The integrity of the literary process: Notes on the development of theoretical thought in J. Mukařovský's work

Abstract

It is distorting to judge Mukafovsky’s structuralism today as an integrated system of thought while leaving out of account the individual stages of his development. Mukafovsky, in fact, has been shaping his views of the theory of art by proceeding from one separate problem to another. In this intellectual process Mukaiovsky has been clarifying or, if necessary, correcting the mutual relations between his current theoretical ideas and the views developed in preceding stages. Not merely the single theses but also the intellectual processes through which Mukafovsky arrived at his particular views are, therefore, important for evaluating Czech literary and aesthetic structuralism. I shall attempt to reconstruct this developing methodological clarification by focusing on one problem, namely on that of the LITERARY PROCESS. This problem is so central that it enables us to form an idea about Mukaiovsky’s total theoretical development which took place in the context of the literary and aesthetic theories of the time. The literary process, decisive for the ‘birth’ and ‘life’ of literary works, is, as we know, determined by three agents: (1) by the originator of the work, i.e. by poets and writers, (2) by the society for which the work is created, i.e. by its recipients and perceivers and, finally, (3) by the literary practise, objectified by the existing literature and its structure. None of these historical agents can be isolated: the genesis of the work is linked to the social situation and to the state of literary structure; social awareness also contains a system of literary norms and requirements that affect the process of creation; literary structure itself develops in the social context and its motion is unthinkable without creators. It is the interweaving of all these agents that gives these relations the character of an actual historical process. In the late twenties, when Mukarovsky was becoming active as a