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The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics by P. N. Medvedev; M. M. Bakhtin; Albert J. Wehrle Review by: Lionel Gossman Comparative Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 403-412 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770299 . Accessed: 01/02/2012 09:42
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REVIEW ARTICLE

THE

A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO M. Bakhtin. Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. The Goucher College Series. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. xxvi, 191 p.
FORMAL METHOD IN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP:

SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS. By P. N. Medvedev/M.

Mikhail Bakhtin was brought to the attention of English-speaking scholars by the translation of his important studies of Rabelais (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968) and Dostoievskii (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).1 The present work, first published in the Soviet Union in 1928, antedates both these studies and appears to have been part of an ambitious cooperative effort by Bakhtin and his circle, during the experimental period of the New Economic Policy, "to rethink the study of culture" (p. ix). In addition to The Formal Method, the group produced studies of Freudian psychology, linguistics, and contemporary philosophy, several of which have now begun to appear in English or German translation. The present translation thus contributes to the rediscovery of an interesting intellectual movement, which seems to have been a victim of internal Soviet politics. The translator's Notes and Introduction provide valuable information about the movement as a whole and about the texts through which it can be further studied. In addition, the Introduction throws light on the unusual conditions in which The Formal Method was published, on the problem of its authorship, and on the subsequent career of both the work and its authors. As The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship seems to me to be an important and challenging work of literary theory, I propose to outline its arguments in some detail. The most effective way for a young discipline to define itself and to "clarify its point of view and methods," according to one of Bakhtin's associates, "is by intelligently criticizing and combating other trends" (quoted on p. xiii). The critique of literary formalism in The Formal Method was intended to contribute to the definition of a new sociological poetics, which would form part of a general Marxist theory of culture. Bakhtin and his group considered Russian formalism methodologically weak, in large measure because it had never had to define itself against a well-developed, disciplined, and entrenched intellectual opposition, such as positivism had been in the West. They also recognized that by 1928 it had passed its zenith as an active and creative school: with Viktor Zhirmunskii it was devolving into a mild and eclectic academicism, with Boris Eikhenbaum it had begun to make peace with psychologism and with the traditional ethical and social concerns of Russian criticism, and with Tomashevskii and Iakubinskii it was seeking an accommodation with sociology (pp. 65-70). Nevertheless, it remained influential. "The number of its adherents has perhaps even increased, and in the hands of epigones it has become even more systematic, undeviating, and precise" (p. 75). It was
1 Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics appeared in a first version in the U.S.S.R. in 1929. A revised version was published in 1963. A French translation, by Guy Verret, appeared in 1970 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions L'Age d'Homme).

the Renaissance appeared in the U.S.S.R. in 1965. Bakhtin had first presented it as a doctoral thesis ("Rabelais in the History of Realism") in 1940.

