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Synaesthesia and Semiosis: Icon and Logos in Andrej Belyj's Glossalolija and Kotik Letaev
Author(s): Amy Mandelker
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 158-175
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309143
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1. Introduction
Vol.
34,
No.
(1990)
158
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tika smysla," 1909) and as illustrated in an example of ekphrasis or intermodal intertextuality in Glossalolija and Kotik Letaev.
of which is that language, like all other phenomena in the physical world,
must not be decoded or employed as a tool of logic or denotation, but
ought rather to be venerated and contemplated as an icon of the divine. To
remain true to his own principle, Belyj attempts to write Glossalolija in
glossolalic discourse. This is sufficient explanation for the dizzying poetic
chaos of the poem, which, Cassedy aptly notes, strikes us "primarily by its
utter madness" ("Belyj the Thinker," 332).
and perhaps the musical structure is most apt for the series of themes and
variations rung on etymological changes which illustrate the philosophical
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the ultimate achievement of artistic language. Glossalolija thus simultaneously explicates and demonstrates the power of those primary cognitive
processes of iconicity and synaesthesia which enhance semiosis.
Despite its problematic designation as a poema, some generic models for
Glossalolija may be claimed, for example, the tradition of sound dictionaries
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CTPYJl
rrK-rtr r "
Figure 2. The gesture "R-r-r-r!" The left side of the frame depicts the tongue on the bottom,
the superior arch represents the palate, and the arrows indicate the streams of air. The dancer
on the right enacts the gesture.
certo ordine, numero & figura constantes, non fortuito, nec casu, nec fragili hominum arbitrio
sed divinitus sic disposi tos atq; formatos, quo cum coeleftibus, atq; ipsis divinis corporibus
virtutibusq, consentiant. (107)
[the order, the numbers, and the shapes of letters are not constituted by chance or accident or
by human convention, but are formed divinely so that they are related to and accord with the
heavenly and divine bodies and their virtues.]
The events in the evolution of the cosmos as related by Belyj are enacted
respectively on Saturn, the sun, the moon, and finally earth. Each day, with
its planetary ruler, is also associated with an element (fire, air, water, and
earth, respectively), with a being (archangels, angels, demons, and men),
and with a complex of etymologically, phonically, or orthographically
related words whose semantic nexus suggests the significance of each day.
True to the spiralling course of evolution-which is the basis of anthroposophical belief, and which, as Janecek ("The Spiral") has demonstrated, is
the constitutive image of the novel Kotik Letaev-each subsequent day
represents both a recapitulation of the previous day and the introduction of
phase and begin the Jovian. As may be expected, the proper use and under-
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Belyj's attention to the salvific potential of extra-systemic, or extrareferential, properties of language may be seen as related to similar ideas of
Verlaine, etc., yet Belyj's theory of linguistic iconicity ought not to be char-
acterized as a Russian translation of French theory. Mallarm6's and Verlaine's essays limit the discussion of the evocative potential of language to
its manifestation in poetry, while Belyj's theory extends to all discourse and
semiotic processes. The French Symbolist privileging of the musical analogy
of the emblem, which de Man considers alien to French Symbolist aesthetics, proves to be central to the theories of Yeats and Belyj.
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"Voyelles" or Bal'mont's Poezija kak voliebstvo), Belyj derives his understanding of phonetic symbolism from his belief in the primary Edenic language, or to use theosophical terms, "Sensar," the Ur-language or language
of languages (Blavatsky, Glossary, 274). Weststeijn suggests that the Symbolists' experiments with sound patterning loosened the bond between signifier and signified by the process of foregrounding, concentrating on the
sound effects, onomatopoetic devices, incantational, or hypnotic effects of
language, the "evocative witchcraft" of Baudelaire. Belyj, by engaging in his
improvisations with the sounds of names, believed rather that he was, if
anything, strengthening the bond between signifier and signified; excavating
among the dead crusts and mineral deposits of the surface of modern languages to determine the fossil records of the proto-language at the vital
core. In describing Belyj as an explorer of etymologies, we recognize his
kinship with Xlebnikov, whose own linguistic investigations similarly reforged the link between signifier and signified. (Mandelker, "Chlebnikov";
Weststeijn, Chlebnikov).
