Jakobson 1968 [PDF]

Citation preview

Lingua 21 (1968) 597-609, © North-Eolland Publ-~shing Co., Amsterdam Not to be reproduced by photo,print or mierufiim without written i.ermission from the publisher



POF-TRY OF G R A M M A R A N D GR..AM.~dAR O F P O E T R Y :) ROMAN JAKOBSON



According ~to EcI ~¢ard Sapir (1921), the juxtapositien of such sequences as t J~: [arn,,er kills the ducklfng and the man takes the chfck makes us 'fee]( ins.t :nctively, without the slightest ~ttempt at conscious analysi,~ tha1 the two sentences fit precisely the same pattern, that they are really the sam e fundamenta.1 sentence, differing only in their material trappings. I-a other words, they express identical relational concepts in an iden' :ical manner.' Conversely, we may modify the sentence or it:; single words 'in some purely relational, nonmaterial regard' without altering any o'f the material concepts expressed. When ~saig ,~_i'a4~tc ce~ain term.,; of the sentence a different pesition in it..a s 5 ~Lt~,~,lic T~ tern and replacing, for instance, the word order 'A kills B' b3" the in~, erse sequence 'B kills A', ",e do not vary, the material concepts invclved but uniquely their rautual relationship. Likewise a substituti ~n of/armers for [ar:~ner or killed for hills alters only the relational concepts of the sent~'nce, while there are no changes in the 'concrete wherewithal of speech'; its 'material trappings' remain invariable. Despite sorae borderline, transitional formations, there is in language a def!inite, clear-cut discrimination between these two classes ol expressed concepts - material and relational - or, in more technical terms, between the lexical and grammatical aspects of language. The linguist must faithfully follow this objective structural dichotomy arid tl,otoughly translate the grammatical concepts,



x) The Englis/h :recension of m y paper presented at the International Cor~ference for Poetics in Warsaw, 1960, appears for the first time, while it:!~two other ver~iot~s have been, published, the ti.u~i_~n variant in the volume of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poetics Po~'tyka Poktika (Warsaw 1961), and the German in Math,~l~atik und Dichtung, ed. by H. Kreuzer (Munich 19651.



59'7



598



ROMAN JAKOBSON



ac,'_ually present in a given language, into his technical metalanguage, without any imposition of arbitrary or outlandish categories uLpon the, language observed. The categories described are intrinsic constituents of the verbal code, maneuvered by the language users, and not at all 'grammarian's conveniences:', as even such attentive i:aquirers into poets' grammar as, e.g., Dona;'d Davie were inclined ta believe. A difference in grammatical concepts does not necessarily represent a difference in the state of affairs reYerred to. If one witness a~serts that 'the farmer killed the duckling', while the other affirms t~'~at 'the duckling was killed by the farmer', the two men cannot be accused of presenting discrepant testimonie~, in spite of the polar difference between the grammatical concept,.~ expressed by active and pa~s~iivo ,~ " of affairs is pre...... constpactions. One and "~'~ ,.~c same state sented by the sentences: Lie (or iying or to lie) is a sin (or fs sin]ul), 70 lie is to sin, Liars sin (or are sin.hal or are sinners),, nr with a gener;dizing sm~:,~ular The liar sins (or is sin/ul, is a sinne:v). .Only the way of presentation differs. Fundame'atally the same equat~ona~l proposition may be expressed in terms of actors (liars~, s,n~,ers) or actions (!o lie, to sin) and we may present these actions 'a:~ if' abstracted (lying) and r.,ified (lie, sin) or ascribe them to tht subject as its w~Derties (sir/ul). The part of speech is one of tLe. grammatical c:~tegories which reflect, according to Sapir's manuaL, 'not so much ,,~r intuitive ana.lysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality irate, a variety of formal patterns'. Later, in his preliminary notes to t;le planned Fou.ndations o/ Language, Sapir (1930) o~tlined the fundamental type~ of referents which serve as 'a naturai basis for parts of speech', namely existents and their linguistic expression: the mmn ; occu,,rents expressed by the verb; and finally modes o/existence and occ2"Trence represented in language by the ad;ective and the adverb Te.,pectively. Jeremv Bentham, who was perhaps the first to di,;dose the maniff&l 'tin~;~2~tic fictions' which underlie the grammatical structure ;~;Id which ,~.re used throughout tl-~e whole field of language as a 'r~,ecessary resource', arrived in his Theory o/[ictions at a ~hallenging conclu_~ior : 'To langtage, then - to language alone - it is that fl,:titio~±s er::ities owe tlheir existence their impossible, yet indispens:,.bi::e . . ~ M ~ . " Li,,~Li~tic fictions should neither be 'mistaken fo) rea:ities r,or be a~rib~.'d to the creative fancy of linguists: they 'owe



