Russian Formalism: its narrative, poetic and prose systems.
Art is a way of thinking through images. Poetry is a way of thinking: a thought through images; so in this way it allows us to save mental efforts, and the aesthetic feeling is just a reflect of that economy. Another point of view is to say that poetry is a special way of thinking: a thought through images, but images that have the function of joining objects and heterogeneous actions and to explain what is unknown by what is known. The image is much more simple and clear than what it is explained in it.
The poetic image is apparently similar to the fable image, to the thinking image. The poetic image is a mean of the poetic language; the prosaic image is a mean of abstraction. We have the example of a child who called a water-melon a ball. Water-melon instead of a balloon, or water-melon instead of a head, that is only the abstraction of the quality of the object and there is no difference between: authomatic and water-melon-ball. It is a thought, however, this abstraction is not poetry.
The idea of the economy of the forces of the law and the end of creation, is maybe true in a particular situation of the language, that is, in coloquial language. We must use the laws of spending and economy in the poetic language inside its boundaries and never by analogy of the prosaic language. If we examine the general laws of perception, we can observe that when actions become common, they change and become automatic.
So our habits are sheltered in an unconcious and mechanized way. Laws about our prosaic speech, with its unfinished sentences and its words half pronounced, are explained by the mechanical process. It is a process whose ideal expression is algebra, where objects are replaced by symbols. In the coloquial speech, words are not pronounced, they are only the first sounds of the noun which appear in our mind.
The self -acting process devours objects. To give it a life sense, to feel objects, to perceive that a stone is a stone, giving as a consequence what we know as art. The finality of art is to give a sensation of the object as a vision and not as a recognition; Art procedures are the singularization of the objects and the one consisting in hidding the form, in increasing the difficulty and lenghten the perception. The act of perception is an art "within itself" and it must be extended.
The life of a poetic work is extended from vision to recognition, from poetry to prose, from what is concrete to what is abstract. Let's take into consideration Don Quixote's example: illustrated and poor nobleman that uncounciously takes humilliation to the Duke's court, Don Quixote uses a poetic language instead of prose, making what is more concrete, more abstract.
But going back to the point we could say, perceived objects, most of the times, begin to be perceived by a recognition: the object is in front of us, we know it, but we don´t see it. This is the reason why we can not say nothing about it. When we talk about art, the freedom of the object of the perceiving automatic process is achieved in different ways.
According to Tolstoi, objects are what we see, without being deformed. What Tolstoi is refering to consists in not calling l the object as it is known, but describing it as if we were looking at it, for the first time. And in addition, in the description of the object, Tolstoi never uses nouns generally given to the parts of the text, but other words taken from the description of the parts which correspond to other objects.
Nearly always where there is an image there is a singularization process.Thi image isn't a constant one for different changeable subjects. Its finality is not to approach our comprehension to significance it contains, but rather to create a particular perception of the object, create its vision, and never its recognition.
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© Copyright 1999-2000 Olivia Malonda Hernandiz.
Created: 02/12/99 Updated: 20/1/00