3. Semiotics and Emblematics: Belyj's Theory of the Symbol
Belyj's interest in the sign (symbol) reflects his intuitive grasp of the three
that is, the distinction between the objective and subjective reifications of
the signified as it breaks down into the Kantian "thing-in-itself," and its
relationship to the psychological or cognitive formation of what Belyj calls
the "concept." In other words, Belyj focuses on the issue of what Peirce
termed the "interpretant," or that third aspect of the sign which serves to
represent the idea or signified of the sign in cognitive processes, and which
therefore is itself a sign, as Peirce states: "any representation is a represen-
with their referent: "...truth is the coincidence of the object with its
representation." ("Istina v takom slucae est' sovpadenie predmeta s predstav-
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In his discussion of the problem of transcendental values and the relationship between thought and language, Belyj rejects both idealist and
empiricist theories. Militating against the notion that linguistic representation is alien to thought, Belyj points out the logical ramifications of the
Saussurean concept of "l'arbitraire du signe":
...ecnH iOHITHCe o CHMBIne yCJnoBeHO, TO c o6pa3oBaHHeM Knacca CHMBOJnHqeCKHX fOHITHI~
n1Hm yanJceMcc OAHHaKOBO H OT AJCiCTBHTeCIbHOCTH, H OT HCTHHbI. MHp CHMBOnOB eCTb MHp
[If the concept of the symbol is relative (i.e., arbitrary, conventional, rather than fixed, A.M.),
then in framing a class of symbolic concepts, we are separating ourselves both from reality and
the truth. The world of Symbols is, then, a world of fictions. Every act of symbolization is merely
the false designation of existing objects in terms that correspond to nothing. In this light,
Symbolism appears to decompose the world of reality.]
His definition overlooks the obvious problem of convention in representation; to give the standard example, the pictorial use of parallel lines which
meet on the horizon succeeds in conveying perspective only as a result of
arbitrarily established conventions for translating three dimensions into two.
Umberto Eco (191-221) has formulated a complex view of the iconic sign
as a "surrogate stimulus": a generous definition which embraces perceptual
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two planes: spatial (features from nature) and temporal (experience of the
artist), and thus anticipates Baxtin's notion of the chronotope. Belyj emblematizes this concept as a cross at the center of which is a dot, from
which a perpetually expanding consciousness emanates, represented as a
series of concentric spheres. This cross with a dot at the center of expanding
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significations s'ils avaient le droit d'etre jeunes. Et les mots s'en vont cherchant, dans les
fourr6s du vocabulaire, de nouvelles compagnies .... (15)
[I am, in effect, a dreamer of words, a dreamer of the written word. ... The syllables of the
word become active. The stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like
a heavy load which prevented dreaming. Then the words take on new meanings as if they had
the right to be young. And the words begin to search in the cubbyholes of language for new
company ... .]
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The third stage, "intuition," consists of merging with the spiritual beings
and recognizing the transcendent unity of all manifestations. This is
accomplished through venerative contemplation. As contemplation of an
object plunges the neophyte into simultaneously contemplating the cognitive
representation of the object, one experiences first a response, then the expe-
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The "Record" of the race, the Akashic Record (Steiner, "Akashic"), the
suggestion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, is the basis for the excursion into the "memory of memory" which occupies the 35-year-old narrator
world of his home in the Arbat section of Moscow, was still as flexible as
the elastic bones of his developing body: "Eti kosti-porog, . . no razdvigaemy kosti; mne porog soznan'ja stoit peredvigaemym, pronicaemym, otkry-
vaemym.. ." (Kotik, 76). ["These bones are the threshold. .. But the bones
have separated; the threshold of consciousness becomes moveable, penetrable, open to me.. ."
While the threshold is open, the child is able to contemplate two knots of
- HH-HH-HHb> -
- KOTOpyKo BCHOMHHaeHIb TbI, TaK )Ke BOT, HOKHJOHstICb 6e3 luenoTa: o6pasbl nocBSILCeHHbIX nepe)KHBRaiHb MHOI BHOCJIeACTCBHH TaK, KaK HOJHoe TaHHbl CKnOHeHHe nlOKpoBeHHbIX @bHrypoOK Ha IIIKanqHKe... H3 pa3J1eTeB1IHXCS cKlIaOK; H -- o6pa3bI CKJIOHeHHbIX
BOJIXBOB B BeIHKOIfenHbIX KOpOHaX HaA SCHbIM HTHTeH ....
