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Lotman: The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography
- University of Wisconsin Press
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c:fO Lotman The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography Perhaps no two thinkers in the latter decades of the twentieth century have changed more our ability to conceptualize Russian literature, the Russian literary context, and ultimately verbal reality regardless of national origins, than Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and Yuri Lotman (1922-93). Yet, once outside the orbit of Russian literature specialists (russisty), Bakhtin is by far the better known and more celebrated - an interesting phenomenon of cultural reception in its own right. (Curiously, Bakhtin has appeared almost singlehandedly to make up for much of the traditional "time lag" in Russian culture by being "ahead of his time," a Western postmodernist - whether he would have agreed with this designation or not - avant la lettre.) And as strange as it may sound to the noninitiate, Bakhtin and Lotman are, by some "Hamburg account" measuring the ability of the human mind to mimic the speed oflight, comparable to no one oftheir time and place except each other, a fact they apparently were coming to realize in the early 1970S. Not by chance was Lotman often compared, both in how he looked and how he thought, to Albert Einstein. The purpose of the present section is to show how Lotman the Pushkinist learned from Bakhtin, adapting the latter's "dialogism" (in its various incarnations) to open up the more mechanical structural-semiotic "modeling systems" made famous in the works of the Moscow-Tartu School of the 1960s and 1970S. This shift in Lotman has been duly noted by several commentators . What has not been noted, however, is the potentially positive or "energy-releasing" aspects of the one concept Bakhtin found most "closed" and "deadening" about structural analysis-the so-called code,216 which stood 216. "In the course of his research Lotman realized that a code identified in a culture is much more complex than that which can be identified in a language and his analyses became increasingly subtle and took on a rich, complex historical awareness" (Umberto Eco, Introduction, in Yuri M. Lotman, Universe ofthe Mind: A Semiotic Theory ofCulture, trans. Ann Shukman [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], xii). For a succinct description ofLotman's own understanding ofhow "code" functions in Saussurean versus Jakobsonian linguistics, see his "Three Functions ofthe Text," in Universe ofthe Mind, 11118 Copyrighted Material Lotman 119 to a given text or cultural moment as the Saussurean langue stood to the parole of individual utterance. My main interest here is simply to demonstrate that, while Lotman learned from Bakhtin and thus under the power of the latter's arguments was able to, as it were, organicize and "soften up" the harder edges ofthe structuralist-semiotic worldview,217 he still remained very much his own thinker, and he did so precisely in this area of the creative potential in what might be termed "code wrestling." In this, as I will suggest, Lotman remained true to the genres and the literary period he began with and was our greatest pioneer in (re)discovering- Russian poetry and poetic consciousness of the Karamzin-Pushkin era. Lotman emerges then as the antipode to Bakhtin, our greatest theorist of the novel and of the novelistic consciousness associated with Dostoevsky and (by Bakhtin's distinguished students) Tolstoi. And the divide, crudely put, between these two thinkers rises up over their orientations , positive and negative respectively, toward the categories of "code," "model," "structure." Thereafter, in the final pages of this section, I will turn to the major works of Lotman's last decade - his biographyof Pushkin in particular. Among other things, these later works apply, in nonspecialist language, the lessons of "code wrestling" to concrete examples of what might be called "poetic thinking." It is my hypothesis that Lotman, who has learned from Bakhtin but has also learned where he departs from his antipode, is trying to use his method to get as close as possible to the headwaters ofpoetic creativity itself-how poets use the material of life, beginning with its implicit codes, not only to write but to live creatively. The connection between life and art, text and code, can 19. It is here, inter alia, that Lotman, expanding on Jakobson's "poetic function," speaks about a semiotic code as potentially including "not only a certain binary set of rules for encoding and decoding a message, but also a multi-dimensional hierarchy," which can have a "creative function" - that is, it can do more than transmit ready-made messages, it can "serve as a...