MORE KEYS TO THE LAMARCK PUZZLE AND RELATED THEORETICAL ISSUES

Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)

 

It so happens that the paper I meant to give has been published in Voprosy literatury[1] and thus needn’t be presented. The advantage being that it can be used in discussing some theoretical issues that underlie my reasoning there as well as in another piece of mine on Mandel’shtam[2] — and which also have been raised in a recent essay on Pasternak by Oleg Lekmanov and Anna Sergeeva-Kliatis in Novyi mir.[3]

 

1.

I will use their stance as a point of departure – a foil for my own. They argue that whereas for Mandel’shtam and Akhmatova the clarifying subtexts are best sought in the world of literature, for Pasternak we better focus on facts of real life.[4] And they proceed to deploy three impressive cases of such real’nye komnmentarii.[5] Remarkably, however, many of the adduced realia, are, at least in part, “literary and/or textual facts”: a biblical passage, a newspaper article, a political tract and a little-known short story by Gorky, and an infamous Soviet telegram on the occasion of an earthquake in Japan. This does not diminish the heuristic validity of looking for facts, but does remind us of the basic textuality of written-up experience.

Also, they seem to assume that the obscure passages that need clarification by the same token hold the keys to the text’s elusive meaning. A famous textbook example of such an analysis is, of course, Cleanth Brooks’[6] reading of two puzzling images in Macbeth: a naked new-born babe,/ Striding the blast… and …the murderers,/ Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers/ Unmannerly breech’d with gore. Each of these fragments is not just dense but actually does encapsulate, in an enigmatically paradoxical nutshell, the central theme of the play: the conflict between appearances and substance (I won’t elaborate). Thus they exemplify, avant la lettre, Michael Riffaterre’s ungrammaticality, which challenges us, by its very opacity, to uncover the in-depth significance of the poetic text.

But obscurity, ungrammaticality, lack of factual data, and signals of hidden design are four logically independent phenomena and do not always coincide.

Thus, Brooks’ passage from Macbeth is obscure, but not factually, and the solution comes from a close reading of the entire text, not from a realnyi kommentarii as to the historical make-up of breeches and daggers.

The two coauthors’ convincing and structurally relevant interpretation of a quatrain from Pasternak’s Vakhanaliia cycle is, indeed, based on an illuminating fact-finding by the authors, but the passage itself is not obscure – it seems transparent on first reading.

On the other hand, their realnyi kommentarii to a fragment of Pasternak’s Vysokaia Bolezn’ is quite solid in itself but doesn’t add much to the overall reading of the rather transparent text; nor, in fact, is it obscure to begin with, as the telegram in question is adequately paraphrased in the poem for the readers’ benefit.

To add a fresh example of my own, it’s hard to figure out the hidden design of Mikhail Kuzmin’s short stories. In one of those, “Shelkovyi dozhd’” (1918), I have been intrigued by the strange references to a horse-drawn povozka and a voznitsa in connection with a scene at the beach. But a couple of weeks ago the solution unexpectedly came from reading some memoirs. In light of which the povozka turned out to be kupal’nia na kolesakh, or,in Victorian English, a bathing machine,– the kind that was used to get bathers, especially women, across the shallows and out to deeper places convenient for swimming; they also provided a private space for changing.

The mystery was gone – but this did not bring me any closer to cracking the code of the story as a whole. A fascinating real’nyi kommentarii in the making, which I will probably write up and publish, but, alas, no Riffaterrian cigar.

In a word, in order to be good, khoroshimi, our approaches should probably remain different, raznymi, fashioned for the task at hand. To open the lock, whatever fits is the key.

That is my general stance. More specifically, I would also challenge the claim that Pasternak is all that different from Mandel’shtam in the intertextual department.

 

2.

Let me start with a “factual” finding about a Mandel’shtam poem, in fact, about one memorable but little studied line – in «Ещедалёкомнедопатриарха…» (1931; впервые опубл. 1961, на родине 1966):

My analysis has already appeared in print (see Fn. 2), so I’ll briefly state how what I discovered supports my point.

First off, a fact of life: namely, that in 1931 the Soviet “dime” coin changed its look, becoming less silver, more copper and nickel-like, yellowish. As a result, Mandel’shtam (and others — I cite relevant testimony) were nostalgic for the disappearing silver piece and — through it — for the silver dime of prerevolutionary yore.

Secondly, a related literary fact: the existence of a venerable “grivennik topos” – the tradition of writing texts about “grivennik” with quite specific thematic connotations and entitling them accordingly. (I skip the details.)

And, thirdly, a relevant cultural and literary fact: the expression “around the world with a dime in the pocket” that entered Russian vocabulary in 1910s, after the French novel Les cinq sous de Lavarède [“The five sous of Lavarede”] by H. Chabrillat & Paul d’Ivoi (1894) appeared in Russian translation in 1908 — under precisely that title: «Вокруг света с гривенником в кармане».

Thus, the proverbial underwater seven eights of Mandel’shtam’s textual iceberg are in this case one third factual and two thirds literary, — just like in the Pasternak examples discussed by the coauthors. Adding up all these parts we get the idea of how this memorable verse line plays into the Mandel’shtam’s invariant theme: his famous “nostalgia for world culture.”

