Theory of Prose [antikvár]

Preface It is perfectly clear that language is influenced by socioeconomic conditions. There is an essay by Gleb Uspensky in which he shows how a fishing crew creates its own reality by inventing names for a constellation of stars which guides them in their nightly "search for the white salmon." In the language of cattle breeders you will find numerous words designating such peculiarities as the coat colors of cows and bulls. These do not lend themselves easily to translation. Nevertheless, the word is not a shadow. The word is a thing. It changes in accordance with the linguistic laws that govern the physiology of speech and so on. If in some language the name of a breastplate becomes the name of the breast of a human being, then, of course, this can be understood historically. But the changes of words do not necessarily correspond to the changes in the form of the breastplate, and, besides, the word may survive the phenomenon that had given rise to it in the first place. As a literary critic, I've been engaged in the study of the internal laws that govern literature. If I may bring up the analogy of a factory, then I would say that neither the current state of the world cotton market nor the politics of cotton tmsts interests me. One thing alone concerns me: the number of strands that make up the cotton plant and the different ways of weaving them. For that reason, this book is devoted in its entirety to a study of the changes in literary form. Viktor Shklovsky Introduction Toward a Random Theory of Prose Gerald L. Bruns I have a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the streets. —Don Quixote Modernity begins with the recognition that the object before me is not a sign but a random particle. And it is all there is; nothing is behind or beyond it, nor is anything underneath. It is opaque and irreducible, one singularity among others multiplied excessively in every direction. The universe is made of such things. The historic task of modernity, starting in the seventeenth century and continuing to this day, has been to develop a theory of rationality adequate to a universe of randomness—and not only a theory but a program of strategic operations capable of entering into the heterogeneity of things and bringing it under control. One could say that with modernity the task of reason was no longer to interpret the world but rather to overcome it—to reduce it conceptually, to grasp and contain it within an order of general laws and technological systems, finally to intervene in its operations and to turn it to productive account. To make sense of the world, we must penetrate its incoherent surface and lay bare its deep structures; we must grasp not its hidden meanings but its inner workings. Grammar is mastery. And with this idea comes the invention of politics, whose task is to produce a cultural system free from internal contradiction, social fragmentation, and endless crises of legitimacy. Another way to put this might be to say that modernity begins with the discovery that the book of the world is written in prose. A poetic universe is, philosophically speaking, a universe of correspondences. In a poetic universe, every fragment is a luminous detail. It resonates with the super-sensuous. It is in perpetual transport from the everydayness of its material appearance to the sphere of the transcendental where it is really located, and its impact upon consciousness constitutes a moment of vision or the sense of embracing the totality of all that is. There are overarchings everywhere. But a prose universe is just one damn thing after another, like an attic or junkyard or side of the road. Shklovsky says that Cervantes began his great book by organizing it as a dinner table, but almost at once things got