Poetry of Grammar or Pragmatics of Poetry?

Confessions of a Compulsive Conservative

Alexander  ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)

I had qualms about participating in this colloquium. Along with various practical reasons there was a theoretical one. I have long been out of love with theory and couldn’t possibly think of anything constructive—or, deconstructive, for that matter—to say. What made up my mind was the anticipated pleasure not so much of speaking as listening to an elite group of colleagues—and the organizers’ tapping of my foible for the confessional mode, which I am now going to indulge.

My tastes are naturally conservative. The passage in Russian literature with which I identify most acutely comes, in accordance with Dostoevsky, from Gogol’s “Overcoat”. It’s the one where “at the word ‘new’ [при слове ‘новую‘]Akaky Akakievich’s eyes fogged over and everything in the room started swinging confusedly.” There was a good measure of conservatism already in my and Shcheglov’s early generativist project, as we set out to formulate a technical framework for a very traditional—“commensensical”—view of literary competence. With age, I have become even more conservative (and hopefully, more commonsensical), in accordance this time with Winston Churchill.

My Soviet structuralist disposition was challenged as soon as I arrived to these shores in 1980. I was promptly initiated into the poststructuralist agenda by no less an authority than Jonathan Culler, who at the same time generously introduced my generativist book (Themes and Texts) to the American reader. Yet, I remember defiantly confessing to Jonathan two decades ago, that, fascinated as I was by reading On Deconstruction, I failed to see what it had to do with whatever interested me in, say, Pasternak’s poetry. I was more attracted by the rather moderate—structuralist-intertextualist-mildly-poststructuralist—work of Michael Riffaterre. Another important poststructuralist push came from the work of and discussions with Boris Gasparov. On the whole, very soon in my American avatar, I came to the tolerant conclusion that all genres were good, not excluding, pace Voltaire, the boring, certainly not the “semantic haloes” studies of the Kiril Taranovsky-Mikhail Gasparov school. I think that the various literary theories and models are best seen as the many tools on the wall of an archetypal American toolshed, each with its specific appropriate use, none exclusively and universally “right.” And I believe that such an unprincipled approach—eclectic, postmodern, pluralist, polyphonic, alternativistic, call it whatever—may be preferable to any one single-minded grand utopian model.

Among the major recent contributions to Slavic theory I count the zhiznetvorchestvo (“life-creation,” or “self-fashioning”) approach, some of whose leading practitioners are present here today. In the years of its gestation on the American soil (because, of course, it goes back to Lotman, Lidiia Ginzburg and Khodasevich), I had the privilege of close contacts with Olga Matich and Irina Paperno. From my structuralist cocoon I couldn’t at first understand what the ado was about. I kept asking, What textual problem calls for all this preoccupation with biography? Which text that otherwise defies analysis are you hoping to explicate in this way? Why would anyone want to know more about this pathetic loser Nina Petrovskaia?

On a more dramatic note, I remember giving a paper (one of my finest, I think, as well as admittedly most boring) about Pasternak’s figurative voices (”voices” in the grammatical sense of verbal zalogi)—almost two decades ago, at an AATSEEL meeting in New York, more or less on New Year’s eve, and if memory doesn’t fail me, in one of the World Trade Center Towers. The discussant, a prominent Slavist, spent all his/her time and more talking about the papers of the other panelists, who happened to be his/her graduate students, now praising, now quibbling with their detailed itemization of Nina Petrovskaia’s days and labors. S/he cursorily excused him/her-self from commenting upon mine, which through one of those scheduling whims was put on the same panel (probably the only one on 20-th century poetry anyway), saying s/he had only received a draft version. Frankly, I do not think s/he was—or is—qualified to comprehend its underlying linguistics, draft or final cut. Thus, a lack of understanding was sometimes quite mutual. It took several years for someone back in Russia with a strong linguistic background to notice and appreciate the article—as well as for me to start teaching zhiznetvorchetsvo in my graduate courses.

