grow是什么意思Art as Technique

2021年1月19日发(作者：martial)
Art as Technique
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky

“Art is thinking in images.” This maxim, which even high school students parrot, is nevertheless the
starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some kind of systematic literary
theory.
The
idea,
originated
in
part
by
Potebnya,
has
spread.
“Without
imagery
there
is
no
art,
and
in
particular no poetry,” Potebnya writes. And elsewhere, “poetry, as well as prose, is first and foremost a
special way of thinking and knowing.”

Poetry is a special way of thinking; it is precisely, a way of thinking in images, a way which permits
what is generally called “economy of mental effort,” a way which makes for “a sensation of the relative
ease
of
the
process.”
Aesthetic
feeling
is
the
reaction
to

this
economy.
This
is
how
the
academician
Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky,
who
undoubtedly
read
the
works
of
Potebnya
attentively,
almost
certainly
understood
and
faithfully
summarized
the
ideas
of
his
teacher.
Potebnya
and
his
numerous
disciples
consider poetry a special kind of thinking--- thinking by
means of images; they feel that the purpose of
imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means
of the known.

Nevertheless, the definition “Art is thinking in images,” which means (I omit the usual middle terms
of
the
argument)
that
art
is
the
making
of
symbols,
has
survived
the
downfall
of
the
theory
which
supported it. It survives chiefly in the wake of Symbolism, especially among the theorists of the Symbolist
movement.
Many
still
believe,
then,
that
thinking
in
images---
thinking,
in
specific
scenes
of
“roads
and
landscape”
and
“furrows
and
boundaries”
---
is
the
chief
characteristic
of
poetry.
Consequently,
they
should have expected the history of “imagistic
art,” as they call it, to consist of a history of changes in
imagery. But we find that images change little; from century to century, from nation to nation, from poet to
poet,
they
flow
on
without
changing.
Images
belong
to
no
one:
they
are
“the
Lord’s.”
T
he
more
you
understand
an
age,
the
more
convinced
you
become
that
the
images
a
given
poet
used
and
which
you
thought
his
own
were
taken
almost
unchanged
from
another
poet.
The
works
of
poets
are
classified
or
grouped according to the new techniques that poets discover and share, and according to their arrangement
and development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging images than
with creating them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the
ability to create them.
Imagistic thought does not, in any case, include all the aspects of art nor even all the aspects of verbal
art.
A
change
in
imagery
is
not
essential
to
the
development
of
poetry.
We
know
that
frequently
an
expression
is
thought
to
be poetic,
to
be
created
for
aesthetic
pleasure,
although
actually
it
was
created
without such intent---
e.g., Annensky’s opinion that the Slavic languages are especially poetic and Andrey
Bely’s ecstasy over the technique of placing adjectives
after nouns, a technique used by eighteenth-century
Russian poets. Bely joyfully accepts the technique as something artistic, or more exactly, as intended, if we
consider
intention
as
art. Actually,
this
reversal
of
the
usual
adjective-noun
order
is
a
peculiarity
of
the
language (which had been influenced by Church Slavonic). Thus a work may be (1) intended as prosaic
and accepted as poetic, or (2) intended as poetic and accepted as prosaic. This suggests that the artistry
attributed to a given work results
from the way we perceive it. By “works of art,” in the narrow sense, we
mean words created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible.
Potebnya’s
conclusion,
which
can
be
formulated
“poetry
equals
imagery,”
gave
ris
e
to
the
whole
theory that “imagery equals symbolism,” that the image may serve as the invariable predicate of various
subjects. (This conclusion, because it expressed ideas similar to the theories of the Symbolists, intrigued
some of their leading representatives---
Andrey Bely, Merezhkovsky and his “eternal companions” and , in
fact,
formed
the
basis
of
the
theory
of
Symbolism.)
The
conclusion
stems
partly
from
the
fact
that
Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he
ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means
of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression. I shall
clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and
getting the butter on her fingers. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic
trope.
Now
a
different
example.
The
child
is
playin
g
with
my
glasses
and
drops
them.
I
call,
“Hey
butterfingers!” This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, butter finger is metonymic; in
the second, metaphoric ---but this is not what I want to stress.)
Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is, depending
upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is neither more nor less
effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the
commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an
expression
(including
words
or
even
articulated
sounds.)
But
poetic
imagery
only
externally
resembles
either
the
stock
imagery
of
fables
and
ballads
or
thinking
in
images---e.g.,
the
example
in
Ovsyaniko-
Kulikovsky’s
Language
and
Art

in
which
a
little
girl
calls
a
ball
a
little
watermelon.
Poetic
imagery
is
but
one
of
the
devices
of
poetic
language.
Prose
imagery
is
a
means
of
abstraction:
a
little
watermelon instead of a lampshade, or a little watermelon instead of a head, is only the abstraction of one
of the object’s characteristics, that of roundness. It is no different from saying that the head and the melon
are both round. This is what is meant, but it has nothing to do with poetry.
These ideas about the economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity, are perhaps
true in their application to “practical” language; they were, however, extended to poetic lan
guage. Hence
they do not distinguish properly between the laws of practical language and the laws of poetic language.
The fact that Japanese poetry has sounds not found in conversational Japanese was hardly the first factual
indication of the differences between poetic and everyday language. Leo Jakubinsky has observed that the
law
of
the
dissimilation
of
liquid
sounds
does
not
apply
to
poetic
language.
This
suggested
to
him
that
poetic
language
tolerated
the
admission
of
hard-to-pronounce
conglomerations
of
similar
sounds.
In
his
article, one of the first examples of scientific criticism, he indicates inductively, the contrast (I shall say
more about this point later) between the laws of poetic language and the laws of practical language.
We must, then, speak about the laws of expenditure and economy in poetic language not on the basis
of an analogy with prose, but on the basis of the laws of poetic language.
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it
becomes
automatic.
Thus,
for
example,
all
of
our
habits
retreat
into
the
area
of
the
unconsciously
automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the
first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will
agree
with
us.
Such
habituation
explains
the
principles
by
which,
in
ordinary
speech,
we
leave
phrases
unfinished
and
words
half
expressed.
In
this
process,
ideally
realized
in
algebra,
things
are
replaced
by
symbols.
Complete
words
are
not
expressed
in
rapid
speech;
their
initial
sounds
are
barely
perceived.
Alexander
Pogodin
offers
the
example
of
a
boy
considering
the
sentence
“The
Swiss
mountains
are
beautiful” in the form of a series of letters:
T. S. m. a. b
.
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of
symbols
(letters,
especially
initial
letters).
By
this
“algebraic”
method
of
thought
we
apprehend
objects