University of Oregon

Review
Author(s): Lionel Gossman
Review by: Lionel Gossman
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 403-412
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770299
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

THE FORMAL METHOD IN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO

SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS. By P. N. Medvedev/M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Al-
bert J. Wehrle. The Goucher College Series. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978. xxvi, 191 p.

Mikhail Bakhtin was brought to the attention of English-speaking scholars

by the translation of his important studies of Rabelais (Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1968) and Dostoievskii (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1973).1 The present work, first published in the Soviet Union in 1928, antedates
both these studies and appears to have been part of an ambitious cooperative effort
by Bakhtin and his circle, during the experimental period of the New Economic
Policy, "to rethink the study of culture" (p. ix). In addition to The Formal Meth-
od, the group produced studies of Freudian psychology, linguistics, and contem-
porary philosophy, several of which have now begun to appear in English or Ger-
man translation. The present translation thus contributes to the rediscovery of an
interesting intellectual movement, which seems to have been a victim of internal
Soviet politics. The translator's Notes and Introduction provide valuable informa-
tion about the movement as a whole and about the texts through which it can be
further studied. In addition, the Introduction throws light on the unusual condi-
tions in which The Formal Method was published, on the problem of its author-
ship, and on the subsequent career of both the work and its authors. As The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship seems to me to be an important and challenging
work of literary theory, I propose to outline its arguments in some detail.
The most effective way for a young discipline to define itself and to "clarify its
point of view and methods," according to one of Bakhtin's associates, "is by intelli-
gently criticizing and combating other trends" (quoted on p. xiii). The critique of
literary formalism in The Formal Method was intended to contribute to the defini-
tion of a new sociological poetics, which would form part of a general Marxist
theory of culture. Bakhtin and his group considered Russian formalism methodo-
logically weak, in large measure because it had never had to define itself against a
well-developed, disciplined, and entrenched intellectual opposition, such as positi-
vism had been in the West. They also recognized that by 1928 it had passed its
zenith as an active and creative school: with Viktor Zhirmunskii it was devolving
into a mild and eclectic academicism, with Boris Eikhenbaum it had begun to make
peace with psychologism and with the traditional ethical and social concerns of
Russian criticism, and with Tomashevskii and Iakubinskii it was seeking an accom-
modation with sociology (pp. 65-70). Nevertheless, it remained influential. "The
number of its adherents has perhaps even increased, and in the hands of epigones
it has become even more systematic, undeviating, and precise" (p. 75). It was

1 Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics appeared in a first version in the U.S.S.R.

in 1929. A revised version was published in 1963. A French translation, by Guy
Verret, appeared in 1970 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions L'Age d'Homme).
The Work of Francois Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance appeared in the U.S.S.R. in 1965. Bakhtin had first presented it as
a doctoral thesis ("Rabelais in the History of Realism") in 1940.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

