ETYMOLOGIE / etymology

From the Latin forma, «form» «shape» (v. FORME), and the suffix ism, designating a movement of ideas, a current of thought, a trend: «movement which emphasizes "form"».

ETUDE SEMANTIQUE / Definitions

1. Aliterary and artistic movement or approach emphasizing form as opposed to content.

2. (Æsthetics especially in, art and literature). The tendency to stress formal beauty in art (cf. the doctrine of art for art's sake. V. l'article ART POUR L'ART).

3. (Neologism). The excessive adherence to artistic forms in opposition to naturalism or realism.

«Aucun art ne peut refuser absolument le réel... Le formalisme peut parvenir à se vider de plus en plus de contenu réel, mais une limite l'attend toujours... Le vrai formalisme est silence. De même, le réalisme ne peut se passer d'un minimum d'interprétation et d'arbitraire» (Albert Camus.-L'homme révolté.- Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p. 332).

4.(Linguistics). A theoretical approach which considers language as a form system rather than a substance or matter.

COMMENTAIRE / Analysis

The «genealogy»

Formalism in literature and literary theory came from two main sources, one artistic and the other linguistic. At its beginnings, formalism was linked to the poetical theories of the Russian Futurists and Constructivists, Burliuk, Mayakovski, Khlebnikov, Pasternak, and others, during the years which preceded the First World War. Other exponents of the movement in the sphere of literary theory were Shklovski, Tynianov, Brik, Jakobson. In the realm of art, to a great extent, the work of Wassily Kandinsky who was not a futurist proper but the «discoverer» of non-representative or non-figurative abstraction, may also be said to have paved the way for Russian formalism. Kandinsky sought to achieve «pure pictoriality» without representation - just as Roman Jakobson, ten years later, was after pure literarity without narrative content. Kandinsky's book, On the Spiritual in Art (1910) was clearly a landmark on the way toward formalism. Thus, formalism can be said to be inscribed within the general trend toward abstraction at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A parallel development existed in the newly founded linguistic science. Thus, Saussurian theory as expressed in the Cours de linguistique générale, taught in the years before the First World War, can be said to be the first «formalistic» approach to language. Ferdinand de Saussure himself saw language as a «form» and not as a «substance» (phonetic and acoustic in nature). Further, his idea of language as a synchronically working system of signs (and not as the result of an «organic» historico-philological development) was another step toward formalism. So was, furthermore, the idea of the structuring of language into «formal» dichotomies. One such dichotomy was the decomposition of the word into a semantic signified versus an acoustic signifier, the two being linked through an «arbitrary» type of relationship. Another was the organizing of language along a syntagmatic axis versus a paradygmatic axis - which would lead to the formalist Roman Jakobson's re-writing of it as metonymic versus metaphoric axes. It is, indeed, mostly through the work of Jakobson that Saussurian linguistic formalism penetrated Russian formalism.

As a historico-spatial «movement», formalism can be said to have moved gradually from Russia toward the West. At first, in the years preceding the Russian revolution, it was the creation of two circles, one in Moscow, the other in Saint-Petersburg. The movement was called Opoyaz (the anagram for Society for the Study of the Language of Poetry). The Petersburg Opoyaz were for the most part disciples of the philosopher Beaudouin de Courtenay, among them Victor Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum.

By nature, formalism was opposed to Marxism, and so, the movement was condemned by the leaders of the new Soviet Union. It «went West», primarily through the emigration of Roman Jakobson to the Czechoslovak republic, in which he found refuge after having forecast the coming of sinister developments within the Russian Revolution. While remaining in touch with his fellow formalists in Russia, in Prague, he found a group of scholars who had been already exposed to formalism or had developed their own brand of formalism. In 1926 Trubetskoy and Jakobson founded the Prague Linguistic Circle. Among the more seminal Tcheck formalists was Mukarovsky, who oriented formalism toward semiotics. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, Jakobson moved into a new American exile where he taught at first at the Free School for Advanced Studies where he met the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. It is chiefly through their close friendship that Russian formalism evolved after the Second World War into French structuralism.

The theory

In literature, formalism was born as a reaction against the traditional approach which claimed the existence of a causal link between «art» and «life». Thus, formalism was also against a sociological approach, and consequently against the Marxist vision of literature as the expression - or «reflection» - of a class-struggle. For the formalists, art stems primarily from art, and literature from literature. New movement in art are seen as the transformation of «forms» into newer ones. Thus, formalism can be defined as the focusing of the creative process - as well as literary research - upon the literary text «in person», as an immanent or sui generis phenomenon, in contrast to the «transcendental» or non-immanent approach, which sees the literary work as the product of philosophical, social or psychological structures (or a combination of all three). Thus, the formalist saw the «literarity», or perhaps the «literariness» (literaturnost), of literature as its essential object of research. Trying to define this «literarity» was one of the main objectives of one of the leading formalists, Roman Jakobson.