I'OETRY



O F G R A M M A I~. A N D



GRAMMAR



OF P O E T R Y



599



their exi:~tence' actually '=to language alone' and particularly t(~ the. 'grammatical form of the dis ~.ourse', in Bentham's terms. The indispensai~le, mm, da,.aty role played by the grammatical concepts confronts us with the intricate problem of the relationship between referential, cognitive value and linguistic fiction. Is the significance of grammatical concepts really questionable or are perhaps some subliminal verisimilar assumptions attached to them ? How far can sci~ ntific thougi., t overcome the pressure of grammatical patterns? Whatever tbe ,;olution of these still controver.~;ial questions is, certainly there is one domain of verbal activities, where 'the classificatory rules of the game' (Sapir 1921) acquire their highest significance ; IN FICTION, in verbal art, LINGUISTICFICTICN.~ are fully realized. It is qu-:te evident that grammatic'.fl concepts - or in Fortunatov's pointed nomenclature, 'formal meanings' - f i n d their widest applica,.tion~c in poetry as the most formalized manifestation of language. There, where the poetic function dominates ow~r the strictly cognitive function, the latter is more or less dil:lmed, or as Sir Philip Sidney declared in his De/eme o/Poesie, 'Now for the Poet, he notlaing affirmeth and therefore never lieth'. Consequemly, in Bentham's succinct formulation, 'the Fictions of the p(,et ar-~ pure of unsincerity'. When in the finale of Majakovskij's poem Xoro~o we read - '; ~iz,~'/ xorogd,//i ~it'/xoro~d//' (literally 'both life is good, and !t is good to i i v e ' ) - one. will hardly look for a cognitive difference bv twee~l these two ct.,or,:litiate clauses, but in poetic mythology the ling,list:c fiction of the substantivized and hence hypostatized process grow: ix~to a metonymic image of life as such, taken by it:;elf and substituted for the living people, abstraclum pro concreto, as G alfredus de Vino Salw~, the cunning English scholar of the early thirteenth century, say.~ in his Poet',,,ia nova (see FarM). In contradistinction to the first ciause with its predicative adjective of the same personifiable, feminine gender a,s the subject, the second clause with its imperfective infinitive and with a neuter, subjectless form of the predicate, represents a pure process without any limitation or transposition and with an open place for the dative of agent. The recurrent 'figure of gran'.:nar' which along with the 'figure of sound' Gerard Manley Hopkins saw to be the constitutive principle of verse:, iis particularly paipable in those poetic forms, where c~mtiguous m.etrical units are more or less consistently combined through



600



ROMAN JAKOBSON



a gcammatical parallelism into pair,: or, optionally, triplets. Sapir's definition quoted above is perfectly applicable to such neigh,bor sequences: ' t h e y are really the same I,mdamental sentence, differi ag only in their material trappings'. There are se-eral tentative outlines devoted to different specimens of such canoni:zal or nearly canonical paraUelism, labeled carmen style b y J. Gonca in his monot~aph, full of interesting remarks a b o u t 'balanced binar 3- word grot'ps' in the Veda a n d also in the Nias ballads and priestly litanies. Particular attention has been paid b y scholars to the bibl)cal paralldismus mernbrorum rooted in an archaic Canaanite tradition and to the pervasive, continuous role of para.1telism in Chinese ver,~es and poetic: prose. A similar l:attern proves to underlie the oral poetry of Finno-Ugric, "Iurkic, and Mongolian peoples "['he same devices play a cardinal role in Russian folk songs and recitatives.Z of., e.g., this typical preamL, ie of Russian hero:ic epics (bTlfny) : Kak vo st61 nom g6rode vo Kieve, A u l~skova knj£zja u Vladfmira, A i b~,lo stolo'~~in'epo~6tnyj st61, A i b3"lopirov£n'e po66sta,yj p it, A i v~$ na pirfi da napiv~.lisja, A i v~ na pirfi da porasxv~stalis ', ~'mnyj xv~staet zolotrj kaznrj, Glfipyj xv'~staet molod6j ~en6j.



