THE RUSSIAN FORMALIST MOVEMENT
289
fable shades of feeling by means of "appropriate" sound-combina–
tions necessitates closer attention to the phonic texture of the word.
But here the similarity ceases. In emotive speech, the sound-cluster is
valued not for what it is, but for what it conveys: here euphony is
the handmaiden of communication only, as "the emotion dictates
its laws to the verbal mass." Not so in poetry, where "the com–
municative function, inherent in both 'practical' and emotive lan–
guage, is reduced to a minimum." "Poetry which is simply an
utter–
ance oriented toward the mode of expression
is governed by immanent
laws," he wrote in his provocative, if extremist, study of Russian
Futurist poetry. Fifteen years later Jakobson restated the same po–
sition
in
more measured terms: "The distinctive feature of poetry
lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely
a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of an emotion, that
words and their arrangement, their meaning, their outward and in–
ward form acquire weight and value of their own."
Another Formalist theoretician, B. Tomashevski, seems to have
taken his cue from Jakobson. In Tomashevski's
Theory of Literature,
the most comprehensive exposition of Formalist methodology, poetic
language is defined as "one of the linguistic systems, where the com–
municative function is relegated to the background and where verbal
structures acquire autonomous v,alue." And Efimov, the author of
a study of Russian Formalism, summed up the Formalist conception
of poetry in the following phrase: "Verbal communication, charac–
terized by the maximum perceptibility of the mode of expression."
"Emphasis on the medium," "perceptibility of the mode of ex–
pression"-these were crucial formulations. The dichotomy of cog–
nitive vs. affective was supplanted here by the distinction between the
referential language of informative prose and the sign-oriented lan–
guage of poetry, geared to the "actualization" of the
ling~istic
sym–
bol.
All the techniques at the poet's disposal-rhythm, euphony, and
last but not least, the startling word-combinations known as "images"
-were seen as converging upon the word in order to throw into re–
lief its complex texture, its "density." In poetry, insisted the Formal–
ists,
the word is more than a verbal shadow of the object; it is an
object
in
its own right.
It has been argued that this doctrine was essentially a hangover
from Futurist poetics, with its slogans of "liberation of phonic energy"
