jakobson - grammar of poetry res

8/13/2019 Jakobson - Grammar of Poetry Res

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): R. D. B. ThomsonSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Oct., 1983), pp. 610-613Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4208769 .Accessed: 13/10/2011 06:29

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6io THE SLAVONIC REVIEWfrequent here. They combine with the author's lust for parenthesis,paranoid avoidance of the simple sentence, and weakness for the presenthistoric, to make this section unreadable. It should have been ruthlessly

boiled down and style-edited, and the result would probably have been auseful final chapter about what matters most. As it is, the job of literaryinterpretation will have to be done again. Whoever does it, though, willneed to begin from Dienes's pioneer labours in Gazdanov bio-bibliography.Vancouver G. S. SMITH

Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings. ol. in: Poetry f Grammar nd Grammar fPoetry. Edited with a preface by Stephen Rudy. Mouton, The Hague,Paris, New York, I98 I. xviii + 814 pp. Indexes. DM 250.00.

RoMANJakobson died on I8 JUly 1982, and the third volume of his SelectedWritings s thus the last to have appeared in his lifetime. There remains onlyvol. VI, Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads, till to be published in this set.

The present volume falls into four sections: 'Principles'; 'Readings' (thelargest section, comprising over 500 pages); 'On the Margins of LiteraryArt' (an appendix to the second part, applying the same techniques to'non-poetic' texts); and 'Early Sketches' (1919-37), concluding with a'Retrospect' in which Jakobson attempts to refute some of his critics,notably Michael Riffaterre, Leon Collier, and Jonathan Culler. Thevolume ends with a series of indexes, one of which, 'Languages discussed',contains some 55 items.

With the exception of the 'Early Sketches' all but two of the paperscollected here were written after I958; the paper that gives the volume itssubtitle is dated I960, and it represents the theme to which Jakobsondevoted most of the energies of the last twenty years of his life. He asks the

question: 'What makes a verbal message a work of art?' (p. I8), and repliesthat the answer is to be found in linguistics, or, to be precise, in theinterrelationship between grammar and poetry proclaimed in his subtitle.By his use of this expression Jakobson might seem to be pointing to thetension between the constraints of grammar and the pressures of poeticform, an approach that has inspired some of the most fruitful criticism ofour time. But it soon becomes plain that Jakobson is not really concernedwith grammar and syntax but with grammatical categories: nouns(concrete or abstract), verbs (active or non-active), adjectives, preposi-

tions, articles, enclitics. He is not interested so much in their grammaticalfunction as in their arrangement within a text, which he compares to'relational geometry in painting' (p. 97).

ForJakobson the aesthetics of poetry do not lie in linguistics as such, butrather in parallelism (or, more often, symmetry: Jakobson tends to use thewords interchangeably), though he usually chooses to demonstrate this interms of linguistic categories. Basing himself on a strained interpretation ofthe etymology of the word 'verse' (versus: a line of writing so named fromturning to begin another line', OED), Jakobson identifies the essence ofpoetry as 'return', and he goes on to declare: 'Hence we must consistently


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draw all inferences from the obvious fact that on every level of language theessence of poetic artifice consists in recurrent returns' (p. 98). Put in lesssweeping terms, this claim would probably win general assent. The stanzas

of a lyric poem often suggest a 'melody' which can fit each separate stanza;this would imply a similarity of intonation and cadence which might well bereflected in a parallelism of word-order. Indeed, looked at in this light, theinteresting question is not so much the extent of symmetry, but rather theelasticity of the concept: why, for example, should poets on the whole prefernon-grammatical rhymes?

