THE RUSSIAN FORMALIST MOVEMENT
291
effect than the sheer sound. The "actualization" of the verbal sign
achieved by poetry was seen as a complex transaction, involving the
semantic and morphological, as well as the phonetic levels, of
language.
III
From insisting on the complex unity of the verbal sign
it was but one step to postulating the indivisibility of that peculiar
system of signs which is the work of literature.
If
in the individual
word, the "meaning" could not be divorced from sound, it seemed
equally futile to differentiate the cumulative meaning of the literary
work--or "content"-from its artistic embodiment commonly known
as "form." Indeed the Russian Formalists had little patience with
the traditional dichotomy of form versus content, which, as Wellek
and Warren put it, "cuts a work of art into two halves: a crude
content and a superimposed, purely external form."
The case for the inextricable unity of the "how" and the "what"
of literature was stated by Zhirmunski in terms of plain common
sense. He took issue with the naive, uncritical notion of form as a
mere clothing of the poet's ideas, as a bowl into which a ready-made
content is being "poured." In imaginative literature, he maintained,
content-emotional or ideational- appears only through the medium
of form and thus cannot be profitably discussed, indeed conceived
of, apart from its artistic objectification. Zhirmunski warned cor–
rectly against the tendency of crudely extrinsic criticism to tear emo–
tions or ideas, embodied in the work of poetry, out of the literary
context and then to discuss them in purely psychological or sociolog–
ical
terms.
Shklovski charged into the fallacy of a separable content in his
characteristically brisk and flippant manner. He poked fun at critics,
treating form as a "necessary evil," a guise for the "real thing," who
impatiently brush aside form in order to grasp "content" of the
work of art. "People who are trying to 'solve' paintings as if they
were crossword puzzles want to take form off the painting in order
to see it better."
A Western "contextualist" critic ' could have no quarrel with
the above strictures. But he may grow somewhat restive, hearing
Shklovski define art as "pure form" or declare in a self-congratulatory