The Work of Francois Rabelais and the Popular Cultureof the Middle Ages and
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necessary, therefore, for the author or authors of The Formal Method to present the essential principles of formalism as clearly and coherently as possible, to identify it as "not only a unified system of views but also a special way of thinking" (p. 75), in order to define effectively, in contrast, their own principles and methods. Part I (Chs. i and ii) lays the groundwork for the critique of formalism that occupies the remainder of the book. The authors begin by pointing to "specification" as the basic problem of the study of ideologies. While recognizing the ideological character of all forms of cultural production, the Marxist scholar must at the same time, they claim, respect the specificity of each, be it painting, literature, science, philosophy, or religion. In most existing criticism, either the specificity of the phenomenon is dissolved by sociocultural analyses or "immanent" readings are proposed which completely ignore the social character of the phenomenon. Some wellmeaning critics advocate a policy of partition and peaceful coexistence. P. N. Sakulin, for instance, "contrasts an 'immanent essence' of literature, which is inaccessible to the sociological method, and its immanent and likewise extrasociological 'natural' evolution, to the effect of extrinsic social factors on literature. He limits the sociological method to the study of the causal effect of extraliterary factors on literature" (p. 32). The authors do not accept such a dualism, and their book is in large measure an attempt to resolve it and to sketch the outlines of a science of ideology that will be both comprehensive and attentive to the specificity of different forms of cultural production. There are many excellent pages on the specific character of literature and on the inadequacy of the simple "reflective" view of literary texts held by most sociologically oriented critics. The authors point out-rightly, as I think it will seem to most readers-that (a) literature is singularly diminished by being considered only as a reflection, a "servant and transmitter of other ideologies" (p. 18) ; (b) what is reflected in the content of literature is not life itself but "the ideological horizon, which itself is only the refracted reflection of real existence" (p. 18) ; (c) the essential content of literature reflects not "prepared or confirmed theses"-these "inevitably show up as alien bodies in the work"-but "generating ideologies . . . the living process of the generation of the ideological horizon" (p. 19) ; and (d) "the artist only asserts himself in the process of the artistic selection and shaping of the ideological material" (p. 20) but "the artistic structure of the novel and the artistic function of each of its elements are in themselves no less ideological and sociological than the esthetic, philosophical, or political ideologemes present in it" (p. 23). At times, it must be admitted, these pages are hard going. Theses are thundered out one after another like the pronunciamentos of some literary dictator. Even a well-disposed reader might be put off by the manner, if not by the content, of a passage such as the following: "There is no meaning outside the social communication of inderstanding, i.e., outside the united and mutually coordinated reactions of people to a given sign. Social intercourse is the medium in which the ideological phenomenon first acquires its specific existence, its ideological meaning, its semiotic nature. All ideological things are objects of social intercourse, not objects of individual use, contemplation, emotional experience, or hedonistic pleasure. For this reason subj ective psychology cannot approach the meaning of the ideological object." (pp. 8-9) The syllogism here seems to run as follows: all cultural products are ideological things; all ideological things exist in the medium of social intercourse; cultural products are consequently not objects of individual use or contemplation and cannot be properly understood as such. I tend to agree, but I know that many of my friends and colleagues would not accept the first term of the syllogism. Moreover, since I am certain that literature does sometimes-rightly or wrongly-serve as an 404

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object of individualuse, contemplation,emotional experience,or hedonistic pleaIs it the result of intellectual sure,I am left wonderingwhat to makeof this "abuse." error or of moral vice-a stupidity to be silenced, a disease to be cured, perhaps even a punishableoffense? The authorsof The Formal Method have a convenient way of dealing with positions that differ fundamentallyfrom their own. If the social aspects of cultural production ("the forms and types of ideological intercourse") have not been much studiedto date, they say, there are "perniciousreasons" for this-among them the traditionalWestern way of conceiving interpretation and understanding as the outcome of an encounterbetween an individualconsciousness and the signs in which another individualconsciousnesshas expressed itself. This tradition-presently much under attack-is dealt with summarilyhere as "incorrecthabits of thinkingfostered by idealism,with its stubborntendencyto conceive of ideological life as a single consciousnessjuxtaposed to meaning" (p. 13). At times, the polemicallanguageof The Formal Methodhas the effective raciness of Marx's own language, as when Russian formalism is described as "the vaudeville radicalismof some declasse innovator" (p. 44), but terms like "perniand "stubborn" have a terrorist ring that other readersbesides cious,""incorrect," myself will probablyfind offensive. I hope they will not lose patience,however, for the dogmatic, hectoring tone of these first pages is hardly heard again once the authorsstop theorizingabstractly (monologically?) and begin to define their position in relation to that of formalism. Chapteriii presents a brief review of what the authors call Western European formalism,though they seem most familiar with Germanwriters. In oppositionto the positivist tendencyto break works of art down into their componentparts and to deal separatelywith these, Germanformalismemphasizedthe unity of the work of art and the articulation of its parts within a closed totality. Neo-Kantian in inspiration,it also laid stress on the constructiverather than the mimetic aspect of literary creation.But it never overlookedthe semanticmeaningof the work of art or of the elements in its construction."Europeanformalismnot only did not deny content, did not make content a conditionaland detachableelement of the work, but, on the contrary,strove to attributedeep ideological meaningto form itself. It contrastedthis conceptionof form to the simplistic realist view of it as some sort of embellishmentof the content, a decorative accessory lacking any ideological meaning of its own" (p. 49). Similarly, the problemof perceptionwas treated in Western formalism-in keeping with its neo-Kantian orientation and in opposition, once more, to positivist reductionof sense perceptionto a mere physical or psychological process of registering abstract quantities-as the problem of "the sensual perceptionof meaning" (p. 49). For Western formalism, "man's basic relation to the world thus defines his 'artistic volition' and, consequently,the constructiveprincipleof the work-object" (p. 51). Different artistic styles (geometric, realist, naturalist, etc.) express and constructdifferent types of relation to the world. In general, this presentationof Western Europeanformalism, and of German writing on aesthetics in particular,seems just. The themes brought out-the emphasis on totality, on the constructive rather than the mimetic character of the work of art, and on form itself as meaning-can be traced far back into the tradition of GermanRomantic writing on aesthetics, from Kant and Schiller through Moritz to Novalis. For Novalis, for instance,the work of art is definedby the fact Yet it is that it does not use language referentiallyas in everydaycommunication. precisely by sheddingmeaning,in the ordinary sense, that the work of art comes to signify, for Nova!is, in the mannerproper to it. Whereas referentiallanguage only reflects the external appearancesof the universe,poetic language-the explo-

