20th Century Studies Russian FormalismRussian Formalism A collection of articles and texts in translation edited by Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt SCOTTISH ACADEMIC PRESS EDINBURGH 1973Published by Scottish Academic Press Ltd 25 Perth Street, Edinburgh EH3 SDW and distributed by Chatto & Windus Ltd 40 William IV Street London WC2N 4DF ISBN 7011 1938 1 © 20th Century Studies All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Scottish Academic Press Ltd. ‘@Printed in Great Britain by Dolphin Press® Brighton Williams Lea GroupContributors er UG 2 > Tavetan Todorov is a co-editor of Poétique. His Théorie de la Litiéra- ture (1965) was the first comprehensive collection of Formalist texts to appear in France. He has recently published, with O. Ducrot, 2 Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (Le Seuil). Richard Sherwood, a member of the British Neo-Formalist circle, is a Lecturer in the Department of German and Russian at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is working on an anthology of Shklovsky’s criticism. Lubomir Dolezel, who was connected with the linguistic studies of the Circle of Prague in the 1930’s and has published widely on the subject, is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. Julia Kristeva is a member of the French Te! Quel group. Among her recent publications is Séméiotiké, Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Le Seuil). John Bowlt is at present lecturing in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. He is about to publish a collection of texts relating to Russian art in the early years of the century (Viking Press). Milka Bliznakov is at present working on the history of Soviet architecture in the School of Architecture of the University of Texas at Austin. Umberto Eco, the prominent Italian critic and a past contributor to 20th Century Studies, has been instrumental in presenting the work of the Russian Formalists to the Italian public.Contents Introduction Some approaches to Russian Formalism Tzvetan Todorov Letter to Haroldo de Campos on Martin Codax’s poetic texture Roman Jakobson Viktor Shklovsky and the development of early Formalist theory on prose literature Richard Sherwood The resurrection of the word (1914) Viktor Shklovsky On the connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices (1919) Viktor Shklovsky Narrative composition — a link between German and Russian poetics Lubomir Dolezel An essay on the analysis of the composition of the novella (1922) A. A. Reformatsky The ruin of a poetics Julia Kristeva Literature and cinema (1926) Boris Eikhenbaum Poetry and prose in cinematography (1927) Viktor Shklovsky 20 26 41 73 85 102 122 128Russian Formalism and the visual arts 131 John Bowlt The Rationalist movement in Soviet architecture in 147 the 1920's Milka Bliznakov On the possibility of generating aesthetic messages in 162 an Edenic language Umberto Eco Acknowledgements Roman Jakobson’s ‘Letter to Haroldo de Campos on Martin Codax’s poetic texture’, which has been translated into Portuguese and French but appears here for the first time in the original English, will be included in Vol. IIL of his Collected Works, Mouton, The Hague (forthcoming). Julia Kristeva’s article first appeared as a preface to the French translation of Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky, Editions Le Seuil, Collection Les Pierres vives, Paris, 1970. Tzvetan Todorov’s article first appeared in Revue d’Esthétigue, No. 2, 1971. Umberto Eco’s article, which first appeared in Strumenti critici, No. 15, June 1971, was included in his collection Le forme del contenuto, Bompiani, Milan, 1971. Viktor Shklovsky’s article ‘On the connection...’, first published in Poetika (Petrograd, 1919), later appeared with very slight changes in his O Teorii Prozy. Jane Knox’s translation follows the text of O Teorii Prozy (2nd edition, Moscow, 1929). Owing to the length of this article, certain sections have been left out: these are marked by dots in the text. The respective sources of the other articles by Shklovsky, Reformatsky and Eikhenbaum are given in the articles by Richard Sherwood (p. 39, note 3) and Lubomir Doledel (p. 84, notes 37-38), and in the introductory note by T.L. Aman (pp. 120-21).Introduction I. As a result of its initial commitment to the task of exploring both external and internal barriers in the field of the Humanities, 20th Century Studies has moved with a certain inevitability towards two particular types of subject matter. On the one hand, as in issue no.3 on Structuralism, it has offered for consideration a method which may be applied with equally productive results in such diverse areas as literature, historiography and the cinema. On the other hand, it has taken its point of departure from a specific geographical area (Ireland in no.4, Italy in no.6) and ranged over a variety of cultural issues emerging within the national context. In a real sense, the subject of Russian Formalism can be seen from both these points of view. Our concern is with successive instances of a ‘formal method’ applied in the analysis of lyric poetry and narrative prose, cinema, the visual arts and architecture. Yet for all its aspirations towards methodological neutrality, Formalism remains distinctively Russian, and as such can hardly be divorced from the course of Russian history in the early part of the twentieth century. In the words of Victor Erlich, the Formalist school was the ‘child of the revolutionary period . . . part and parcel of its peculiar intellectual atmosphere’. The reference to Professor Erlich, whose pioneering study of the move- ment dates from as far back as 1955, leads us to define in more exact terms the scope of this particular collection of texts and the role which it is intended to fulfil. In part, it answers specifically to the purpose already stated, that of pursuing Formalism into areas beyond the literary sphere with which it is most commonly associated. As the articles on the cinema by both Eikhenbaum and Shklovsky make abundantly clear, the extension of Formalist criticism into the theory and practice of film was an almost inevitable step and it has been accepted as such. But, in spite of the Janus-like figure of Osip Brik, it is surely less generally recognised that the evolution of criticism in the visual arts followed a parallel course. And we can appreciate from Dr. Bliznakov’s discussion of Ladovsky and the Rationalist movement that the saddling of the Rationalists with the term ‘Formalist’ was more than mere vituperation: Ladovsky also had his ‘formal method’. 1Beyond this general aim, it is worth setting down the simple point that, despite the widespread contemporary interest in their work and the considerable number of translations published recently in European countries, the amount of Formalist material easily available to the English reader remains remarkably little. We are extremely glad to be able to alleviate this deficiency by including texts by the two most famous surviving members of the school. Roman Jakobson has allowed us to print his recent ‘Letter to Haroldo de Campos on Martin Codax’s poetic texture’, which has not yet been published in the original English. And, reverting through over half a century, we are delighted to present translations of two short articles and one more considerable piece by Viktor Shklovsky. Of the two shorter articles, the one dating from 1914 constitutes perhaps the first characteristically Formalist statement, against the backcloth of Russian Futurism, while the second, on ‘Poetry and Prose in cinematography’, vaults lightly over the barrier that even today has the force of an institutional taboo in traditional British academic circles. The longer article (slightly abridged) which completes the trio, unquestionably contains some of Shklovsky’s most brilliant insights into the ‘Theory of Prose’. It forms the main subject of Richard Sherwood’s article on Shklovsky. There are, however, as Professor DoleZel expresses it in his article on ‘Narrative composition’, two quite different ways of tracing the history of the Formalist movement: the ‘exclusive’ approach, which portrays Formalism as an ‘exceptional phenomenon in the history of Russian critical thought’, and the ‘inclusive’ approach, which places it against the general background of the evolution of European critical theory in the present century. The utterly individual style of Shklovsky seems to call for the ‘exclusive’ approach. But Professor DoleZel considers that it is now opportune to explore the possibilities of the other alternative. His discussion of the links between German and Russian poetics serves in part to introduce the work of A. M. Petrovsky in the field of narrative composition, and its ‘most systematic’ theoretical expression in the virtually unknown work of A. A. Reformatsky. It is in accordance with this ‘inclusive’ view that we have taken par- ticular care to include articles which display Formalism in relation to the ongoing process of contemporary criticism. Tzvetan Todorov, co-editor of Poétique, acknowledges the achievement of the Formalists in reinstating the Aristotelian notion of a ‘poetics’, even if he is equally concerned to point out some of the inconsistencies and confusions in Formalist critical theory. Julia Kristeva suggests that the work of Bakhtin was in effect the ‘ruin’ of the Formalist poetics, but her analysis of the historical limitations of Formalism serves to bring into even sharper focus a contemporary critical stance which Bakhtin to a remarkable degree anticipates. Finally, taking as its starting point Professor Jakobson’s definition of language, there is 2Umberto Eco’s linguistic fantasy on the possibility of ‘generating aesthetic messages in an Edenic language’. We could scarcely have more conclusive proof of the fact that the concerns of the Formalists need not yet be relegated to the museum of culture. S.B. Il. When the Symbolist writer, Andrei Bely, remarked in 1909 that tendentious criticism had outlived its time, he was acknowledging an imminent and radical move from literary criticism as a socio-political process to literary criticism as an intrinsic, medial activity. Russian Symbolism, poised between two centuries, acted asa vital link between a still dominant didactic school of criticism and an emergent formal method: the fact that Bely uttered the above statement in the context of a structural analysis of prosody — perhaps the first scientific in- vestigation of Russian poetry — emphasised that literary and artistic criticism was moving from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’, from extraneous criteria to the work as the ‘sum of all the stylistic media employed therein’. It is legitimate that the Symbolists be mentioned in any examination of Russian Formalism since it was they, and not the Futurists, who were the essential innovators in Modernist art and criticism. Although the Futurist poets, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh and Mayakovsky, expanded the potentials of language and drew attention to specific poetical and linguistic devices, and although they may have been the personal friends of Jakobson and Shklovsky, it was such eminent Symbolist literatias Bely and Valerii Bryusov who, in artistic and critical achieve- ment, anticipated the theoretical principles of the Formalists as such. It was indicative of the profound aesthetical ambiguity germane to the Russian Symbolists, both poets and critics, that on the one hand they could have aspired to the cosmic and the synthetic and on the other could have concentrated on the literary craft in a highly cerebral and analytical fashion: hence, by 1909, Bryusov could speak in terms of ‘scientific poetry’ and Bely could stipulate that the task of Symbolist theory was to derive a series of methodical values from the basic concept of artistic value. In turn, Bely’s own endeavours in this area, published in his remarkable collection of essays, Symbolism, could prompt his assertion that poetical depictions of reality were subject to laws of causality and motivation. From this it was but one step to Shklovsky’s advocation of motif and motivation