Paper, Scissors, Stone

Language is fossil poetry.
— Ralph Waldo Emerso

WORDS DIE, THE WORLD IS ETERNALLY YOUNG.
— Aleksei Kruchenykh

Traditional rhetoric accorded two main functions to metaphor, the first functional and the second ornamental. This binary conception of metaphor continues to resonate in two modern approaches to poetic metaphor and its relation to ordinary speech.1

The first of these regards metaphor as prior to language, the creative organism whose "fossils," to borrow Emerson's phrase, provide the building blocks for our everyday interactions with the world and with each other. On this view, metaphors are like so many mineral deposits, a gradual and occasionally glinting accretion of poetic names for the objects and experiences that make up the world and human life in it, and the poetic origins of our everyday speech are amply evidenced by the countless 'dead' metaphors scattered through it: a clock's "hands", the "leg" of a journey, "brand-new".

The second view identifies poetic metaphors as, conversely, a by-product of everyday language — as nothing more than variations, albeit imaginative and sophisticated ones, on the myriad conceptual metaphors that structure our thought and which are the source of many of the common metaphors just mentioned.2 According to this cognitive theory of metaphor, developed by George Lakoff and his colleagues, dead metaphors are in fact very much alive, as their ubiquity and the creative use that is made of them demonstrate. This has proven somewhat troublesome for critics looking to demarcate the special realm of lyric language. As Metaphors We Live By and subsequent studies demonstrate so forcefully, we all use metaphorical language on a near-constant basis and to express even the most banal of sentiments ("I've wasted so much time": TIME IS LIMITED RESOURCE; "He fell in love": LOVE IS CONTAINER OBJECT; "London is an hour from here": SPACE IS TIME). Far from the surest sign of poetic genius, as Aristotle would have it, a command of metaphor turns out to be the most basic requirement for cognition.

Even if it were not so wont to fraternize with ordinary language, metaphor would be unlikely to occupy a more prominent position in contemporary discussions about poetic form given its apparent inextricability from the philosophy-heavy debates around literal and figurative reference, meaning, and truth that so animated the field of metaphor studies in its '70s heyday. Recent studies of form have instead tended to focus on explicating more fully devices such as rhythm, rhyme, and sound patterning — devices that, as Jonathan Culler writes in his recent Theory of Lyric, "need not be subordinated to meaning and whose significance may even lie in a resistance to semantic recuperation."3 These features of poetic language and structure combine, Culler argues, with lyric poetry's distinctive manner of address (apostrophe) and its special temporal strategies to lend poetry its peculiar "ritualistic" quality — its ability to speak past its readers' intellectual understanding to reach the deeper parts of their consciousness and their physical being.

I am sympathetic to this urge to move beyond the kind of definitive interpretations of isolated poetic texts favored by New Criticism (an approach to the study of literature that, not coincidentally, placed metaphor at the center of its critical practice) and the more suspicious branches of hermeneutics towards poetics, the study of how the structure and language of poetic texts in general produce their effects. But I wonder where metaphor might fit into this scheme — not least given the centrality of metaphor, or what they referred to as the "image" [obraz], to the initial stirrings of the group to whom we owe the twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnation of poetics, Russian Formalism. The remainder of this essay will return to the early years of this movement to make a case for the continued importance of metaphor to our account of poetry and poetry's potential resonance.

***

When a group of linguists and literary critics formed Opoyaz (the Russian acronym for Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in Petrograd in 1916, they took as their primary aim a return to the poetic text and the linguistic material that comprised it. Specifically, they aimed to dispel the belief — widespread among the Symbolist poets and theorists who had been in the ascendancy in Russian literature for the first decade of the twentieth century — that the sounds of poetry resonated with a significance that lay beyond the bounds of the poem. Here, the opposition was not so much between surface and depth, as some have characterized the relationship between poetics and hermeneutics, as between surface and the dizzy heights of spiritual transcendence.

Against this symbolic interpretation of sound, the Opoyaz Formalists asserted the independent significance of sound in poetry. The entire first issue of Poetics, their in-house journal, was devoted to this question, addressed in scholarly articles such as "On the Sounds of Poetic Language" (Lev Yakubinsky), "On the Sound Gestures of Japanese" (Yevgeny Polivanov), and "Sound Repetitions" (Osip Brik). Shklovsky put these linguistic studies to use in the very next issue of Poetics in order to continue his argument with the Symbolists and their favorite theorist, the Ukrainian philologist Alexander Potebnya. This now-infamous essay, "Art as Device" [Iskusstvo kak priem], takes poetic imagery as its starting point. Contrary to Potebnya's claim that imagery is at the center of art, which he defines as "thinking in images," the first half of Shklovsky's essay makes short work of demoting the image to the same level as all the many other devices by means of which poetry "increas[es] the impact of a thing (words and even sounds of the text itself are things, too)."4 And so the essay arrives at Shklovsky's theory of ostranenie, or "estrangement":

And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the "estrangement" of things and the complication of form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art.5 Does the stone, in other words, weight the balance of Shklovsky's theory in favor of life or of art?