Indeed, only gradually did I realize that in self-fashioning studies the text under analysis was the life-text itself—in a break with the formalist/structuralist focus on literariness. Or, rather—in an extension of literariness, i. e. of the assumption of rhetorical patterning—to the interpretation of a creatively structured biography. Once this dawned on me, I saw where the most interesting—and soothingly conservative—challenge lay: in reading the literary text plus the author’s life-text as a single macrotext with the help of structuralist techniques and thus eventually beating life-creationists at their own game. This fueled a series of my demythologizing projects: on Akhmatova’s lady-into-peasant totalitarianism, Pasternak’s sisterly assimilationism, and Zoshchenko’s lifelong poetics and prosaics of mistrust. The point of such excercises is, in the more obvious instances, to establish a uniformity of life-texts and texts proper in terms of invariant motifs; in the less obvious cases,—to discern more complex continuities based on contrast rather than similarity. In fact, contrast is still a Jakobsonian parallelism—just another pattern, another expressive device. In this way, I would say, structuralist tools are not so much discarded as modified, extended, perfected—vindicated, after all.

I must confess that in working on Zoshchenko—his comic and “serious” works and the text of his biography (collated from his autopsychoanalytical writing and memoiristic materials about him), I was surprised by the possibility of a seamless fusion of structuralist and poststructuralist modes of study. But then, my underlying impulse was not to prove a theoretical point, but to understand, as best I could, a writer who had always fascinated and puzzled me,—to figure out chto u nego vnutri (“what is inside him”), naive and essentialist as it may sound.

This much for literary pragmatics. My next—and current—project is even more traditionally structuralist, but by the same token it has a robust theoretical component. A couple of years ago I came across a poem by a major living Russian poet Sergei Gandlevskii [example 27]. I loved it and proceeded to familiarize myself with extant criticism, which, it turned out, had focussed on direct subtexts: one by Aleksandr Blok (“Greshit’ besstydno, neprobudno…” [To sin shamelessly, without awakening…; [example 20]), another by Joseph Brodskii (“Rodit’sia by sto let nazad…” [To be born a hundred years ago…; example 24]). A list of other virtual subtexts suggested itself: poems by Afanasii Fet [example 18], Boris Pasternak [not on the handout] and Aleksei Tsvetkov [example 26], Marina Tsvetaeva [example 21]among many others—up to one published last month, by the late Boris Ryzhii [example 28]. Unlike the first two specimens, some of these were not in the same meter, iambic tetrameter, but all had one feature in common, which was so obvious in the first two that it had been taken for granted and therefore not seen in the proper theoretical perspective: they were all written in long series of infinitive constructions. To make this clear to non-speakers of Russian, one may offer the following digest of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

To be, or not to be… to suffer the slings and arrows… or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?To die: to sleep; and, by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream… Who’d fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life… and so on [see also examples 1, 2, 7, 9 for more specimens in English and in French.]

A favorite pastime of Russian scholars is hunting for sub-tetxts—the text’s sources, objects of parody etc. A theoretically more sophisticated, Western, in particular, Riffaterrean, but also Russian, notably Mikhail Gasparov’s, strategy is to look for a generic inter-text, or hypo-gram: the memory of a genre, a meter, a motif, a trope—the discourse type that underlies the text in question. This theoretical awareness prompted me to take a look at as many as possible relevant cases, which, in turn, called for further theorizing: defining infinitive writing. I put together a working definition (with which I am not going to bore you) and have now collected over a thousand infinitive poems by around two hundred Russian poets from the 350-year-long history of modern Russian literature. They exhibit an impressive set of similarities in their poetic and linguistic structure and motific repertoire. Moreover, in Taranovsky-Gasparov terms, they share a “semantic halo,” one that is both predictably generic and rewardingly specific. Stated very crudely, the invariant theme of infinitive poetry is a ‘meditation on a virtual alternative mode of being.’