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ration of language itself in the work of art-is

a discovery of its inner structure,

languagebeing, for Novalis, like mathematics,a part of nature. It is characteristicof the position taken by the authors of The Formal Method
that they consider Russian formalism a far poorer affair than its Western Euro-

pean counterpart. Having to combata highly disciplinedand professionalpositivist school, Western formalism,they claim, had thoroughlythought out its philosophical position and its method. Its close relation to contemporary neo-Kantian philosophy also ensured a high degree of methodological self-consciousness, since in the Kantian tradition the method is not adapted to the real existence of the object, but on the contrary, the object is itself defined by the method. While the authors of The Formal Method, as Marxists, naturally reject neo-Kantian idealism and approve in principle the more pragmatic attitude of the Russian formalists, in actual

practice they considerthat the Russianswere so inattentiveto questionsof method,

so cavalier and "journalistic" that they naively and uncritically took over many linguistic and literary categories as if they were given objects, without adequately reflecting how they had been or should be defined. They thus turned out to be much closer in several important respects to the positivism that Western formalism had set out to criticize.2 Though always careful to signal their rejection of neo-Kantian idealism, the authors of The Formal Method do not disguise their affinity with certain features of neo-Kantian aesthetics. Hermann Cohen, for instance-the

leading figure in a reevaluationof Kant at Marburgat the end of the nineteenth

century-is praised for the inclusiveness of his aesthetic theory, for conceiving the aesthetic as "a kind of superstructure over other ideologies," and for recognizing that reality enters art "already cognized and ethically evaluated," even if he must be criticized for seeing in the ideological horizon, "deprived of concreteness and materiality," the ultimate reality-even if, in short, Cohen, as an idealist, knows of no real existence or material base which determines cognition (p. 24). Similarly, the theory of genre outlined in The Formal Method-"one might say that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality" (p. 134)-appears strikingly neo-Kantian. As the authors, while dutifully acknowledging the material basis of ideological superstructures, have little to say about the relation between basis and superstructure-a question on which Marx and Engels themselves were notoriously concise-it is possible to see how they

could come to be accused, in a later, less experimentalperiod of Soviet history, of

the dreadful heresy of neo-Kantianism (p. xvi). Having begun to define Russian formalism indirectly, in relation to Western European formalism, the authors approach their topic directly in Chapter iv. Formalism in its Russian version is now located historically. Its polemical, adversary

stance, and its close associationwith various literary trends and movements,notably futurism, of which it is presented as having been in many respects the critical arm, are seen by the authors as a handicap from the point of view of the elaboration of a theoretically sound poetics. The struggle against idealism, transcendentalism, symbolism, everything high-flown and pretentious, in the name of those elements of literary language "which seemed vulgar, second-class, and almost artistically indifferent to the symbolists, namely, its phonetic, morphological, and syntactic structures taken independently of meaning" (p. 59), was a healthy one, they acknowledge, but it was ultimately nihilistic. The primary aim of the formalists, according to the authors, was the "subtraction of meaning" (p. 60). Thus the related devices of deautomatization of the word and defamiliarization were for them, above all, means of abstracting words or objects from semantic context. One
2

See, for instance,pp. 98-103on soundin poetry.

