Lemon Lee T. - Russian formalist criticism: four essays

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Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the authors imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

1965 by the University of Nebraska Press
Introduction by Gary Saul Morson 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russian formalist criticism: four essays / translated and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis; new introduction by Gary Saul Morson.Second edition.
pages; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-3998-2 (paperback: alkaline paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-7451-8 (electronic: e-pub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-7452-5 (electronic: mobi)
1. Formalism (Literary analysis) 2. Literature, Modern. I. Lemon, Lee T. II. Reis, Marion J. III. Morson, Gary Saul, 1948 IV. Shklovskii, Viktor, 18931984. Iskusstvo kak prim. English. V. Shklovskii, Viktor, 18931984. Tristram Shendi Sterna i teoriia romana. English. VI. Tomashevskii, B.V. (Boris Viktorovich), 18901957. Tematika. English. VII. Eikhenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich, 18861959. Teoriia formalnogo metoda. English. VIII. Title: Art as technique. IX. Title: Sternes Tristram Shandy. X. Title: Thematics. XI. Title: Theory of the formal method.
PN98.F6R87 2012

801.950947dc23 2011050454

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Introduction

G ARY S AUL M ORSON

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. 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.

R USSIAN S CIENCE

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 nihilists 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 Halvy 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, politicsindeed, everything in human lifecould 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, Lvi-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.

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.

L ITERARINESS

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 Eichenbaums 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.

Eichenbaums 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 theoriesas 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. (1023)