- Ha JaKHpOBaHHOM IuIKanHKe JIHHHH AepeBAHHbIX BOJIOKOH C6e)KarIHCb K AByM HATHaM:
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"No-no-no!"-
-which you recall, just like this, bending without a whisper: subsequently, I experienced the holy images as if they were filled with mysteries, as were the bowed veiled figures
on the little cupboard. . .-and the images of the Magi in their magnificent crowns bowed
over the radiant Infant...
-on the lacquer cupboard the lines of the wood grain run together into two spots: of the
sawed branches; and the spots are not spots, but Moors, that is, dark pious faces: the Magi.]
Tw x,
;i-~
0?~
Figure 3. The eurhythmic depiction of the Biblical phrase "Tohu-wa-Bohu" (Inta) ~nth)
(emptiness and invisibility). (From the second line of Genesis: "In the beginning God created
heaven and earth. Now the earth was unformed and void.. ." The Holy Scriptures, 1917 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America).
the Magi are meant to express the eurhythmic gesture of the Biblical Hebrew
phrase,
.In3 as
Anh
[emptiness
which
serves
the("Tohu-wa-bohu"
motto. Interestingly,
we have and
two invisibility]),
versions of the explicatio: the exegesis offered in Glossalolija and the "recalled" explication of
Kotik Letaev's childhood contemplation. The significance of the emblem is
the act of the Creation, and thus, according to figurative Biblical interpretation,
the birth of Christ. ".nf1 iTll" is taken from Genesis, where it refers
to the void preceding creation, before the manifestation of God on earth.
The Words of God in Genesis which will bring about creation are the same
logoi as the Logos which will create Christ. The Christ Child, however, is
not shown in the emblem; instead, the principle of linguistic iconicity is
invoked, adding a fourth semiotic dimension to the emblem. Occupying the
central space, the locus of the "ancient mystery" is the letter "t," itself a
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ija (See Figure 4) and Belyj's improvisation (or explicatio) on the letter "t,"
Stz
t
As the narrator proceeds in his growth up the slope of his psychic topos, he
"falls" from his earlier state of grace as he is forced to learn to employ words
referentially, this being the main difficulty confronting the maturing child:
- <(Hy, KOTHK, crca)KH TO-HH6ygub. . .
- ((OTero TbI MoJI'MqHib?))
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Later in his biography, the narrator returns to confront the two knots of
wood:
5I BnocneACTBHH B3pOCRbIM CMOTpen c o KHgaHHeM Ha JIaKHpOBaHHbIli CKaHnqHK: ABe Q)HrypbI,
The narrator is able to de-code the shapes into images, as he might "read"
the words of a prayer, but he fails to contemplate the image, and therefore
does not receive the mystery. In another section of the novel, the narrator
contrasts his childhood "memory" of a lion with his adult discovery of the
"truth": there was a Saint Bernard named "Lion" who lived in the Arbat,
and whom Kotik encountered on his morning walks. Despite the fact that
the narrator's memory of a lion has been invalidated when he learns that
the "lion" was only a large dog with the name of a lion, the narrator's soul
still reverberates with the image of the Lion. He recognizes his persistent
sense of mystery and awe as the immanence of the sign (blizko znamen'e).
He is able to "intuit" the "truth" about the Lion at this later stage of his
life, because he "was then reading Zarathustra." At this spiritually more
advanced stage of adulthood, he has learned to do what he failed to do
with the knots of wood; he contemplates the image (the memory of
memory) of the Lion as a sign.
Rather than depicting a Lacanian loss of meaning with the acquisition of
language, Belyj's narrative suggests that early childhood is an age of union
with language in its fullest significance, before the acquisition of adult language habits encroaches on the child's attunement to verbal symbols. This
model strikingly resembles Piaget's stages of child language acquisition, with
the transition from "egocentric" speech to "socialized" speech representing
the loss of a pre-social, "autistic" world view. Kotik, like Joyce's young
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this inspiration, he writes his first piece of prose. For Belyj also, the state of
Belyj has been accurately described as a precursor of Formalism and Structuralism, of statistical stylistics, and most recently, has even been credited
with anticipating the linguistic theory of distinctive features (Rifkin). The
perfusion of his philosophical thought throughout his oeuvre, even in his
most erratic, idiosyncratic and difficult compositions, allows us to recapture
and appreciate the degree to which his thought anticipates most of the
major developments in 20th-century literary theory and linguistic poetics.