as integral parts of the stylistic fabric of a literary work. But the Symbolists were firstly creators and secondly critics, whereas the Formalists were critics above all. This divergence in artistic 3priorities combined with the chronological difference between the two trends would explain why the Symbolists were not active supporters of the two initial Formalist platforms — the Moscow Linguistic Circle (established in 1915) and Opoyaz (Society of Poetical Language, established in Petrograd in 1916). Even so, it is relevant to note that the more ‘scientific’, linguistic wing of the Formalists, including Jakob- son and Vinokur, were members of the Moscow group (both Bely and Bryusov were Muscovites), whereas the more historical, perhaps even more empirical wing, including Eikhenbaum and Shklovsky, attended the Petrograd meetings —and this despite their debt to the linguistician, Baudoin de Courtenay. It was logical, therefore, that Opoyaz should have nurtured such literaryessays as Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Device’(1917) and Eikhenbaum’s ‘How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made’ (1919), whereas the Moscow Linguistic Circle should have stimulated such studies as Jakobson’s ‘Khlebnikov’s Poetic Language’ (1919). However insubstantial the demarcation line between the literary and linguistic adherents of Russian Formalism, certain developments within the movement were attributable to the above preferences. When Jakobson left Moscow for Prague in 1920 the Moscow Lingui- stic Circle declined rapidly and colleagues such as Vinokur remained active only within the framework of literarylanguage and linguistics as such. The Petersburgian faction, however, especially during the early 1920s, assumed increasing importance, not only because it attracted new sympathisers such as Arvatov, Tomashevsky and Tynyanov, but also because it broadened its literary interests to encompass the visual arts and the cinema, even fusing its identity with that of the literary and tactile Constructivists. This tendency towards a comparative aes- thetics yielded fruitful results in the many critical articles which appeared in the journal, Lef/Novyi lef, and in the many Formalist booklets and miscellanies published during the early 1920s. In turn, it was thanks to original members of Opoyaz such as O. Brik and Kushner and to newcomers such as Arvatov and Punin that Formalism as a critical method became less intrinsic and more reliant on socio- political factors. And although the essential premise of Formalism — that a work of art was an aesthetic unit obedient to its own laws — was undermined both by the expansion of its artistic horizons and by the increasing political pressure during the 1920s, it did, to a considerable extent, share the prevalent view that artistic intuition and empiricism were outmoded in a materialist, technological society. In this respect the Formalists could agree tentatively that the ‘fundamental methodo- logical aspiration of Marxist art criticism is the affirmation of a Scientific approach to art.’ Eventually, of course, the formal method was replaced by that same tendentious criticism which Bely had censured. As the patron of a manifestly cohesive and integrated society, the Soviet government 4required a thematic and synthetic culture: in this light Formalism was seen to be refractive and individualistic and hence had no place in a positivist, collective society. By the late 1920s Formalism as a definite literary doctrine had lost its original physiognomy — not only because of emigration and the political demand for a socio-political inter- pretation of culture, but also because of inner tensions produced by the fundamental realisation that the formal method did not advance ultimate criteria for the aesthetical evaluation of a given work: it explained, but it did not pass judgement. One might argue, in fact, that even without external pressure Russian Formalism as an indigenous movement would have had to give way to a more eclectic conception of art and criticism. But Russian Formalism, like the Russian avant- garde in art, transcended both disciplinary and national barriers and, as our selection demonstrates so succinctly, contributed a new and vital system to the aesthetical codex of Western Europe and America. JB. Note: In the main text, the system of transliteration is that used by the journal Soviet Studies (publ. University of Glasgow), although where a variant has been cstablithed (eg. Burliuk, not Burlyuk, Lissiisky not Lisiisky) this has been retained. 5Some Approaches to Russian Formalism Tzvetan Todorov I. The re-birth of a poetics It is certainly no accident that the term poetics, which has always been associated with the Aristotelian treatise of that name, gained a new currency as the title of the first published collection of the Russian Formalists; the close links between the two approaches are undeniable, and span twenty centuries of misguided contempt of the literary text by critics who refuse to consider text and text alone. The Formalists’ initial axiom held that any consideration of particular works as the product of Jiterature was bound to change radically the practitioner’s view of what literary research involves. This change of attitude did in fact take place within the framework of Formalism; but it was no overnight happening. There was more the sense of a slow process of development and personal commitment, and the present article is designed to pick out the principal points along this line. At first sight the Formalists appear to deny that they have any theoretical or methodological programme. They maintain that the purpose of literary study is ‘quite simply’ the knowledge of literary writings. This is brought out in the synthesising article ‘Theory of the formal method’! by Boris Eikhenbaum, where he says: ‘For the Formalists it is not the problem of method in literary research which counts, but simply the question of literature as a subject of research’ (p.31). ‘What I hold to be important, in rigorously conducted work, is not the setting-up of schemas, but the possibility of detecting facts’ (pp.58-59). ‘It has become obvious, even for people outside the Opoyaz circle, that our work consisted in a study of certain intrinsic peculiarities of literary art and not the establishing of a “formal method” which is fixed and unchangeable. People have realised that we were investigating the subject of literary research, not its method’ (p.65) Yet in the same article Eikhenbaum weighs up the achievement of individual Formalist projects and admits that the specific aim of these 6was not the increased knowledge of such and such a text, but the solution of a theoretical problem. Discussing another member of the circle, he says: ‘Shklovsky studies the relationship between narrative and special devices; he considers Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy as ideal material for an analysis of novel and story structure quite separately from any problems of literary history which they might be felt to raise’ (pp.52-53). In any case Shklovsky had already made the same general statement in his essay: ‘I have not the slightest intention of conducting an exhaustive study of Sterne’s novel, because that is not whatinterests me. I am concerned withthe theory of the syuzhet’? Again, speaking of himself, we find Eikhenbaum saying: ‘In my study of Anna Akhmatova, I have also tried to re-examine fundamental problems connected with the theory of verse: the problem of rhythm and its combination with syntax and intonation, of verse sounds combined with articulation and finally of vocabulary and semantics in poetry.”* Eikhenbaum is aware of the distance between these two declarations, but merely notes it down as a chance element: ‘It was quite natural at this period that literary texts merely provided the Formalists with a testing-ground for the verification of their theoretical proposals’ (p.47). Throughout his essay Eikhenbaum employs the doublet ‘theory/ history’. Therefore one might have expected each of these terms to correspond to one sector of literary research, the former containing theoretical considerations and the latter concerning actual familiari with the texts. But it doesn’t work out like this at all. When Eikhen- baum touches on literary history, he ties it up with the studies which he has described at an earlier stage. ‘The past as such hardly engages our interest, the past as a specific historical fact: we are not concerned with the recovery of such and such a period which happened to meet with our critical approval ... We approach history with an accumula- tion of our own personal theoretical axioms and difficulties . . . In fact, literary history can be distinguished from theory more by its purpose than by any particular method for literary research or by the point of view which it adopts. This accounts for the sort of literary history which we produced. It aimed at theoretical solutions just as much as historical ones; it was designed to bring to light completely new theoretical problems while at the same time re-examining the old questions’ (pp.71-72). But here again, whatever Eikhenbaum seems to be stating, the main emphasis of literary research is clearly ‘the theoretical problem’. Was this attitude fated to stay in the form of an abstract activity never given its proper name? The answer is ‘no’, because we had to reckon with the famous concept of ‘literariness’ put forward in Roman Jakobson’s first book (1919), and subsequently taken up by other writers. ‘The real field of literary science is not literature but /iterariness ; in other words, 7that which makes a specific work /iterary’ (p.37). But we are surely entitled to ask what exactly this ‘literariness’ is ? Initially this concept satisfied negative requirements: how to avoid studying anything outside the definition of ‘literary’. It helped to circumscribe the area inside ‘literary science’ which was not a fit field for research — the author’s biography, the work’s social context, the history of ideas, and so on. This emerges from the way Jakobson continues his argument: ‘However, up to now historians of literature have invited comparison with a certain type of police detective who intends to arrest a culprit but is quite prepared to seize hold of anything to be found in the room where the crime was committed and even the people passing by in the street below. Literary historians were totally indiscriminate; they used the evidence of their own life, of psychology, politics, philosophy and what have you. A conglomeration of un- related trades was substituted for literary research, as if people had forgotten that each of the fields of study involved in fact belonged toa separate discipline: history of philosophy, the history of culture, applied psychology and so on: and that in fact these separate dis- ciplines are quite capable of using literary evidence as second-rate documentation for their own purposes’ (pp.37-38). A few years later, another Formalist, Tynyanov, can be found echoing this: ‘The programme of any study project which claims to concern itself with art must surely possess specific features which set art apart from other areas of intellectual enquiry .. .’(p.65). Apart from this negative conception of ‘literariness’ (what is typical of literature and of nothing else), there was another, more positive doctrine, enunciated by Jakobson in the paragraph immediately following the quotation which was given a little way back: ‘If literary research wishes to have the status of an exact science, it must adopt the question of “devices” as its single dominant theme.”* According to this view, it is not the body of the literary work, the text itself, which constitutes the field of literary analysis, but the devices employed inside it — in other words, certain theoretical concepts devised by the literary analyst to help him in his work. These are abstract concepts which can be picked out along a whole series of related texts where the techniques can be observed at work: estrangement (ostranenie), ladder construction, laying bare. These were the main devices which the Formalists examined in the early period. In anessay written some ten years later, Tynyanov was to be even more explicit: ‘Before embarking on any study of literature, it is necessary to establish that the literary work constitutes one system and literature itself another, unrelated one. This is the only foundation upon which we can build a literary science which is capable of going beyond 8unsatisfactory collections of heterogenous material and submitting them to proper study.’