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consequence of the close association of formalism with contemporary literary and artistic trends was, in short, the limited scope of formalist poetics and the excessively journalistic character of the formalists' activity as critics. They played the role of enfants terribles of the scholarly world with verve and wit, but they failed to develop an independent poetics which could have acted not only negatively on established literary doctrines and practices but critically and constructively on the new ones. At the beginning of Chapter v the authors outline what they see as the six essential principles of formalism, and Chapters v through ix of the book (confusingly divided between Chapters vii and viii into Parts III and IV) deal with each of them in turn, though the last receives only very brief treatment at the very end of Chapter ix. The six points are as follows: "(1) poetic language (and poetic phonetics) as the object of poetics; (2) material and device as the two components of the poetic construction; (3) genre and composition, theme, story, and plot as the detailing of the constructive functions of material and device; (4) the concept of the work as a datum external to consciousness; (5) the problem of literary history; (6) the problem of artistic perception and criticism" (p. 79). I shall attempt to summarize each of the five chapters. Chapter v presents a critique of the formalist notion of poetic language. There is no way of differentiating between ordinary language and poetic language on the basis of linguistic features alone, the authors point out,3 and in the work of the formalists poetic language comes to be simply the "converse and parasite of practical language" (p. 88). The opposition of the useful and the beautiful, they might have noted, goes back to the late eighteenth century at least, to Mendelssohn and Kant, and it was taken up enthusiastically by virtually all the German Romantics. But whereas poetic language, for the Romantics, had a deeper meaning than practical language, its essence for the Russian formalists, according to the authors of The Formal Method, is simply to negate meaning. Once again, in short, the authors bring out what in their view is the characteristically negative thrust of formalism. "If the only difference between poetic and practical language is that the construction of the former is perceptible owing to the negative devices enumerated above," they observe, "then poetic language is absolutely unproductive and uncreative . . . poetic language is only able to 'make strange' and deautomatize that which has been created in other language systems. It does not create new constructions itself. Poetic language only forces the perception of the already created" (p. 89). But it is not only the formalists' conception of poetic language that is found to be inadequate; their conception of "practical language" is also unsatisfactory. Practical language, the authors insist, is not frozen, stereotyped, or automated, as the formalists claim it is, except in a few special cases of interchange ("narrowly technical, industrial, and business" types of exchange, where the word is easily "replaced by a signal or symbol of another type"). Normally, "practical intercourse is constantly generating, although slowly and in a narrow sphere" (p. 95).4 The formalist conception of language makes it impossible to account for the creative enrichment of language: "A language which transmits prepared communications within the bounds of fixed, generated intercourse cannot . . . be cre3 The point was restated recently by Roger Fowler, "Linguistic Theory and the Study of Literature," in Essays on Style and Language, ed. R. Fowler (London, 1966), pp. 1-28. 4 An attempt to explain such change at the level of folk or oral literature was made by Jakobson in an important article written with Piotr Bogatyriev and published in 1929: "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens," in Donum Natalicium Schrijnen (Nijmegen and Utrecht, 1929), pp. 900-13.

