Introduction
GARY SAUL MORSON
A century after the Russian Formalist movement began, and a half century since the present translation brought it to American readers, we can appreciate its enormous importance.1 One could almost say that literary theory has evolved into a series of footnotes to Formalism. Further developed by Prague structuralists and later by structuralists in France and around the world, the key concepts of Formalism have shaped thought across the humanities and social sciences. Even theorists who explicitly reject Formalism have shown its profound influence in defining what needs to be rejected. The various schools we have come to call post-structuralist develop Formalist tenets, directly or by inversion.
The Formalists’ intellectually strongest opponents, the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin, first enunciated their ideas as a respectful if vigorous critique of Formalist assumptions.2 Bakhtin used his opposition to Formalism as a springboard to create a set of counter-theories that have arguably proven to be the strongest contributions to literary theory since Aristotle. Neither the Formalists nor Bakhtin can be properly understood outside their debate with each other.
RUSSIAN SCIENCE
In ways Americans often do not appreciate, Formalism reflects important trends in Russian thought. Dostoevsky once observed that a Russian intellectual is someone who can read Darwin and promptly resolve to become a pickpocket (for the good of the people, of course). That is, Russians take ideas to their extreme, as if the greater the violation of common sense, the better. They find it hard to resist the appeal of “lefter than thou” thinking, and having gone as far as possible, they discover salvational implications in the most unlikely theses. Dostoevsky had in mind the Russian nihilist’s discovery of spiritual exhilaration in extreme materialism. One radical famously saw in the “dissected frog” (which somehow demonstrated the nonexistence of the soul) the salvation of the Russian people. Or as Dostoevsky also liked to say, Russians do not just become atheists, they have faith in atheism. They are converted to it, and treat leaders who die in a state of unbelief as martyrs.
Dostoevsky would not have been surprised at the extreme doctrines or tone characteristic of the Russian Formalists. In their passionate coldness, the Formalists belonged to a Western intellectual tradition the Russians took especially seriously: the idea that it is possible to construct a true social science, as hard as physics. Elie Halévy has famously called such thinking “moral Newtonianism.” As Newton had reduced the dizzying complexity of planetary motion to three laws of motion plus the law of universal gravitation, so his followers aspired to do the same for the human and social worlds. Economics, the psyche, culture, ethics, politics—indeed, everything in human life—could be studied like physics, allowing for iron-clad laws and predictability. Surely to think otherwise must be sheer sentimentality, or still worse, the legacy of religion and superstition! We find this faith in social science in thinkers as diverse as Locke, Condorcet, Laplace, Bentham, Marx, Freud, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, B. F. Skinner, Milton Friedman, and Jared Diamond. Before Auguste Comte coined the word “sociology,” he intended to name his new discipline “social physics.”
It is well known that modern economics has claimed to have achieved the status of a hard science and to have offered mathematical models of all (not just economic) human behavior. As Gary Becker has put the point, “The economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behavior…. Human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set of preferences and accumulate an optimal amount of information and other inputs…. [T] he economic approach provides a unified framework for understanding behavior that has long been sought by and eluded Bentham, Comte, Marx and others.”3 It is less well known that modern economic theory was explicitly modeled on Newtonian astronomy (or, rather, what was taken to be Newtonian astronomy). Among Becker’s predecessors in formulating the economic approach, Léon Walras, whose last work was titled Économique et Mécanique, formulated the notion of economic equilibrium as a parallel to the equilibrium (that is, stability) of planetary motion.4
This kind of thinking proved especially strong in the first land to adopt “scientific socialism.” Russians found particularly seductive the sort of scientism that claimed not only to explain events but also to control them for human salvation. The Bolsheviks represented only one strain of such thought.
LITERARINESS
The Formalists exemplified this approach by turning it on its head. They, too, claimed to have developed a hard science but inverted the theories of their putatively scientific predecessors. They rejected “sociological” reductions of literature to nonliterary forces. The sociologists, especially Marxists, had reasoned that if we know the laws of economics, and if the laws of economics shape all of culture, and if literature is just another branch of culture, then we already have a science of literature. Other movements claimed to have different sociological keys. For the Formalists, all these movements failed the test of science.
To begin with, the sociologists did not have a consistent theory but (in practice) borrowed incompatible ideas as current polemic dictated. They were guilty of mere “eclecticism” (a favorite Formalist term of abuse). Moreover, they were closed to empirical disconfirmation. Boris Eichenbaum’s essay “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’” takes the form of a history because, he explains, the Formalists are not dogmatists but scientists, and scientific theories change as they are tested against facts. When the Formalists found a theory challenged by a set of previously unconsidered facts or by application to a new topic, they reformulated it. Then they repeated the process again and again. There is no ready-made “formal method,” Eichenbaum concludes, only a scientific approach to literature. This unusual readiness for disconfirmation remains one of the most unusual and appealing aspects of Russian Formalism.