> To sum up, we can say that the field of literary research, or better, of poetics, can never be composed by the ‘chaotic image’ of actual, concrete literary output. The object of poetics is to produce a con- ceptual system, which can identify certain abstract categories as they operate inside an individual work or series of works. In other words, a poetics is concerned with critical ideas and not a concrete object, so that (contrary to what Eikhenbaum seemed to be maintaining) it will not consider literature, in the sense of the ‘totality of written produc- tion’, but rather the system of literary discourse in so far as this is the generative principle behind any and every text. Barthes has re-stated this recently as follows : ‘Perhaps man possesses a faculty for literature, corresponding to the faculty of language postulated by Humboldt and Chomsky, a potentiality for verbal expression which has nothing to do with genius since it is made up of prescriptive categories outside the individual author’s control and does not depend on inspiration or personal volition.’ Perhaps we should disagree with Eikhenbaum’s view and hold that the important thing is not so much to consider literary ‘facts’, because these are not fixed and irrevocable as such. It is the method of approach which determines the purpose of research, and the critical point of view is what defines a literary fact. The same goes for language: ‘We fondly imagine that we can achieve a direct cognition of the fact of language, as if this were an objective reality. But the fact is that we can only perceive it according to a certain point of view which must first be defined.” To conclude my disagreement with Eikhenbaum, therefore, I would maintain that there is in fact a theoretical position underpinning Formalism, rather than a common purpose. The object of this sort of literary work could equally well serve in a different discipline. For example, whether Freud is writing about Hoffmann or Dostoevsky, he still uses a psychoanalytic approach, and there is by analogy a political element in Lenin’s writing about Tolstoi. Hence one can say that the vital thing is not the obvious, immediately visible object of research, but rather the composite programme which merges into theory or method. A science of poetics will thus achieve the same status as any other human discipline when it is properly distinguished from the act of reading, whose object is precisely the interpretation of one particular text.® It is clear from the foregoing that practical work can precede theory; to be more precise, all practical approaches incorporate within 9themselves a theoretical programme which need not necessarily be the same as what they explicitly claim. IL. Thenotionof form The name ‘Formalists’ was not the choice of the critics who are nowadays designated by this title. It was a nick-name slung at them by contemporary denigrators (like the label ‘Impressionists’ some fifty years earlier), and the ‘Formalists’ never accepted it as a description of themselves. Yet it is true that the concept of form has a place in their main writings and remains vitally important though its meaning varies considerably. Before we go any further, the issue of form should be placed in its actual historical situation. The Formalists’ ideas emerged as part of a polemical confrontation with the then predominant Symbolist concept of form. Broadly speaking, the Russian Symbolists saw form as the perceivable part of a work of art (as opposed to its intelligible content); in a literary text they would see form as the range of its phoneticstructures. The sound experiments of Bal’mont, for example, area celebrated project at this period, or Bely’s doctrine (in his role as spokesman for the Symbolists) that an exquisite ‘painting by sounds’ is provided by the two lines of Pushkin which show the pouring of some champagne from bottle into glass. It was Bely again who saw the “tragedy of oncoming greyness’ in the repetition of consonantal group r, dand tin Blok. In short, one can say that the Symbolists tended to divide the literary product into form (i.e. sound), which was vital, and content (i.e. ideas), which was external to art. The Formalist approach was completely opposed to this aesthetic appreciation of ‘pure form’. They no longer saw form as opposed to some other internal element of a work of art (normally its content) and began to conceive it as the totality of the work’s various components. Thus every element inside a work of art is, according to the exact measure of its appropriateness to it, a formal part of the whole. Eikhenbaum comments: ‘Effectively the Formalists had given the sense of artistic coherence to the term form. They had merged it with the image of the artistic work in its unity so that it no longer involved any opposition inside the work except with other, non-aesthetic forms.’® This makes it essential to realise that the ‘form’ of awork is not its only formal element: its content may equally be formal. This interpretation of the concept of form marked the first direction, in the Formalists’ work, towards the problem of literary evolution. Once it is granted that all elements in the work of art are formal, the process of creation and its subordinate activity, aesthetic perception, cannot be understood outside the context of an interaction of forms. ‘Form, once understood as the fundamental basis of the work of art, is 10constantly self-adjusting in relation to all previous works in the past,’ writes Eikhenbaum (p.65), and Shklovsky says: ‘The work of art is viewed in relation to other artistic productions and is assisted by associations connecting it up to them’ (p.50). This leads Tynyanov to the conclusion: ‘The form of a literary work must be felt as a dynamic force inside it’ (p.64). This can be taken a step further: anything which is already included in the work, according to the Formalists, is formal. The only non- formal elements are the ‘materials’ with which it is composed, that is the self-same elements before they were integrated into this particular artistic structure. There is no natural or qualitative distinction between subject material and formal elements: the only difference comes with the use made of these same elements, or in their function. This is how Eikhenbaum formulates the proposition: ‘The evidence of art itself is that its differentia specifica is not expressed in the elements that go to make up the individual work but simply in the particular use that is made of them’ (p.43). Now we can see how the concept of form produces and is then fused with the concept of function. Analysis of form, in other words of the totality of the work of art, leads to the identification of its functions, i.e. the relation between its various components. Tynyanov writes: ‘Its components(that is those of form- totality) are connected by algebraic signs of co-relation and integration’ (p.117). These latter two operations, as stated by Tynyanov, happen to be precisely the same as those used by modern linguisticians to describe the way language functions: ‘horizontal’ relations of distribu- tion and ‘vertical’ relations of integration. This is how Tynyanov defines a co-relative function: ‘I call the constructive function producing an element in a work of art its capacity to enter into co- relation with the other elements in the same system, and consequently with the whole system of the work in question’ (p.123). Function thus takes over the place of form. Summing up the evolution of the concept ‘form’ in the Formalist movement, Eikhenbaum states: ‘We set out with the general concept of form in itsnew currency, and came by way of the concept of device to the new concept of function’ (p.74). All this makes it easier to see how wrong it i is to accuse the Formalists of ‘only’ having been concerned with form, since they took form to be the totality of the work of art. But this was the accusation which their contemporaries taxed them with and has been taken up again much more recently: to limit ourselves to just one example, here is how Lévi- Strauss contrasts Formalism with Structuralism: ‘In the case of the former, the twin domains of form and content are kept absolutely separate, because form alone is intelligible and content is mere residual matter void of any significant value. But in Structuralism, this seopposition is non-existent: there is no abstract on one side and concrete on the other. Form and content belong to the same category and submit to the same type of analysis.’!° The ‘Formalist’ Eikhen- baum puts it in the following way: ‘Clearly the concept of form had become increasingly merged for us with the concept of literature as a whole and the notion of literary event.’ To accuse the Formalists of having isolated form and content is as wrong-headed as condemning (and executing) Socrates for having been a sophist. IL. ‘Fable’ and ‘subject’ (‘syuzhet’) Any study of the narrative story must begin by a theoretical examina- tion of the term ‘story’. As in other forms of analysis, the starting point is provided not by actual stories in their individual make-up, but by a special way of conceiving narrative. ‘Scientific enquiry is not concerned with things but with the systems of signs which it replaces things by,” wrote Ortega y Gasset. The preliminary investigations of the Formalists in the field of narra- tive were characterised by this conceptual specification, and in their case it led to the concepts of subject and fable (which I prefer to keep as translations of syuzhet and fabula because of their etymological resemblance, despite their differing connotations in French and English usage). The Formalists seem to have introduced the term subject to authenticate their initial approach to a formal analysis of narrative: the subject constituted the ascertainable part of ‘content’, while the fable corresponded to any pre-literary aspects. In a sense, this was a definite consequence of the new status accorded to the concept of form. Previous literary criticism had seen the events reported in the text as belonging to its content. But the Formalists reject this idea of a shapeless and ill-defined content and call its formal component (i.e. the organised and therefore ascertainable elements of the plot) subject. Nonetheless, the situation is not quite as easy as it sounds, because the terms subject and fable do not cover just one meaning in the Formalist texts; they have several different senses. Once again we are obliged to follow the historical development of terminology. The two terms first appear in the Shklovsky essays entitled The connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices and The novel as parody: ‘Tristram Shandy’. The subject (which is Shklovsky’s exclusive concern here) is made up of every- thing which stands in any shape or form outside a straight chrono- logical resumé of the novel’s plot. A section of the first of the two essays is called ‘Staircase construction and retardation’, and here Shklovsky makes a list of the various types of repetition, resump- tion and even suspension of the main action which he detects in the 12narrative process. In the case of this last device, suspension of the main action, he seems to lay exceptional importance on a kind of intuitive feeling as to what the normal rhythm of narrative exposition should be; so much so, that we find him writing: ‘The fundamental rule of change of fortune (peripeteia) is the principle of “blocking”, or post- ponement of effect. What ought to have been revealed immediately, and is already known to the audience, is only gradually revealed to the ero.” Similarly, in his analysis of Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky argues that ‘in this book everything is distanced and displaced’ (p.246), and this displacement is presumably felt to be so in relation to some hypo- thetical pre-ordained unfolding of the action. He goes on to catalogue the various breaks in the time sequence of the book, together with its digressions in the form of sub-stories or philosophical meditations on related topics by the author. The concept of unrolling (razvertivanie) of the subject takes on a special importance at this point (though it is not given a precise definition). Unrolling consists of disproportionately extended description of individual parts of the plot which result in their being felt by the reader to be digressions although they still constitute a main link in the narrative sequence of a story; in Tristram Shandy this is the case with the extended description of the narrator’s Uncle Toby. All these various techniques for subverting the main plot of a story (repetitions, postponements, chronological inversions, sub-stories, philosophical digressions, excessively expanded episodes) serve to amplify what Shklovsky holds tobe the concept of the subject (syuzhet). This is how he defines it: ‘People frequently confuse the concept of subject with a table of events, and for this latter item I substitute the conventional title fab/e. In actual fact, fable is simply a mass of material serving to form a subject. Hence the subject of Eugene Onegin is not the hero’s idyll with Tat’yana, but the development of this fable inside a subject, which is achieved by way of intercalated digressions.”