In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Seven Outsides To do the same thing over and over is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do. —Heraclitus AROUND THE TIME Petersburg was written, scholars were beginning to practice literary criticism as a sort of triage. The formalists’ concept of “literariness,” the New Critics’ focus on the “text [or ‘work’] itself,” and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essays on the “intentional fallacy” and the “affective fallacy” are but the most famous in a series of attempts to define what is and is not “artistic literature” and what is and is not part of the individual literary text. The “external” side of the work—perhaps the author’s biography, the reader’s response, the historical circumstances surrounding the writing of the book—may provoke a sort of morbid curiosity, but the object of such curiosity is in some essential way dead. The goal of literary criticism, it seemed, was to rescue the living core of the artistic work, without wasting precious time on lost causes. This effort at purification requires at least a working definition of the literary work of art, so we can know what does and does not belong in it. It seems reasonable to say that a work of art, literary or otherwise, is (at least) a kind of pattern, an ordered arrangement of elements. The more efficient the order, presumably, the less energy it wastes—“waste” being defined here as a loss to the outside world: dissipation, perhaps, or friction. The more perfect the artistic pattern, one assumes, the more closely it comes to resemble a perpetuum mobile, with each component giving back to the structure as much energy as it absorbs from it. The twentieth-century artists and thinkers who wanted to purify literature (and literary criticism) all displayed an affection for reflexive pronouns: the work itself, the word itself, the novel itself. This is no coincidence but rather the verbal expression of their essentially reflexive aesthetic. Thus in the years of Petersburg’s publication, a group of Russian writers 96 who called themselves “futurists” proclaimed their allegiance to the “word as such” or the “self-sufficient word.” Their arguments were built on a paradox. Words, after all, have meanings. They reach beyond themselves, out to some thing or category or person or something. The “word as such” is not an “assuch ” entity; it is in the nature of the word to point to other natures. The tendency of words to point outside themselves greatly complicates the practice of literary triage, and not only for futurists. For whatever we deem to be “outside” the text, we must surely agree that all its words are “inside ” it. One solution is to say that, while each word points outside itself, it ideally points to another part of the literary structure which, as a whole, is perfectly efficient. “A poem speaks,” writes Guy Davenport, “but except in the fiction of apostrophe and address it cannot speak to anyone. A poem cannot explain itself . . . [and] is as silent as a painting as to what is known as significance , interpretation, symbolic content, or paraphrase, and silent in the same way.”1 The poem speaks to itself. The words of Petersburg appear to reach beyond—not only beyond themselves, individually, but beyond the work “itself.” We are invited to think of Kant, Bergson, Pushkin, Gogol, Peter, and even Bely himself. Yet such is the paradox of verbal art—always reaching out, always circling back—that these “outsiders” are themselves drawn into some “whole” experience given by the text. Or are they? This is one way of asking whether the work is an artistic whole, whether it possesses unity. Triage typically involves separation not into two groups but into three, and the middle group (comprised of those individuals who, with proper care, may survive) usually receives the greatest attention. By the 1920s, the Russian formalists turned their attention to the ambiguous middle group and thereby expanded their idea of what really belongs in the literary work of art. Boris Tomashevsky, for example, wrote that in some cases even the author’s biography can legitimately be considered part of the work itself: during those eras in which the author’s life is felt to be a “literary fact.” Bely certainly lived during one of those eras, and Petersburg’s thinly veiled references to his own unhappy affairs enlist the author’s life (to the...

Share