How in the capital cit.y, in Kiev, Under the gTacious prince, u~,der Vladimi r, There was banqueting, an hor~.orable banquet, There was feasting, an honorm3r feast, Everyone in the feast ~as drunk, Everyoue in the feast was boasting, The clever one boasts of his golden stock, The stupid one boasts of his young wife.



Parallelistic systems of verbal art give us a direct insight into the ;peakers' own concept:ion of the grammatical equivalences. The analysis of various kinds of poetic license in the domain of parallelism, like the examination of riming conve:otions, m a y provide u:; with important clues for interpreting the make-l,p of a given lan-. gu,tge and the rank order of it:: constituents (e.g. the current eqtt~-t.~on between the Finnish alia:five and iltative or between the preterit ahd present against the background of ur, pairable cases or verbal categories, according to Steinitz's observations in his p a t h breaking inquiry into parallelism in Karelian folklore;). The interaction between syntactic, morphologic and lexical e~uivalences and z) On the present state of international research in paralleL~ tic foundations o1 ,~itten and oral poetry see: 'Grammatic.ol ~m-alleI:Lsmand itt~ Russian facet,' Language, 42, 1965.



POETRY



OF



GRAMMAR



AND



GRAMMAR



OF



POETRY



601



discreoancies, the diverse kinds of semantic contiguities, similarities, synonynlies and antonymies, finally the different types and functions o7. tlhe allegedly 'isolated lines', all such phenomena call for a systematic analysis indispensable to t he comprehension and interpretation o.~. the various grammatical contrivances in poetry. Such a crucial linguistic and poetic problem as parallelism can hardly be mastered by a scrutiny automatically restricted to the external form an,~l excluding any discussion of grammatical and lexical meanings. In the,. endiess travel songs of the Kola Lapps (see Xaruzin) two juxtapo,~ed pecsons, performing identical actions, are the uniform topic, impeUing an automatic concatenation of verses of such a pattern: 'A is sitiing on the right side of the boat; B is sitting on the left side. A has. a paddlo in tb~ right hand ; B has a paddle in the left hand', e~Lc. In th.~: Russian sung or narrated folk stories of Foma and Erema (Thoma,.,, and Jeremy), both unlucky brothers are used as a comic motivation for a chain ol parallel clauses, parodying the carmen style, tyl-.,ieal of Russian folk poetry and presenting quaai-differential characteristics o.~ the twe brothers by .t juxtaposition of synonymous expressions or clt,sely coincident ~mages: 'They uncovered Erema and they found Foma; They beat Erema and they did not pardon Foma; Erema ran away into a birch wood, and Foma into an oak wood;' etc. (see the instructive surveys of these stories by Aristov ar:d Adrianova-Peretc as well as their careful examination by Bogatjrev). In the Nortt.,-Russian balla~I 'Vasilij a~,.1 Sotlj.( (see particularly its variants puolished by Sobole~skij and Astax~v:,. and her summarizing notes) the binaET grammatical parallelism becomes the pivot of the plot '~nd carries the '~rhole dramatic development of this beautiful and concise byli~,a~. In t~.rms of antithetical parallelism the initial church sceI.,e contrasts the pious invocation 'Father God !' of the parishioners ar, d Sofija's incestuous call 'My brother Vasilij !'. The subsequent malicious intervention of the mother introduces a chain of distichs tying together both heroes through a strict correspondence between any line devoted to the brother and its counterpart speaking of Ns sis;ter. Some of these pairs of parallel members in their s,tereotypec conslruction resemble the mentioned cliches of the Lappic songs: ' ~:asil:ii was buried on the right hand, And Sofija was buried on the left i.:and.' The interlacement of both lovers'



