Formalism

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The 13-year survival of an outstanding school of formalist

criticism, in Russia, during and after the pivotal, tragic time of the
1917 Bolshevik revolution, is itself a paradoxical phenomenon on
both a historical and a cultural level: it would require a special
study to clarify the complex causes of an impossible cohabitation
between a dogmatic cultural establishment and an apparently
elitist, context-free ideology.

            Indeed, it was for the first time in the history of criticism

that a group of scholars had as a definite aim the attempt to find


a "scientific", objective method for defining the specific features of
literature, its methods and devices. The Russian formalists refuted
the earlier perspectives which regarded literature as a mere
reflection of biographical, historical or social reality; instead they
insisted on its specificity. From an epistemological viewpoint, their
premises largely derived from Edmund Husserl’s
phenomenological theory, which attempted to set apart objects of
knowledge in their genuine, pure form, by “bracketing” the
contextual factors. Although the formalist movement had
essentially Russian roots, on an aesthetic level the influence of
the German theories of form, such as the principles put forward
by Heinrich Wölfflin in his studies on the art of painting, can
clearly be discerned in some of its prerequisites.

              The activity of the formalists was concentrated in two

centers, where the foci of their studies were slightly different: the
Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 by Roman Jakobson,
Petr Bogatyrev and Grigori Vinokur, adopted a linguistic
perspective on literariness; the other group, Opojaz (i.e. “The
Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), which began its
activity in Petrograd in 1916, was formed of literary historians
(Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris
Tomashevsky) who were rather bent on studying literature as an
independent form of art, having its own principles and methods.

           In the early 1920s formalism played a leading role in


Russian literary scholarship, although it was not spared the
attacks of the orthodox Marxist critics for its disregard of the
social and economic influences upon the literary work and for its
allegedly bourgeois ideological roots; however, by 1930 the
official disapproval of the formalist movement became definitive
and its members were forced to relinquish their persuasions.
(Shklovsky, the principal target of the anti-formalist attacks, was
forced in 1930 to draw up a self-critical text, “A Monument to
Scientific Error”, which castigated the formalist persuasions.) For
a good many decades this approach to literature was proscribed
in the Soviet Union, the term “formalism” signified an anti-Marxist
heresy, and only in the 1960s did some of their studies come out
again. In the meantime Jakobson, Bogatyrev and others
continued their activity in Prague, with the formalist linguistic
circle in that city, and later Jakobson emigrated to the United
States, where his studies (like those of René Wellek, another
émigré from Prague) considerably influenced the principles and
methods of the American New Critics and of the French
structuralists.
            In the first stage of the Russian formalists’ activity, which

lasted from 1916 to about 1921, they sought to ensure an


independent place for literary studies as a science in its own right,
which is different from other related cultural domains. As
Jakobson put it in an article written at that time,

the situation has been that historians of


literature act like nothing so much as
policemen, who, out to arrest a certain culprit,
take into custody (just in case) everything
and everyone they find at the scene as well as
any passers-by for good measure. The
historians of literature have helped
themselves to everything - environment,
psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a
science of literature they have worked up a
concoction of homemade disciplines.1[1]

            In order to achieve this purpose, they concentrated on


the LITERARINESS (LITERATURNOST’) of the poetic and fictional
works, their specific organization and the structural devices that
differentiated them from other types of discourses.

            One way of defining literariness was to emphasize the


difference between POETIC LANGUAGE AND PRACTICAL
LANGUAGE. The former was seen as the quintessential form of
literary expression, and at first the formalists insisted particularly
on the “phonic texture” of poems, which they believed had a

1[1]   Recent Russian Poetry, Sketch 1 (Prague, 1921), 11, quoted in Boris
Eikhenbaum’s article “Introduction to the Formal Method”. See Note 11.
greater import than meaning itself. Thus rhythm is, for
Tomashevsky, the foundation upon which all the other elements
of verse lie, be it classical metrics or any speech-like rhythmic
impulse:

/C/lassical metrics do not exhaust the nature of


verse, ... verse is viable also in its secondary
features of sound, ... there is such a thing as a
recognizable rhythm along with meter, ... verse
can be written with only its secondary features
observed, ... speech can sound like verse even
without its observing a meter. One type of
rhythmic procedure is dominant in any individual
work, and accordingly verse can be classified as
tonic-metrical verse (e.g., the description of the
battle in Poltava), intonational-melodic verse
(Zukovsky’s poetry), and harmonic verse (typical
of Russian Symbolism in its later years).[2][2]

Tomashevsky’s view on the prominent role of verse form is


related to the formalists’ notion of the genuine fusion between
form and content in poetic works.

            Sounds (which manifest themselves through rhythm and


phonetic figures, i.e. deviations from the normal structures) exert
an “organized violence” (Jakobson’s term) upon the perceiving
consciousness, and thus our attention is drawn to the constructed
nature of the poem. The object to which the poem seemingly
[2][2]   Quoted by Eikhenbaum in “Introduction ...”, 15.
refers becomes less important to the reader than the very “mode
of expression”. Therefore literary language can be said to be
devoid of the practical function which everyday language
performs, being instead self-referential. In their view of literature
as deviation from and distortion of practical language, Shklovsky
and Jakobson were significantly influenced by the tenets of the
Russian futurist poets, who developed the notions of the self-
sufficient word and trans-rational poetry, in which meaning was
lacking in importance.

            Later on Eikhenbaum, Tynianov and others became aware

that attention should be paid as well to other elements which


make up a poem, such as vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and
their interlocking in the text; several studies were dedicated in
the 1920s to the role of these complex relationships in the
definition of the poetic object.

            One of the most salient concepts meant to define literariness

was OSTRANENIE (i.e. “making strange”, DEFAMILIARIZATION),


introduced by Shklovsky, in his 1917 innovatory study “Art as
Technique”. Art functions by making objects “unfamiliar”, in order
to help us experience the artfulness of objects, in other words to
ensure our fresh, non-habitual, non-automatic perception of
words and ideas. Shklovsky begins by rebutting a widely-admitted
concept of a precursor, Aleksander Potebnya, who stated that “art
is thinking in images” - an idea which was highly popular with the
contemporary theorists of the Symbolist movement. In actuality,
Shklovsky argues, images are given to poets beforehand: the
latter are “much more concerned with arranging images than with
creating them” .2 [3] Imagistic thought and art overlap, but do
not coincide.

       Because habitualization devours everything, “works, clothes,


furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war”, it is the role of art “to
impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as
they are known”. (264) The main artistic method consists in
making forms difficult and increasing the difficulty and the length
of perception. Leo Tolstoy, for instance, makes things strange by
not naming the familiar object: in “Shame” he does not use the
notion of “flogging” but instead refers to that action in this way:
“to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the
floor, to rap on their bottoms with switches ...”, (265) and then
ironically proposes a change in the proceedings, which would not
alter the nature of that punishment. In another story,
“Kholstomer”, Tolstoy employs the point of view of a horse (which
is the narrator in the text) in order to make unfamiliar the things
he sneers at, and not only them. Defamiliarization is the basic
technique of the erotic riddle (based on euphemism), states
Shklovsky, and of any kind of riddle for that matter. The greatest
possible effect toward removing the automatism of reception is
obtained through the slowing of the perception: the object is thus
perceived not in its spatial extension, but in its continuity. This
obtains especially in the use of poetic language, which may
contain archaic phrases, intricacies (like il dolce stil nuovo), or

2[3] Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”, in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer
(eds.), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York:
Longman, 1986), 262. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
may be obscure, with “roughened” forms that make pronunciation
difficult.