The exploration of this vast and heretofore unknown continent of Russian poetry—and by extension of other poetries—poses a host of theoretical and practical problems. To list some:

– establishing the relevance/irrelevance of the distinction between fully absolute infinitive sequences and those governed by other words (verbs like хочу, “I wish,” могу, “I can, ” and nouns like права, “the rights,” мечта, “a dream,”)—I keep hearing objections to my claim that they are basically one;

– creating a grammar—syntax—of the typical constructions used in conjunction with the infinitive structures (in particular, nominative and gerund, deepreichastnye, constructions) and of a dictionary of typical combinations of governing words and the frequently recurring infinitives;

– analyzing the correlations between the typical syntactic structures and typical metrical and other poetic characteristics of infinitive verse (for instance, the initial, final or medial position of the infinitives; the interaction of infinitive and sonnet structures in infinitive sonnets);

– conducting a comparative analysis of infinitive and nominative poetry—in terms of semantic haloes, syntactic and poetic contexts and so on (the two are clear minimalist cognates, yet different, infinitive poetry being focused on the virtual, mental picture, nominative, on the actual, visual);

– exploring the probable existence of other “grammatical poetries”—“imperative”, for one, “conditional,” as in Rudyard Kipling’s “If-“ [example 9], for another;

– studying the recurrent motifs of infinitive writing, which, to give you a foretaste, typically involves: the cycle of a human life or a day in the life of a persona; travel into another country or realm, involving a vehicle: a boat, a car, a carriage; dreaming; remembering; death and resurrection;

– establishing the historical origins of such writing in Russian poetry: borrowed from French and classical, Greek and Latin, literature, but also having probable sources in folk poetry, as well as in some non-fictional genres, e. g. the 16th century Domostroi [Home Organizer] (for a 17th-century example straddling the boundary between non-fiction and poetry, see example 11);

– creating a history of infinitive writing from its beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries, through the resurgence and development of absolute constructions in the second half of the 19th century and to its heyday in the Silver Age and subsequent 20th-century poetry (one of the turning points being Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (see examples 15–16 in conjunction with Rzhevskii’s example 12).

– compiling a commented anthology of Russian infinitive poetry.

I could go on, but will stop there—after outlining briefly a particular problem I’m working on now: infinitives and tropes. Infinitive writing is tropogenic by nature in an archetypal manifestation of poetry’s affinity for metaphoricity, i. e. trans-portation. Implicit in the thematic halo of infinitive poetry is the essentially tropological reconciliation of two poles: the ‘actual–one’s own, familiar, given, svoe’ and the ‘virtual—other, different, alien, chuzhoe.’ This tropological potential is rooted in the very indefiniteness of the infinitive’s grammatical subject, which oscillates between the lyrical persona’s ‘I’ and a more or less specific Other (an ideal hero or poet; a satirized or stylized character; a simple folksy type; an animal; a plant, a stone, a speck of dust).

The linking of the ‘actual svoe’ with a ‘virtual other’ can take the form of physical transportation, which, indeed, is a frequent motif in infinitive writing. This type of identification with the ‘other,’ occurring on the plane of contiguity, can remain literal or go figurative—as an imaginary spatial travel to some other real place or imaginary realm (Одной волной подняться в жизнь иную, “In/as/with one wave to rise into a different life” [Fet; example 18]; Перенестись туда, где ливень…”To rush to/find oneself where the rain…” [Pasternak]; Из зала прыгнуть в полотно, “From the [movie-]hall to leap into the screen” [Simonov]). On the plane of similarity, the traffic between ‘one’s own’ and ‘other’ produces literal or figurative equations, breeding similes, metaphors, metamorphoses, transmigrations of soul. The two basic Jakobsonian processes often combine; indeed, once Fet’s izbrannyi pevets, “the chosen bard,” succeeds in “riding a wave up into another life,” he by the same token himself becomes different/other. The tension/attraction between contiguity and similarity is a core characteristic of infinitive troping. Let us take a look at some examples.

Prutkov’s poem—a parody of Khomiakov’s “Zhelanie” [A Wish] (see example 17) is a textbook case of pure metaphorizing: the lyrical persona wishes to turn into various representatives of Nature and ends by stating the metamorphic principle in overtly metapoetic terms: Как сладко было б на свободе/ Свой образ часто так менять… [How sweet would it be out there at large one’s image so frequently to change] (a motif absent in the spoofed original poem, replete as the latter is with imagined morphings).