necessary, therefore, for the author or authors of The Formal Method to present
the essential principles of formalism as clearly and coherently as possible, to iden-
tify it as "not only a unified system of views but also a special way of thinking"
(p. 75), in order to define effectively, in contrast, their own principles and methods.
Part I (Chs. i and ii) lays the groundwork for the critique of formalism that oc-
cupies the remainder of the book. The authors begin by pointing to "specification"
as the basic problem of the study of ideologies. While recognizing the ideological
character of all forms of cultural production, the Marxist scholar must at the same
time, they claim, respect the specificity of each, be it painting, literature, science,
philosophy, or religion. In most existing criticism, either the specificity of the phe-
nomenon is dissolved by sociocultural analyses or "immanent" readings are pro-
posed which completely ignore the social character of the phenomenon. Some well-
meaning critics advocate a policy of partition and peaceful coexistence. P. N. Saku-
lin, for instance, "contrasts an 'immanent essence' of literature, which is inaccessible
to the sociological method, and its immanent and likewise extrasociological 'natur-
al' evolution, to the effect of extrinsic social factors on literature. He limits the so-
ciological method to the study of the causal effect of extraliterary factors on litera-
ture" (p. 32). The authors do not accept such a dualism, and their book is in large
measure an attempt to resolve it and to sketch the outlines of a science of ideology
that will be both comprehensive and attentive to the specificity of different forms
of cultural production. There are many excellent pages on the specific character
of literature and on the inadequacy of the simple "reflective" view of literary texts
held by most sociologically oriented critics. The authors point out-rightly, as I
think it will seem to most readers-that (a) literature is singularly diminished by
being considered only as a reflection, a "servant and transmitter of other ideolo-
gies" (p. 18) ; (b) what is reflected in the content of literature is not life itself but
"the ideological horizon, which itself is only the refracted reflection of real exis-
tence" (p. 18) ; (c) the essential content of literature reflects not "prepared or
confirmed theses"-these "inevitably show up as alien bodies in the work"-but
"generating ideologies . . . the living process of the generation of the ideological
horizon" (p. 19) ; and (d) "the artist only asserts himself in the process of the ar-
tistic selection and shaping of the ideological material" (p. 20) but "the artistic
structure of the novel and the artistic function of each of its elements are in them-
selves no less ideological and sociological than the esthetic, philosophical, or politi-
cal ideologemes present in it" (p. 23).
At times, it must be admitted, these pages are hard going. Theses are thundered
out one after another like the pronunciamentos of some literary dictator. Even a
well-disposed reader might be put off by the manner, if not by the content, of a
passage such as the following:
"There is no meaning outside the social communication of inderstanding, i.e.,
outside the united and mutually coordinated reactions of people to a given sign.
Social intercourse is the medium in which the ideological phenomenon first acquires
its specific existence, its ideological meaning, its semiotic nature. All ideological
things are objects of social intercourse, not objects of individual use, contemplation,
emotional experience, or hedonistic pleasure. For this reason subj ective psychology
cannot approach the meaning of the ideological object." (pp. 8-9)
The syllogism here seems to run as follows: all cultural products are ideological
things; all ideological things exist in the medium of social intercourse; cultural
products are consequently not objects of individual use or contemplation and can-
not be properly understood as such. I tend to agree, but I know that many of my
friends and colleagues would not accept the first term of the syllogism. Moreover,
since I am certain that literature does sometimes-rightly or wrongly-serve as an
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

object of individual use, contemplation, emotional experience, or hedonistic plea-

