary backgrounds,
biography, literary sources, and analogues; (4) linguistic studies, which include identifying
allusions and meanings of words; (5) moral content, since this is not the whole
content of the text; (6) “Any other special studies which deal with some abstract or
prose content taken out of the work” (WB, 343–345). Ransom demands that criticism,
whose proper province includes technical studies of poetry, metrics, tropes, and
fictiveness, should “receive its own charter of rights and function independently”
(WB, 346). Finally, in this essay and other works, Ransom insists on the ontological
uniqueness of poetry, as distinct from prose and other uses of language, as in prose.
“The critic should,” he urges, “regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate
ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre,” which cannot be reduced to prose (WB,
347–349). All in all, he argues that literature and literary criticism should enjoy
autonomy both ontologically and institutionally. His arguments have often been
abbreviated into a characterization of New Criticism as focusing on “the text itself ” or
“the words on the page.”
formalisms
William K. Wimsatt, Jr. (1907–1975) and Monroe C. Beardsley
(1915–1985)
In addition to their other works, the critic Wimsatt and the philosopher Beardsley
produced two influential and controversial papers that propounded central positions
of New Criticism, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949).
In the first of these, they lay down certain propositions that they take to be axiomatic:
while acknowledging that the cause of a poem is a “designing intellect,” they refuse to
accept the notion of design or intention as a standard of literary-critical interpretation.
6 In stating their second “axiom,” they raise the question of how a critic might find
out what a poet’s intention was and state what is effectively their central claim: “If the
poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And
if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic
must go outside the poem – for evidence of an intention that did not become effective
in the poem.” The third axiom is the American poet Archibald’s MacLeish’s statement
that a “poem should not mean but be.” Wimsatt and Beardsley explain this statement
as follows: “A poem can be only through its meaning – since its medium is words – yet
it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended
or meant . . . In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful
if and only if we correctly infer the intention” (VI, 4–5). This is an effective restatement
of a New Critical position that the poem is an autonomous verbal structure
which has its end in itself, which has no purpose beyond its own existence as an
aesthetic object. It is not answerable to criteria of truth, accuracy of representation or
imitation, or morality. Finally, Wimsatt and Beardsley insist that the thoughts and
attitudes of a poem can be imputed only to the dramatic speaker or persona of the
poem, not directly to the author (VI, 5).
The foregoing “axioms” are merely stated rather than argued. The first argument of
the essay is Horatian: a poem, once published, no longer belongs to the author but to
the public: “It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is
about the human being, an object of public knowledge” (VI, 5). The implication here
is that, as an object in public language, the poem is available to the public for interpretation;
the author has no privileged claim over language and his word outside of the
poem cannot be taken as somehow authoritative. They acknowledge that an author
can offer useful practical advice for a would-be poet, but such advice falls under the
“psychology of composition rather than criticism” (VI, 9).
What Wimsatt and Beardsley are opposing is what they take to be a Romantic
intentional fallacy: the Romantic idea, expressed in ancient times by Longinus and
more recently by figures such as the great German writer Goethe and the Italian philosopher
Benedetto Croce, that a poem echoes the soul of its author, that it embodies
his intentions or psychological circumstances (VI, 6). The most influential recent
statement of intentionalism, according to the authors of this essay, is I. A. Richards’
fourfold characterization of meaning as “sense,” “feeling,” “tone,” and “intention.”
The passwords of the intentional school are Romantic words such as “spontaneity,”
“sincerity,” “authenticity,” and “originality.” These need to be replaced, say the authors,
part viii: the twentieth century
with terms of analysis such as “integrity,” “relevance,” “unity,” and “function,” terms
which they claim to be more precise (VI, 9).
Like Ransom, Wimsatt and Beardsley are concerned to exclude from criticism certain
related studies such as author psychology, biography, and history. They in fact
make a distinction between “internal” and “external” evidence for the meaning of a
poem. Internal evidence is actually public: it is evidence that is internal to the poem
itself, evidence discovered through the poem’s semantics and syntax and the knowledge
of how these operate within the larger context of language and culture. External
evidence is private or idiosyncratic: it is evidence gleaned from outside the poem, and
may include diaries, journals, letters, and reported conversations. Wimsatt and Beardsley
acknowledge that there may be a third kind of evidence which is “intermediate”: evidence
about an author’s character, or semi-private meanings attached to words and
concepts by the author and his circle (VI, 10).