602



ROMAN J A K O B S O N



fates is reinforced by chiasmic constructions: 'Vasilij, drink but ,ton't give to Sofija, And Sofija, drink, don't give to Vasilij! Yet Vasilij drank and feasted Sofija, yet Sofija drank and feasted Vasilij'. The same function is performed by the images ,of a k i p a r i s (cypress), tree w;th masculine name, on Sofija's grave, al:,d of a verba (willow), with feminine name, on the adjacent grave of Vasilij : 'They wove together with their heads,/and they stuck logether with their l,~ave~.//' The parallel destruction of both trees 15y the mother echoes the violent death of both siblings~ I doubt 'that efforts of such scholars as Christine Brooke-Rose to draw a rigorous line of demaration between tropes and poetic scenery are applicable to this ballad, and in general, the range of poems and poetic trends for which .;uch a boundary actually exist- is very limited. According to one of Hopkins' brightest con*~ributions to poetics, his paper of ! 865 On the Origin o / B e a u t y , such ccnonical structures as Hebrew poetry 'paired off in parallelisms' are well-known, 'bat the important part played by paralMism of expression in our poetry is , l o t so well-known: I think it will surprise anyone when first pointed cmt'. "qotwithstanding some isolated exceptions such as Berry's recent reconnaissance, tbe role performed by the 'figure of grammar' in world poet~" from antNuity up to the present time is still surprising for students of literature a whole century after it had been first pointed out by Hopkins. The ancient and medieval theory of poetry had an inkling of poetric grammar and was prone to di~'riminate between lexical tropes and grammatical figures (/igurae vc,~o: a ;:), "Du~. * "' ,.ese sound rudiments were later lo,;t. One may state that i1.,, poetry similarity is superimposed on con:ig-aity, and hence 'equivalence is promoted ~o the constitutive device of the sequence'. Here any noticeable reiteration of the same ~7ammatical concept becomes an effective poetic device.3) Any una) See 'Linguis ics and poetics', Style in Language, ed. by T. Sebeok (New York 1960). The grammatical structure of diverse poems from the ninth to the twentieth centur3, has been analyzed by the present author in the following ~tudies: 'Poxvala Konstant~na Filo:~ofa Grigoriju Bogoslovu', George Flozov. sky Festschrilt (New York, in press); [with P. Valesio] 'Vocabulorum constructi¢~ in Dante's so,met 'se Vedi li occhi miei',' Studi Danteschi, 43 (Florence 1966) ; 'Struktura ,lvej u srbohrvatskih pesama,' Zbornik za lilologiju i lingvisti/***, 4-5 (Novi Sax. 1961-62); 'The grammatical texture of a sonnet from Sir Philip Sidney's 'a rcaxlia',' ,Studies ;n Language and Literature in Honour ol



POETRY



OF G R A M M A R AND G R A M M A R OF t'OE'I"RY



603



biased, attentive, ¢:xhaustive, t(,tal description of the selection, distribution and ivLterrelation of diverse mo::phologic~d classes and syntactic constlaxctions in a given poem surprise,; the examiner himself by unexpected, striking symmetries and antisymmetries, balanced ,~tructures, efficient accumulation of equivalent forms and salient contrasts, finally by rigid restrictions in the repertory of morphological and syntactic constituents used in the poem, eliminations whicl [ on the other hand, permit us to follow the rrJ.asterly interplay of the actualized c¢,nstituents. Let us insist on the strikingness of thes,~ devices; ~:ny ~ensitive reader, as Sapir woulcil say, feels instinctively the poetic effect and the semantic Ic,a~! o* these ~zrammatical[ appliance~;, 'without the slightest attempt at con~ciou~ analysis,' avd in m a n y cases the poet himself in this respect is similar to such a reader, in the same ~vay both the t~:-aditio~:ai ii~tener and the periormer of folk poetry based on a ncz~rly col~tant parall6iism, catche~ the deviations without, however, being c~pable of analyzing them, as the Serbian guslars and their audience noti(:(" and ofi:en condemn any deviation from the syllabic [::,~:ttern ,)f th(: epic songs and from the regular location of the break but do not know how to define such a slip. Often contrasts in the grammatical make-up su,)po~ ,~ the m(,tric~l dixdsio~, of a poem into strophes and smaller sectio ~:;, as for insl:at~cc, in the double trichotomy of the Hussite battle :,ong of tht' oarlv