Eichenbaum’s classic essay (the fourth selection in the present volume) describes Formalism “not as a dogmatic system but as a historical summation”:
Our scientific approach has had no such prefabricated program or doctrine, and has none. In our studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts…. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. If the material demands their refinement or change, we change or refine them. In this sense we are quite free from our own theories—as science must be free to the extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is no ready-made science; science lives not by settling on truth, but by overcoming error. (102–3)
Above all, the Formalists rejected the sociologists’ attempt to explain literature in terms of extraliterary social forces. Such forays led to absurdities such as explanations of Gogol’s humor by his class origin as a small landowner. Literature must be explained in terms taking cognizance of the literary. To explain something one must first understand it, and one cannot even begin to understand literature unless one first understands it as literature.
How can one develop a science of some set of phenomena, they asked, when those very phenomena are not even properly seen—when their very integrity is denied? Mathematicians live in society, and their work must somehow reflect history (because everything does), but surely to understand the history of mathematics one must first learn how to solve an equation or grasp a proof! Can one understand physics knowing only the sociology or biography of physicists? If so, why do we still teach physics as a separate discipline?
By the same token, the Formalists contended, before we formulate a science of literature we must understand literature, and that means grasping precisely what is literary about it. Eichenbaum cites Roman Jakobson’s well-known (and very Russian) methodological statement:
The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness—that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historians used everything— anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. (107)
But what exactly is “literariness”? What makes a literary work “literary”? As Jakobson’s tone suggests, the Formalists’ answers to these questions typically adopted a nihilistic manner. It was as if they tried to outdo the sociological reductionists with a still more shocking Formalist reductionism. Épater les marxistes! Far from overcoming romantic sentimentality, the sociological critics just substituted a different kind of sentimentality. The Formalists took utter delight in rejecting anything remotely spiritual, ethical, or otherwise “uplifting” as so much unscientific bosh.
BLOODLESS BLOOD
Whatever makes literature literary, then, it could not be any of those questions Tolstoy had in mind when he titled a story “What People Live By.” Nothing could be less scientific than “the meaning of life,” the nature of right and wrong, or problems of good and evil. Only philistines regard literature this way. As the Formalists liked to say, one might as well rush on to the stage to stay the hand of the actor playing Judas. Like so many scientistic reductionists, they took a rather unscientific delight in calling their opponents rubes.
Victor Shklovsky famously voices this insouciant nihilism on page 44 of the present collection: “Gore in art is not necessarily gory; it rhymes with amor.” More literally, the line says: “Blood in art is not bloody; it rhymes with love” (in Russian, “blood” and “love” do rhyme). For Shklovsky, literary blood is entirely bloodless. Blood is simply “the substance of the tonal structure or material for the construction of figures of speech. Art, then, is unsympathetic—or beyond sympathy—except where the feeling of compassion is evoked as material for the artistic structure. In discussing such emotion we have to examine it from the point of view of the composition itself, in exactly the same way that a mechanic must examine a driving belt to understand the details of a machine.”
The machine metaphor was of course designed to shock. Art is not inspiration but fabrication. The Formalists loved to use the word “make” (rather than “create”), especially in the title of articles, or to adopt industrial terms. Anything to discredit the reverential, romantic, or otherwise unscientific view of art as the product of unfathomable genius! For much the same reason, Shklovsky liked to use obscene jokes as examples of what was going on in acknowledged masterpieces.
It was statements like these that made Bakhtin argue that the Formalists themselves had missed the very essence of literature. As Bakhtin explained, they had fallen victim to, and relied for their appeal on, “a vogue for science, of superficial imitation of science, of a prematurely self-confident scientific tone where the time of real science has not yet come. For the striving to construct a science, at any cost and as quickly as possible, frequently leads to an extreme lowering of the level of problematics, to the impoverishment of the object under study, and even to the illegitimate replacement of this object—in this case, artistic creation—by something entirely different.”5
Bakhtin attacked the Formalists on their central claim: to have developed an approach to literature based on “the object under study.” That was precisely what they failed to do, Bakhtin contended. Bakhtin saw literature as “verbal art,” and so, like all art, it constitutes a distinct (aesthetic) approach to the human condition. Artists and writers correctly insist that “their creative work is value-related, that it is directed toward the world, toward reality, that it has to do with human beings, with social relations, with ethical, religious and other values.”6
Bakhtin, however, also found value in Formalist theories, and many of his best ideas rely on or recast Formalist insights. Where the Formalists identified a literary device (as they repeatedly do in this collection), Bakhtin sought to give an aesthetic explanation of its use in terms of the meanings and values it conveys. For Bakhtin, therefore, Formalism “is harmless and, given a methodically clear-cut awareness of the limits of its applicability, it can even be productive in studying technique in artistic creation. But it becomes unmitigatedly harmful and inadmissible when it is taken as a basis for understanding and studying artistic creativity as a whole.”7
PETRIFYING THE STONE
If for the Formalists literature has nothing to do with meaning and value as Bakhtin understood these concepts, then what is the essence of literature in their view? Here the Formalists offered a series of brilliant answers. Most famously, they insisted that art is defined by what Shklovsky called “defamiliarization,” or as the word is sometimes more literally rendered, “bestrangement” (ostranenie). The idea comes from learning theory. In ordinary life, as we learn to do something it becomes a habit. We no longer have to think of each muscular adjustment. If we had to fix our attention on everything that goes into walking or driving—as we did when these skills were being acquired—we could not do more than one thing at a time. Attention is a highly limited resource, and habit keeps our mental hands free, so to speak. The problem is that habit itself may block our perception—may lead us to forget the details of something familiar or overlook the new in something already habitualized. Instead of seeing things as we did when they were fresh, we merely recognize them. Sometimes that can lead us to miss what is most important.