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ative. The vocabulary, grammar, and even the basic themes are already prepared. All that remains is to combine them, adapting them to circumstances . . . Given such presuppositions, there can be no impulses or bases for the creation of anything new. Thus the forimalists' poetic language is the parasite of a parasite" (pp. 96-97). What the authors of The Formal Method appear to be arguing here, as at other points in their book, is that for the full understanding of language a linguistics of parole must complement the linguistics of langue. The formalists' concept of poetic language breaks down because it is simply the negation of a concept of ordinary or practical language, which the formalists took over from linguistics without understanding that "linguistics formed its concept of language and its elements for its own theoretical and practical purposes, in complete abstraction from the characteristics of diverse practical constructions and from the characteristics of the poetic construction as well" (p. 93), and that, moreover, "the material [it] used to elaborate its basic concepts and elements is least of all the utterance of practical language" (p. 94) and mostly made up of written monuments. This, the authors suggest in an extremely interesting passage, is "the source of the onesided monologism of linguistics. The whole series of language phenomena connected with the forms of direct dialogue have until very recently remained outside its field of vision" (p. 94). The formalist ideas of "material" and "device" as the components of the poetic construction are taken up in Chapter vi. The authors question the notion that motivation is indifferent (pp. 108-13, 141)-a question raised again, subsequently, by Levi-Strauss in his review of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale-and once again they point to the negative character of the formalist position. "The only quality possessed by the formalist device is its innovation. And this innovation is only relative in that it is theoretically based and 'perceptible' only against the background of either practical language or another literary work, school, or style. "Thus the device is deprived of all positive content and reduced to a bare 'difference from . . .'" (pp. 111-12). More generally, the formalists' conception of the literary work is held to suffer from the same distortion as their conception of language. Like language, the literary work is seen by the formalists as an object, and "the organic connection between the sign and meaning attained in the concrete historical act of utterance" (p. 121) is broken. The literary work, according to the authors of The Formal Method, must be thought of not as an object but as an act -not, one might say, as analogous to langue but as analogous to parole: "To comprehend an utterance does not mean to grasp its general meaning, as we grasp the meaning of a 'dictionary word.' To understand an utterance means to understand it in its contemporary context and [in]our own, if they do not coincide . . . Why are two particular words next to each other? Linguistics only explains how this is possible. The real reason cannot be explained within the limitations of linguistic possibilities. Social evaluation is needed to turn a grammatical possibility into a concrete fact of speech reality" (pp. 121, 123). This critique of the formalists' acceptance of contemporary linguistics as a model for poetics seems to anticipate an obj ection frequently made to the new poetics in our own time-namely, that it provides only a general grammar of literary creation but does not account for particular choices or enhance our understanding of individual works. Chapter vii deals with the formalists' conception of the literary work as an "amalgamation . . . of diverse materials intrinsically alien to each other" (p. 136). The authors argue--consistently with their anti-positivist, "neo-Kantian" point of view-that the organizing structure is prior to the parts. The unity of the work is "not created by external devices as Shklovskii understands them. On the contrary, the external devices are the result of this unity and the necessity to locate it 408

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in the plane of the work" (p. 136). The work of art is seen as defined by its "finalization"-a category that is crucial to the authors' conception of literature as distinct from other forms of ideological creation and that seems closely related to the category of totality in Romantic aesthetics. "Outside of art, all finalization, every end, is conditional, superficial, and is most often defined by external factors rather than factors intrinsic to the object itself. The end of a scientific work is an illustration of such a conditional finalization. In essence, a scientific work never ends: one work takes up where the other leaves off. Science is an endless unity. It cannot be broken down into a series of finished and self-sufficient works . . . To put it another way: compositional finalization is possible in all spheres of ideological creation, but real thematic finalization is impossible. Only a few philosophical systems, such as that of Hegel, pretend to thematic finalization in epistemology . . . But the essence of literature is in substantial, objective, thematic finalization, as opposed to the superficial finalization of the utterance in speech. Compositional finalization, confined to the literary periphery, can at times even be absent . . . But this external vagueness sets off the inner thematic finalization more strongly." (pp. 129-30) The various genres correspond to different types of finalization. "Every genre represents a special way of constructing and finalizing a whole, finalizing it essentially and thematically (we repeat), and not just conditionally or compositionally" (p. 130). It is perhaps worth remarking that the authors' very strong sense of the organizing structure and the teleological articulation of the literary work leaves Freud out of account. Organizing structure seems to be located not in the unconscious, but in the collective consciousness. One wishes the translator had found room in his introduction to tell us more than he does about the Bakhtin circle's work on Freud. In Chapter viii the formalist view of literary works and of literary history as autonomous with respect to general ideology is analyzed and rejected. To the degree that the formalists' dissociation of the work from the psyche of creator and perceiver marks an attempt to liberate literary study from psychologism and biologism, the authors of The Formalist Miethod welcome it. As in so many other instances, however, the formalist negation of a specific meaning turns out to be a negation of all meaning, a pure nihilism. "While liberating the work from the subjective consciousness and psyche, the formalists at the same time estrange it from the whole ideological environment and from objective social intercourse" (p. 145). Moreover, in severing literature from the ideological world, the formalists turn it into a "stimulus for relative and subjective psychophysical states and perthe perceptibility of the ceptions . . . For their basic theories-deautomatization, construction, and the others-presuppose a perceiving, subjective consciousness" (p. 149). The work of literature becomes "an apparatus for the stimulation of this perceptibility" (p. 149). Perception itself thus becomes completely subjective, and expresses only the subjective condition of consciousness, not the "objective datum of the work" (p. 149). At the same time the readers are in their turn reduced to mere "psychophysiological apparatuses for perception" (p. 158). The last chapter of The Formal Method concerns literary history. The authors recall that the formalists consider the series of literary history, "the series of artistic works and their constructive elements" (p. 159), to be completely independent of other historical series, and notably of other ideological series. (The formalist position on this score was restated programmatically, in the same year The Formal Method was published, in eight theses by Jakobson and Tynyanov.) The course of literary development is autonomous and has its own inner necessity. Extraliterary reality may affect the tempo of change, but it will not affect the logic, which 409