sure, I am left wondering what to make of this "abuse." Is it the result of intellectual
error or of moral vice-a stupidity to be silenced, a disease to be cured, perhaps
even a punishable offense ? The authors of The Formal Method have a convenient
way of dealing with positions that differ fundamentally from their own. If the so-
cial aspects of cultural production ("the forms and types of ideological inter-
course") have not been much studied to date, they say, there are "pernicious reas-
ons" for this-among them the traditional Western way of conceiving interpreta-
tion and understanding as the outcome of an encounter between an individual con-
sciousness and the signs in which another individual consciousness has expressed
itself. This tradition-presently much under attack-is dealt with summarily here
as "incorrect habits of thinking fostered by idealism, with its stubborn tendency to
conceive of ideological life as a single consciousness juxtaposed to meaning" (p.
13). At times, the polemical language of The Formal Method has the effective raci-
ness of Marx's own language, as when Russian formalism is described as "the
vaudeville radicalism of some declasse innovator" (p. 44), but terms like "perni-
cious," "incorrect," and "stubborn" have a terrorist ring that other readers besides
myself will probably find offensive. I hope they will not lose patience, however, for
the dogmatic, hectoring tone of these first pages is hardly heard again once the
authors stop theorizing abstractly (monologically ?) and begin to define their posi-
tion in relation to that of formalism.
Chapter iii presents a brief review of what the authors call Western European
formalism, though they seem most familiar with German writers. In opposition to
the positivist tendency to break works of art down into their component parts and
to deal separately with these, German formalism emphasized the unity of the work
of art and the articulation of its parts within a closed totality. Neo-Kantian in
inspiration, it also laid stress on the constructive rather than the mimetic aspect of
literary creation. But it never overlooked the semantic meaning of the work of art
or of the elements in its construction. "European formalism not only did not deny
content, did not make content a conditional and detachable element of the work,
but, on the contrary, strove to attribute deep ideological meaning to form itself. It
contrasted this conception of form to the simplistic realist view of it as some sort
of embellishment of the content, a decorative accessory lacking any ideological
meaning of its own" (p. 49). Similarly, the problem of perception was treated in
Western formalism-in keeping with its neo-Kantian orientation and in opposi-
tion, once more, to positivist reduction of sense perception to a mere physical or
psychological process of registering abstract quantities-as the problem of "the
sensual perception of meaning" (p. 49).
For Western formalism, "man's basic relation to the world thus defines his
'artistic volition' and, consequently, the constructive principle of the work-object"
(p. 51). Different artistic styles (geometric, realist, naturalist, etc.) express and
construct different types of relation to the world.
In general, this presentation of Western European formalism, and of German
writing on aesthetics in particular, seems just. The themes brought out-the em-
phasis on totality, on the constructive rather than the mimetic character of the
work of art, and on form itself as meaning-can be traced far back into the tradi-
tion of German Romantic writing on aesthetics, from Kant and Schiller through
Moritz to Novalis. For Novalis, for instance, the work of art is defined by the fact
that it does not use language referentially as in everyday communication. Yet it is
precisely by shedding meaning, in the ordinary sense, that the work of art comes
to signify, for Nova!is, in the manner proper to it. Whereas referential language
only reflects the external appearances of the universe, poetic language-the explo-

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 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ration of language itself in the work of art-is a discovery of its inner structure,
language being, for Novalis, like mathematics, a part of nature.
It is characteristic of the position taken by the authors of The Formal Method
that they consider Russian formalism a far poorer affair than its Western Euro-
pean counterpart. Having to combat a highly disciplined and professional positivist
school, Western formalism, they claim, had thoroughly thought out its philosophi-
cal position and its method. Its close relation to contemporary neo-Kantian philos-
ophy also ensured a high degree of methodological self-consciousness, since in the
Kantian tradition the method is not adapted to the real existence of the object, but
on the contrary, the object is itself defined by the method. While the authors of
The Formal Method, as Marxists, naturally reject neo-Kantian idealism and ap-
prove in principle the more pragmatic attitude of the Russian formalists, in actual
practice they consider that the Russians were so inattentive to questions of method,
so cavalier and "journalistic" that they naively and uncritically took over many
linguistic and literary categories as if they were given objects, without adequately
reflecting how they had been or should be defined. They thus turned out to be much
closer in several important respects to the positivism that Western formalism had
set out to criticize.2 Though always careful to signal their rejection of neo-Kantian
idealism, the authors of The Formal Method do not disguise their affinity with
certain features of neo-Kantian aesthetics. Hermann Cohen, for instance-the
leading figure in a reevaluation of Kant at Marburg at the end of the nineteenth
century-is praised for the inclusiveness of his aesthetic theory, for conceiving the
aesthetic as "a kind of superstructure over other ideologies," and for recognizing
that reality enters art "already cognized and ethically evaluated," even if he must
be criticized for seeing in the ideological horizon, "deprived of concreteness and
materiality," the ultimate reality-even if, in short, Cohen, as an idealist, knows of
no real existence or material base which determines cognition (p. 24). Similarly,
the theory of genre outlined in The Formal Method-"one might say that human
consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing re-
ality" (p. 134)-appears strikingly neo-Kantian. As the authors, while dutifully
acknowledging the material basis of ideological superstructures, have little to say
about the relation between basis and superstructure-a question on which Marx
and Engels themselves were notoriously concise-it is possible to see how they
could come to be accused, in a later, less experimental period of Soviet history, of
the dreadful heresy of neo-Kantianism (p. xvi).
Having begun to define Russian formalism indirectly, in relation to Western
European formalism, the authors approach their topic directly in Chapter iv. For-
malism in its Russian version is now located historically. Its polemical, adversary
stance, and its close association with various literary trends and movements, nota-
bly futurism, of which it is presented as having been in many respects the critical
arm, are seen by the authors as a handicap from the point of view of the elabora-
tion of a theoretically sound poetics. The struggle against idealism, transcenden-
talism, symbolism, everything high-flown and pretentious, in the name of those
elements of literary language "which seemed vulgar, second-class, and almost ar-
tistically indifferent to the symbolists, namely, its phonetic, morphological, and
syntactic structures taken independently of meaning" (p. 59), was a healthy one,
they acknowledge, but it was ultimately nihilistic. The primary aim of the formal-
ists, according to the authors, was the "subtraction of meaning" (p. 60). Thus the
related devices of deautomatization of the word and defamiliarization were for
them, above all, means of abstracting words or objects from semantic context. One