Strictly speaking, it is only internal evidence that the authors allow. They give examples
of how resort to evidence of the other types can distort a poem’s meaning: if we
approach John Donne’s poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” through our
prior knowledge of his interest in astronomy, we might interpret the following stanza
in the poem as centered on a metaphor involving geocentric and heliocentric views of
the world:
Moving of th’earth brings harmes and feares,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
But to advance such an interpretation, the authors warn, is “to disregard the English
language, to prefer private evidence to public, external to internal” (VI, 14). In other
words, we are reading the poem through our knowledge of Donne’s “private” interests,
rather than attending to what the words themselves might signify.
One of the major problems arising in literary scholarship from the intentional fallacy,
according to the authors, concerns the poetic use of allusion by writers such as
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whose verse extensively alludes or refers to lines and
phrases of earlier poets. Taking as an example Eliot’s inclusion of a lengthy series of
notes explaining the various allusions found in his long poem The Waste Land, the
authors suggest that Eliot’s use of these notes attempts to justify his poetic practice
through recourse to his own intention. Yet the notes, they say, should be held up to the
same scrutiny as the lines of the poem itself; if the force of the allusions is not felt by
the reader through the poem itself, then recourse to the notes is superfluous (VI, 15–
16). As far as allusions are concerned, we must be able to justify their use in terms of
their objectively discerned function in the poem, not by consulting the author as an
oracle for his intention (VI, 18).
There are many possible objections to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument. To begin
with, it presupposes that we can treat the poem as an isolated artifact, torn from all of
its contexts, including the circumstances of its reading or reception. Clearly, the distinction
between internal and external evidence cannot be absolute and will vary according
formalisms
to the reader’s knowledge and literary education. Moreover, many interpretative
disputes arise not from questions of content but rather from questions of form and
tone: we may agree on the most basic meaning of a poem but disagree on the significance
we attach to this meaning. For example, Horace’s famous “Ode to Pyrrha” could
be translated in a tone of polite urbanity or one of crude sarcasm. Broad considerations
of the intention behind the poem may legitimately help us clarify such issues.
Many poems, such as satires or mock-heroic poems, presuppose a reader’s prior
acquaintance with certain literary traditions and conventions: it is important to
acknowledge, for example, that Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is intended to employ epic
conventions for the purpose of satire. Recourse to intention can yield necessary insight
into the relations between form and content, as well as relations between an artist
and his audience. Moreover, given that the same statement made by different speakers
in differing contexts could have vastly divergent meanings, it seems implausible to
attribute autonomy to any statement or group of words, whether embodied in poetic
language or not. As Frank Cioffi has remarked, to refute the intentionalist, Wimsatt
and Beardsley should have shown that our response to a poem is not altered by reference
to intentional information; but all they have shown is that this does not always or
need not happen.
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s later essay “The Affective Fallacy” is motivated by the same
presupposition, namely, that literature or poetry is an autonomous object, independent
not only of author psychology, biography, and history but also of the reader or
audience that consumes it. The word “affection” is used by philosophers to refer to
emotion, mental state, or disposition. Hence, the “affective fallacy” occurs, according
to Wimsatt and Beardsley, when we attempt to explicate or interpret a poem through
recourse to the emotions or mental state produced in the reader or hearer. As these
authors put it, just as the intentional fallacy “is a confusion between the poem and its
origins,” so the affective fallacy “is a confusion between the poem and its results (what
it is and what it does).”7 Again, part of their problem with using the reader’s response as
a criterion of interpretation is that it makes criticism a subjective rather than objective
activity, a discourse about the subject (the reader) rather than the object (the text). An
affective reading of a poem “begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from
the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The
outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an
object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear” (VI, 21).
