Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman
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Imagining each heroine
Of her own most belovèd authors,
Clarissa, Julie, and Delphine,
Tatyana silent forests wanders,
In hand a risky volume caught,
In which she finds, there having sought,
Her secret ardor, reveries,
The fullest fruits of heartfelt dreams,
She sighs to make of stranger’s sorrow,
Of stranger’s rapture, her own plight,
And in absent whisper she recites
A letter to a tender hero …
Our hero, though, a man such as he
A Grandison could never be. (VI, 55)
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Воображаясь героинeй
Своих возлюбленных творцов,
Кларисой, Юлией, Дельфиной,
Татьяна в тишине лесов
Одна с опасной книгой бродит,
Она в ней ищет и находит
Свой тайный жар, свои мечты,
Плоды сердечной полноты,
Вздыхает и, себе присвоя
Чужой восторг, чужую грусть,
В забвенье шепчет наизусть
Письмо для милого героя …
Но наш герой, кто б ни был он,
Уж верно был не Грандисон.
The text of the novel she has read becomes a model for rethinking reality. Tatyana has no doubt that Onegin is a novelistic character; what is not clear to her is which type she ought to identify him with:
What are you, angel my protector,
Or else perfidious seducer … (6, LXVII)
Кто ты, мой ангел ли хранитель,
Или коварный искуситель …
In Tatyana’s letter to Onegin, it is characteristic that the text splits into two parts: in the frame (the first two stanzas and the last), where Tatyana writes as a lady in love with the lord of the neighboring estate, she naturally addresses him formally, but the middle portion, where she models both him and herself against novelistic schemata, is written in the informal. Given that the letter had originally been written, as Pushkin has advised us, in French, where in both cases one would only use the pronoun vous, the form of address in the letter’s central passage is merely a sign of the bookish, non-experiential—coded—nature of the given text.
It is interesting that Lensky, a Romantic, likewise explains people (including himself) to himself by identifying them with certain texts. Here, too, Pushkin makes demonstrative use of the same set of clichés: “savior” (= “protector”), “tempter” (= “seducer”):
He thinks: For her I’ll be a savior.
I will not suffer that some tempter … (6, CXXIII)
Он мыслит: «Буду ей спаситель.
Не потерплю, чтоб развратитель …»
It is obvious that in all these instances the texts function not as messages in a given language (not for Pushkin, but for Tatyana and Lensky), but as codes that incorporate information about what kind of language they are.
We have been borrowing examples from artistic literature, but it would be erroneous to conclude from this that poetry constitutes a pure form of communication within the “I—I” system. This principle is applied in a more consistent form not in art, but in moralistic and religious texts like parables, in myths, in proverbs. It is characteristic that repetitions penetrated proverbs well before they were treated chiefly in an aesthetic way and still served a much more substantial mnemonic or moral-normative function.
Repetitions of specific constructive (architectural) elements in a temple interior compel us to perceive its structure as something not bound to practical, constructive, technical needs, but, we might say, as a model of the universe or of human individuality. It is precisely because the temple interior in this case is a code, and not just a text, that it is perceived not only aesthetically (only a text, and not the rules of its construction, can be perceived aesthetically), but religiously, philosophically, theologically, or in some other, non-artistic way.
Art arises not among texts of the “I—HE” system or the “I—I” system. It uses both communicative systems in oscillating across the structural tension between them. The aesthetic effect arises at the moment when the code starts to be used as a message, and the message as a code, that is, when the text switches from one communicative system to the other while preserving the connection between them in the audience’s consciousness.
The nature of artistic texts, as a variable phenomenon connected to both kinds of communication, does not exclude the fact that separate genres are oriented to a greater or lesser degree toward the reception of texts as messages or codes. Of course, the lyric poem and the sketch do not correspond equally to one system of communication or the other. Besides the orientations of genres, however, at specific moments, due to historical, social, or other causes of an epochal nature, one literature or another (or, more broadly, art as a whole) can be wholly characterized as an orientation toward autocommunication. It is evident that a negative attitude toward the text/cliché will be a good working criterion for a literature’s general orientation toward the message. Literature oriented toward autocommunication will not only not avoid clichés, but will display a gravitation toward transforming texts into clichés and identifying the “high,” “good,” and “true” with the “stable,” the “eternal”—that is, with cliché.
And yet moving away from one pole (and even consciously polemicizing with it) in no way means casting off its structural influence. No matter how much the literary work imitates the text of a newspaper report, it retains, for example, so typical a feature of autocommunicative texts as the multiple repeatability of its reading. Rereading War and Peace is a significantly more natural activity than rereading the historical sources that Tolstoy used. At the same time, no matter how the artistic text strives, for polemical or experimental reasons, no longer to be a message, this is impossible, as the whole experience of art convinces us.
Poetic texts are apparently formed through a distinctive “swinging” between structures: texts created within the “I—HE” system function as autocommunications, and the other way around—texts become codes, and codes become messages. Obeying the laws of autocommunication—the separation of the text into rhythmic segments, the reduction of words to indices, the weakening of semantic connections while underscoring the syntagmatic ones—the poetic text comes into conflict with the laws of natural language. And yet, without being perceived as a text in natural language, poetry could not exist and fulfill its communicative function. But if one were to view poetry as nothing more than a message in natural language, its specificity would be lost. Poetry’s high capacity for modeling behavior is connected to its transformation from message to code. The poetic text swings like a peculiar pendulum between the “I—HE” system and the “I—I” system. Rhythm is elevated to the level of meaning, and meanings fall into a rhythm.
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