Incidentally, the line doesn’t appear obscure at first glance and that’s probably why it hasn’t attracted the attention of commentators. The art of naturalization – of making art artless – succeeded in obscuring the very obscurity of the image. The upshot being that our commentaries should elucidate not only the patently opaque passages but also the deceptively transparent ones. And the focus should be on whatever facts are relevant, whether of life or literature.

 

3.

Staying with Mandel’shtam – and his predilection for literary subtexts, a few words about the promised new keys to his “Lamarck.”[7] My article is available, so I’ll focus on its theoretical gist. The fact that the poem remains an extremely popular “hit” among readers and scholars, calls, I believe, for a special type of approach. This kind of success cannot be accounted for by references, on one hand, to Lamarck’s science and, on the other, to little-known poetic subtexts, such as the poetry of Kuekhelbeker (brought up in one influential article on the subject), even if these links are plausible. A “hit” is usually rooted in major types of poetic discourse.

“Lamarck” reworks motifs from such magisterial texts of Russian poetry as Pushkin’s “The Prophet” and Lermontov’s “Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu…” With the latter it shares the meter – the trochaic pentameter, so relevant to the theme of “journey” that informs the entire narrative structure of “Lamarck.” The poem is not only replete with verbs of motion, but is designed as a journey down the evolutionary ladder into the past — the origins of man and life itself. As a result, it taps the powerful energies of the corresponding types of narrative: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and the like. These are in turn rooted in the archetypal folktale and adventure-novel narratives, with their paradigms of departure, travel and (problematic) return etc., as well as more specific motifs of ladder, bridge, and others. An additional archetypal motif underlying the plot of “Lamarck” is the journey undertaken by a disciple, often a little kid (or a grown-up transformed into a kid or a dwarf), on the orders and under the guidance of a magical Mentor…

All of these and some others add up to the fascinating drama of the failure to get back from the fateful journey, with which the reader easily identifies. In my article, I also document other relevant influences, among them the poetry of Mandel’shtam’s fellow-Acmeist Mikhail Zenkevich – his «Дикая порфира» (1912), which was big on the time travel into earlier periods of human and animal life on earth.

To repeat the theoretical point: Even when looking for relevant literary subtexts, one should focus on those that promise to explain the main thrust of the poem’s esthetic effect. A Mandel’shtam poem is not an encyclopedia of quotations, it’s a structure, a design, a message, in this case, a powerful “hit,” and should be commented on accordingly. (For reasons of time, I completely omit the role played by the poet’s invariant motifs.)

 

4.

Let’s now move into Pasternak territory and produce an obscure passage that is clarified strictly and solely by identifying the right poetic subtext.

Here is a fragment from his openly Pushkinian «Тема» («Скала и шторм…», the opening poem of the cycle “Тема с вариациями”):

It would hardly make sense to go looking for some unknown “facts” of Pasternak’s – or, for that matter, Pushkin’s – life that would explain the image of drinking off of the kneecaps – in Russian knee-cups – of some fish- or siren-like creatures. But a thorough search of Pushkin’s texts does indeed yield an explanatory passage – from his unfinished poem «Как счастлив я, когда могу покинуть…» (1826? 1829?), associated with his work on “Русалка”:[8]

Another similar example concerns the possible underpinnings of the spectacular image of the “sad Diotima” in Pasternak’s «Лето» («Ирпень это память о людях и лете…»; 1930):

It turns out[10] that, in addition to Pushkin’s «Пир во время чумы» and Plato’s «Symposium» («Пир» in Russian), where Socrates quotes a certain Diotima, a major subtext to Pasternak’s love life at the time and this poem in particular was Friedrich Hölderlin’s (1770-1843) life, poetry and prose – the novel Hyperion or The Hermit in Greece. The female protagonist of this novel is named Diotima, and Diotima is also the name of the addressee of Hölderlin’s love lyrics, in real life known as Suzette Gontard.

In other words, this passage of “Leto” is saturated with literary allusions which far outweigh the also quite significant biographical ones. Small wonder that the poem was a favorite of Mandel’shtam’s!

5.

Pasternak’s rather early poem «Зимнее небо» (1915)[11] reads as a perfect realization of his avowed desire to have a poem contain a piece of reality – a specific landscape, the Brestskii railway station, the city of Venice etc. Hence only realnyi kommentarii would seem to be called for, and in notes and commentaries, one indeed finds some information about the racing skates mentioned – the norvegi, that naturalize the poem’s metaphorical Norway. But, as has been shown in a recent study,[12] «Зимнеенебо» harks back to the “skating topos” of the German poetic tradition, in particular, its treatment by Friedrich Klopstock (1724–1803). Once again, Pasternak proves to be no less intertextual than Mandel’shtam.

What remains missing in the notes, as well as in the two solid articles about the poem,[13] is any mention of the poem’s whimsical metrical structure, culminating in the of the irregularly long, six foot, rather than 5 foot, line that also stands out by its ungrammatical, indeed, un-morphological, look: Реже-реже-ре-жеступай, конькобежец. In a paper still in the press,[14] I show that this irregular line serves to iconize – enact rhythmically – the shift in the motions of the skater that is described verbally in this line and the next.

A theoretical implication is that commentaries should contain (as they do in Western annotated editions of, say, Horace’s Odes or Shakespeare’s Sonnets) – along with the facts of life and the literary facts — the relevant information regarding what we call, after Jakobson, the poetry of grammar. In a word, whatever it takes.