2 See, for instance, pp. 98-103 on sound in poetry.

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

consequence of the close association of formalism with contemporary literary and

artistic trends was, in short, the limited scope of formalist poetics and the exces-
sively journalistic character of the formalists' activity as critics. They played the
role of enfants terribles of the scholarly world with verve and wit, but they failed
to develop an independent poetics which could have acted not only negatively on
established literary doctrines and practices but critically and constructively on the
new ones.

At the beginning of Chapter v the authors outline what they see as the six es-
sential principles of formalism, and Chapters v through ix of the book (confusingly
divided between Chapters vii and viii into Parts III and IV) deal with each of them
in turn, though the last receives only very brief treatment at the very end of Chap-
ter ix. The six points are as follows: "(1) poetic language (and poetic phonetics)
as the object of poetics; (2) material and device as the two components of the
poetic construction; (3) genre and composition, theme, story, and plot as the de-
tailing of the constructive functions of material and device; (4) the concept of the
work as a datum external to consciousness; (5) the problem of literary history;
(6) the problem of artistic perception and criticism" (p. 79). I shall attempt to
summarize each of the five chapters.
Chapter v presents a critique of the formalist notion of poetic language. There
is no way of differentiating between ordinary language and poetic language on the
basis of linguistic features alone, the authors point out,3 and in the work of the
formalists poetic language comes to be simply the "converse and parasite of prac-
tical language" (p. 88). The opposition of the useful and the beautiful, they might
have noted, goes back to the late eighteenth century at least, to Mendelssohn and
Kant, and it was taken up enthusiastically by virtually all the German Romantics.
But whereas poetic language, for the Romantics, had a deeper meaning than prac-
tical language, its essence for the Russian formalists, according to the authors of
The Formal Method, is simply to negate meaning. Once again, in short, the
authors bring out what in their view is the characteristically negative thrust of
formalism. "If the only difference between poetic and practical language is that
the construction of the former is perceptible owing to the negative devices enumer-
ated above," they observe, "then poetic language is absolutely unproductive and
uncreative . . . poetic language is only able to 'make strange' and deautomatize
that which has been created in other language systems. It does not create new
constructions itself. Poetic language only forces the perception of the already cre-
ated" (p. 89). But it is not only the formalists' conception of poetic language that
is found to be inadequate; their conception of "practical language" is also unsatis-
factory. Practical language, the authors insist, is not frozen, stereotyped, or auto-
mated, as the formalists claim it is, except in a few special cases of interchange
("narrowly technical, industrial, and business" types of exchange, where the word
is easily "replaced by a signal or symbol of another type"). Normally, "practical
intercourse is constantly generating, although slowly and in a narrow sphere" (p.
95).4 The formalist conception of language makes it impossible to account for the
creative enrichment of language: "A language which transmits prepared com-
munications within the bounds of fixed, generated intercourse cannot . . . be cre-