One of the core ideas of the Russian formalists, was that the literary work of art had to be seen as a system organizing literary devices, or foregrounding one or more literary devices - so that these devices (procédés) could be said to be the real «theme» or «subject» of the work (Shklovsky) - and not the descriptive or narrative content, or the «psychology» of characters or «heroes». In this respect, Russian formalism resembled the implicit formalism of Saussure.

Just as language, for Saussure, must be seen synchronically, as a functioning system - and not historically, as a «genealogy», the literary text must be seen as a synchronic system of «devices».

As Jakobson put it as early as 1919: «If literary studies are to become a science, they must recognize that the device is their one and only «character» to be studied.» Thus Shklovsky focused his research on such devices as the «conundrum-poem», Ossip Brik on repetitions and negative parallelisms in the biliniy (popular epics).

At the level of «plot» the real «subject» (sjužet) of the literary work was now seen as a manipulator of the narrative succession of events in the work (the fabula). Thus the fabula was chronologically ordered and linear, a mere succession of events, whereas the sjužet reorganized it according to its own chronology, with flashback, flashforward or syncopated «time» rhythms. It was seen as a structure for presenting and representing time as literature. This reorganizing of fabula as sjužet was also close to the technique of montage developed by the Russian cineasts of the time, Eisenstein and Pudovkin, although it is not clear whether the latter received their ideas from Russian Futurists or, vice versa, contributed a major contribution to the formalist theory of «sjužet».

Russian formalism also proclaimed that it privileged the study of variability and variations, the study of series comprised within a system («literature»), rather than that of the genesis of a single literary text as the «unique» production of an artist. Thus, a narrative or a novel even by a great writer of the past was not studied for its uniqueness as the product of an individual psyche but as a variation within a series belonging to a specific genre rather than to a specific writer. In so doing formalism came close to formulating the idea of «narrative structure» later formulated by Levi-Strauss in his research on the Indian myths.

The discovery of «narrative structures» was made by a man who was certainly enormously influenced by formalism, Vladimir Propp. Indeed, formalism did not restrict itself to the plane of pure literary studies but also influenced folklorists and anthropologists. Thus, Propp can be said to have applied a formalistic approach to his study of folklore. In his Morphology of the Folktale, Propp defined all folktales as a manipulation of a maximum of 36 variables, tantamount to 36 narrative functions. These functions were variants of a very reduced scheme or structure : interdiction, transgression, punishment, rehabilitation. His vision of the folktale as a set of limited functions also implied the reducing of the characters to pure forms. This would lead to the later definition of characters as actants by A. J. Greimas; Greimas further reduced the 36 functions of Propp to a maximum of 6 functions represented by 6 actants.

Thus, the idea of «function-system» replaced that of procédé-organizing system. In the years immediately after the war and the October Revolution, under the influence of Tynianov, and above all Jakobson, another development emphasized the «structural» character of the literary text as a hierarchy of specific communicative «functions» - rather than devices or «procédés», or even «functions» in the Proppian sense.

Roman Jakobson also used «function» in the sense of «communication». Here, another influence was felt, that of the German linguist Karl Bühler, a child of the German «Expressionist» period, who had elaborated a theory concerning three core functions of language in respect to human communication: Ausdruck (Expression), Darstellung (Representation), and Appel. Jakobson changed the terminology but not the content. Thus, Ausdruck became his «Emotive» function, Darstellung the «Reference». «Appel» became the so-called «Conative function». To these, Jakobson added three new ones: the «phatic», the «metalinguistic» and the «poetic» functions. The metalinguistic function was a self-reflexive one : «language speaking about language», as it were. The phatic function had a mere «contact maintaining» role between interlocutors.

According to Jakobson, these six functions of the text did not occur arbitrarily but were submitted hierarchically to a «dominante», the hegemony of one function over all the others in a text. Thus this latter function, the «poetic» (named the «aesthetic» by the Czech formalist Mukarovsky) was really the core-function for all formalistic approach to literature. It encapsulated the self-referential intention within the text; the textual intentionality aiming at achieving a sui generis, immanent or intrinsic statute or value for one's literary creation, and this despite the «narrative» or «referential» content this text may have. It was through his theory of functions and dominante that Jakobson was able to give an answer to the first problematic set by Russian formalist: «What defines the literarity of a literary text?». The answer was that it was the presence of the poetic function as a dominante that defined literaturnost. Thus, the literary text was said to foreground this «poetic function» as a «dominante» and placed all the others in a secondary or subaltern position in relation to it. On the contrary, a newspaper article - seen as a merely informative item - would be characterized as a foregrounding of the «referential function».