Given this approach, however, one might expect an examination of thedifferent kinds of symmetry, phonetic, rhythmical, grammatical, syntacti-cal, visual, etc., illustrating each type and the counterpoint between them

in a given poem. The reader would then be led to extend his appreciation ofthe role of these patterns and of the time-scale over which they operate. Thefirst part, 'Principles', might seem to promise such a foundation, but in thissection Jakobson merely asserts and reasserts the superiority of thisapproach, buttressing his case with the obiter icta of such diverse authoritiesas Gerard Manley Hopkins and Stalin. He then plunges straight into theanalyses of individual texts, the 'Readings'. The thirty-three papers thatmake up this section have been reprinted from their original versionsunedited and unrevised; the same obiter icta reappear again and again, andone soon begins to feel that every single text is being forced into aProcrustean bed. What is particularly distressing is the lack of anystructure to the argument: obvious symmetries, the not-so-obvious and thepurely fanciful are thrown together higgledy-piggledy, with no attempt torange them in any hierarchy (though Jakobson occasionally pays lip-service to this ideal), as though all symmetries were equally significant.Where the sy'mmetry s not as perfect as it might bejakobson declares thatthis too is part of the plan, a 'narochitoye raskhozhdeniye' (p. 209) or'nesluchayno' (p.214). In this 'Heads I win, tails you

lose' kind ofargument, it is difficult to see what Jakobson would count as evidenceagainst him.

To take one example. In his analysis of a sonnet by Dante Jakobsonobserves: 'In the second and fourth lines of the second strophe the rhymingvocables [ ...] belong to Dante's favorite trisyllabic word-pattern. Thusonly the two EVEN lines of the EVEN quatrain end in a word with anODD number of syllables, whereas i) the ODD lines in all the strophes, 2)all lines in ODD strophes, and 3) the EVEN line of the EVEN tercet finish

with disyllables' (pp. I 79-80). This elaborate way of saying that all thelines in the sonnet end in disyllables except for 11.6 and 8, which end intrisyllables, seems to be more obscurantist than enlightening. For what is itthatJakobson wants us to see here? Is it the fact that only two of the fourteenrhyming words are Dante's 'favourite' trisyllables? or that these twotrisyllables stand out among all the disyllables? or are we seriously expectedto believe that the oddness or evenness of the number of syllables in a wordbears any significant relationship to the oddness or evenness of the numberof the line in which it appears? Even this unlikely relationship could,however, be made more plausible by a well-constructed (and conducted)


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argument. Asserted as it is on the fourth of the sixteen pages in the essay itcan only damage the cogency of some of the stronger points raised later. It istempting to point out in the case of the two heterogeneous lines that 6 = 2 X

3 while 8=

23, so that the tension between the twos and the threes could beresolved if necessary. But since it is not clear whether Jakobson wants toshow symmetry or 'radical disaccord' (also p. I8o) in this instance, it isdifficult to say whether or not he would have welcomed the suggestion.

It seems thatJakobson is not quite clearjust what he is trying to prove. Attimes he apparently wants to show that symmetry (and especiallyasymmetry) has a semantic function: e.g. 'The only three exceptions [. . ]must be interpreted as an eloquent implementation of a motivatedantiparallelism'. In that case symmetry is only illustrative and so secondary

to the meaning. At other times, however, symmetry is treated as thefundamental principle in art. This too raises problems, for even in the moststriking examples provided by Jakobson one can always find non-symmetrical elements. Would more symmetry make such poems even moremasterly? Or could it be that doggerel would illustrate these patterns evenbetter? Some works of music carry symmetry to lengths quite unattainablein language (except possibly Khlebnikov's perevertni); oes this mean thatliterature is condemned to an inferior status? It would seem thatJakobsonhas taken one of the elements of art and emphasized it at the expense of allthe others. Although in theory he admits the validity of other approaches,he believes that only his method can reveal 'the essence of poetic artifice'.To illustrate this one can only point to aspects of poetry that he ignores andsuggest alternative explanations for some of the points that he discusses.