M. Schl~mch (Warsaw 1966); Razbor tobol'skix stixov Radig(~eva,' 18 :,:k, 7 (Leningrad 1966); 'The G r a m m a t i c a l S t r u c t u r e of J a n k o Nr{ti's \:or~t.:~,' 5:bornik ]ilozo]icke] ]akulty Univerzity Komen,:kdho, 16 (Bratisla,,a 1964); [with C. L6vi-Scrauss] 'Les Chats de Charles Baude!aire,' L'Homrne, 2 (1962) ; ' U n e microscopie du dernier Spleen dam; les ;~'leurs du Mal,' Tel O,~el. 29 (:Paris 1c,:67) ; 'S~cruktura na poslednoto Bc1 evo stihotvorenie,' Ezik i literat~tra, 16 (Sofia 1961); [with B. Casacu] 'Anal~.'se du pob~Fle Fevedere de .Mihai E m i n e s c u , ' Cahiers de lingui~tlque thdorique et appliqude, I (Bucharest 1%2); 'Devugk~ pel~' [..k. ~q!;,k's poem], Orbis scriptz,s D. Tschizewski] zum 7,~. Geburtstag ,Mu ~'5,,zh 1966) ; [~ i~h P. Colaclides] 'Grain matical imagery in ('a',.'~:lfy's p o e m ' ] i e m e m b e r , B o d y ' , ' Linguistics, 20 (The H a g u e 1966) : 'I)er gramnaatische Ba.u des Gedichts yon B. Brecht 'Wir sind sie',' Beitrdge zur Spvad~wissenscha/2, Volkskunde und Liwratur]orschung, IV. Steinitz davgebracht (T3erlin 1965) : ,:rid t h e papers refer,'ed to in the i!ootnotes 4 and 6. "Fhe entiro ~'hird v o l u m e of R. Jakobson's Selected Writing:;, now in preparation, is de~'otcd t', "Poetry of G r a m m a r and G r a m m a r of Poetr" ' '



604



ROMAN J A K O E S O N



fifteenth century, 4) or, even, they unde lie and bui!d such a stratified composition, as we observe it in /larvell's poem To his Coy Mistress with its three tripartite paragraphs, grammatically delimited and subdivided. The juxtaposition of com rasting grammatical concepts may be compared with the so-calle~ 'dynamic :utting' in film montage, a type of cutting, which, e.g., in Spottis~voode's definition, uses the juxtaposition of contrasting shots or sequences to generate ideas in the mind of the spectator, which these constituent shots or sequences by themselves do not carry. Among grammatical categories utilized for parallelisms and contrast~:; we actually find all the parts ot speech both mutable aml immutable, numbers, genders, cases, grades, tenses, aspects, moods, • _,t___ voice:3, ,. . 1, ~. . . .e . -q O ~ ~ao~u~ct and concrete words, animates and inanimates, a.ppellatives and proper names, affirmatives and negatives, finite and infinite verbal forms, definite and indefinite pronouns or articles, and diverse syntactic elements and constructions. The Russian writer Veresaev c'nfesse:l in his intimate notes that sometimes he felt as if imagery were '.,. mere counterfeit of genuine poetry'. As a nile, in imageless poems it is the 'figure of g r a m mar' which dominates and which supplants the tropes. Both the Hussite battle song and Pu~kin's lyrics as 'Ja vas/4ubil' are eloquent examples of such a monopoly of grammatical devices. Much more usual, however, is an intensive interplay of both elements, as for instance, in Pu~kin's stanzas 'Cto v imeni tebe moem', manifestly contrasting with his cited composition .vlthout images,' both being written in the same year and probably dedicated to the same ad~re.,see, Karoi[ina Sobaflska. 5) The imaginative, metaphoric vehicles of a poem may be opposed to its matter-of-fact level by a sharp concomitant contrast of their grammatical constituents, as we obnerve ~t, for example, in the Polish concise meditations of Cyprian Norwid, one of the greatest world poets of the later nineteenth century.n) 4) See 'Kto~- jsfi bo~i bojovnici, 'International Journal o/Slavic Lingu, istics



