Bottlenecks

FOREWORD

Conception and method. In 2015, the Moscow publishing house NLO had published my monograph “Hypogrammar: The Book on Mandelstam,” being a reviewed and extended version of my Ph.D. thesis. The book I am now offering to the reader is comprised of eight research papers, some of which were written during my work on the Mandelstam project, and some after it had been completed. Only one of them is focused on Mandelstam, but, composed as a singular cycle, they are supposed to develop and generalize the interpretative strategy fleshed out in my thesis. After a brief summary of that strategy, I will proceed to describe this book.

The time when I was working on my thesis coincided with the years in Mandelstam studies when the so-called subtextual method, developed by Kirill Taranovsky and his adherents in the 1970s and dominant in Mandelstam poetic studies ever since, started to seriously frustrate many researchers. The theoretical background of this method was the idea that in Mandelstam’s poetic system, every aesthetically significant component was not just explicitly motivated by being present in this or that obvious parallelism (a rhyme or other figure, a metaphor or other trope), but also implicitly motivated by a concealed but detectable and verifiable genetic link to an equal or similar element of the antecedent text called the subtext. Thus, the motivating subtextual device was a concealed quotation (reminiscence) of a text (not necessarily verbal) in the text in question. That quoted text usually had a high cultural status, since the object of the imitation or application (i.e. inspiring the idea of similarity or contiguity) was supposed be recognizable.

One of the most salient points of the subtextual method was based on the idea of essential polygenic nature of Mandelstam’s text, where any aesthetically relevant element needed more than one implicit motive. However, the main reason for the increasing unhappiness related to the subtextual method was the permanently increasing number of Mandelstam’s isolated subtexts found by Mandelstam scholars. Against the background of outstanding non-narrative character and logical incoherence of Mandelstam’s writing, especially in his poetry, such abundance was causing perplexity and discomfort. The found subtexts of a poem did not always help in the task of its fruitful interpreting; their mutual combinations seemed dubious; unknown but imminently detectable subtexts, contrary to all theoretical claims, threatened to bring the existing ones in doubt rather than join a productive interchange.

The foundation of this book ascends in the final count to the well-known idea of Roman Jakobson: the dominant aesthetic function of the artistic text (message) is revealed on all of its levels through the fundamental principle of parallelism. The subtextual method had demonstrated that this principle is double-barrelled: it can be explicit or implicit. An implicit parallelism indicates the presence of just one of the paired elements in the text, while the second, absent one, is obviously absent. The source of the absent parallelism element is the subtext in the conceptual framework of Mandelstam scholars.

I.P. Smirnov had revised Jakobson’s concept in the book “The Generation of Intertext: Elements of Intertextual Analysis with Examples from the Works of Boris Pasternak” (1985; 1995). This research was based, on the one hand, on intertextual models of French structuralists, and, on the other hand, on the achievements of the subtextual method and the contributions to the idea of the Moscow/Tartu semiotic school. I had already discussed the key assumptions of Smirnov’s book in the introductory section of “Hypogrammar,” where I was claiming that though Smirnov had developed the achievements of Mandelstam studies, the Mandelstam studies had not yet made the best of his book. Now, based on my own experience of applying Smirnov’s model to analysing Mandelstam’s work, I hope to extend the area of practical application of the model. First, I’m extending it far beyond the pale of Mandelstam studies; second, I’m testing it on literary phenomena which belong to various and quite different levels of artistic communication.

I’ll cite the simplest example of such restriction and further expansion of the semantic field from Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Заклятие смехом” (“Incantation by Laughter”):

…смешики, смешики,

Смеюнчики, смеюнчики.

[…laughlings, laughlings

Laughlets, laughlets.]

Here, as we can see, one literal repetition is intercepted by another literal repetition. The elements of each couple are not just grammatically equivalent, but, being cognate neologisms, create a semantic unity connected with the element of laughter. From this reduced sense, threads are spinning to all other segments of the text produced from the same root. The title of the poem, which is something like the solution to the riddle, is its hypotext, only in its explicit shape.

I will call the manifestation of the hypotextual “common denominator” in the text the bottleneck effect. In population genetics, this term means a sharp reduction in the size of a biological species genetic diversity and the accompanying shrinking of its population, which is supposed to be subsequently restored from a low-capacity genetic pool. Transferred from genetics to literature, the metaphorical bottleneck image also relates to the transmission of genetic information. While not addressing the catastrophic side of the real bottleneck effect, this metaphor however is fully compliant with the bottleneck concept in its broader idiomatic sense, as a weak, problematic, overwhelmed section of a large system. Finding that kind of vulnerable section is what allowed a code breaker to break the system code. The system, however, is deliberately inviting this kind of a break, basically determining it through the multiplicity of information channels which all lead the code-breaker to the same innermost point. When speaking about the retrospective decoding process, it makes more sense to speak about the reverse bottleneck effect.

The same mechanics acts on supratextual levels. For example, on the scale of an author’s corpus, the hypotexts of various works can lead to the next-order hypotext, like it is in Mandelstam’s case. Everywhere, on both micro- and macro-levels of artistic communication, the interpreter’s work means identifying the bottleneck effect.

The structure and composition of the book. In this book, the set of theoretical tools described above is variously applied to the phenomena of Russian literature of the 19th through the first half of the 20th century. The only exception is the small chapter on one local device in “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” but even in that case the oblique verification of the device is made possible through the comparative analysis of the fragment in a number of censored Russian translations of Rabelais’s work.

The book consists of eight chapters, which are autonomous from the subject point of view but divided into two-chapter pieces due to thematic affinity and similar articulation of the problem. These couples form four sections. The binary chapters are contrasting to one another in some salient feature within the same invariant. Four sections, in their turn, are quite different in the scale of the interpreted artistic messages and, if one can say so, in the bottleneck calibre.