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is defined by literature itself. Literary history unfolds, in short, in a remarkably similar way to that discovered by Propp for the folktale, and like the folktale, though it permits of variations and allows for many options, its inner logic is ineluctable. As Jakobson and Tynyanov declared in a text that may well have been intended to be conciliatory with respect to sociological criticism: "Demonstration of the immanent laws of the history of literature (or language) . does not explain the tempo of evolution, nor the direction which it takes when it is confronted with several theoretically possible paths of development. The immanent laws of literary (or linguistic) evolution only give us an indeterminate equation, which allows of several solutions-limited in number, no doubt, but not imposing any single answer. The concrete problem of the direction or at least the dominanta chosen, cannot be resolved without an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and the other social series."'5 To the authors of The Formal Method the development envisaged by the formalists is not a genuine development; more precisely, it is not an evolution, not a history, but a succession, whose only content turns out to be difference. "All that the formalist system needs is the existence of two mutually contrasting artistic trends, let us say the Derzhavin and the Pushkin traditions. Let us find them in the required situation of mutual contrast. The Pushkin tradition succeeds the Derzhavin tradition, and the latter tradition becomes the junior line. After a certain time the Derzhavin tradition succeeds the Pushkin tradition, which now takes the position of the junior line. This process can continue to infinity . .. If new forms appear, they do so for reasons completely incidental to literary development." (p. 163) The final page of the book raises the question of the relation between criticism and literature. In opposition to the formalist view that criticism should be the organ of the writer, and should campaign actively in the service of contemporary literary movements, the authors argue for the traditional position of criticism as a mediator between the public and the artist. The function of the critic, as they had already outlined it earlier, toward the end of Chapter ii, is to "give the artist his 'social assignment' in his own language, as a poetic assignment" (p. 35). In the rare societies in which culture is relatively homogeneous and undivided, social demands and needs will "naturally and easily translate . . . into the immanent language of poetic craftsmanship"(p. 35). In most cases, however, a "translating medium" is required, and this, for the authors of The Formal Method, is the function of criticism. Criticism as a discipline, therefore, has a duty to maintain a relative independence of contemporary literary trends, and to preserve a long, historical view of poetics. Only by so doing can it contribute effectively and constructively to the ongoing culture. To Medvedev/Bakhtin the absence of mediation between writer and public and the rejection by criticism of its mediating function are themselves symptoms of "sharp and deep social disintegration" (p. 36). I have tried to present the argument of this book as clearly as possible, at the risk of sometimes going over ground made familiar by Victor Erlich in his comprehensive and readable Russian Formalism (2nd ed., rev., The Hague: Mouton, 1965), and worse still, of failing to meet my obligation, as a reviewer, to be brief. I did so because, half a century after its publication in Russia, The Formal Method remains, in my opinion, an important and challenging work. Even if it does not lead to a mass abandonment of positions that have come to be assumed, almost naturally, throughout the academic community, it will at the very least make us aware
5 Quoted from R. Jakobson and J. Tynyanov, "Theses on Formalism," New Left Review (London), 37 (May-June 1966), p. 61.