Another core idea of Russian formalism, from its very beginnings, concerned aesthetic communication. All genuine art works had to achieve a «de-automizing» of the perception of the literary work of art. This was formulated chiefly by Tynianov who also defined the cognate idea of ostranenie (see articles DISTANCIATION, OSTRANENIE) that was tantamount to «estranging» the spectator from the work of art so that said spectator might focus his attention upon the work of art and not remain indifferent to it. This estranging was meant as a weapon against the blunting of artistic perception in the average reader or spectator. On the level of the Russian theater, this led to the experiments of Meyerhold. On the international scene, this would later lead to the Brechtian concept of Verfremdung. Thus, all genuine works of art had to provoke the reader into aesthetic awareness so that an awakening of his aesthetic consciousness might take place. This was achieved through provocatory devices (that is, through what the contemporary exponents of the modern Rezeptionsaesthetik call «the breaking of the horizon of expectation» of the reader.)

As mentioned above, the Saussurian dichotomy «syntagmatic axis versus paradygmatic axis» deserves a special mention because of the formalist twist given to it by Roman Jakobson. It was through his study of aphasia and aphasics that Jakobson came to the conclusion that the two axes of language corresponded to two «rhetorical» axes, metonymy and metaphor.

This could lead to a typology of texts (just as there is a typology of aphasics), some being more metonymic, and other more metaphorically oriented. Spectacularly, during the sixties, this formalistic dichotomy came to be borrowed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan, now, defined symptom as «metaphor» and desire or pulsion as «metonymy: «...faire entendre que si le symptôme est une métaphore, ce n'est pas une métaphore que de le dire, non plus de dire que le désir de l'homme est une métonymie» (Ecrits I, 288-289). If, according to Lacan, the Unconscious was structured as language, it was language as seen through the «formalistic» definition of Saussure, then Jakobson.

The heritage

Notwithstanding the new developments in the West, formalism experienced a revival under Communism during the Khrushchov era, after the Second World War, the famous «school of Tartu», in Estonia, under the leadership of Yuri Lotman. Again, literature was studied «for itself» as an independent sign-system.

As a final assessment, one may say that formalism, stemming from a general trend toward abstraction in linguistics and the arts, led toward still more abstract trends in literary theory, linguistics, anthropology, and even psychoanalysis. Thus, formalism was the matrix from which were born, at once, French structuralism, the semiology of Greimas, the semiotic- psychoanalysis of Lacan. On the strictly linguistic level, the formalism of Saussure gave birth to the more complex formalism of Hjelmslev in which the dichotomy form/substance developed into the trichotomy matter/form/substance.

Claude Gandelman†

Marc Tsirlin

University of Haifa

BIBLIOGRAPHIE / Bibliographie

Bennett, Tony.– Formalism and Marxism, 1979.

Erlich, Victor.– Russian Formalism, History, Doctrine, 1965.– The Hague : Mouton, 1969.

Ferrari-Bravo.– I formalisti russi nel cinema.– Milan, 1971.

Jakobson, Roman.– Essais de linguistique générale.– Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1963.

Jamescu, Frederic.– The Prison-House of Language, 1972.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude.– Anthropologie structurale.– Paris : Plon, 1958.

«La Structure et la forme» in Cahiers de l'I.S.E.A.– 99, Série M., 7, 1960.

Lotman, Yuri, ed.– Trudy po znakovym systemam.– Tartu, 1971, esp. vol. V.

Medvedev, P. N.; Bakhtin, M. M..– The Formal Method inLiterary Scholarship; A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics.– Baltimore, MD : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Pomorska, K.– Russian Formalist Theory and its Poetic Ambiance.– The Hague : Mouton, 1968.

Propp, Vladimir.– Morphologie du conte.– Préf., E. Meletinsky, Paris : Seuil, 1965.

Shklovsky, Victor.– Sur la théorie de la prose.– trad. G. Verret, Lausanne, 1973.

Todorov, Tzvetan.– Théorie de la littérature : Textes des formalistes russes.– Paris : Seuil, 1965.

«Formalistes et Futuristes», in Tel-Quel N° 35, 1968.

Wellek, René; Warren, Austin.– Theory of literature, 1963. Trad. Française, La théorie littéraire.– Paris : Seuil, 1971.

«Le cercle de Prague», in Change, N̊ 3, 1969.