Even more, Belyj's notion of the symbol, its creation and reception, is a
productive fusion of linguistic, philosophic, psychological, and poetic
thought which offers semiotic harmony as an alternative to the ruptures
and losses in signification posited by deconstruction.
NOTES
1 Brief versions of this paper were read at the Annual Meeting of the American Association
of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, New York, December, 1986, and at
the Comparative Literature Colloquium, City University of New York Graduate Center,
April, 1986. All translations are my own, with the exception of the excellent translations
by Steven Cassedy from which I quote for the following essays by Belyj: "Emblematika
smysla," "Lirika i eksperiment," and "Magija slov."
2 I use the terms "phonetic symbolism" and "linguistic iconicity" interchangeably here to
refer to the potential of language sound to create meaning which is not a product of
lexical semanticity. Whether this meaning is evoked by onomatopoeia (primary or secondary) or by a more abstruse synaesthesia is beyond the range of this paper to determine.
Linguistic theories of sound symbolism which were widely known in Russia in Belyj's
time were reviewed by V. Sklovskij in his article, "Zaumnyjjazyk ipoezija." The speculative
essays of Otto Jespersen, collected as Language: Its Nature, Development, Origin stimulated
a series of psycholinguistic experiments to test the existence of phonetic symbolism in
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20th century. For a review of phonetic symbolism research, see A. Mandelker, New
Research in Phonetic Symbolism, and J. Peterfalvi, Recherches experimentales. Linguistic
poetics has explored some of the implications that the results of phonetic symbolism
experimentation may have for literary criticism; in particular, linguistic poetics and stylistics of recent decades focused on the concept of quantifiable style features. Some investigators of statistically enumerated patterns of sound in poetry have proposed the existence
of "phonesthemes" (Householder), vowel "fugues" (Abernathy), or the potency of tonality
features (Jones). Jakobson summarized these views in his Sound Shape of Language.
5 The spiral as a constitutive figure has resonance, both for Belyj and for Yeats. Yeats'
theory of the "widening gyre" (A Vision) is motivated by the same sources as Belyj's
spirals, or rayed wings; archetypal figures of spiralic motion are the ouroboros, the umbi-
licus, the caduceus, the lotus, the spiral staircase (Jacob's ladder), the tower (nautilus
snail shell). The belief that the spiral is an encoded unit of all of nature's patterns, apparently substantiated by the discovery of the double helix of the DNA strand, has stimulated
contemporary semiotic research into patterns of symmetry and asymmetry in nature and
in the complementarity of the two hemispheres of the human brain (Lotman, "Mozgtekst-kul'tura-iskusstvennyj intellekt"). Steiner's theories suggest that all externally visualized structures are projections of the interior of the body (Man in the Light of Occultism,
124). The spiral convolutions are thus emblems of the cerebrum; while the evolution of
the universe according to a spiral pattern is ontogenically recapitulated in the firing of
neurons along the cortical pathways of the brain in the evolution of a single thought.
Such views were seriously entertained by the American scientific community during the
1960s in Sperry's theory that short-term memories were "re-entrant loops" of firing
neurons.
6 Vygotskij's critique of Piaget in Thought and Language resists the perception of socialization as an encroachment on the child's individual language and argues convincingly that
language is social from its earliest appearance, a position developed by Volo'inov (Baxtin?)
into a model of dialogism, where every utterance is double-voiced, representing and reacting to other speech acts simultaneously. Volo'inov's position is unexpectedly similar to
Belyj's when he argues that semiosis occurs in the cognitive processes of meaning production and that, therefore, speech and consciousness share the same modality: "Although
the reality of the word, as is true of any sign, resides between individuals, a word, at the
same time, is produced by the individual organism's own means without recourse to any
equipment or any other kind of extracorporeal material. This has determined the role of
the word as the semiotic material of inner life-of consciousness (inner speech)" (Volo'inov,
14).
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