System and History: A Critique of Russian Formalism

Abstract

The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an imma­ nent approach to the literary text and the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change — that is, of the connection between literary history and history, and between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists' almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra-aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system into which it is inserted). Nevertheless, despite this incompleteness, and despite the extent of the Marxist critique of the Formalist School, its methodological bases can provide a useful lever for overcoming the dichotomy of intrinsic (formal or literary) and extrinsic (social or contentual or ideo­ logical) values. Particularly in its later phases, the Formalist school worked towards a dynamic conception of the temporal field in which the literary text is situated; this field is constituted by the unity of the diachronic and synchronic systems to which the text belongs, that is, by the fact that every diachronic series is at each moment determined by the systematic configuration of elements at that moment, and that conversely