Lecture
The specificity of reflection and depiction in art, and especially in literature, is such that in a work of art we are presented with, as it were, life itself, the world, a certain reality. It is no accident that one Russian man of letters called a literary work a «condensed universe». This kind of illusion of reality is a unique property specifically of works of art, one not inherent in any other form of social consciousness. To designate this property, scholarship uses the terms «artistic world» and «artistic reality». It seems fundamentally important to clarify what relations hold between life (primary) reality and artistic (secondary) reality.
First of all, let us note that, compared to primary reality, artistic reality represents a certain kind of convention. It has been created (unlike life reality, which is not man-made), and created for some purpose, for the sake of some definite aim, as is clearly indicated by the existence of the functions of a literary work discussed above. This is also a difference from life reality, which has no purpose outside itself, whose existence is absolute, unconditional, and in need of neither grounding nor justification.
Compared with life as such, a work of art appears as a convention also because its world is an invented, fictional world. Even with the strictest reliance on factual material, the enormous creative role of invention – which is an essential feature of artistic creation – is preserved. Even if we imagine a practically impossible case in which a work of art is built exclusively on the description of what is authentic and really happened, even then invention, understood broadly as the creative processing of reality, will not lose its role. It will manifest itself in the very selection of the phenomena depicted in the work, in the establishment of regular connections between them, in imparting artistic purposefulness to the life material.
Life reality is given to every person directly and requires no special conditions for its perception. Artistic reality is perceived through the prism of a person's spiritual experience and rests on a certain conventionality. From childhood we imperceptibly and gradually learn to recognize the difference between literature and life, to accept the «rules of the game» that exist in literature, and to become at home in the system of conventions inherent to it. All this fundamentally distinguishes artistic reality from life reality; in general terms the difference comes down to the fact that primary reality is the domain of nature, while secondary reality is the domain of culture.
Why is it necessary to dwell in such detail on the conventionality of artistic reality and its non-identity with life reality? The point is that this non-identity does not prevent the work from creating an illusion of reality, which leads to one of the most widespread errors in analytical work – the so-called «naively realistic reading». This error consists in identifying life reality with artistic reality. Its most ordinary manifestation is the perception of the characters of epic and dramatic works, and of the lyrical hero in lyric poetry, as really existing individuals – with all the consequences that follow from this. Characters are endowed with an independent existence, held personally responsible for their actions, and have circumstances of their lives invented for them, and so on. Let us note straight away the negative consequences of the naively realistic approach, in order to assess how far from harmless it is. First, it leads to the loss of aesthetic specificity – the work can no longer be studied as a properly artistic one, that is, ultimately one can no longer extract from it specifically artistic information or derive from it the distinctive, irreplaceable aesthetic pleasure it offers. Second, as is easy to see, such an approach destroys the integrity of the work of art and, by tearing individual particulars out of it, greatly impoverishes it. Moreover, by focusing attention on the characters, that is, on the objective subject of depiction, the naively realistic approach forgets about the author, his system of evaluations and relations, his position – that is, it ignores the subjective side of the work of art.
And finally, the last point, and perhaps the most important, since it bears directly on the moral aspect of studying and teaching literature. Treating the hero as a real person, as a neighbor or an acquaintance, inevitably simplifies and impoverishes the very artistic character. The persons brought forth and conceived by the writer in the work are always necessarily more significant than really existing people, since they embody the typical, represent a certain generalization, sometimes grandiose in its scale. By applying the scale of our everyday life to these artistic creations, judging them by today's standards, we not only violate the principle of historicism, but also lose any possibility of growing up to the level of the hero, since we perform the exact opposite operation – we reduce him to our own level.
The naively realistic approach to a work naturally leads to disregard of the author's will, to arbitrariness and subjectivism in interpreting the work. How undesirable such an effect is for scholarly literary criticism hardly needs explaining.
While arguing against the transformation of naively realistic reading into a methodology of analysis and teaching, G.A. Gukovsky at the same time saw the other side of the question. The naively realistic perception of the artistic world, in his words, is «legitimate, but insufficient». G.A. Gukovsky sets the task of «teaching students to think and speak about her (the heroine of the novel – A.E.) not only as a person, but also as an image». In what, then, does the «legitimacy» of the naively realistic approach to literature consist?
The point is that, owing to the specific nature of a literary work as a work of art, by the very nature of its perception we can nowhere escape a naively realistic attitude toward the people and events depicted in it. As long as the literary scholar perceives the work as a reader (and, as is easy to see, this is where any analytical work begins), he cannot help but perceive the characters of the book as living people (with all the consequences that follow – the characters will please him or displease him, arouse compassion, anger, love, and so on), and the events that happen to them as things that really occurred. Without this we would simply understand nothing of the content of the work, not to mention the fact that a personal attitude toward the people depicted by the author is the basis both of the emotional infectiousness of the work and of its being vividly experienced in the reader's consciousness. Without an element of «naive realism» in reading a work, we perceive it dryly, coldly, and this means that either the work is bad or we ourselves are bad as readers. If the naively realistic approach, raised to an absolute, in G.A. Gukovsky's words, destroys the work as a work of art, then its complete absence simply does not allow it to come into being as a work of art.
Thus one theoretical subtlety comes to light: the reflection of primary reality in a literary work is not identical to reality itself, and bears a conventional, non-absolute character, but at the same time one of the conditions consists precisely in this – that the life depicted in the work be perceived by the reader as «real», genuine, that is, identical to primary reality. On this rests the emotional-aesthetic effect that the work produces on us, and this circumstance must be taken into account.
The naively realistic perception is legitimate and necessary insofar as it concerns the process of primary, readerly perception, but it must not become the methodological basis of scholarly analysis. At the same time, the very fact of the inevitability of the naively realistic approach to literature leaves a certain imprint on the methodology of scholarly literary criticism as well.
Comments