ABSTRACT
Jakobson’s theory of poetry is obviously motivated by the belief, in his case the verifiable certainty, that poetic structuration and signification are intrinsically different from any other form of linguistic discourse, and it might seem rather odd that his generally impartial, scientific methods of analysis could accommodate the pseudo-mystical notion of supraconscious, subliminal exchange. The essay on ‘Subliminal Verbal Patterning’ was published in 1970, and a short, related piece called ‘Supraconscious Turgenev’ in 1979, but the questions raised by both take us back again to the Russia of half a century before, to the unlikely collaboration between Futurism and Formalism. The zaumnye or supraconscious/transrational poem was one of the more wildly revolutionary gestures of the Futurist ethos. In the broader context of modernism correspondences can be found between Zaum and stream of consciousness or the Imagist notion of an object or experience captured in an instant of time. All share the desire to transcend the refractory mechanics of conventional language, literary and non-literary, and to uncover more instinctive, primal relations between consciousness, experience and signification. The principal difference between Zaum and its modernist relatives is that, while the latter maintained the irritating, indeed self-contradictory, belief that language, in all its forms, is a barrier to or falsification of true consciousness and experience, the Zaum poets dealt with language as a constituent element of all aspects of the human condition. Xlebnikov and Kručenyx (see Pomorska, 1968, pp. 93–118), the two most prominent Zaum poets, believed that their new method of writing would bring poet and reader closer to an encounter with language as experience. Many of Xlebnikov’s poems share with concrete poetry (of which Marinetti was the principal Futurist exponent) and sound poetry an emphasis upon the materiality of the sign at the expense, and virtually to the exclusion, of conventional linguistic organisation. But unlike most of his graphicentric or phonocentric counterparts Xlebnikov also concentrated upon the systems and subsystems by which we classify and analyse linguistic material. In short, he shifted the balance of the double pattern as far as possible towards poetic convention. He did not, however, create formless, unstructured collections of sounds and rhythmic sequences; rather he allowed correspondences between rhyme, assonance and alliteration to effectively supersede syntactic structure as the generator of meaning. This foregrounding of intersections between the material elements of language was the principal topic of Jakobson’s 1921 essay on ‘New Russian Poetry’. For example, when dealing with the deployment of neologisms Jakobson stresses that the bringing together of different roots, prefixes, suffixes, affixes will create ‘dissociations’ ‘in the given structure of language as a whole’, but that in Xlebnikov’s poems this deformation of the structural norm is countered by an internal pattern ‘within the framework of a particular poem, which as it were forms a closed linguistic system’ (Brown, p. 74). This secondary pattern consists of phonemic parallelism.
It is possible to produce verses characterised by an emphasis primarily on euphony. But is this sort of emphasis equivalent to the accentuation of pure sound? If the answer is yes then we have a species of vocal music, and vocal music of an inferior kind at that…. Euphony operates, however, not with sounds but with phonemes, that is, with acoustical impressions which are capable of being associated with meaning.
(Brown, p. 77)