and Poetics, 7, 1963. z} CI. the comparative scrutiny of these two Pugkin's poems in the Russian paper referred to in the footnote 1. 6) See 'Przeszh ~ ' C)qgriana Norwida,' Pamiftnik literacki, 54, (Warsaw t963).



POETRY



OF G R A M M A R



AND



GRAMMAR



OF P O E T R Y



605



The obligatory character of the grammatical processes and concepts constrains the poet to reckon with them; eiffer he is striving for symmetry and sticks to these simple, repeatable, diaphanous patterns, based on a binary principle, or he may cope with them, when longing for an 'organic chaos'. I stated repeatedly that the rhyme technique is 'either grammatical or antigrammatical' but never agrammatical, and the same may be applied as well to pcets' grammar in general. There is in this i espect a remarkable analogy between the role c,f grammar in poetry and the painter's composition based on a latent or patent geometrical order or on a revulsion against geomelrical arrangements. For the figurative arts g,eometrical principles represent a 'beautiful necessity,' accordi,g to the designation taken over by Bragd,-.~. from Emerson. It is the same necessity which in language marks out the grammatical meanings. 7) The correspondence between the two fields which aheadv in the thirteen::h century was pointed out by Robert Kilwardby (see Wallerand, p. 46) and which prompted Spinoza to try.at grammar more geometrico, has emerged in a linguistic study by Benjamin Lee Whorl, ' L a n g u a g e , Mind and Reality' published sholtly after his death: Madras, 1942. The author discusses the abstract 'designs of sentence structure' as opposed to 'individual sentence.,~' and to the vocal:ul~ry, which is a 'somewhat rudimcntary and not s?lf-stlfficient paX' of the linguistic order, and envisages 'a "geometry' ~f form principles characteristic of each language'. A further comparison between gramma: and geometry was outlined in Stalin's pdemics of 1950 against Marr's linguistic Mas: the distinctive property of grammar lies in its abstractive power; 'abstracting itself from anything that is pxrticular and concrete in words and sentences, gramma,," treats only the general pattern, underlying the word,'hanges and the combination of words into sentences, and builds in ,;ueh a way grammatical rules and laws . . . In this respect grammar bears a resemblance to geometry, which, when giving its law.~;, abstracts itself from concrete objects, treats objects as bodies deprived of concreteness and defines thei~ muO~.M relations not as concrct~. relations of certain concrete objects c u t as relations of bodies in



7) Cf. ~t° Jakobson, 'Boas' view of gram-natit ~dmeaning, 'American .4 nthropologist, 61, 5, part 2, Memoir 89, 1959.