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of the choices we have made, and may prompt some serious soul-searching. It does us good to be reminded, from time to time, of the history of our discipline. Though it would be possible, I think, to show that Russian formalism and Western European formalism have important common roots in Romantic aesthetics, the comparison drawn between the two in these pages is extremely interesting. It sheds a striking-and disquieting-light on the recent and still current vogue of Russian formalism in academic circles in this country and in the West generally.6 Above all, it prompts one to ask what it tells us about ourselves that of the two formalisms it is the Russian one that we have appropriated, and what it means (if the question may be asked) that the Russian formalists' impoverished version of literary history is the one now current in many "advanced" critical circles. After reading The Formal Method it is difficult not to identify the rejection of history as the essential characteristic of much recent literary theory and literary criticism. If the "pseudodialectic" (p. 92) of the formalists acquires a content, it is at best one borrowed from Freud. Thus a contemporary philosopher, who is close to literary scholarship, could simply assume in a recent article, as if it were the accepted doctrine, that development in literature is a matter of struggling with and outdoing predecessors.7 To the degree that history survives at all in avant-garde intellectual circles, it is probably in a form close to that of the formalists, that is, as pure difference. What survives, in other words, is not history but the ghost of history, history tamed and deprived of its density and social significance. If history is another name for God the Father, we certainly seem to have done our work of castration well. The struggle against history and the struggle against meaning are one and the same. The authors of The Formal Method return several times to what they describe pointedly as the formalists' "fear of meaning" (pp. 105, 118). And this fear of meaning is diagnosed-most interestingly in view of certain recent speculations -not as the abandonment of an ideal of presence, but as a desire for presence, an avidity of appropriation, a fear of otherness. "Meaning . . . with its 'not here' and 'not now' is able to destroy the material nature of the work and the fullness of its presence in the here and now" (p. 105). It is a pity that Professor Wehrle, who appears to be familiar with the work of Derrida (quoted in the Introduction, pp. xi, xxi), was not encouraged to explore some of the intersections between Medvedev/Bakhtin and the contemporary critics and philosophers he refers to in passing in his Introduction. Instead of isolated and rather gratuitous references to Paul de Man or Levi-Strauss-which seem to function here, like tics or speech traits, to establish membership of a particular coterie--one would have liked a fuller discussion of the relations between The Formal Method and the work of present-day scholars in the so-called human sciences. In general, though informative on matters of historical background and authorship, the Introduction seemed unusually turgid and occasionally pretentious. But why cavil? Most literary scholars will be as grateful as I am to Professor Wehrle for following the suggestion, made to him by Renate Horlemann
6 Thus the editors of the New Left Review, quoted above, urge their backward English readers to keep up to date by paying attention to formalism: "Today Formalism is once more beginning to receive the recognition it deserves: Tynyanov's memoirs are being serialized in Novy Mir; a collection of Formalist writings has appeared in France and a study has been written and recently republished in the Netherlands by Victor Erlich. It is time this growing interest spread to Britain too." 7 Richard Rorty, "Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy,"

JP, 74 (1977), 673-81.

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during her regrettably brief association with The Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, that he translate The FornmalMethod. Likewise, The Johns Hopkins University Press deserves praise for once again undertaking to place a significant but hitherto inaccessible work of literary scholarship and theory before the academic community.8 Finally, if I may be permitted a personal comment, it is a particular pleasure for me that the publication of this important book is due to the collaboration of two institutions with which I was happily associated for many years. LIONEL GOSSMAN

Princeton University
8 I must, however, register a protest at the state in which this book was allowed to go to press. There are misspellings: "canvass"-as in "to canvass votes"-for the artist's "canvas" (p. xxiii), "taylor" for "tailor" (p. 110), "calander" for "calendar" (three times, pp. 169-70); there are misprints: "sweckbeurissten" for "Zweckbewussten" (p. 10), "totaly" (p. 26), "usualy" (p. 35), "Leben und Werke der Troubadour" for "Leben und Verke der Troubadours" (p. 81), "melieu" (p. 94). There are some apparent mistranslations (e.g., "meanwhile" for "however" on page 11) or inappropriate translations ("the big bourgeoisie" on p. 17). And surely Pushkin's play must be printed either as Mozart and Salieri or-though less probably-as Motsart i Sal'eri, but not as Mozart and Sal'eri. Or does Mr. Wehrle want us to take Salieri for a Russian ? Perhaps it is impossible to do anything about solecisms such as "different than" followed by a noun instead of a clause, or the ubiquitous "cannot help but." But has academic prose already capitulated to the popular use of "like" as a conjunction, as in "like Shklovskii does" (p. 115) ? In general, the writing in this text is often quite careless. The following sentences are, unfortunately, not sufficiently exceptional to be forgiven: " . . . a certain gap, a shifting and hazy area through which the scholar picks his way at his own risk, or often simply skips over . . . " (p. 3) ; " . . . Gottfried Semper, whose following definition is characteristic . . . " (p. 9) ; "Life, the aggregate of defined actions, events, or experiences, only become plot . . . " (p. 17). It is regrettable that we professors of the humanities do not write better than we do. Until we improve, publishers cannot afford to dispense with the services of expert editors.

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