3 The point was restated recently by Roger Fowler, "Linguistic Theory and the
Study of Literature," in Essays on Style and Language, ed. R. Fowler (London,
1966), pp. 1-28.
4 An attempt to explain such change at the level of folk or oral literature was
made by Jakobson in an important article written with Piotr Bogatyriev and pub-
lished in 1929: "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens," in Donum
Natalicium Schrijnen (Nijmegen and Utrecht, 1929), pp. 900-13.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ative. The vocabulary, grammar, and even the basic themes are already prepared.
All that remains is to combine them, adapting them to circumstances . . . Given
such presuppositions, there can be no impulses or bases for the creation of any-
thing new. Thus the forimalists' poetic language is the parasite of a parasite" (pp.
96-97). What the authors of The Formal Method appear to be arguing here, as at
other points in their book, is that for the full understanding of language a linguis-
tics of parole must complement the linguistics of langue. The formalists' concept of
poetic language breaks down because it is simply the negation of a concept of ordi-
nary or practical language, which the formalists took over from linguistics with-
out understanding that "linguistics formed its concept of language and its elements
for its own theoretical and practical purposes, in complete abstraction from the
characteristics of diverse practical constructions and from the characteristics of
the poetic construction as well" (p. 93), and that, moreover, "the material [it]
used to elaborate its basic concepts and elements is least of all the utterance of
practical language" (p. 94) and mostly made up of written monuments. This, the
authors suggest in an extremely interesting passage, is "the source of the one-
sided monologism of linguistics. The whole series of language phenomena con-
nected with the forms of direct dialogue have until very recently remained outside
its field of vision" (p. 94).
The formalist ideas of "material" and "device" as the components of the poetic
construction are taken up in Chapter vi. The authors question the notion that moti-
vation is indifferent (pp. 108-13, 141)-a question raised again, subsequently, by
Levi-Strauss in his review of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale-and once again
they point to the negative character of the formalist position. "The only quality
possessed by the formalist device is its innovation. And this innovation is only rela-
tive in that it is theoretically based and 'perceptible' only against the background
of either practical language or another literary work, school, or style.
"Thus the device is deprived of all positive content and reduced to a bare 'differ-
ence from . . .'" (pp. 111-12). More generally, the formalists' conception of the
literary work is held to suffer from the same distortion as their conception of lan-
guage. Like language, the literary work is seen by the formalists as an object, and
"the organic connection between the sign and meaning attained in the concrete
historical act of utterance" (p. 121) is broken. The literary work, according to the
authors of The Formal Method, must be thought of not as an object but as an act
-not, one might say, as analogous to langue but as analogous to parole: "To com-
prehend an utterance does not mean to grasp its general meaning, as we grasp the
meaning of a 'dictionary word.' To understand an utterance means to understand it
in its contemporary context and [in]our own, if they do not coincide . . . Why
are two particular words next to each other? Linguistics only explains how this is
possible. The real reason cannot be explained within the limitations of linguistic
possibilities. Social evaluation is needed to turn a grammatical possibility into a
concrete fact of speech reality" (pp. 121, 123). This critique of the formalists' ac-
ceptance of contemporary linguistics as a model for poetics seems to anticipate an
obj ection frequently made to the new poetics in our own time-namely, that it pro-
vides only a general grammar of literary creation but does not account for particu-
lar choices or enhance our understanding of individual works.
Chapter vii deals with the formalists' conception of the literary work as an
"amalgamation . . . of diverse materials intrinsically alien to each other" (p. 136).
The authors argue--consistently with their anti-positivist, "neo-Kantian" point of
view-that the organizing structure is prior to the parts. The unity of the work
is "not created by external devices as Shklovskii understands them. On the con-
trary, the external devices are the result of this unity and the necessity to locate it