Baudelaire’s “La Geante” [example 7] (which, incidentally, is much richer in infinitives, of which it has 8, than the Bal’mont translation [example 8]) features just two similes (“like a cat”, “like a village”) and throughout the rest of the poem concentrates on various forms of contiguity with the desired giantess): жить у ног—глядеть—заглянув, угадать—пробегать—проползать [to live at the feet of, look at, guess, run alongside, crawl over].Such a “desire of contiguity” underlies a whole subgenre of infinitive writing, ushered in by Anakreontic poetry, as instanced by Nikolai L’vov’s 1794 translation of Ode XX [example 13]. The difference in this latter case is that contiguity is achieved through multiple metamorphoses: into the beloved’s mirror, clothes, bathtub water, lotion, bra, necklace and sandals, whose contacts with her body are then infinitivized: “to be your mirror”, “to wash”, “to be rubbed in”. Interestingly, the metamorphic motif is spelled out in the very beginning, yet this time not metapoetically (as in Prutkov), but in a simple intertextual reference to a Greek myth.

The first quatrain of Anna Akhmatova’s “Last Rose” [example 23]: Мне с Морозовою класть поклоны,/ С падчерицей Ирода плясать,/ С дымом улетать с костра Дидоны,/ Чтобыс Жанной на костер опять, conveys the persona’s identification with the great women of the past through the contiguous preposition “c” [with]: “to perform bows with Morozova”, “to dance with Salome”. The climactic third trope/infinitive, “to fly away with smoke from Dido’s bonfire”, marks a subtle fusion of contiguity and similarity: с дымом [with smoke] keeps the same contiguous preposition but implies full integration with that smoke; it’s no chance, of course, that the invoked motif itself is a famous metamorphosis. The fourth and last instance (With Jeanne [d’Arc] back to the bonfire] skips the infinitive altogether.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem [example 22] reads like a deliberate study in turning contiguity into metamorphosis: “to be your acolyte—to follow you in a disciple’s cloak—to make out your sighs—to break the path for you through the crowd—to serve as your cloak—to be your waking disciple, not just a cloak, a shield—to ascend to your bonfire [ahead of you].” The gradual transformation of an underage disciple into the Christ figure itself is additionally naturalized through a skillful use of the “cloak”, which is first simply—contiguously—worn and then wishfully metamorphosed into. Notably, the poem is yet another variation on the topos of “figurative contacts with an object of desire”, taken by the extremist Tsvetaeva to the limit of “becoming that object”.

The general theoretical purport of this project, as well as of similar others—such as the now classical analysis by Gerard Genette of Marcel Proust’s ‘nostalgic Imparfait tense’ and my unfortunate paper on the figurative zalogi [voices] in Pasternak—is providing Roman Jakobson’s “poetry of grammar” with a semantic component. A “deviant” use of linguistic structures, one not registered in “regular” grammars, but shaped and canonized by their systematic reworking in poetry, represents a contribution made by poetry to the natural language. In the case of Russian, it seems to be enriched by several figurative voices, compliments of Boris Pasternak, and a special “meditative mood,” compliments of infinitive poetry.

As for pragmatics, one pay-off for a modern-day conservative is that here is an extensive area of research, textually rich, intellectually challenging, sufficient to keep one busy for a decade and completely free of worrying about what Bakhtin, Zhdanov, Derrida, Benjamin, Saul Morson, Homi Baba, Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and other assorted ideologues might have to say on the subject. To paraphrase Laplace, this project has no use for those hypotheses. As a result, to quote from Plantin’s infinitive sonnet [example 1], one may hope to Conserver l’esprit libre & le jugement fort,/ Dire son Chapelet en cultivant ses entes,/ And attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort [To keep the spirit free, the judgement strong, to say one’s prayers while cultivating one’s grafts <i. e. garden>and quietly to await death].

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