Jakobson's approach to poetry is primarily through the eye (it isnoticeable that his ventures into traditional literary criticism tend to dealwith visual imagery). He sees the patterns in a poem statically as in apicture where everything is visible at the same time: he does not think ofpoems as unfolding in time, or of symmetries as

(thoughhe uses the

term)'returns' as in music. Rhythm (as opposed to meter) does not seem tointerest him; he has nothing to say, for example, about such effects as thosein Pasternak's 'Metel , where the same words are repeated in the sameorder, but in different parts of the line. Most disconcerting of all, one doesnot need a good knowledge of the language in which a poem has beenwritten to produce these analyses; a standard dictionary and the co-operation of a specialist in the field seem to be all that is required. IfJakobson had only taken his own subtitle closer to heart and had looked

harder at the grammar and syntax of poetry and their interrelationshipswith rhetoric and intonation he would have avoided the scholasticism ofmany of these essays and come closer to achieving his goal.

For example, in discussing the sestet (beginning 'This is thy worke, thouGod. . .') of'A Sonnet from Sidney's Arcadia'Jakobson points out that thewhole grammatical structure of the [third] quatrain differs from [that of]the first two: in its figurative expressions, in the shift from the auxiliary tothe copula function of the verb 'to be', and from 'neutral declarative forms'to 'emphatic authorial assertion' (pp. 277-78). The point is not so muchwhether these comments are 'true' or not, or how far they are


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subconsciously apprehended by the reader, but whether they point toprimary or secondary features. One might rather argue that the word 'This'sums up the preceding lines and indicates that a transition from the

particular to the general is about to take place, as often happens at thispoint in a sonnet. It is signalled further by the reversal of the iambic in thefirst foot (This is . . ), a rhythmical (or rhetorical) device that often marksthe beginning of a new sentence or paragraph in poetry. Together theyindicate a new turn in the argument quite unmistakably, and it is notsurprising, then, that the other contrasts described by Jakobson can bedetected, though they would seem, at least to my ear, to be consequencesand not causes of the semantic change.

Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of texts in which no such

symmetries can be observed. In a revealing asidejakobson remarks: Thosepoetic patterns where certain similarities between successive verbalsequences are compulsory or enjoy a high preference appear to bewidespread in the languages of the world, and they are particularlygratifying both for the study of poetic language and for linguistic analysis ingeneral' (p. 98). One might retort that a scholar should be particularlysuspicious of what is 'particularly gratifying' for his studies. But theadmission that these patterns are not universal but only 'widespread' seemsto destroy much ofJakobson's work in this volume, while elsewhere we readof 'the abundance of entire folk traditions totally unfamiliar with pervasiveparallelism and of different poetic genres that within one folklore system areopposed to each other by the presence or absence of this device' (p. I28).Would not a study of some of those cultures in which symmetry is not a'dominant' be particularly instructive for this kind of project? Of course thetrouble is that one can never 'prove' the absence of symmetry; there isalways the possibility that it lies in some area ignored by the researcher.

Jakobson is notoriously a scholar of the article, not of the book, and this

volume shows up the dangers of such a piecemeal approach. If he haddefined his position and goals more rigorously then the fundamental insightthat lies behind these essays could have been presented more persuasively,and the various repetitions and inconsistencies could have been obviated.Undoubtedly, there are temperaments that will find his argumentsconvincing; but the unconverted are likely to be reinforced in their doubtsby the preference for assertion over argument and demonstration, theintolerance of all dissenting opinions (manifested frequently, but, above all,in the 'Retrospect') and by the careless mistakes (e.g. the word ver in

Khlebnikov's 'Kuznechik' is translated 'of faiths' instead of as 'of reeds' onP. I38); and what is one to make of a scholar who quotes 'AllesVergaingliche ist nur ein Gleichnis' and adds: 'Said more technically,anything sequent is a simile' (p. 42)? It is regrettable that in the last volumeto be published in Jakobson's lifetime these defects should have obscuredthe erudition and insight that distinguished his work at its best.Toronto R. D. B. THOMSON

jakobson - grammar of poetry res

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