Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman
XXXVIII
… Как походил он на поэта,
Когда в углу сидел один,
И перед ним пылал камин,
И он мурлыкал: Benedetta
Иль Idol mio и ронял
В огонь то туфлю, то журнал.
In this instance, we have three external rhythm-forming codes: the printed text, the measured flickering of the fire, and the “humming” motif. It is quite typical that the book appears here not as communication—it is read without its content being noticed (“While eyes continued reading,/His thoughts remained yet far away”)—but as something that stimulates the development of an idea. And, crucially, it stimulates not with its content, but through the mechanistic automaticity of reading. Onegin “reads without reading,” just as he looks at the fire without seeing it and hums without noticing. None of these three rhythmic sequences, each perceived by different organs, has an immediate semantic relationship to what he is thinking, his imagination’s game of “pharaoh.”iv And yet they are indispensable if he is to read the “other” lines “with the spirit’s eyes.” The external rhythm’s intrusion organizes and stimulates the interior monologue.
Finally, a third example we would wish to introduce is the Japanese Buddhist monk contemplating a “rock garden.”5 Such a garden consists of a modest, gravel-strewn square with stones arranged according to a complex mathematical rhythm. Contemplating these complexly arranged pebbles is supposed to create a certain mood that fosters introspection.
* * *
Various systems of rhythmic series, from musical repetitions to repeating ornamental patterns—constructed according to clearly marked syntagmatic principles, but deprived of their own semantic content—can appear as the external codes by which the verbal message is reconstructed. For comparison, see also Yuri Knorozov’s notion of a correlation between information and fascination.6 v In order for the system to work, however, two heterogeneous fundamentals must collide and interact: the message, in some semantic language, and the intrusion of an additional, purely syntagmatic code. Only the combination of these fundamentals gives rise to a communicative system that one might characterize as “I—I.”
Thus we can regard the existence of a special channel for autocommunication as well-established. And it happens that this question has already drawn scholarly attention. We find an indication of the existence of a special language specifically designed for autocommunication in L. S. Vygotsky, who describes it as “inner speech.”vi And here we also find an indication of its structural markers:
The basic distinction between inner and outer speech is the absence of vocalization.
Inner speech is mute, silent speech. This is its fundamental distinction. But it is in precisely this respect, meaning the gradual increase of this distinction, that egocentric speech undergoes an evolution. … The very fact that this marker develops gradually, that egocentric speech makes itself known sooner in function and structure than in vocalization, indicates only that upon which we have based our hypothesis about how inner speech develops, namely, that inner speech develops not through the outer weakening of its vocal aspect, passing from speech to whisper and from whisper to mute speech, but through the functional and structural separation from outer speech, passing from it to the egocentric, and from egocentric to inner speech.7
Let us try to describe some features of the autocommunicative system.
The first marker distinguishing it from the “I—HE” system will be such language’s reduction of words: they will tend to turn into signs of words, indices of signs. On this score, Wilhelm Küchelbecker has an excellent note in his fortress diary: “I have noted something strange, a curiosity for psychologists and physiologists alike: for some time I have been dreaming not of things, not of incidents, but of these wondrous sorts of abridgements that are related to them, as a hieroglyph is to a picture, as a book’s table of contents is to the book itself. Does this not proceed from the paucity of things around me and of incidents that befall me?”8
The tendency toward reduction in “I—I” language is manifest in the shorthand that forms the basis of notes to oneself. Ultimately, the words of such notes constitute indices that one might decipher only by knowing what was written. Consider how the scholar I. Iu. Krachkovsky characterized the early script tradition of the Koran: “Scriptio defectiva. Absence not only of short vowels, but also of long ones, and of diacritical marks. Can only be read if you know it by heart.”9
We find a striking example of this kind of communication in Anna Karenina, in the famous confession scene between Kitty and Konstantin Levin, which is all the more interesting for recalling the episode of Leo Tolstoy’s confession to his fiancée Sofya Bers:
“Right,” he said, and he wrote the initials w, y, r—i, c, b—d, t, m, n, o, t? These letters meant: When you replied, “It cannot be,” did that mean never, or then? …
“I got it,” she said, blushing.
“What word is this?” he asked, pointing to the n, which signified never.
“That one means never,” she said.10
In all of these examples we are dealing with a case where the reader understands the text only because he or she knows it in advance (in Tolstoy, because of the fact that Kitty and Levin are spiritually already one; the conflation of the addresser and addressee occurs before our very eyes).
Word-indices formed through such reduction tend toward isometry. Also connected with this is the fundamental peculiarity of syntax in this kind of speech: it does not form complete propositions, but moves toward infinite chains of rhythmic repeatability.
The majority of the examples we have introduced are not “I—I” communications in the pure sense, but constitute a compromise that arises because the laws governing the text deform its usual language. Accordingly, one ought to distinguish between two instances of autocommunication: one having a mnemonic function, the other not.
As an example of the first, one might turn to Pushkin’s note to the final draft of his poem “Beneath the Blue Sky of One’s Native Land” [Pod nebom golubym strany svoei rodnoi]:
Hear of d. 25
H of d. R. P. M. K. B.: 24.
It can be deciphered as follows:
Hear[d] of d[eath of] [Riznich] 25 [July 1826]
H[eard] of d[eath of] R[yleev], P[estel], M[uravyov], K[akhovsky], B[estuzhev]: 24 [July 1826].11 vii
The note serves a distinctively mnemonic function, though one ought not to forget the other as well: to a significant degree, by virtue of the sporadic connection between the signified and the signifier in the “I—I” system, it turns out to be significantly better suited to cryptography, insofar as it is constructed according to the formula of being “understood only by those who understand.” As a rule, the text’s secret encoding is connected to its transfer from the “I—HE” system to the “I—I” one. (Members of a collective using cryptography are regarded in this case as a single “I,” relative to which those from whom the text should be concealed compose a collective third person.) True, what occurs here, too, is clearly an unconscious act that can be explained by neither the mnemonic-memorial function of the note, nor by its nature as secret: the words in the first line are shortened into groups consisting of a few graphemes, and in the second the group is composed of single letters. Indices gravitate toward equal length and rhythm. In the first line, insofar as the preposition feels a pull to merge with the noun, two groups are formed that, in the phonological parallelism of u and o in the original Russian, on the one hand, and l and m, on the other, display not only