Wimsatt and Beardsley reject the attempts of critics such as I. A. Richards and
philosophers such as Charles L. Stevenson to separate emotive from referential meaning,
to distinguish what a word suggests and what it means. There is no evidence, they
argue, that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything except what it
means, or what it suggests (VI, 22, 26). In other words, describing the effect of a poem
is tantamount to describing its meaning. Wimsatt and Beardsley fear that the doctrine
of emotive meaning, as separated from cognitive meaning, results in affective relativism
and potentially endless license: on reading a given line of poetry, a reader could
feel a certain emotion regardless of the cognitive quality of the line’s context; there is
no linguistic rule to stabilize or systematize emotional responses, and therefore there
can be no parallel between cognitive meaning and emotional suggestion (VI, 27–28).
part viii: the twentieth century
Certain schools of anthropology, the authors observe, have promoted affective relativism
of a historical or cultural kind by using as the criterion of poetic value “the degree
of feeling felt by the readers of a given era” (VI, 27).
Wimsatt and Beardsley trace various manifestations of affective theory back to
Plato’s view of poetry as inciting the passions, Aristotle’s conception of katharsis whereby
certain emotions were purged by tragedy, through Longinus’ notion of sublimity as a
state of the reader’s soul, through Romantic conceptions of the imagination to modern
impressionist critics (VI, 28–31). They even see the affective fallacy operating in the
neoclassical unities of place and time: the idea that a drama should span one day and
occur only in one location is designed to have a hallucinatory effect on the audience,
convincing it that the action is realistic or probable (VI, 30). The most impressive
recent champion of psychologistic or affective theory, in their eyes, is I. A. Richards,
whose own critical practice, however, somewhat undermines his theories, given his
demonstration that the suggestive aspects of poetic rhythm and form are actually
connected with “other and more precise parts of poetic meaning” (VI, 32).
In general, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that when readers report that a poem or
story induces in them “vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness,”
such statements are too vague to be refuted or to be used by the objective critic.
Indeed, an accurate account of what a poem does to the reader will ipso facto be a
description of the poem itself, of its meaning (VI, 32–33). The critic, they insist, is not
a reporter of his own affective and subjective states, not even a creator or facilitator of
intersubjective consensus: he is “not a contributor to statistically countable reports
about the poem, but a teacher or explicator of meanings.” His report will only speak of
emotions as stable and as “dependent upon a precise object” (VI, 34). The authors
deny that there is a poetry of “pure emotion.” Poetry, they say, “is characteristically a
discourse about both emotions and objects, or about the emotive quality of objects,
and this through its preoccupation with symbol and metaphor.” The point is that even
emotions are treated objectively, as part of the poetic subject matter (VI, 38). Indeed,
for Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them
more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change
from culture to culture” (VI, 38). Rejecting, then, all models of reader-response
or affective theory, whether these be highly subjective or intersubjective historical
models, the authors affirm that criticism should not lose sight of its specifically
literary objects of inquiry, that it should not become dependent on social history or
of anthropology: “though cultures have changed and will change, poems remain and
explain” (VI, 39).
The arguments of this essay are subject to many of the same criticisms that have
been leveled against their positions in “The Intentional Fallacy.” Perhaps the most
fundamental objection is the impossibility and artificiality of treating literature as a
self-contained object, an object which is not somehow realized in its performance, in
interaction with readers who legitimately bring to the texts their own cultural backgrounds,
interests, and assumptions. Moreover, the insistence on the text as an isolated
object in itself effectively represents a philosophical regression to a world atomistically
conceived as composed of separate and independent objects; despite its persistence on
many levels of ideology and politics, it is a view that has been discredited by many
thinkers, from Hegel and Marx, through Bergson, Sartre, and Derrida.
formalisms
The Chicago School
Another group of critics, known as the Chicago School or the Neo-Aristotelians, began
formulating their central ideas around the same time as the New Critics were voicing
their manifestos. In the 1930s, departments of humanities at the University of Chicago
were undergoing a radical transformation in an attempt to revive them and make them
institutionally more competitive with the sciences. Six of the figures later known as the
Chicago critics were involved in these changes: R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder
Olson, W. R. Keast, Norman Maclean, and Bernard Weinberg. These critics later produced
the central manifesto of the Chicago School, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and
Modern (1952), which both attacked some of the important tenets of the New Criticism
and elaborated an alternative formalistic method of criticism derived in part from
Aristotle’s Poetics.