Clearly, the stone is intended in part to bring art back down to earth. It contributes to Shklovsky's polemic against the Symbolists, who repeatedly turned to images of petrification (okamenenie) and ossification to describe what they saw as the decay of language in the modern world. In simplified terms, this mythic view of language proposed that all words had originally been capable of mediating between objective reality and subjective inwardness thanks to the absolute harmony of their "outer form" (external sound qualities) and "inner form" (the etymological metaphor from which the word arises: one example that Potebnya gives is stol (table), from the Slavic root /STL/, "to spread").6 In modern times, this harmony has been lost, leading, in the worst cases, to the degradation of the "living" metaphors from which everyday language grew into "stinking, decomposing corpse[s]," as Andrei Bely puts it in his 1909 essay, "The Magic of Words", and, in the best, to "word-terms" — "crystallized" metaphors that, preserved but ultimately dead, have lost forever the energy of properly living speech.7

In fact, Shklovsky himself had expressed a similar view in "Resurrection and the Word" (1914), an article that is heavily influenced by (among others) the same Potebnya against whom he would later inveigh and in which Shklovsky dwells at length on the degraded, "fossilized" words that make up our everyday speech. The essential shift in Shklovsky's thinking that occurs by the time he writes "Art as Device", however, is away from the notion of language itself as dead or alive and toward a psycho-perceptual concern with our attitude toward language: here, it is not language that has ossified — or, to use Shklovsky's newly-preferred term, automatized — but our perception of it; it is not the relationship between language and the things it is meant to describe that should concern us, but our own relationship with language and with things. Where Bely and others like him looked for salvation to poetry's ability to invent new words (and so, according to the magical bent in Bely's thought, to create new worlds), Shklovsky is interested in poetry's ability to awaken us to all the variety and wonder of the words and the world that already exist.

 To return to the stone: in the context of the passage, the strangest thing about this stone is not its triviality but the fact that it seems to be such a bad example. There are few things, if any, for which "the making" is more hidden than for stone, which forms without human intervention over a period longer than most human lives. It is an excellent example, however, if we understand Shklovsky's central point to be that art should help us to perceive language and things for what they are, rather than for what they used to be in some mythic time past: a stone, after all, is a stone; it did not exist before it became petrified. Art's primary mechanism for achieving this end is, by complicating form, to make us confront the text, its words and sounds as things, rather than as conduits for thought. Reviving our feeling for the material of language as a "thing," art heightens our attentiveness to the material of things in general, a parallel effect that the achievement of the first does not exclude — indeed, which lends the first its real urgency and ultimate purpose. For if poetic language is distinguished from practical language in Shklovsky's scheme by its distance from the latter's goal-oriented efficiency, it does not solely inhabit the realm of disinterested pleasure. The stoniness of stone is primarily a tactile discovery, as soft flesh comes into contact with hard surface. As Shklovsky's article proceeds through a series of disturbingly violent examples to illustrate estrangement in action — where flesh is flogged, beaten, penetrated — the moral imperative to deal with language and the world as they present themselves to us, and not as we would ideally like to see them, makes itself abundantly clear.

***

Shklovsky was not the first to turn to stone in search of ballast for a new theory of art. In 1913, the poet Osip Mandelstam had published Stone, a collection of poetry that sought to reject the metaphysical dualism of the then-dominant Symbolist art by returning to the things of this world and replacing Symbolism's shimmering landscapes with the solidity of stone and the clear lines of architecture. This was simultaneously a call for clarity in poetic form and renewed respect for the structures of poetic speech, as one of the collection's best-known poems, "Notre Dame," illustrates:

Where the Roman justice judged a foreign people,
Stands the basilica; first and joyous,
Just like Adam, with nerves stretching,
The vault, a cross of air, flexes its muscles.

But outside a secret plan emerges:
Here labored the strength of arching stone
So the freighted mass won't crush the walls,
And the cocky vault's battering ram is still.