       The defamiliarizing technique of slowing down, protracting


actions is best exemplified, according to Shklovsky, in Lawrence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for instance in the scene in which the
dejected Mr Shandy lies on his bed after hearing of his son’s
broken nose, where his posture is depicted in an unusually
detailed manner (down to “his knuckles reclining upon the handle
of the chamber pot...”). [4] [4]

      In his study


      In his study Shklovsky insists also on another
device which results in ostranenie, and which was employed by
Lawrence Sterne in his unconventional novel: the LAYING BARE of
his own literary techniques, in other words the frequent
commentaries on the very structure of the novel (actually
Sterne’s method anticipated both Bertold Brecht’s dramatic effect
of “alienation”, and the postmodern metafictional schemes).

      Shklovsky’s colleague, Boris Tomashevsky, exemplified


defamiliarization with Jonathan Swift’s technique of having
Gulliver explain the ways of humankind in Book IV of Gulliver’s
Travels. Here the narrator discards the euphemistic expressions
which are usually employed to explain the human vices and
follies, and in this way the full monstrosity of war or class iniquity
is revealed. The freshness of perception is thus ensured through
specific literary devices.

[4] [4]   Cf. V. Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” (1921), in Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 27-44.
      In his study
      Later on the rather sweeping, diffuse concept of
defamiliarization was taken over and expanded by Jan
Mukarovsky, a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, into
foregrounding, which describes more coherently the intentional
distortion of the linguistic elements in the literary work.

      The formalist critics did not believe in the value of the


traditional dichotomy between content and form in the literary
work, because in this kind of discourse content could find its
expression only through a certain formal arrangement, which
becomes identified with it. Speaking about verse and the
“rhythmic impulse”, Eikhenbaum states in “Introduction to the
Formal Method” that

verse form ... is not in opposition to any


“content” extrinsic to it; it is not forced to fit
inside this “form” but is conceived of as the
genuine content of verse speech. Thus the
very concept of form ...emerges with a new
sense of sufficiency.3[5]

       Instead of that dichotomy the formalists suggested a


difference should be made between MATERIAL and DEVICE, that
is between the pre-aesthetic stage of the creative process and the
aesthetic stage. The organizational principles of that process turn
the raw material into a literary work through such devices as
rhythm, phonetics, syntax, and plot.

3[5]   B. Eikhenbaum, “Introduction to the Formal Method”, in Julie Rivkin and Michael
Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999),  15.
      In a narrative, PLOT (SJUZET) should be distinguished from

STORY (FABULA). Actually the distinction was first suggested by


Aristotle, in Section 6 of Poetics, who spoke about the plot as the
arrangement, by the author, of the incidents of the story.
According to the formalists, these incidents are connected through
chronological and causal links, whereas in creating the plot the
author rearranges them without necessarily observing such
motivations. Besides, as Shklovsky ingeniously notes, the plot
arrangement in Tristram Shandy also includes the interpolated
digressions, authorial commentaries, typographical games, which
all are employed in order to protract or discontinue the narration.
Typical categories of plot composition are, according to
Shklovsky, the “staircase” (based on episodes, in which repetition
and parallelism are used), the “hook-like” structure (where
contrast, opposition prevail and there is a false ending), and the
double-plotting (including heterogeneous components). The plot
type is either motivated by the requirements of verisimilitude, or
unmotivated, “laid bare”, as in Sterne’s novel, which thwarts the
reader’s expectations.

        The concept of plot is a central concern also in Morphology of

the Folktale (1928), an extremely influential study by Vladimir


Propp (who was only partially associated with the Russian
Formalist school). Other pre-structuralist studies of the narrative
which focus on the functions and the types of plot are E. M.
Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) and Norman Friedman’s
“Forms of the Plot” (1955). They will be dealt with in a later
chapter.
       Eikhenbaum and other Russian theorists were interested not

only in the plot construction, but also in the role which the
narrative voice played within the framework of the story. That
kind of narrative which is fashioned so as to give the impression
of spontaneous speech was called SKAZ by Eikhenbaum (from the
Russian skazat’, to relate, to tell). In it the voice of the narrator is
foregrounded (as different from that of the author): his or her
lexicon, grammar, intonation are significant in themselves,
sometimes outweighing the composition or the interplay of
narrative motifs. Skaz may be based on puns, idioms and folk
etymology (as in the stories of the 19th century writer Nikolai
Leskov); in other cases it makes use also of gestures, miming and
sound gestures (as in Nikolai Gogol’s story The Overcoat).