!? The story of Onegin and Tat’yana forms the fable; the digressions on this plot are its subject. It is only the latter element which is formal, and consequently relevant for rigorous literary research. Genette has recently re-examined the problems arising out of this nomenclature, without, however, resuscitating the technical terms Sable and subject. He takes a ‘baroque story’, Saint-Amant’s Moyse sauvé, and shows that there are three formally separable types of digression (or ‘amplification’) which approximately match Shklovsky’s classification but can be much more precisely defined. First there is what Genette calls the diégése, which constitutes the main theme inside a story, and this gives way to three distinct sorts of digression: 13intradiégétiques, métadiégétiques and extradiégétiques. Intradiegetic digressions usually correspond to cases classified by Shklovsky as examples of ‘unrolling of the subject’; they consist of ‘swelling the story from within by making use of its lacunae, spreading out its subject matter and generally multiplying the diverse detail and inci- dent in the plot.’** Thus an action which is supposed to last for a short while (it is no more than twenty-four hours in Ulysses) can be described in every minute detail so that it gives rise to ‘a work of major pro- portions’ (ibid). Metadiegetic amplifications correspond to stories within stories, where narration is one degree removed (hence the name): ‘a second-hand narration is constituted wherever a narrative agent (or general representational factor) conducts the story inside the primary narration.’ (p.202). This secondary status is obviously a purely formal property and has nothing to do with value judgments. Lastly, there are extradiegetic amplifications, which occur whenever the absent narrator (i.e. the author himself) conducts his own digres- sions, usually consisting of moral reflexions on his characters or their actions but not representing the opinions of any one figure in the book. These amount to ‘direct interventions bythe story writer’ (ibid, p.213), and have generally gone out of fashion in modern fiction. This classification certainly rationalises Shklovsky’s somewhat ram- bling analysis, but does not materially affect the danger of a ri distinction between the essential narrative (diégése) and everything else outside this. If the second and third of Genette’s categories seem to possess distinct formal properties of their own, there is an equally formal element about the first, the so-called intradiegetic ampli- fication; this calls for a pre-ordained standard formula for narrative whichit then by definition falls outside. The same goes for Shklovsky’s concept of ‘unrolling’: how in fact are we to measure slowness or swiftness of action? Why should we use the idea of slowed-down action, but not speak of an accelerated story? Or again, why should we deem certain changes of fortune to be supplementary additions and yet not consider other changes as merely missing? All that we really seem entitled to state is that some sections of the plot are more expansively described than others (for this aspect of story structure has been inadequately investigated), but this hardly entitles us to establish a standard norm for the literary text, nor indeed to declare as Shklovsky does that ‘swift’ sequences are not a legitimate part of the subject, i.e. of the formal literary quality of a text. Genette puts it effectively in his essay when he admits that ‘what for a long time was considered the natural order of occurrence in a text is nothing more than one possible order among many others’ (p.221). 14In order to establish the above premisses, Genette makes considerable use of a Bible story which served as Saint-Amant’s source for his Moyse sauvé. ‘We are entitled to consider the Moyse sauvé as an exercise in amplification and to study it from that point of view. Its subject [here Shklovsky would have said: fable]is borrowed, so that any analysis of it is bound to throw more light on the Bible version than on Saint Amant’s reworking of it. It is the amplification itself, the adaptation of a Biblical datum [this is what Shklovsky would have termed: subject] which should engage all our attention’ (p.195). But even in a case of this kind, with its privileged quality of a direct borrowing, this procedure i is surely theoretically untenable — although in practice it leads to positive results, in Genette’s case to a brilliant lecture du texte. The point is this: what constitutes the essence of one story can- not automatically be viewed as the essence of another story, even if there is historical evidence connecting them: the evidence must con- nect them formally. Only an internal analysis of Moyse sauvé will help us to distinguish between theme and digressions. The same story can clearly have different meanings in both texts, and consequently will always require specific analysis.1® Let us now move on to a second sense of the two terms subject and fable, as we meet them in Tomashevsky. Instead of contrasting the thematic essence of a story with digressions, Tomashevsky creates an opposition between the sequence of events referred to by the narrative and the way these events are presented in the story. ‘The fable would seem to consist of a collection of narrative motifs in their chrono- logical sequence, moving on from individual cause to effect, whereas the subject represents the same collected motifs, but in the specific order of occurrence which they are assigned to in the text. As for the fable, it is of little importance that the reader should become aware of an event in any particular part of the story, or that this event should be communicated to him directly by the author himself, inside the reported story of one of the characters in the main story or by way of marginal references. On the other hand, every narrative motif which is presented has an important réle to play in the subject.’?® This way of viewing fable and subject is a good deal more coherent than Shklovsky’s, but is equally open to criticism on a number of counts. Firstly, there is a conspicuous lack of homogeneity in the elements which Tomashevsky gathers under the term subject: it hardly seems right to put breaks in time sequence in the same category as narrative points of view or variations in vocabulary usage, and in any case these latter two components are not in any way distinguished from each other. Secondly, despite the fact that Tomashevsky includes the study of fable in ‘literary science’, he still tends to consider it as more or less external to literature. This tendency is borne out by his own state- ments: ‘Some miscellaneous fact which the author himself has not 15invented can often be adapted by him to serve as his fable. The subject is an exclusively aesthetic construction.’ (p.296). But a sequence of events can surely be identical only in substantial terms as it appears in the miscellaneous source and again in the book; for there can hardly be a functional identity between real life events and their narrative composition. This latter dimension is what really concerns us here. Certain subsequent studies by Shklovsky (especially The construction of the short story and the novel and The mystery story) suggest a third and independent sense of the terms subject and fable. This involves an important shift in terminology, because what Shklovsky is particu- larly concerned with in these two essays is the way events are arranged in a text in relation to each other. He pays much less attention to the question of digressions and technique of presentation (in fact we never find Shklovsky very interested in presentation). But the technical term here employed for mutual arrangement of events is subject, while fable is retained as the heading for all pre-literary materials. But this is not the end of the various modifications undergone by the terms subject and fable. We even find them flagrantly reversed at times, and they more or less swap functions in A. M. Petrovsky’s Morphology of the Novella (first published in 1927) where we meet under the head- ing subject what other critics would call fable and the title exposition (izlozhenie) is provided for the category which others would call subject. Having noted this difference in terminology, perhaps we can look more closely at the way Petrovsky analyses his concepts: ‘In a story it is important that we distinguish between the sequence of movements in its fable and the process of its exposition [i.e. subject)’ (p.72). Thus when we are considering a standard detective story and detect the order: 1. Crime. 2. Hunt for the murderer, what we are really discus- sing is its fable. But if, on the other hand, we maintain the order presented in a certain story and observe: 1. Hunt for the murderer. 2. Description of the crime which he had already committed, then we are dealing with its subject. This is how Petrovsky closes his discussion ‘The arrangement of events in a narrative [i.e. its fable] has no parti- cular interest for us’ (p.73); so that his essay is clearly outside the scope of ‘literary science’. Petrovsky’s distinction is in any case close to Shklovsky’s second application of the two technical terms. Tynyanov himself provides yet another sense for subject and fable. He offers the following definition for the terms in his essay Fundamentals of the cinema’®: ‘We are obliged to define fable as the significant course of action. A work’s subject must therefore be defined as the dynamic formation of various inter-acting strands in its material; it is a combi- nation of style, fable, scene of action and many other vital links in the work’s make-up’ (p.67). This way of employing the term subject brings us close to the usage of form, which I have already discussed, in 16its sense of the totality of appropriate elements in a text when con- sidered as an artistic field of dynamic interactions. Fable thus becomes just one aspect of the subject (Shklovsky himself will argue in similar fashion that content is just one aspect of form), and can be reduced to its representative function. A little further on in his essay Tynyanov cites the example of Hugo’s Les misérables, and states that the novel’s fable corresponds to the life pattern of the various charac- ters which it represents. This means that ‘the introduction of historical, scientific and descriptive material . . . is a characteristic of the subject but not of the fable’ (ibid). Atanotherpoint Tynyanovproduces various examples of subjects, like the stories of Pil’nyak, which are exclusively based on style and discard all fable structure. Tt may be useful to sketch a diagram of the way the two terms have evolved (excluding the initial nomenclature followed by Shklovsky): Classification Pre-literary Literary The presentation events events of events Tomashevsky fable subject Shklovsky (Qnd definitions) fable subject 2 Petrovsky fable subject 2 fable style etc, Tynyanov subject What can we conclude as a result of this enquiry into terminology? Perhaps we should begin by underlining how difficult it has become to borrow technical terms once they have been used a short while back by a full-fledged school of literary criticism. This can only be done if we are prepared to take into consideration their historical context and the variety of meanings which they are capable of passing through. As for the critical problem itself, I think we should insist that the sequence created by the events described in a text is a field of literary study, since these events can have no autonomous existence outside the boundaries of this text. Even a writer like Tomashevsky persists in holding that the sequence of events is a sort of pre-text, a mainspring for the work of art but somehow external to it. This leads him to observe: ‘The material for the fable comes to form its subject after passing through several intermediate stages’.1* Petrovsky had already noted that ‘Our task is to extract the fable only when we have been provided with the text of a story. It is the subject which gives us access to the fable.’