Elemental labyrinth, inscrutable forest,
The gothic soul's rationalized abyss,
Egyptian awe and Christian timidity,
Reed by oak and plumb-line's king of all.

But, citadel of Notre Dame, the closer
I studied your preternatural ribs,
The more I thought: from crude weight
Someday I too will fashion the beautiful.8

Though it's unlikely that Shklovsky was thinking explicitly of this poem when he wrote "Art as Device," Mandelstam's text offers an intriguing gloss on what I have identified as one of the essay's central concerns — the direct, material equivalence of art and life. Here, the relationship is dramatized in the opposing forces of flesh and stone that animate the opening stanzas. These two forces are the balance upon which the rest of the poem's contrasts and antitheses — between exterior and interior, creation and destruction, delicacy and strength, knowledge and obscurity, control and submission — steady themselves, marking the limits against which they strain but which also make them possible.

According to one influential theory of metaphor, this is precisely how the metaphorical use of language generates new meaning — by creating, and asking us to resolve, tensions: between tenor and vehicle, between literal and metaphorical interpretations, between "identity and difference in the interplay of resemblance."9 A metaphor brings two meanings into abrupt collision, causing a struggle that Paul Ricoeur casts in metaphorical terms: the tenor's meaning "yield[s] while protesting" to the counter-meaning of the vehicle. The work of metaphor is much like the push-and-pull of stone and gravity in Mandelstam's cathedral, in other words, and if the poem seems to model the effort required to find new semantic pertinence amid mass of stone and muscle of living organism, it also demonstrates vividly the ease with which successful metaphors enable this pertinence to be found.

At the same time, however, Mandelstam's poem illustrates the absolute proximity that is the paradoxical effect of metaphor, which goes beyond mere resemblance and semantic pertinence. Metaphor does not just compare two like things; the act of comparison materially transforms these two things, which are fundamentally altered by dint of their new proximity: tenor becomes vehicle, just as here exterior becomes interior (the secret plan), destruction becomesconstruction (the vault's battering ram). Stone becomes body. The word became flesh. Notre Dame becomes "Notre Dame," and poetry becomes a cathedral. None of this, of course, is literally true. Metaphorically, however, these transformations demonstrate the structural role that poetic imagery plays, bringing words and things into transformative contact to render the material reality of each newly palpable.

***

Of course, recent events have made us only too aware of Notre Dame's materiality. If the images of this ancient cathedral going up in flames were not enough, there are now reports that the air in Paris still contains toxic levels of lead. Surely, now is not the time for metaphor. Indeed, metaphor seems in part to blame for our current predicament. As John Durham Peters reminds us in The Marvelous Clouds, fire — one of the "elemental media" that sustain and enable human existence on this planet — has long since retreated from view. No longer made visible by the soot on our clothing, fire's centrality to the infrastructure of modern civilization surfaces only in the metaphorical names we choose for the technological accouterments that are now the first things to come to mind when we speak of media: lightning cables, firewalls, Tinders. And yet fire, Durham Peters argues, like all media — and like the other ancient elemental media, sea, sky, earth, and ether — is a "repositor[y] of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence," data and processes that we ignore at our peril.10 The likely cause of the Notre Dame fire was a cigarette or a short-circuited fuse, just two of the forms that literal fire, apparently tamed, takes in our everyday lives. If we needed an example of infrastructural neglect, this is one. In a strange twist of fate, the day that Notre Dame went up in flames was the very same day that saw Extinction Rebellion activists began to stage mass actions protesting political inaction on climate change in cities around the world (though not in Paris). There is another one.

"All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms," Marshall McLuhan writes in Understanding Media.11 Here, as in Durham Peters's study, metaphor is one of the culprits: it does its job too efficiently, transforms too completely, dulls our senses to the material reality of the structures and infrastructure that supports human life on earth. Yet metaphor itself might also be the solution, as Mandelstam's poem and Shklovsky's essay seem to argue, and as the ambitious, imaginative use of metaphor made by McLuhan, Durham Peters, and many others also makes clear. If we're asking what poetry can do for society now, surely this is it. Now is exactly the time to pay attention to metaphor — precisely to the extent that, bringing words and things into new constellations, it provides new, transforming vision of the world and the structures and processes that enable and sustain our life in that world. As Shklovsky would later comment, "[a]rt always and only deals with life. What do we do in art? We resuscitate life. [ . . . ] So what is art's great achievement? Life. A life that can be seen, felt, lived tangibly."12

---

Isobel Palmer is a lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham (UK). She is writing a book about the intersection of practice and theory in Russian modernist poetic culture.

---

References