      We could add examples of skaz narratives from other


literatures, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Jerome D.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange. Other first-person narratives, in which the intellectual
and linguistic distance between the (implied) author and the
narrator appears as comparatively smaller or hard to detect,
cannot be classified as skaz: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is such an
example.

    Apart from its undeniable merits in creating new concepts for


the definition of literariness, the first phase of the Russian
formalist movement came under attack later on for its members’
rather static, mechanistic, and ahistorical view of the artistic
phenomenon. In the second stage of its development, roughly
between 1921-1926, some of them attempted to partially
reconcile that view with a diachronic, dynamic one, and to reduce
the gap between the art object and the reality to which it refers.

  Yuri Tynianov’s and Roman Jakobson’s studies published at that


time advanced the formalist tenets toward a proto-structuralist
theory: in his book, The Problem of Verse Language (1924),
Tynianov regarded the literary form for the first time as a
DYNAMIC STRUCTURE, characterized by the interaction of its
component elements, not their mere combination. These elements
are in a continuous struggle with one another, and the device
which prevails and subordinates all the others was called by
Tynianov THE CONSTRUCTIVE FACTOR. But this prevalence is
only temporary; in the course of the work the hierarchy will
change whenever this is appropriate.           

  In another study, “On Literary Evolution” (1927), Tynianov


commented on the functional importance of both the
intrarelationships of the elements in a specific work (THE SYN-
FUNCTION), and the relationships between these elements and
similar ones in the literary system as a whole, or even in
extraliterary structures (THE AUTO-FUNCTION).

  Literature can be analyzed properly only if we take account of


LITERARY DYNAMICS, which explains why literary forms are
always renewed diachronically: after a new principle of literary
construction appears, it is adopted in other works, then becomes
widely used and ends up by being superseded by another one.

  Tynianov’s concepts of “constructive factor” and “literary


dynamics” are closely connected with Roman Jakobson’s notion of
THE DOMINANT, which he defined in detail in a 1935 article with
the same title: within the internal hierarchy of the global sign
which is the literary work, one device (the dominant) always gets
foregrounded. This focusing element of the art work ensures its
gestalt or total order. Jakobson shifted the stress from the
materiality of the device to its function (later on he quoted
Braque, the Cubist painter, who said that he believed not in
things, but in the relationships between them). A dominant can
also be observed when higher relational networks are considered,
such as poetic genres, as well as their diachronical evolution. The
systematic change of poetic forms in the course of time is due to
the “shifting dominant”, sometimes originating in a non-literary
structure. (Such examples would be the dominant in the
Renaissance age, which was based on visual arts, or the one in
Romantic poetry, which had its roots in music.)

   Generally speaking, the Russian formalists’ principles and


methods relied on a staunch belief in the linguistic basis of
literaturnost’ and in its systemic nature, comparable to that of
grammar: there was a “dream of order”4 [6] which informed their
theories and analyses (the same that would underlie the works of
the French structuralists later on). In order to illuminate the
particular traits of the literary work these theorists gave their
attention to both poetic and narrative texts and for the first time
brought to light a significant series of devices and characteristics
of such literary creations, without insisting greatly on the
differences between the two genres. The external relationships

4[6]   The syntagm is taken from  Mihaela Irimia’s study, The Stimulating Difference:
Avatars of a Concept (Editura Universitatii Bucuresti, 1995), 26.
with other cultural systems and their dynamics were also the foci
of their analyses especially in the second phase of formalism.

      The later development of literary theory, especially in its


structuralist phase, could hardly be imagined if it had not been for
the seminal findings put forward by the Russian formalists during
their brief but fruitful period of activity.

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