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in the plane of the work" (p. 136). The work of art is seen as defined by its "final-
ization"-a category that is crucial to the authors' conception of literature as dis-
tinct from other forms of ideological creation and that seems closely related to the
category of totality in Romantic aesthetics.
"Outside of art, all finalization, every end, is conditional, superficial, and is most
often defined by external factors rather than factors intrinsic to the object itself.
The end of a scientific work is an illustration of such a conditional finalization. In
essence, a scientific work never ends: one work takes up where the other leaves off.
Science is an endless unity. It cannot be broken down into a series of finished and
self-sufficient works . . . To put it another way: compositional finalization is pos-
sible in all spheres of ideological creation, but real thematic finalization is impossi-
ble. Only a few philosophical systems, such as that of Hegel, pretend to thematic
finalization in epistemology . . . But the essence of literature is in substantial, ob-
jective, thematic finalization, as opposed to the superficial finalization of the utter-
ance in speech. Compositional finalization, confined to the literary periphery, can
at times even be absent . . . But this external vagueness sets off the inner thematic
finalization more strongly." (pp. 129-30)
The various genres correspond to different types of finalization. "Every genre
represents a special way of constructing and finalizing a whole, finalizing it essen-
tially and thematically (we repeat), and not just conditionally or compositionally"
(p. 130). It is perhaps worth remarking that the authors' very strong sense of the
organizing structure and the teleological articulation of the literary work leaves
Freud out of account. Organizing structure seems to be located not in the uncon-
scious, but in the collective consciousness. One wishes the translator had found
room in his introduction to tell us more than he does about the Bakhtin circle's
work on Freud.
In Chapter viii the formalist view of literary works and of literary history as
autonomous with respect to general ideology is analyzed and rejected. To the de-
gree that the formalists' dissociation of the work from the psyche of creator and
perceiver marks an attempt to liberate literary study from psychologism and bi-
ologism, the authors of The Formalist Miethod welcome it. As in so many other
instances, however, the formalist negation of a specific meaning turns out to be a
negation of all meaning, a pure nihilism. "While liberating the work from the
subjective consciousness and psyche, the formalists at the same time estrange it
from the whole ideological environment and from objective social intercourse" (p.
145). Moreover, in severing literature from the ideological world, the formalists
turn it into a "stimulus for relative and subjective psychophysical states and per-
ceptions . . . For their basic theories-deautomatization, the perceptibility of the
construction, and the others-presuppose a perceiving, subjective consciousness"
(p. 149). The work of literature becomes "an apparatus for the stimulation of this
perceptibility" (p. 149). Perception itself thus becomes completely subjective, and
expresses only the subjective condition of consciousness, not the "objective datum
of the work" (p. 149). At the same time the readers are in their turn reduced to
mere "psychophysiological apparatuses for perception" (p. 158).
The last chapter of The Formal Method concerns literary history. The authors
recall that the formalists consider the series of literary history, "the series of ar-
tistic works and their constructive elements" (p. 159), to be completely indepen-
dent of other historical series, and notably of other ideological series. (The formal-
ist position on this score was restated programmatically, in the same year The For-
mal Method was published, in eight theses by Jakobson and Tynyanov.) The course
of literary development is autonomous and has its own inner necessity. Extralit-
erary reality may affect the tempo of change, but it will not affect the logic, which
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

is defined by literature itself. Literary history unfolds, in short, in a remarkably

