Persistent Forms

Explorations in Historical Poetics

Ilya Kliger, Boris Maslov, Ilya Kliger, Boris Maslov

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823264865
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria rusa

Since the mid-1980s, attempts to think history and literature together have produced much exciting work in the humanities. Indeed, some form of historicism can be said to inform most of the current scholarship in literary studies, including work in poetics, yet much of this scholarship remains undertheorized.Envisioning a revitalized and more expansive historicism, this volume builds on the tradition of Historical Poetics, pioneered by Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) and developed in various fruitful directions by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Olga Freidenberg. The volume includes previously untranslated texts of some of the major scholars in this critical tradition, as well as original contributions which place that tradition in dialogue with other thinkers who have approached literature in a globally comparatist and evolutionary-historical spirit. The contributors seek to challenge and complement a historicism that stresses proximate sociopolitical contexts through an engagement with the longue durée of literary forms and institutions. In particular, Historical Poetics aims to uncover deep-historical stratifications and asynchronicities, in which formal solutions may display elective affinities with other, chronologically distant solutions to analogous social and political problems.By recovering the traditional nexus of philology and history, Persistent Forms seeks to reinvigorate poetics as a theoretical discipline that would respond to such critical and intellectual developments as Marxism, New Historicism, the study of world literature, practices of distant reading, and a renewed attention to ritual, oral poetics, and genre.

PART I

Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics

CHAPTER 1

From the Introduction to Historical Poetics

Questions and Answers (1894)

ALEXANDER VESELOVSKY

This publication dates1 from the period when Alexander Veselovsky, following two decades of mostly empirical philological and historical work, returned to theoretical issues in literary history. It is one of his most wide-ranging and ambitious pieces. Committed to a vision of literature as a social phenomenon, and thus to a definition of literary scholarship as social science, Veselovsky poses questions, daring in their overt generality, about the history of culture and seeks to provide answers that appeal to a soft version of the scientific principle of law-like regularity. In place of unequivocal causal linkage, he indicates a set of preconditions; instead of regular recurrence, a suggestive pattern; and the argument’s validity is tested by cross-cultural and cross-historical comparison. Poised on the border of historical determinism, Veselovsky’s proposed correlations between social and literary history are marshaled to explain the rise and fall of particular literary forms in particular historical periods.

In this essay, Veselovsky puts forward a new fundamental mechanism of cultural history: the encounter between an imported and a native cultural impetus, which is often manifested in collaboration or confrontation between the elite and the larger populace. This proto-dialogic encounter between the alien and the indigenous also instantiates a dynamic that Veselovsky appears to have regarded as a historical universal: the ever-present combat between old (perceived as conventional or constrained) and new (perceived as free) cultural elements.

A cultural-historical analogue of dvoeverie (coexistence of the Christian and pagan religions) thus becomes constitutive of both cultural and literary history. In contrast to Veselovsky’s early methodological pronouncements, in which he effectively restricted cultural history to intercultural encounters, he gives more room here to the possibilities of a single people’s organic evolution.2 Some contrasts and connections that he draws—especially those that rely on organicist rhetoric—now appear irrevocably outdated (such as a value-laden comparison between a lucid Latin humanism and a fictitious northern European Romanticism), while others retain their force and freshness (such as the analysis of animal mock epic or the identification of a transitional period between communal and individual art as a precondition of national epic). More generally, what makes this essay a classic of Historical Poetics is the determination and insight with which Veselovsky pursues one of his major scholarly ambitions: to supplant philosophical and evolutionary-teleological accounts of the supra-genres of Western literary history—epic, drama, and the novel (lyric is conspicuously absent from this essay)—with a historical examination of the preconditions for their (re)emergence and social efficacy. The concluding section of the essay is particularly significant from a methodological point of view. Having presented several case studies of periodic renewal of forms, Veselovsky offers a far-reaching reflection on the nonsynchronous quality of cultural memory in which older elements are preserved in a passive state, ready to be reawakened in response to “an urgent call of the times.”

Literary history is reminiscent of a geographical zone that international law has consecrated as res nullius, where the historian of culture and the aesthetician, the erudite antiquarian and the researcher of social ideas all come to hunt. Each carries away what he can, according to his abilities and views; the goods or the quarry display the same tag, but their contents are far from identical. There is no agreement about a common standard, for otherwise we would not return so insistently to the question: What is the history of literature?3 One of the views to which I am most sympathetic can be reduced more or less to the following definition: literary history is the history of social thought in its imagistic-poetic survival [perezhivanie]4 and in the forms that express this sedimentation. History of thought is a broader notion; literature is its partial manifestation. Such a specification presupposes a clear notion of what poetry is, what the evolution of poetic consciousness and its forms is, for otherwise we would not speak of history. Such a definition, however, also calls for a mode of analysis that would be adequate to the goals that have been set.