To reverse this process of automatization, we need to make the familiar unfamiliar again—to “defamiliarize” or “bestrange” it. That is the task of art. Without art, Shklovsky famously argued, “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war…. [A] rt exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists … to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (12). Here we see the salvationist side of Formalism: Formalists, too, see art as having profound moral significance. Theirs is the ethic of the avant-garde, of the cultural revolutionary. Lives lived according to habit: “such lives are as if they had never been.”
Then where do they differ from Bakhtin? To begin with, Bakhtin valued tradition as well as novelty. More important, the Formalists usually forgot the moral implications of their theory. Or they limited its applicadon to art itself. The only perception they cared to see renewed was the perception of artistic forms themselves, a preference that explains why the Formalists especially loved what we have come to call metaliterature, like Tristram Shandy. They enthused about what they called “baring the device.” A device is “bared” when it is not “motivated,” that is, when the author overtly has a character do something not because the character wants or needs to but because that is what the conventions of art demand.
In short, art exists not to make the stone stony but to make the language of poetry poetic. Thus, in the very passage about defamiliarization I have just quoted, Shklovsky rather inconsistently concludes: “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (12, italics in original).
In his essay on Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky treats that self-conscious novel as concerned centrally with literary forms and conventions—an approach we now take for granted but then was quite new. Sterne was still often assumed to be a mere sentimentalist. Tolstoy valued him as a psychologist. But Shklovsky not only identifies the metaliterary aspects of Tristram Shandy, he denies the existence of any other. Everything else in the book is simply so much material for playing with forms. For Shklovsky, that is true of all literature, but Sterne makes this pure formalism explicit. That is how Shklovsky can arrive at a deliberately paradoxical conclusion about Sterne’s idiosyncratic masterpiece: “Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature” (57). However atypical it is in the sense of uncommon, it is typical because it represents the essence of literature. Its content is form. It depicts not its characters but literariness itself.
WORDS BY THE POUND
As Formalism evolved, Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky offered a more nuanced understanding of form and defamiliarization. Instead of opposing form to content, and denying the latter, they saw literariness as applying the shaping power of defamiliarization to extraliterary material. The opposite of form was no longer content but extraliterary material. That is why Bakhtin referred to Formalism as a branch of what he called “material aesthetics”: it understands “artistic form as the form of a given material and nothing more.”8 Literature is words made palpably verbal.
It is hardly surprising, then, that so many Formalists were linguists or relied heavily on linguistics. Words were the material of art, and so it seemed that to be a scientist—and therefore a materialist—one had to reduce all of art to so many words. Of course, it is decidedly odd to claim the banner of materialism for words, which, after all, have neither mass nor extension, traditionally the defining attributes of matter. How much do metaphors weigh? But in abusing the prestige of materialism the Formalists are hardly unique. We could just as easily ask a Marxist: How much do “exploitation” or “feudalism” weigh?
Bakhtin noted that in reducing literary study to a branch of linguistics, the Formalists were contradicting their own requirement that the discipline must be based on the specifically literary. Linguistic reductionism was still reductionism.
The Formalists added to this kind of “materialism” another, equally seductive, concept for would-be scientists: atomism. To such thinkers it seems as if a properly scientific approach first dismembers the object under investigation to its most primitive elements and then studies the ways these elements combine. That is precisely what the Formalists did with literature and many of its genres. Their contributions based on this way of thinking have retained lasting influence.
Consider their approach to plot, as demonstrated by Tomashevsky’s essay in the present volume. Tomashevsky explains: “After reducing a work to its thematic elements, we come to parts that are irreducible, the smallest particles of thematic material: ‘evening comes,’ ‘Raskolnikov kills the old woman,’ ‘the hero dies,’ ‘the letter is received,’ and so on. The theme of an irreducible part of a work is called the motif ” (67). Motifs combine to form a story, which is the sequence of events as they occur in temporal and causal order in real life. The author then forms this material into an artistic order in which the events are presented in an artistically effective way, which is to say, not in chronological order and, perhaps, with digressions.