similar way to that discovered by Propp for the folktale, and like the folktale,
though it permits of variations and allows for many options, its inner logic is in-
eluctable. As Jakobson and Tynyanov declared in a text that may well have been
intended to be conciliatory with respect to sociological criticism:
"Demonstration of the immanent laws of the history of literature (or language)
. does not explain the tempo of evolution, nor the direction which it takes when
it is confronted with several theoretically possible paths of development. The im-
manent laws of literary (or linguistic) evolution only give us an indeterminate
equation, which allows of several solutions-limited in number, no doubt, but not
imposing any single answer. The concrete problem of the direction or at least the
dominanta chosen, cannot be resolved without an analysis of the correlation be-
tween the literary series and the other social series."'5
To the authors of The Formal Method the development envisaged by the for-
malists is not a genuine development; more precisely, it is not an evolution, not a
history, but a succession, whose only content turns out to be difference.
"All that the formalist system needs is the existence of two mutually contrast-
ing artistic trends, let us say the Derzhavin and the Pushkin traditions. Let us find
them in the required situation of mutual contrast. The Pushkin tradition succeeds
the Derzhavin tradition, and the latter tradition becomes the junior line. After a
certain time the Derzhavin tradition succeeds the Pushkin tradition, which now
takes the position of the junior line. This process can continue to infinity . .. If
new forms appear, they do so for reasons completely incidental to literary develop-
ment." (p. 163)
The final page of the book raises the question of the relation between criticism
and literature. In opposition to the formalist view that criticism should be the or-
gan of the writer, and should campaign actively in the service of contemporary lit-
erary movements, the authors argue for the traditional position of criticism as a
mediator between the public and the artist. The function of the critic, as they had
already outlined it earlier, toward the end of Chapter ii, is to "give the artist his
'social assignment' in his own language, as a poetic assignment" (p. 35). In the
rare societies in which culture is relatively homogeneous and undivided, social de-
mands and needs will "naturally and easily translate . . . into the immanent lan-
guage of poetic craftsmanship"(p. 35). In most cases, however, a "translating
medium" is required, and this, for the authors of The Formal Method, is the func-
tion of criticism. Criticism as a discipline, therefore, has a duty to maintain a rela-
tive independence of contemporary literary trends, and to preserve a long, histori-
cal view of poetics. Only by so doing can it contribute effectively and construc-
tively to the ongoing culture. To Medvedev/Bakhtin the absence of mediation be-
tween writer and public and the rejection by criticism of its mediating function
are themselves symptoms of "sharp and deep social disintegration" (p. 36).
I have tried to present the argument of this book as clearly as possible, at the
risk of sometimes going over ground made familiar by Victor Erlich in his com-
prehensive and readable Russian Formalism (2nd ed., rev., The Hague: Mouton,
1965), and worse still, of failing to meet my obligation, as a reviewer, to be brief.
I did so because, half a century after its publication in Russia, The Formal Method
remains, in my opinion, an important and challenging work. Even if it does not lead
to a mass abandonment of positions that have come to be assumed, almost natur-
ally, throughout the academic community, it will at the very least make us aware

5 Quoted from R. Jakobson and J. Tynyanov, "Theses on Formalism," New Left

Review (London), 37 (May-June 1966), p. 61.

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

of the choices we have made, and may prompt some serious soul-searching.
It does us good to be reminded, from time to time, of the history of our disci-
pline. Though it would be possible, I think, to show that Russian formalism and
Western European formalism have important common roots in Romantic aesthet-
ics, the comparison drawn between the two in these pages is extremely interesting.
It sheds a striking-and disquieting-light on the recent and still current vogue of
Russian formalism in academic circles in this country and in the West generally.6
Above all, it prompts one to ask what it tells us about ourselves that of the two
formalisms it is the Russian one that we have appropriated, and what it means (if
the question may be asked) that the Russian formalists' impoverished version of
literary history is the one now current in many "advanced" critical circles. After
reading The Formal Method it is difficult not to identify the rejection of history as
the essential characteristic of much recent literary theory and literary criticism. If
the "pseudodialectic" (p. 92) of the formalists acquires a content, it is at best one
borrowed from Freud. Thus a contemporary philosopher, who is close to literary
scholarship, could simply assume in a recent article, as if it were the accepted doc-
trine, that development in literature is a matter of struggling with and outdoing
predecessors.7 To the degree that history survives at all in avant-garde intellec-
tual circles, it is probably in a form close to that of the formalists, that is, as pure
difference. What survives, in other words, is not history but the ghost of history,
history tamed and deprived of its density and social significance. If history is an-
other name for God the Father, we certainly seem to have done our work of cas-
tration well.
The struggle against history and the struggle against meaning are one and the
same. The authors of The Formal Method return several times to what they de-
scribe pointedly as the formalists' "fear of meaning" (pp. 105, 118). And this fear
of meaning is diagnosed-most interestingly in view of certain recent speculations
-not as the abandonment of an ideal of presence, but as a desire for presence, an
avidity of appropriation, a fear of otherness. "Meaning . . . with its 'not here' and
'not now' is able to destroy the material nature of the work and the fullness of its
presence in the here and now" (p. 105).
It is a pity that Professor Wehrle, who appears to be familiar with the work of
Derrida (quoted in the Introduction, pp. xi, xxi), was not encouraged to explore
some of the intersections between Medvedev/Bakhtin and the contemporary crit-
ics and philosophers he refers to in passing in his Introduction. Instead of isolated
and rather gratuitous references to Paul de Man or Levi-Strauss-which seem to
function here, like tics or speech traits, to establish membership of a particular
coterie--one would have liked a fuller discussion of the relations between The
Formal Method and the work of present-day scholars in the so-called human sci-
ences. In general, though informative on matters of historical background and
authorship, the Introduction seemed unusually turgid and occasionally preten-
tious. But why cavil? Most literary scholars will be as grateful as I am to Pro-
fessor Wehrle for following the suggestion, made to him by Renate Horlemann