606



ROMAN JAKOBSON



general, namely, ~elations deprived of any concreteness.' s) The abstractive power of human thought, underlying - in the views of the two quoted authors - both geometrical relations and grammar, .~uperimposes simple geometrical and grammatical figures upon the pictorial word of particular objects and upon the concrete lexical 'wherewithal' of the verbal art, as it was shrewdly realized in the thirteenth century by Villard de Honnecourt for graphic arts and by Galfredu.~ for poetry. The pivotal role, performed in the grammatical texture of poe+:ry bv (iiverse kinds of pronouns, is due to the fact that pronouns, in contradistinction to all other autonomous words, are purely grammatical, relational units, and besides substantival and adiectival pror~ouns we must include in this class also adverbial pronouns and the ,+o-called substantive (rather oronominal) w~hs ~,,~h as to be ~-'~ 1o h(,:ve. The relation of pronouns to non-pronominal words has been repeate(tly compared wit.h the relation between geometrical and l,by+dca] bodies (see, e.g., Zareckij). B.:side coramon or wide.~;pread devices the grammatical texture c +. [.umtry offers many salier~t differential features, typical of a given pat]ma] literature or of a limited period, a specific trend, an indivi(!ua poet or ,even one single work. The thirteentb century students of a~ts whose names we have quoted remind us of the extraordinary compositional sense and skill of the Gothic epoch and ilelp us to inte-pret the impressive structure of the Hussite battle song ' K t o ~ i~fi ~:4.i bojovnici'. We deliberately dwell on this incentive revolutionary poem almost free of tropes, far from decorativeness and rnainerism. 1"he grammatical structure of this work reveals a pan icularly elaborate ar::iculation. A~ shown by the analysis of the song (see footnote 4), its three stro)hes in turn display a trinitarian form: they are divided into thr~ ~ smaller strophic unit.,; - membra. Each of the three strophes exh b:~ts its specific grammatical features which we labeled 'vertical simi !arities'. Each of the three membra throughout the three strophes 8) As V. A. ;,'vegin:ev brought to my attention, Stalin's confrontation of gran mar with geometry was prompted by the views of V. Bogorodickij, an outs a~ding disciple cf the young Baudouin de Courtenay and M. Kruszewski.



POETRY



OF GRAMMAR



AND



GRAMMAR



OF POETRY



607



h.s its pa,rticular properties, termed 'horizontal similariti~;' and distinguMdng any given membrum in the strophe fr~ir, i~:s two other membra. The initial and the final membra of the .~,ong are linked together with its central membrum (the second membrum of the second stro, phe) and differ trom the rest of the membra by special features, enabling us to connect these three membra through a 'falling diagonal', in contradistinction to the 'rising diagonal' linking the central membrum of the song with the final raembru~: of the initial strophe and with the initial rr.embrum of the final strophe. Furthermore, noticeable similarities bring together (and separate fr(ml the rest of the song) the initial membra of the first and bird .~trophes with the second membrum of the second strophe, an~, on the other hand, the second membra of the first and third stro?hes with t~e third membrum of the second strophe. The fo__rm_erdisposition may be labeled 'initial upright arc', because it involves initial vnembra, while the tatter, iavolving a final membru,m, will be called 'final ~.~pright arc'. There appear, moreover, the 'inverted arcs', likewise grammatically d(limited, an 'initial' one, uniting the initial ~rembra of the first and last strophes, with the central membrum oi tnc .~t-c,,r,l strophe, and a 'final inverted arc', tying the central ~nemb~/a of the first and last strophe.~' with the final mernbrum of the second strophe. This steadfast membnflcatJ, n a,.d congruou.~ ac'~r.,,,.t~i( itv must be viewed against the background of Gothic art and ,~,.h,,~.,. *;~;,.,-~ convincingl. 3 compared by Erwin Panofskv. In its sla0pe the Czech song of the early fifteenth century approximates the authoritative precepts of the 'classic S u m m a with its three requirements of (1) totality (sutficient enumeration), (2) arrangement according to a system of homologous parts and parts of parts (sufficient articulation), and (~;) distinctness and deductive cogency (sufficient interrelation).' However immense the difference is between Thomism and t]he ideoiogy c* the anonymous author of Zisskiana cantio, the shape of this song totally satisfies the artistic request of Thomas Aquinas" 'the senses delight in things duty proportioned as in something akin to them; for, the sense, too, is a kind of reason as is ever?" cognitive power.' The grammatical texture of the Hussite chorale corresponds to the compositional principles of Czech contemporaneous I~ainting. In his monograph about the pictorial art of the ttm~si~te epoch, Kropgt~ek analyzes the style of the early fifteenth century an'i points out a conglq.lotts and systematic articulation of the surface, a strict '



"



"



"0



'



--



. . . . .



