neither its tropes nor its poetic licenses any longer speak to the consciousness.
Form takes possession of the matter; the matter is totally dominated by the form. Then form becomes stereo-type, and it is no longer alive. When this happens an access of new verbal material is required, an addition of fresh elements from the everyday language, to the end that the irrational structures of poetry may once again disturb us, may once again hit a vital spot.[1]
Khlebnikov thought of taking the required "fresh verbal material" from oral language, from folk-culture and from "the countryside". He wrote of words being created every moment "in the countryside by the rivers and forests"[2], and described his word—creation technique as being based on this fact. The creation of new words; he continued,
gives us the right to populate the died-out, non-existent words—words no longer beating with the waves of language—with new life.[3]
The result, he concluded would be that the words would again sparkle with life "as in the first days of creation".[4]
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The struggle against 'byt' on the linguistic level was, then, a struggle against what Jakobson called a "hardening" of the forms of language into a "stereotype". This is the linguistic equivalent to the process described by Zamyatin in which a molten planetary mass (or a young science, religion, art-form or form of social life) cools—"the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust".[5]
- ↑ Ibid pp 69–70.
- ↑ Nasha Osnova, SP V 235.
- ↑ Ibid pp 233–4.
- ↑ Loc cit. This, of course, was more than a casual analogy: the idea of his art as a kind of re-enactment of the original creation—was part of a cosmic re-birth—was central to Khlebnikov (see, for example, his letter to Petnikov, SP V 313–14). Compare also the language of "Lesnaya'deva", written, as Markov says, "as if in an imaginary prehistoric tongue" (Longer Poems, p 94). There are many parallels with Joyce in "Finnegans Wake". A re-enactment of the Creation is obviously a supreme triumph over 'byt'.
- ↑ Zamyatin, op cit p 108.