?° This latter doctrine, which substitutes a coded pro- 17cedure handled by the reader for a random (and hence undefineable) procedure controlled by the author, seems to have conspicuous advantages; it means that the fable is not a phenomenon which is logically prior to the subject; rather it follows after it. The fable is a pure construction thought up by the reader. To be more exact, we must discard the concept of time sequence; then the fable can be seen as the extension of an explicit presence in all texts, their eventual reader. When we read a novel, we see its events in an (eventually) inverted order, which is sometimes presented by a special character in the story, or in a distorting version, and so on. During the course of our reading, we begin to assemble our own personal impression of the real events portrayed by the text. This personal image of the story will only be definitely fixed when we finish reading the last page of the book. The classic detective novel with ‘whodunit?’ elements presents us with a virtual caricature of this phenomenon: throughout our reading of the story we only grasp the subject; we are incapable of reconstructing a complete version of its fable. In the closing pages the fable is finally organised (roughly as the reader must have imagined it) by a narrative explanation which stands almost completely outside the plot. This structure is rigorously coded by the text (and in certain cases the same is true of the ambiguities in the genre of the fantastic),?' while some modern fiction makes any reconstruction by the reader impossible (and this only serves to emphasise its importance). The sequence of events can be analysed from several different points of view. Shklovsky and Tomashevsky (with Propp, a little later) put special emphasis on the juxtaposition of a set of narrative events in relation to each other. In general terms this field can be called the syntactic aspect of narration and research on it constitutes narrative analysis. Quite apart from the rules of linear narrative syntax, this type of research should concern itself with recognition scenes, the keeping of secrets, the characters’ behaviour patterns, time shifts and flashbacks, parallel or contrasting sub-plots and the formal status of ero, There is a further group of problems related to what Tomashevsky calls the presentation of motifs. This calls for an analysis of the relationship between syntactic units and the lexical devices which pattern them. On one side we have the narrator's point of view (which I call factors of énonciation); on the other we have the different stylistic devices called into play (these may be called factors of that which is énoncé). All this concerns the verbal aspect of a narrative text and research onit constitutes rhetorical analysis. There is still a third group of problems left; this is a third way of conceiving of the text. The Formalists paid relatively little attention to it, though it seems equally important. In the same way that Saussure 18reduced the components of language to signifiant and signifié, without including syntax in his classification, the Formalists simplified the literary system to its syntactic and verbal aspects without accounting for semantics. The significance of events referred to in a narrative must certainly not be expelled outside the ambit of a literary text and re- quires its own measure of proper research. This consists of the semantic aspect of a literary text and research on it constitutes thematic analysis. This whole tripartite definition which I have attempted to sketch as a working programme for research on narrative literature would allow the critic to account for the widest variations in methodo- logical orientation. Above all it re-affirms the strong kinship linking structure of narrative to the structure of language. Translated by Bruce Merry NOTES 1 Eikhenbaum’s essay is translated into French and collected in Théorie de la littérature, Textes des Formalistes russes, Paris, Seuil, 1965. 2 This Shklovsky essay is translated into German in Texte der Russtschen Formalisten, Bd. 1, ‘Manchen, W, Fink Verlag, 1969; the passage here quoted isat p.294, 3 Théorie de laiitiérature, p.2.. 4 Novelshaja rustala poezia, Pragus, 1921,.11. 5 Théorie de la littérature. pp.122-123, § R. Barthes, Critique et vertté. Paris, Seuil, 1966,p.58. 7 E. Benveniste, Problémes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966,p.38. 8 Ideal at greater length with the relations between different types of literary research in ‘Comment lire? La nouvelle revue francaise, 18, (1970), 214,p. 129-143. 9 Théorie dela littérature, .63. 10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘La structure et la forme’, Cahlers de l'Institut de science économique sppliqute, 991960 (serie M.n0. 7). 11 Théorie de fa'ittérature, p.48. 12 Texte der Russischen Formalistencit.,p.92. 13. Théorie de la littérature, p.54, 14 G.Genette, Figures 11, Paris, Seuil, 1969, 0.196. 15 The second two categories of amplification can usefully be compared with other narrative procedures: metadiegetic digression can be compared with other sorts of combinative plot ler-weaving and enchainement), while extradiegetic digres introducing énoncan/ subject in the énoncé (evaluative comment, modalising terms, and 0°0n). 18 Thdoriede a ittrature. 209. 17 Petrovsky, 4rspoetica, Vol. 1, Moscow. 1927, pp.69.100, 18 Tynyanov, “Des fondements du cinéma’, Cahters du cinéma, pp.220-221, 1970, pp.59-68 (trans~ ised by Sylviane Messe and Andsée Revel): 19 Théorie de la littérature, p.274. 20 Petrovsky, Morphologie de la nouvelle, in Ars poeticacit.,p.73.. 21 C¥.T. Todorov, “The fantastic in fiction’, 20rk Century Siudies No. 3.,May 1970, pp.76-92. 19Letter to Haroldo de Campos on Martin Codax’s poetic texture Roman Jakobson It was Luciana Stegagno Picchio who, with her infallible literary taste, brought to my attention the enthralling Cantigas of the Galaigo- Portuguese troubadour. The fundamental monograph by Celso Ferreira da Cunha, O Cancioneiro de Martin Codax (Rio de Janeiro, 1956), and an instructive conversation with Francis Rogers helped me to gain an insight into these magnificent creations of an uncommon epoch in the history of European verbal art. As an admirer of that supreme flair for the innermost ties between sound and meaning, a flair which underlies and sustains your daring poetic experiments and thrilling discoveries and which inspires your extraordinary transpositions of the seemingly untranslatable poems from quite different languages, I would like to share with you my cursory observations on an exquisite specimen of the thirteenth- century verbal jewels, the fifth of the seven Cantigas d’amigo by Martin Codax. Quantas sabedes amar amigo treydes comig’ a lo mar de Vigo e banhar nos emos nas ondas. Quantas sabedes amar amado treydes comig’ a lo mar levado e banhar nos emos nas ondas. Treydes comig’ a lo mar de Vigo veeremo’ Io meu amigo e banhar nos emos nas ondas. Treydes comig’ a lo mar levado e veeremo’ lo meu amado ¢ banhar nos emos nas ondas. 20A French Translation by Frangois Dehouche, Chansons d’Amt traduites du portugais (Brussels, 1945), p.79, closely follows the original text: ‘Vous toutes qui savez aimer un ami, venez avec moi a la mer de Vigo et nous nous baignerons dans les fiots. Vous toutes qui savez aimer un aimé, venez avec moi a la mer agitée et nous nous baignerons dans les flots. Venez avec moi 4 la mer de Vigo, et nous verrons mon ami, et nous nous baignerons dans les flots. Venez avec moi a la mer agitée, et nous verrons mon aimé, et nous nous baignerons dans les flots. Each of the four stanzas contains 1) a couplet made up of two riming decasyllables and 2) a nonriming burden of nine syllables (or, in traditional Portuguese nomenclature, which discards the final un- stressed syllable, 1) eneassilabos graves and 2) octossilabo grave). The burden line and one line of each couplet presents marine imagery, while the other line of each couplet treats an amorous theme. The break divides the amorous lines into two equal colons (5 +5), e.g. Quantas sabedes | amar amigo, whereas the colons of the marine lines are asymmetric: (4 +6) within the couplets — Treydes comig’ / alo mar de Vigo — and (6 +3) in the burden — E banhar nos emos / nas ondas. The montage of movable repetitive components introduces a different criterion for dividing the riming lines: each consists of two segments — the first of seven syllables, which is to be termed ‘stem’, and the second of three syllables, to be labelled ‘coda’. Each riming line contains four downbeats, which fall on its first, fourth, seventh, and ninth syllables: Quantas sabédes amar amddo. Thus the penult of the coda and the final syllable of the stem are always stressed. The three downbeats of the stem are separated from each other by two-syllable upbeats. The structural invariant of each colon in the couplet lines is its double downbeat, while the division of these lines into stems and codas is marked by the difference between the two internal disyllabic upbeats of the stem and the two external mono- syllabic upbeats of the coda. As for the burden, the accentual pattern of its first, hexasyllabic colon duplicates the last, hexasyllabic colon of the antecedent marine line: alo mar de Vigo /{ e banhar nos emos. The entire burden line is built on a regular alternation of four—two disyllabic and two monosyllabic— upbeats separated from each other by three downbeats. 