In an earlier essay of 1934, Crane had anticipated (and influenced) Ransom’s call
that professional criticism should move from a primarily historical toward an aesthetic
focus. However, Crane and the Chicago School generally diverged from the New
Criticism in their insistence that literary study should integrate both systematic theory
of literature (being informed by the history of literary theory) and the practice of close
reading and explication of literary texts. Moreover, the Chicago School drew from
Aristotle’s Poetics a number of characteristic critical concerns, such as the emphasis on
literary texts as “artistic wholes,” the analytical importance of locating individual texts
within given genres, and the need to identify textual and generic (as opposed to authorial)
intention. Whereas the New Critics had focused attention on specifically poetic
uses of language, irony, metaphor, tension, and balance, the Chicago School followed
Aristotle in emphasizing plot, character, and thought. In general, the Neo-Aristotelians
offered an alternative formalist poetics which acknowledged the mimetic, didactic, and
affective functions of literature. The influence of this school, however, was overshadowed
by the widespread adoption of New Critical dispositions throughout the American
education system.
The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Modernism comprised a broad series of movements in Europe and America that came
to fruition roughly between 1910 and 1930. Its major exponents and practitioners
included Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia
Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. These various modernisms were the
results of many complex economic, political, scientific, and religious developments
over the nineteenth century, which culminated in World War I (1914–1918). The vast
devastation, psychological demoralization, and economic depression left by the war
intensified the already existing reactions against bourgeois modes of thought and economic
practice. Rationalism underwent renewed assaults from many directions: from
philosophers such as Bergson, from the sphere of psychoanalysis, from neoclassicists
such as T. E. Hulme, the New Humanists in America, and neo-Thomists such as
part viii: the twentieth century
Jacques Maritain. These reactions were often underlain by a new understanding of
language, as a conventional and historical construct. The modernist writer occupied a
world that was often perceived as fragmented, where the old bourgeois ideologies
of rationality, science, progress, civilization, and imperialism had been somewhat
discredited; where the artist was alienated from the social and political world, and
where art and literature were marginalized; where populations had been subjected to
processes of mass standardization; where philosophy could no longer offer visions of
unity, and where language itself was perceived to be an inadequate instrument for
expression and understanding.
Hence, over the last fifty years or so, we have come to appreciate more fully the
complexity and heterogeneity of literary modernism, in its nature and genesis. It is
no longer regarded as simply a symbolist and imagistic reaction against nineteenth-
century realism or naturalism or later versions of Romanticism. It is not so much that
modernism, notwithstanding the political conservatism of many of its practitioners,
turns away from the project of depicting reality; what more profoundly underlies
modernistic literary forms is an awareness that the definitions of reality become increasingly
complex and problematic. Modernists came to this common awareness by
different paths: Yeats drew on the occult, on Irish myth and legend, as well as the
Romantics and French symbolists. Proust drew on the insights of Bergson; Virginia
Woolf, on Bergson, G. E. Moore, and others; Pound drew on various non-European
literatures as well as French writers; T. S. Eliot, whose poetic vision was profoundly
eclectic, drew on Dante, the Metaphysical poets, Laforgue, Baudelaire, and a number
of philosophers.