608



ROMAN J A K O B S O N



subordination of the individual parts to the total compositional t;~sks and a deliberate use of contrasts. The Czech example helps us to glance into the intricacy of corresp)ndences between the functions of grammar in poetry and of re1~tional geometPy in painting. We are faced ~ t h the phenomenologic d problem of an intrinsic kinship between both factors and with a c mcrete historical search for convergent development and for intera,:tion between verbal and representational art. Furthermore, in the quest for a delineation of artistic trends and traditions, the analysis of grammatical texture provides us with important clues, mad, f n~dly, ~.~: approach the vital question, how a poetic work exploits the exta~t ~nventory of masterly devices for a new end and ree valuates them iin the light of their novel tasks. Thus, for instance, t i~le mast,- piece of Hussite revolutionary poetry has inherited from the opulent Gothic stock both kinds of grammatical parallelism, in I lopkins' parlance 'comparison for likeness' and 'comparison for unlikeness', and we have to investigate how the combination of these t wo, mainly grammatical ways of proceeding enabled the poet to ~chieve a coherent, convincing, effective transition from the initial spiritual through the belligerent argumentation of ~:he second strot~h,e to the military orders and battle cries of the finale, or - in other word s - how the poetic delight in verbal structures duly proportioned grows into a preceptive power leading to a direct action.



J:tazvard University, Boylston Hall 3oz, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.



REFERENCES ,~,DRIANOVA-PERETC, V., 1954. Russka]a demokratideska]a satira X V I I



v.



Moscow-L~mingrad. Ar~Iszov, N., 1876. 'Povest' o Fome i Ereme', Drewz]a]a i nova]a Rossija, 4. = ( "~ST.~X~VA, A., 1951. Byliny Severa, 2. Moscow-Leningrad. [~E:~THA:~, J., 1939. Theory o/Fictions, ed. and introduced by C, K. Ogden.



l~ondc,n. BEtraY, F., 1958. Poets' grammar. London. ]~-~GATY~,~tEV,P , 1967. 'Improvizacija i normy xudo~est-vetmyx priemov n a ~ateriale povestej X V l I I v., r.adp~j na htbo~nyx kartinka~c, skazok i ~ e n o Ereme i Fome,' To Honor Roman J akobsol¢, 1. The Hague-Paris. Bv~soDo n, C., 19t0. The beautilul necessity. Rochester, New York.



P O E T R Y OF GRAMMAR AND GRAMMAR OF P O E T R Y



609



BROOKE-Ro~E, C., 1958. A grammar o] metaphor. I,ondon. DAVlE, D., 1955. Articulate energy; an inquiry into the syn~.ax o] Eng, lish poetry. London. FARAL, E., 1958. Les arts podtiques du X I I e et X I I I e sii!cle Paris. FORTUNATOV, F., i955. Izbrannye Trudy, 1. Moscow. GONDA, J., 1959. Stylistic repetition in the Veda. Amsterdam. HOPKINS, G. M., 1959. Jo,:rnals and papers. London. KROP~C~tJ;K, P., 1956. Mal*~stvl doby husitshd. Prague. P&NOFSKY, E., 1957. Gothic a,'chitecture and scholasticism. New York. SAPIR, E., 1921. Language New York. SAPIR, E., 1930. Totality. Baltimore. SOBOLEVSKIJ, A., 1895. Vdikorusskie narodnye pesni, t. SPb. SPOTTISWOODE, R., 1951. ~Film and its technique. New York. STALIN, I., 1950. M~rksizm i voprosy ]azyhoznanija. Moscow. STEIN~TZ, W., 19.34. Der Parallelismus in der /innisch-karelischen Vo!b.sdich tung. Helsinki. VER:ESAEV, V., 1¢360. 'Zapisi dlja sebja,' Novy] Mir, 1. WALLERAND, (_~., 1913. Les oeuvres de Siger de Courtrai. Louvain. WHORF, B. L., 1965. Language, thought and reality. New York. XARUZIN, N., 1890. Russkie lopari. Moscow. ZARECKIJ, A., 1960. 'O mestoimenii,' Russhij jazyh v §kole, 6.