21The make-up of the codas divides the Cantiga stanzas into two ODD and two EVEN stanzas. Within each of these two pairs the codas are identical, whereas the odd and even stanzas offer two different pairs of timing words. In either of these two pairs one word is amorous and the other pertains to the marine theme. Thus amigo rimes with de Vigo in the odd stanzas, and amado with /evado in the even ones. In the termi- nal phonemic sequence VCVCV of the codas the second pair of V(owel) and C(onsonant) alone differentiates these two rimes, while the rest of the sequence remains invariable: am..o—ev..o. Both ANTERIOR (I. and II.) stanzas of the Cantiga differ from both POSTERIOR stanzas (III. and IV.) in the make-up of their stems as well asin the order of stems and of codas. The stem carrying the marine imagery in each couplet is invariable throughout all four stanzas (treydes comig’ a lo mar), whereas the other, thematically amorous stem remains unalterable within each pair of couplets but distinguishes the anterior stanzas (I., II. quantas sabedes amar) from the posterior ones (III., IV. e veeremo lo meu). In the anterior stanzas the variable stem precedes the invariant marine stem, while in the posterior stanzas the order of both stems and, correspondingly, the order of both riming codas is inverted. Thus the invariant stem is followed in the posterior stanzas by the same codas as in the anterior ones. In contradistinction to the subordinate (Quantas) amorous protasis and marine apodosis of the anterior couplets, in the posterior couplets the marine protasis is followed by a coordinate (¢) amorous apodosis or, with regard to the constant burden, the amorous motif appears enveloped in the marine metaphors so that both themes merge. The end of the stem rimes in the anterior couplets (amar — a lo mar) and shares a common three-phoneme sequence within the posterior couplets (a Jo mar — lo meu). Thus the thematically dissimilar lines (marine vs. amorous) are bound phonically not only in their codas but also in their stems. On the other hand, the initial word units of the two marine, invariant hexasyllabic colons within the four stanzas rime with each other: a lo mar —e banhar. Moreover, in the odd stanzas the antecedent word of the invariant stem (the second accented word from its end), comig’ comigo, forms a potentially full rime with the coda of the adjacent line amigo, whereas in the even stanzas the positionally corresponding verb of the in- variable stem builds a grammatical rime with the verb of the following line: II. sabedes — treydes and IV. veeremo’ — emos. Thus, amid all variations of the stem and coda, the sound texture intimately links the amorous line with the neighbouring lines of the marine imagery. The burden, with its nasal feature reiterated five times and with the four words ending in /s/, displays a punlike confrontation of nos and 22nas. The terminal ondas of the burden responcs to the initial words of the four stanzas — I., I]. Quantas and III., IV. Treydes. The inward structure of all the lines within the four couplets, with their eighteen labial nasals, presents a repetition of /m/ and of either the preceding vowel or both surrounding vowels: in the four invariant stems — comig’ a lo mar, and in the other line of the four couplets the anterior stanzas display an etymological figure — I. amar amigo, II. amar amado — and stanzas III., [V, invert the order of the adjacent vowels — yeeremo’ lo meu. Thus the grave nasal rallies the word family amar (I., IL), amigo (I., III.), amado (II., IV.) with the metonymic yet chiefly metaphoric mar (I-IV.) and with such semantically subjective gram- matical categories as the first person plural of the future forms in eos (L, IL, III. bis, IV. bis) and especially the first person singular of the pronouns comig’ (I.-IV.) and meu (IIL., IV.). Almost devoid of other nasals, the couplets differ conspicuously from the climactic burden with its prevalently high-pitched nasals, the four /n/ and /nh/. Tf one accepts the reading of the marine stem proposed by J. J. Nunes in his Crestomatia arcaica (Lisbon, 1906), p.343 — treydes vos mig’ with a reflexive verbal construction parallel to the grammatical form of the burden (cf. Cunha, p.69) — the sound texture of this line gains a new link between the stem and the coda; treydes vos — de Vigo /levado. The line appears to excel in reduplications of consonantal phonemes. There are six pairs in the odd and six in the even variant: Treydes vos mig a lo mar de Vigo (2 /r/, 2 /A/, 2 /s/, 2 /v/, 2 /m/ and 2 /g/); Treydes vos mig a lo mar levado (2 /t/, 2 /d/, 2 /s/, 2 /v/, 2 /m/ and 2 /1/). Briefly, both in the odd and in the even variant of this line twelve out of thirteen consonantal phonemes adjacent to a vowel partake in reduplicative pairs. In contradistinction to the final downbeat of the burden — ondas — the downbeats within the couplets never fall on rounded, flat vowels and are tied to three syllabics only: twelve /4/, twelve /é/, and eight /{/, with an amazingly symmetric distribution of the vocalic contrasts between the four couplets of the poem and between the four downbeats of its eight decasyllables: COUPLETS: Inner Outer Anterior Posterior © Even Odd a 6 8 4 8 4 e 6 6 4 8 6 6 i 4 4 4 4 2 6 DOWNBEATS a 6 6 2 10 4 8 e 6 6 10 2 4 8 i 4 4 4 4 8 - The pair of the outer couplets (I, IV) offers the same distribution of the three downbeat vowels as the pair of inner couplets (IT, III), i.e. 23exactly one half of the total number assigned to each of these vowels in the four couplets of the Cantiga. Six /4/ and six /é/ occur in each of the two pairs. We observe a surprisingly similar vocalic equilibrium between the two outer and two inner downbeats of the eight couplet lines or in other words, between the beginnings and the ends of their twocolons. The two other oppositions among couplets, their division into pairs of anterior (I, II) and posterior (III, IV) couplets and into pairs of odd (I, 1D and even couplets, endow the two correlative pairs with a contrary difference in frequency of /4/ and either /é/ or /{/. The anterior couplets count four more /4/ and four fewer /é/ than the posterior couplets, while the number of /{/ is identical in both pairs of couplets. Ina parallel way the even couplets count four more /a/ and four fewer /i/ than the odd couplets, whereas the number of /é/ remains the same In both pairs of couplets. Ananalogous opposition in frequency between /4/ and one of the front, acute vowels determines the relation between the anterior and posterior and between the even and odd downbeats, but in these cases the difference in frequency equals eight and the direction of numerical prevalence is inverted in comparison with the distribution of the same vowels between anterior and posterior and between odd and even couplets. The anterior couplets comprise eight fewer /4/and eight more /6/ than the posterior downbeats, while the number of /{/ remains identical, just as we observed it in the case of anterior and posterior couplets. Between the even and odd downbeats the frequency relation is the same, four to eight, for /4/ and /é/, so that the even downbeats display eight fewer /4/ and /é/ and eight more /{/ than the odd down- beats. The total absence of /i/ under the odd downbeats renders this contrast particularly effective, while the alternation of end rimes brings to light the prevalence of the two doubly oppositive phonemes, * /4/ in the even, and /i/in the odd couplets. A significant role is assumed by the rigorous selection and symmetrical distribution of grammatical classes. No nominal subjects occur in the Cantiga. Nouns are used at the ends of the four amorous lines as direct objects governed by transitive verbs, whereas in the eight marine lines common nouns function as locative circumstantial modifiers intro- duced by a preposition: in the burden they conclude the line (nas ondas), but in the couplets they are followed by a final adnominal modifier — the proper noun (de Vigo) or the adjective (Jevado). Each line contains one finite verb always in plural. Within the couplets the masculine singular of all the nouns contrasts distinctly with the plural of the finites and with the feminine of the interlocutors referred to by these verbal forms and expressed by the relative pronoun Quandas. Contrary to the riming lines, the burden extends the number stated 24and the gender intended by the verb throughout the whole line with its feminine plural ondas. Only two finite forms occur in the poem: the second person plural in the present tense (sabedes and, perhaps, with an imperative conno- tation, treydes) and the first person plural in the future tense (veeremo’ and banhar nos emos). Each of these two temporal and personal varieties appears six times, but the former occurs four times in the anterior and only twice in the posterior stanzas, while the latter dis- plays the reverse order: twice in the anterior stanzas and four times in the posterior ones. The distribution of pronouns relating to the first person singular (two times in the anterior and four times in the posterior stanzas) exhibits the same tendency towards gradual inclu- sion and promotion of the feminine addresser’s ego: e veeremo’ lo meu amigo | amado. This amorous line of both posterior stanzas, with its acute, high-pitched downbeats and its patently prevailing vowels and sonorants against one single obstruent — /g/ or /d/—at the end, forms an ecstatic response to the abundance of seven obstruents in the colon Quantas sabedes, the incipit of the Cantiga. 25Viktor Shklovsky and the development of early Formalist Theory on Prose Literature Richard Sherwood The earliest Russian Formalist essays were concerned almost ex- clusively with poetry and the sounds and rhythms of ‘poetic language’. Contributions to the collections of 1916 and 1917 bore such titles as ‘On the Sounds of Verse Language’ (Lev Yakubinsky), ‘On the Sound Aspect of Poetic Speech’ (Boris Kushner), and ‘Sound Repetitions’ (Osip Brik). Other essays by Yakubinsky, Kushner, E. D. Polivanov and Vladimir Shklovsky were on similar topics. Viktor Shklovsky contributed ‘On Poetry and Trans-sense Language’ and ‘Art as a Device’ to issues 1 and 2 of these collections respectively. The first of his essays is likewise concerned with sounds in poetic language, and, in particular, the zaumnyi yazyk or zaum’? of some of the Russian Futurists such as Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov. Shklovsky sees this element as comprising what has (so he felt at the time) always been the essence of poetic language: ‘self- valuable’ sounds. This was in fact Shklovsky’s second published essay on language, literature and the Futurists, his first being the earliest Russian Formalist publication of all — ‘The Resurrection of the Word’, published as a separate brochure in 1914 and translated in the follow- ing pages. In the interval between the two essays, Shklovsky’s ideas had crystallised into a more original and coherent theory of poetic language. The early essay is, however, most valuable, in that it enables us to see how some of the essential Formalist ideas were generated not purely from reaction to preceding ideas, but also from partial agreement with them, a fact sometimes ignored in studies of Russian Formalism. ‘The Resurrection of the Word’ shows Shklovsky quoting uncritically from Aleksandr Potebnya on the gradual loss of form in words and their ‘journey from poetry to prose’, and from 26Aleksandr Veselovsky on the use of the epithet as a means of revitali- sing the dead word. Shklovsky did not attack Potebnya’s interpretation of the central role of the image in poetic language (nor was there any direct criticism of Symbolism), while Potebnya’s ‘journey from poetry to prose’ appears to have been the starting point for the Formalist theory of the distinction between poetic and prosaic (practical) language, and more particularly for Shklovsky’s theory of the auto- matisation of the senses through over-familiarity with an object or a word or a work of art or even a whole school of art. The originality of the essay lies in Shklovsky’s interpretation of the Futurists’ language as a resurrection of true perception in art. Shklovsky thus afforded approval to aspects of earlier theories and accepted uncritically some things which he was later to view differ- ently. For example he passively recorded Potebnya’s distinction of ‘internal’ (image) and ‘external’ (sound) forms, a distinction which he later jettisoned as being irrelevant to his theory of form as such, in which the image was only one of many formal factors. Potebnya had considered ‘internal form’ to be the hallmark of poetic language and had decided that ‘external form’ (sounds, rhythm, etc.) could be disregarded in assessing poetic language, a belief almost reversed in Shklovsky from 1916. Potebnya and Shklovsky agreed on the need to discover the differentiating features of poetry, but later disagreed on what this feature was, although they both thought it was the source of aesthetic pleasure. While Potebnya saw that prose and poetry differed in their means, he failed to define any difference in purpose. Definition in terms of use or purpose was the very basis for Formalist distinctions between poetic and prosaic language. For the third component part of the word which Potebnya described — ‘con- tent’ — Shklovsky did not even reserve a mention. Subsequently he was to dismiss content altogether, talking instead about ‘material’ and ‘form’, with form ‘creating its own content’. If Potebnya was more concerned with the psychology of the creative writer, Shklovsky turned his attention to the effect of literature on the reader; the process of seeing or sensing the word or work of art became the focus of the literary critic. In the descriptions of true perception and of mere ‘recognition’ of art that Shklovsky made in several essays, we find him close to the problem of the relationship of the word to its referent (a problem familiar enough since Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale). However Shklovsky never grappled with, and perhaps consciously shied away from, this problem, possibly because he did not wish to be drawn into the realm of linguistics proper, and even psychological and philosophical influences would have had to be taken into consideration (influences alien, of course, to Shklovsky’s conception of art and language). Through i ignoring the word/referent problem, he was undoubtedly led to certain naive conclusions on the 27relationship of art to real life, the point on which the Formalists were most vehemently attacked in their own day and later on. Shklovsky also accepted Veselovsky’s theory of the history of the epithet in language, although it is fair to say that he never viewed the case of the epithet as a sign of the mutative influence of external, social (ethnographic) pressures on language or literature, as did Veselovsky. Shklovsky used the epithet rather to exemplify the general process of intrinsic evolution in language and the changing ‘perceptibility’ of different words. Perhaps the greatest difference in approach to the language of literature between Shklovsky on the one hand, and Potebnya and Veselovsky on the other, was that the latter two, especially Veselovsky, had a keen sense of history and of the effect of time on language, while Shklovsky appears to have been able to view language only syn- chronically and divorced from its real historical context. Time enters Shklovsky’s theory only insofar as it happens to be one of the actual means by which different forms are separated and differentiated from each other. This is why Shklovsky can make startling contrasts and comparisons between words, motifs and plots from different ages and laces, while positively rejecting any genetic links (as opposed to formal or constructional links) between them. The fact that Shklovsky was not an expert in historical linguistics, and had little taste for linguistics as such, except where it could find application in supporting an intrinsic theory of art, was a decisive factor in the a-historical attitude of early Russian Formalism. Indeed the Formalist linguist Grigorii Vinokur was later to pinpoint this defect in Shklovsky’s approach to language.* Shklovsky’s second essay in the collection of 1917, ‘Art as a Device’ which has now come to be seen as the most important single source of inspiration and almost the manifesto for the developing ‘formal method’ in Russia up to 1924, dealt more precisely with the key issue underlying all the other articles in the collections: the differentiation of ‘poetic’ from ‘prosaic’ language. It established several important terms such as ‘perceptibility’ (oshchutimost’) and ‘making strange’ (ostranenie) within the jargon of literary criticism, and re-defined and specified other existing terms such as ‘image’ (obraz) and ‘device’ (priem). Above all Shklovsky demonstrated his belief that poetic and prosaic language do not correspond to the genres of poetry and prose, but are systems of language, each of which is orientated towards a specific function. It should, of course, be appreciated that poetic language was always understood by the Russian Formailists not to be confined to the genre of poetry as such, but to cover all literature that is deliberately structured to present an artistic impression, literature of various genres, prose works included. Prosaic, or practical language 28was understood to be merely the language of communication, a utilitarian system of speech or literature devoid of contrived artistic devices. It was naturally poetic language, the language of art, that would occupy the prime interest of the literary critic and theoretician. The discussion on what constituted poetic language was the necessary first step in the dissociation of the formal method from preceding critical theories. The two most immediate and important representa- tives of these theories were, in Shklovsky’s view, Potebnya and Vese- lovsky, and Shklovsky devoted the first half of ‘Art as a Device’ to a full attack on Potebnya’s theories about imagery. This attack was followed up by the article ‘Potebnya’ in the celebrated 1919 edition of Poetika® which contained no less than four of Shklovsky’s essays: ‘Potebnya’, ‘On Poetry and Trans-sense language’, ‘Art as a Device’, and his pioneering article on the formal method in prose literature: ‘On the connection between devices of Syuzhet construction and general stylistic devices’. Shklovsky thus firmly established himself as the leading Formalist theoretician on prose literature. In a sense, it is as if Shklovsky’s earlier work was a mere preparation for his life-long career asa critic of, principally, the novel and the short story. As forall the other Formalists, it was necessary to ‘clear the table’ (in Eikhen- baum’s words), by studying and refuting earlier theories before giving concentrated critical attention to imaginative literature with a fresh vision. Shklovsky’s characteristic method, in fact, was to combine these two tasks, making sharp analyses of past and contemporary writers and schools, and at the same time liberally sprinkling them with generalised conclusions and affirmations of the principles of literary criticism. If ‘The connection .. .’ was the first published article on Formalist prose theory, Shklovsky had in fact been preoccupied with the topic while still at school®, and was privately engrossed in it while still a student at Petersburg University. He later complained: ‘the university did no work in my special subject. They did nothing on the theory of prose there, but I myself was already working on it.’” Having defined the differences between poetic and prosaic language, Shklovsky seems to have decided to by-pass the whole realm of poetry as a genre (which was in any case being exhaustively studied by the other Formalists) in order to test the criterion of ‘perceptibility’ on the less obviously ‘artificial’ genre of prose literature.* Verse usually shows easily recognisable signs of its differentiation from prosaic language — such basic devices as rhythm, rhyme and line-divisions—but the artistic devices of prose writing are not so obvious. Shklovsky’s task was to show that the latter has its own set of devices embodying ‘artistic quality’ or ‘literariness’, the effect of which might be compared with that of the different set of devices found in verse. The implication was 29that differences in genre could be accounted for bythe different sets of devices employed, while their respective aesthetic effects on the reader or listener would follow the same pattern. ‘The connection .. .’ was a bold attempt to abolish the vague and subjective impressions, which the critic usually produces in his description of an author’s style, in favour of an enumeration of actual literary devices comprehensible to everyone, Shklovsky starts with one of his favourite themes — the ‘convention- ality’ (us/ovnost’) of art. He compares the well-known conventions of poetry (‘oblique, difficult poetic speech, which makes the poet tongue- tied; strange, unusual vocabulary, unusual arrangement of words’)? with conventions of drama (Lear’s failure to recognise Kent; Kent and. Lear’s failure to recognise Edgar, recognition scenes in last acts of classical dramas etc.), and even the formalities of dancing (‘a walk which is constructed to be felt’). Why, he asks, did Ovid, in creating an ‘Art of Love’, recommend unhurried enjoyment? The answer to all these irrationalities lies in the very nature of art; art is: ‘the crooked road, the road on which the foot senses thé stones, the road which turns back on itself — this is the road of art’.1° It is typical of Shklovsky to unite with a single formula not only all the genres of literature but many other types of man’s creative activity too (his comments are extended elsewhere to architecture, sculpture, painting, music, cinema, vaudeville, newspapers and so on). Having created an aura of artistic irrationality in his first paragraph, Shklovsky proceeds to restore order, and reveal his own ideas on plot-composi- tion, by the very method of partially attacking and partially adopting the theories of an influential literary scholar that he had used against Potebnya. In this case the target is the ‘ethnographic’ school of A.N. Veselovsky. The most obvious influence of Veselovsky on the Formalists was his identification of the ‘motif’ (motif) and the ‘plot’ (syuzhet) in the history of prose literature, defined respectively as ‘the simplest narrative unit’ and ‘a theme in which are woven various situations — motifs’. Shklovsky accepts these definitions even more uncritically than he accepted Potebnya’s definitions of content, internal and external form. (Tomashevsky was later to take a much narrower view of the motif, placing in opposition to the motif of historical poetics, such as the migratory plot, the smallest non-decomposable units of the material such as ‘evening came’, ‘the hero died’."4), Asa literary histor- ian Veselovsky stressed the origin of the motif, which he believed ‘figuratively answers the various enquirings of the primordial mind or of real-life observation’. He pre-supposed a ‘similarity or unity of actual and psychological conditions in the first stages of human development’ when motifs could be born ‘independently’ (in different 30places), yet bear similar features to each other (Shklovsky gives examples — the Légendes des origines etc.). Combinations of such primitive motifs were held to form the first ‘plots’. Such an explanation gives a somewhat Rousseauesque picture of the psychology and society of primitive man and takes no account of ethnic, geographical and climatic differences between various peoples and environments. Veselovsky realised that ‘psychological self- generation’ (psikhologicheskoe samozarozhdenie) was a most un- satisfactory explanation for similarities in more complicated com- binations of motifs, and suggested historical ‘borrowing’ of plots between different peoples. It is this part of the ‘ethnographic theory’ which Shklovsky, the champion of the self-contained nature of literature and of the ‘internal laws’ of plot-composition, was deter- mined to attack. He offers as evidence for his contrary views similar plots vastly separated by time and distance which nevertheless succeed in retaining a merely fortuitous sequence of motifs, even though the identity of any tale passed on orally is inevitably affected by the ‘narrator’s turn of mind’ (sklad skazchika). It is noteworthy that Shklovsky does not delve into literary history on his own in order to prove his point, but prefers to use material from others (including Veselovsky). He is far too concerned with the inner dynamics of literature to have any time for painstaking, scholarly research of the traditional type, and is content to play off one authority against another, leaving himself with at least neutral ground on which to build his own theories. Here he ends with a typical declaration of the Formalist doctrine: Fortuitous coincidences are impossible. Coincidences can be explained only by the existence of special laws of syuzhet construction (...) tales are continually disintegrating and being recomposed on the basis of particular, but as yet unknown, laws of syuzhet construction.? Having stated the Formalist position Shklovsky takes exception to the particular emphasis of Veselovsky on the motif rather than the plot. The difference in attitude is between the literary historian, for whom origins and a wealth of documentation are important, and the literary theoretician, for whom each work of literature is in itself material