6 Thus the editors of the New Left Review, quoted above, urge their backward
English readers to keep up to date by paying attention to formalism: "Today For-
malism is once more beginning to receive the recognition it deserves: Tynyanov's
memoirs are being serialized in Novy Mir; a collection of Formalist writings has
appeared in France and a study has been written and recently republished in the
Netherlands by Victor Erlich. It is time this growing interest spread to Britain
too."
7 Richard Rorty, "Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy,"
JP, 74 (1977), 673-81.
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 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

during her regrettably brief association with The Johns Hopkins Humanities
Center, that he translate The Fornmal Method. Likewise, The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press deserves praise for once again undertaking to place a significant but
hitherto inaccessible work of literary scholarship and theory before the academic
community.8 Finally, if I may be permitted a personal comment, it is a particular
pleasure for me that the publication of this important book is due to the collabora-
tion of two institutions with which I was happily associated for many years.

LIONEL GOSSMAN
Princeton University

8 I must, however, register a protest at the state in which this book was allowed
to go to press. There are misspellings: "canvass"-as in "to canvass votes"-for
the artist's "canvas" (p. xxiii), "taylor" for "tailor" (p. 110), "calander" for "cal-
endar" (three times, pp. 169-70); there are misprints: "sweckbeurissten" for
"Zweckbewussten" (p. 10), "totaly" (p. 26), "usualy" (p. 35), "Leben und Werke
der Troubadour" for "Leben und Verke der Troubadours" (p. 81), "melieu" (p.
94). There are some apparent mistranslations (e.g., "meanwhile" for "however"
on page 11) or inappropriate translations ("the big bourgeoisie" on p. 17). And
surely Pushkin's play must be printed either as Mozart and Salieri or-though less
probably-as Motsart i Sal'eri, but not as Mozart and Sal'eri. Or does Mr. Wehrle
want us to take Salieri for a Russian ? Perhaps it is impossible to do anything about
solecisms such as "different than" followed by a noun instead of a clause, or the
ubiquitous "cannot help but." But has academic prose already capitulated to the
popular use of "like" as a conjunction, as in "like Shklovskii does" (p. 115) ? In
general, the writing in this text is often quite careless. The following sentences
are, unfortunately, not sufficiently exceptional to be forgiven: " . . . a certain gap,
a shifting and hazy area through which the scholar picks his way at his own risk,
or often simply skips over . . . " (p. 3) ; " . . . Gottfried Semper, whose follow-
ing definition is characteristic . . . " (p. 9) ; "Life, the aggregate of defined ac-
tions, events, or experiences, only become plot . . . " (p. 17). It is regrettable
that we professors of the humanities do not write better than we do. Until we im-
prove, publishers cannot afford to dispense with the services of expert editors.

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