Jakobson wrote that “poetic form is the organized coercion of language” (quoted in Eichenbaum, 127), that is, it is “practical” language deformed into poetic language. In much the same way, plot (siuzhet) may be regarded as organized coercion of story (fabula), that is, the real-life sequence is deformed into the artistic order we find in novels. As Tomashevsky puts it, “Real incidents, not fictionalized by an author, may make a story. A plot is wholly an artistic creation” (68).
Because authors often manipulate their presentation of events, Formalist insights led to numerous useful studies, many by the Formalists themselves. For folklorists, Vladimir Propp’s studies of the plots of fairy tales retain enormous influence a century later. There is much to be said for this approach, but one may also detect a serious ambiguity.
Is the “story” that the author defamiliarizes the real sequence of events or is it rather the way we usually narrate those events? Shklovsky and Tomashevsky write as if we usually narrate events in chronological order and as if only an artist ever does something else. But a moment’s thought will reveal that we rarely narrate any complex set of events in chronological order. If we are describing how two people came into conflict, we may trace the events experienced by one until he encounters the other, whose experiences we then go back to trace. We do not jump from one causal line to another in order to keep the chronological order. Indeed, so rarely do we keep to strict chronological order that to do so would itself be a form of defamiliarization.
We tell stories for a reason. When we narrate, we are trying to make ourselves understood so as to convey a point, and it is that point, not chronological order, that dictates how we narrate. The Formalists err because they forget real, lived human experience, which always comes with purposes, in order to focus on raw material and form, which do not.
GENRES
As Eichenbaum and Shklovsky explained, the Formalists approached longer genres from their atomistic perspective. Motifs combine into anecdotes, anecdotes into short stories, short stories into novels. The progression from shorter to longer forms is entirely a matter of devices. Thus, Shklovsky explained that writers first learned to combine stories by using a frame narrative about how people told a sequence of stories, as in the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales. Then they got the idea of making the stories all the adventures of a single hero. The reason that Don Quixote appears to be both noble and foolish, according to Shklovsky, is not that the book examines the complexity of idealism but that Cervantes used linking devices that did not (as in later novels) presuppose a consistent hero. “The type of Don Quixote, so glorified by Heine and beslobbered by Turgenev, was not the primary aim of the author. The type was the result of the process of constructing the novel, just as the mechanism of performance often creates new forms of poetry.”9
The Bakhtin group took the Formalists to task for such conclusions, which were to them evidently absurd. The Formalists’ core error, they contended, lay in their misunderstanding of genre. Formalist atomism notwithstanding, a genre is not a particular complex of devices assembled from the bottom up. On the contrary, a genre is a particular way of understanding and evaluating some aspect of life. It proceeds from the top down, that is, from its perception of the world to its means of expression.
For the Bakhtin group, a genre has “eyes.” Different genres see and evaluate the world differently. Realist novels are not just long anecdotes, because the “anecdotal” view of life differs markedly from the novelistic one. Nor do all long narratives—“novels” in the purely formal sense of the term—express the same view. Realist works like Middlemarch or Anna Karenina belong to an entirely different genre, and reflect a different way of viewing life, from The Golden Ass, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, and Moby-Dick, all of which differ generically from each other. Genres are “form-shaping ideologies,” by which Bakhtin meant they are ways of viewing the world that create or reshape appropriate forms to convey that view. Forms do not define a genre; they result from the vision that does. This debate—between atomists and what we might call “visionists”—continues.
The Formalists tried to rescue literature from reductionist approaches that did not reflect its integrity and complexity. If they sometimes went overboard in separating literature from life, they nevertheless left us an excellent set of analytic tools. As Bakhtin would be the first to acknowledge, no school of criticism can afford to ignore the Formalists’ contributions.
NOTES
1. I capitalize “Formalism” and “Formalist” when referring specifically to Russian Formalism. There have been many movements that have been called, for one reason or another, formalist, and the term (with a small “f”) is often used to refer to this approach as a whole.
2. The Bakhtin circle’s two most important examinations of Formalism are Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 276–325; and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). For a more detailed discussion of Bakhtin’s and Medvedev’s critique of Formalist theories of genre, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 271–305. The best study of the Formalist movement is still the classic one by Victor Erlich, which has gone through numerous editions and printings and has provided a model for studies of other movements. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
3. Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 14.
4. For an account of these origins of economics, see Stephen Toulmin, “Economics, or the Physics That Never Was,’’ in Return to Reason (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47–66.
5. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 258.
6. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 262.
7. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 263.
8. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content,” 262.
9. Quoted in Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 136.