for analytical study, comparison of different works being confined to assessing purely /iterary relationships, to the exclusion of all socio- historical references. Where the ethnographists suggest a real-life origin for the ‘abduction motif’, and claim that the abduction ritual still found in certain marriage ceremonies supports this view, Shklov- sky feels that the motif is a narrative convention and the wedding ‘abduction’ a ritualised spell for warding off evil spirits. Shklovsky is able to demonstrate the absurdity that could be reached by taking the ethnographic theory to its logical conclusions: the widespread motif 31of enclosing land with a cow-hide cut into one long thong, which suggests deception of the seller of the land, is made inexplicable by the fact that the seller does not protest, though the essence of the motif is precisely in the fact that he is tricked. Shklovsky shows that this measure of the hide was well-known to everyone. And he explains the motif as a requirement of the plot which cannot be explained in terms of real life, one which is determined by the ‘conventionality which lies at the heart of every literary work, in that situations are freed from their everyday interrelation and influence each other according to the laws of the given artistic web’ (sp/etenie lit. ‘interweaving’).1* Once again the Formalist appeal is to the ‘conventionality’ of art. But the weakness of Shklovsky’s argument is that he is unable to demon- strate convincingly that laws of plot-composition do in fact give rise to the actual existence of the motif in so many different times and places. He does admit the possibility of motifs having a real-life origin, but declares that this is irrelevant from a literary point of view; in litera- ture it is a conflict of customs, as seen in the motif in question, which provides material for plot-composition, the origin of this conflict in historical reality being beside the point. It is therefore not true to say that Shklovsky altogether denied the influence of life on art, or that he believed that material for art did not originate from non-art sources, i.e. from history, social customs and so on. He simply decided, in the interests of a more sharply-defined science of literature, that the source of the material for art can be dis- regarded by the art critic who is specifying art as such as his field of study. The historian or sociologist, who views art from a different angle, may well find extra-literary sources and influences to be a pro- per object of study in his field, but he will not, in Shklovsky’s view, be saying anything specific about the artistic quality of art as art (nor will he probably wish to). All the same, Shklovsky is positing laws of plot-composition which he is unable to display as a coherent system, and he later confessed that he did not even know what qualities a motif must have, or how motifs should be put together to forma plot.** It is evident that for Shklovsky the static motif is interesting only inso- far as it forms part of the wider structure of plot: this alone can claim to be the agent of ‘literariness’ in a work. A motif may, however, still play an artistic role by itself in constructing plot, and Shklovsky was to give examples of leit-motifs in Bely and Sterne which helped to hold the work together.’ Shklovsky blames Veselovsky for barely touching on the arrangement of motifs into story-patterns and the influence of these on each other. To some extent the criticism is unjustified since Veselovsky was not searching for ‘literariness’ (as embodied in a single work of literature), but for the separate materials which make 32up literature (such as motifs), particularly in their historical context. The aims of the two scholars being somewhat different, it is surprising how close their respective methods of analysis are. ‘Only later did Shklovsky pay tribute to Veselovsky’s appreciation of the function and artistic importance of ‘facts’ such as motifs.*¢ Interest in the materials and devices of literature, the categories of motif and plot, and an em- pirical, non-psychological approach to literary study are features common to both scholars.17 But Veselovsky lacked a sense of the peculiar relativism of literary works between one another, and had decided that literature, in its primitive stages at least, was a direct reflection of social customs and not a distortion of real life. Like the civic critics of the 19th century before him, and the Marxists after- wards, he discerned the forces that cause literary forms to change in the socio-historical conditions of the moment. This was naturally quite unacceptable to the Formalists, who rejected the direct influence of life on literature, and posited the forces of formal change in the ‘internal laws’ of literature. Shklovsky and Veselovsky were inclined to agree that there exist a certain numberofready-made motifs which can be grouped together in plots.!® The motif, therefore, is by itself static, lifeless and non-artistic. This was also Veselovsky’s view of plot — simply a combination of motifs. The Formalist use of the same term ‘plot’ (syuzhet) implied something quite different, and they substituted the word ‘story’ ¢ fabula) for Veselovsky’s ‘plot’.1° Tomashevsky defined story and plot thus: The sum total of events, mutually and internally linked, we shall call the story.” fe the total number of motifs, linked causally and temporally together). These events must be distributed, they must be constructed into a certain order, expounded, and from the story material a literary combination must be made. The artistically constructed distribution of events in a work is called the plot of the work.?* The story is therefore the pre-aesthetic material at the writer’s disposal for plot-composition, material which he may not even have created himself. Countless authors have used a stock ‘story’ as material for their own particular artistic purpose. The plot is the arrangement of the story into an aesthetically pleasing creation, as seen in the overall construction of the work. The vital difference is notin what is presented, but the way in which it is presented: For the story it is unimportant in which part of the work the reader learns about an event, and whether it is imparted to him by way of a direct com- munication from the author, or in a tale by one of the characters, or by a system of passing remarks. It is in the plot that the actual introduction of 33motifs within the reader’s field of view plays a role. Even a real occurrence which has not been invented. byt the author can serve asa story. The plot isan entirely artistic construction, The essential difference between story and plot is exhibited in the formal method of analysing ‘how’ prose literature is ‘made’: motifs which form the story will be noted and even classified, but the vital factor will be the way in which they are arranged into the integrated structure of plot; indicative of this is Shklovsky’s statement, in discussing similarities and repetitions found in epic poetry: T am emphasising not the similarity of the motifs, which I consider un- important, but the similarity of the patterns.’ The analysis of the devices which embody the internal laws of plot- composition opens with a re-affirmation that art does not seek to generalise but has a ‘thirst for concreteness’ (Carlyle) and tends towards a splintering effect (razdroblenie) (cf. Shklovsky’s similar view of the image, in his attack on Potebnya). Thus a device of art such as ‘staircase construction’ (stupenchatoe postroenie, stupen- chatost’) will splinter even apparently unified non-aesthetic material, distort and deform it, making it artistically perceptible: The thing‘ branches out through its own reflections and contrasts.25 The effect is the same as the ‘semantic shift’ (semanticheskii sdvig) caused by the trope or image. The various types of stepped construc- tion — repetition, rhyme, tautology, tautological parallelism, psycho- logical parallelism, retarding (zamedlenie), epic repetition, story ritual and peripeteia are termed by Shklovsky devices of syuzhetnost’ (i.e. ‘embodiment of plot’), an invented word. Taking the particular case of parallelism, Shklovsky noted that Veselovsky had made a distinction between psychological parallelism and rhythmical or tautological parallelism; the first of these was supposed to be an echo of primitive totemism, and the second arose from the exigencies of metre in particular languages ; the formulae of psychological parallel- ism, Veselovsky noted, sometimes ‘sink’ into the other type. Shklov- sky explains this overlapping of the two categories thus: They have the general distinctive procedure of need to retard the figurative mass and to create di: try. Both pases reflect a inct steps.2° Veselovsky’s two categories of parallelism are re-interpreted as a ‘discord of images’ and ‘lexical formal’. In other words, Shklovsky considers them to be two variations of the same ‘staircase’ device, in which the form pre-determines the content, i.e. words are chosen or invented, often quite arbitrarily, to fill up the available structure in the way that ‘sound blanks’ (zvukovye pyatna) in lyric poetry predetermine 34the choice of actual words. Naturally the available structure is most easily seen in archetypal folk tales and folk poetry, but also in the highly stylised triolet and rondo (where the device of parallelism is canonised) and, when a whole episode is repeated, in epic poetry and the early adventure novel. These are the genres that Shklovsky takes fora first analysis. Even at the simplest level of folk expressions we find tautological pairs of words. Different inflexions of the same words, synonyms, repetition of prepositions or of words in two separate lines of poetry are all manifestations of tautologous staircase construction on the smallest scale. At a more advanced level there are the ‘/aisses similaires’ as found in the Chanson de Roland, where the same event is repeated in very | similar words, but always with some variation, to produce the precious ‘differential impression’ exalted by the Formalists. Here the splintering effect of the staircase device is seen perhaps in its most evident form. The unity of the work dissolves into complicated compositional diversity at the most dramatic moments of the tale as variations are placed in layers to form a multiple aesthetic effect, like musical variations on an original theme. The parallelism may be conducted through several motifs simultaneously, or in non-chronolo- gical order, or with mounting emphasis at each step. The repetitions, once thought to betray the naivety of mediaeval French verse, or a corruption of the text, can now be seen as a deliberate and highly contrived device. By contrast Veselovsky’s interpretation of the repetitions was that they arose from the mechanism of execution, a supposed form of antiphonal singing.27 He compared the lack of temporal or causal conjunctions to lack of perspective in primitive paintings and the illogicalities of place on the mediaeval stage, where the spectator had to supply the perspective for himself. This ‘dittology’ (he claimed) precluded artistic intention, though he was ready to admit that in the French epic it became a genuinely stylistic device. For the purposes of the modern reader, he conceded that an aesthetic impression was caused by the repetitions, in particular by the impression of length. Thus Veselovsky realised that the aesthetic effect of a given work would not be the same for each age of mankind, and, like the Formal- ists, declared our present-day impressions of non-contemporary works to be ‘deceitful’.#® But having noted the particular devices of the repetitions — parallel verses and an impression of length — he failed to follow this up with any sort of interpretation of the literary effect or even purpose of these devices. He simply said that consideration of the history of style would not be a ‘superfluous criterion’ for studying poetic texts ; at the same time that such devices?® as the antiquity of the text, its language and metrics, and historical and social details in the text would be predominant in the mind of the critic, 35