In general, literary modernism was marked by a number of features: (1) the affirmation
of a continuity, rather than a separation, between the worlds of subject and object,
the self and the world. The human self is not viewed as a stable entity which simply
engages with an already present external world of objects and other selves; (2) a perception
of the complex roles of time, memory, and history in the mutual construction
of self and world. Time is not conceived in a static model which separates past, present,
and future as discrete elements in linear relation; rather, it is viewed as dynamic,
with these elements influencing and changing one another. Human history is thus not
already written; even the past can be altered in accordance with present human
interests, motives, and viewpoints; (3) a breakdown of any linear narrative structure
following the conventional Aristotelian model which prescribes beginning, middle,
and end. Modernist poetry tends to be fragmented, creating its own internal “logic” of
emotion, image, sound, symbol, and mood; (4) an acknowledgment of the complexity
of experience: any given experience is vastly more complex than can be rendered in
literal language. For example, the experience of “love” could be quite different from
one person to another, yet language coercively subsumes these differing experiences
under the same word and concept. Modernist poetry tends to veer away from any
purported literal use of language which might presume a one-to-one correspondence
between words and things; it relies far more on suggestion and allusion rather than
overt statement; (5) a self-consciousness regarding the process of literary composition.
This embraces both an awareness of how one’s own work relates to the literary tradition
as a whole, and also an ironic stance toward the content of one’s own work; (6)
finally, and most importantly, an awareness of the problematic nature of language.
formalisms
This indeed underlies the other elements cited above. If there is no simple correspondence
between language and reality, and if these realms are mutually constituted through
patterns of coherence, then a large part of the poet’s task lies in a more precise use of
language which offers alternative definitions of reality. Eliot once said that the poet
must “distort” language in order to create his meaning.
Of all the Western modernists, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) has been the most pervasively
influential through both his poetry and his literary criticism. He was initially
influenced by the American New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer,
and his early ideas owed a great deal to their emphasis on tradition, classicism, and
impersonality. Eliot was also indebted to later nineteenth-century French poets and
particularly to Ezra Pound and the imagist movement. Pound assumed a broad range
of critical roles: as poet-critic, he promoted his own work and the works of figures such
as Frost, Joyce, and Eliot; he translated numerous texts from Anglo-Saxon, Latin,
Greek, and Chinese; and, associating with various schools such as imagism and vorticism,
he advocated a poetry which was concise, concrete, precise in expression of emotion, and
appropriately informed by a sense of tradition. As a result of his suggestions, Eliot’s
major poem The Waste Land was radically condensed and transformed.
Eliot took his so-called theory of “tradition” from both Babbitt and Pound, though
it had political precedents in conservative theories of tradition such as that of Edmund
Burke. Eliot’s theory claimed that the major works of art, both past and present,
formed an “ideal order” which is continually modified by subsequent works of art. The
central implication here was that contemporary writers should find common ground
with that tradition even as they extended it. Eliot effectively succeeded in redefining
the European literary tradition, continuing the humanists’ onslaught against the
Romantics, and bringing into prominence Dante, the Metaphysical poets, and the
French symbolists. Eliot also advanced an “impersonal” notion of poetry, whereby
the poet expresses not a personality but a precise formulation of thought and feeling
such as is lacking in “ordinary” experience. The poet, according to Eliot, employs an
“objective correlative,” whereby objects and events in the external world are used to
express complexes of thought and emotion.
In terms of literary history, Eliot held that a “dissociation of sensibility” had set in
after the seventeenth century that entailed a disjunction of various human faculties
such as reason and emotion which had previously been integrated within a unified
sensibility. Eliot’s ideas bore an ambivalent relationship with the claims of the New
Criticism. On the one hand, he believed that the aesthetic dimension of works of art is
irreducible; on the other, he believed, with increasing insistence throughout his career,
that art is irreducibly bound to its social, religious, and literary context. The ideas of
Pound and Eliot have had a lasting influence but their most forceful impact occurred
between the 1920s and the 1940s.
Notes
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee
T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 5. Hereafter
page citations are given in the text.
part viii: the twentieth century
2
Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’ ” in Russian Formalist Criticism,
trans. Lemon and Reis, p. 103. Hereafter page citations are given in the text.
3
Part of this account is indebted to the valuable introduction to M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bakhtin’s essay “The Dialogic Imagination” is
contained in this volume, which is hereafter cited as DI.
4
“Linguistics and Poetics,” in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska
and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 63.
Hereafter cited as LL.
5
John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1968), p. 329. Hereafter cited as WB.
6
W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in W. K. Wimsatt,
Jr., The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 4. Hereafter cited
as VI.
7
W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” in VI, p. 21.
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