My lectures at the University and at the Women’s Advanced Courses a few years ago, which concerned epic and lyric, drama and the novel in relation to the development of poetic style, had as their aim the collection of materials for a methodological inquiry into literary history, for an inductive poetics that would do away with speculative interpretations, for an elucidation of the essence of poetry derived from its history. My audience will recognize, in the generalizations that I shall propose, much that is old, but now formulated with less assurance, more doubts than affirmations, and even more queries: there is no harm in asking questions, whereas there is harm in arguments constructed on a weak factual basis.

Since the time of my lectures, Scherer’s Poetik has been published, a formless fragment of an undertaking conceived both with talent and on a grand scale, as well as with the same objectives [as my undertaking]; the tendency of several German studies on particular issues in poetics is another indication of a lively interest in the same project. Evidently, there arose a demand for it, and along with it an attempt at systematization in the book by Brunetière, a classicist in his tastes, a neophyte of evolutionism, fanatical, as are all new converts, in whose consciousness, somewhere in a small corner, the old gods still tacitly reign—a book that reminds one of those sinners in Dante who walk forward with their faces turned behind.5

Such is the literature on the subject: there are more queries than axioms. Have we, for example, reached a consensus on how poetry is to be understood? Who will be satisfied with the vague formula that was recently proposed by Brunetière: poetry is “metaphysics, revealed in images and in this way made comprehensible to the heart” (une métaphysique manifestée par des images et rendue sensible au coeur)?6

Let us leave this general question open for the future; its solution depends on a whole series of systematic studies and solutions of particular problems that belong to the same field. It is on some of these problems that I would like to dwell.

French journals on folk poetry7 and antiquities include an appealing section: “Les Pourquoi?” Why? Children pester us with such questions; humanity posed them at its simplest stages of development, posed them and gave extrinsic, sometimes fantastical answers that calmed by being definite: Why is the crow black? Why does the sun grow reddish before sunset and where does it disappear for the night? Or why does the bear have a short tail? Answers to such queries lie at the basis of ancient myths, which historical development has introduced into a system, into a genealogical linkage, and the result was mythology. The survival [perezhivanie] of such answers in contemporary popular religion shows that they were once an object of belief and imagined knowledge.

In literary history there is a whole set of such les pourquoi, which at some time were posed, answered, and these answers still exist in survivals at the basis of certain literary-historical views. It would be useful to reconsider them, so as not to find ourselves in the position of a man of the common people who is convinced that the sun spins and plays on St. John’s Eve. It would be useful also to propose new “les pourquoi,” because there is much that is still unexplored, which often passes for something already solved and self-evident, as if we were already in agreement as to what, for example, Romanticism and Classicism, Naturalism and Realism are, what the Renaissance is, and so on.

These are the questions I would like to engage. I will take my examples not from the contemporary world, although everything leads up to it. Antiquity, for us, has settled into a perspective in which many details are blurred and straight lines predominate, which we are prone to mistake for conclusions, for the simplest contours of evolution. And, in part, we are correct in doing so: historical memory overlooks minor facts and retains only those that are significant and contain the seeds of further development. Yet historical memory can also be mistaken; in such cases, that which is new and present to observation serves as a criterion for what is old and has been lived through outside our experience [perezhitomu vne nashego opyta]. Solid results in research on social—and that means, also on literary-historical—phenomena are obtained precisely in this way. The contemporary world is too confused, too exciting for us to be able to examine it holistically and calmly, searching for its laws. We are more composed in our attitude toward antiquity and, whether we wish it or not, we seek lessons therein, which we do not follow, and generalizations, to which we are drawn by antiquity’s apparent finality, in spite of the fact that we ourselves half inhabit it. This is what gives us the right to voice an opinion and verify it. Only recently, questions pertaining to the development of religious consciousness and language were discussed solely on the basis of ancient documents. We became fascinated with the Vedas and Sanskrit and constructed the edifice of comparative mythology and linguistics, relatively coherent systems in which everything was in its proper place and much was hypothetical. Without these systems, criticism, the practice of verifying the past against the present, would not have appeared. We were constructing the religious worldview of the primitive human without having cross-examined the experience that was close at hand, whose object is our common folk as well as ourselves; we were constructing phonetic laws for languages whose sounds had never reached us, while next to us dialects thrive and develop in accord with the same physiological and psychological laws that held in the times of our Aryan progenitors. Progress in the field of mythological and linguistic scholarship requires us to test systems that were constructed on the basis of facts from the historical past against observations about the reality of contemporary popular religion and dialects.

The same applies to literary history: our views on its evolution have been founded on a historical perspective into which each generation has introduced corrections arising from its own experience and from accumulating parallels. We rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Eric Hayot
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form
• Part I: Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics
• Part II: The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration
• Part III: Comparative Poetics and the Historicity of Experience
• Part IV: Literary Genres in the Longue Durée
• Further Readings in Historical Poetics
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series Page