Lecture
By theme we mean the object of artistic reflection – those life characters and situations (relationships between characters, as well as the interaction of a person with society as a whole, with nature, everyday life, etc.) which, so to speak, pass from real actuality into the artistic work and form the objective side of its content. Thematic material in this sense acts as a connecting link between primary reality and artistic reality; it belongs, as it were, to both worlds at once – the real and the artistic.
Methodology for analyzing theme. First, within a specific artistic whole it is often not easy to distinguish between the object of reflection proper (the theme) and the object of depiction (the specific depicted situation). Yet this distinction must be made in order to avoid confusing form and content and to ensure precision of analysis: at every moment one must be clearly aware of exactly what is being analyzed. The difference between the object of reflection and the subject of depiction is very clearly visible in works with conventionally fantastic imagery. But the structural relations between form and content do not change depending on the nature of the imagery, so even in works realistic in form it is necessary, when analyzing the theme, to go deeper than the depicted world, to the particularities of the characters embodied in the personages and the relationships between them.
Second, in analyzing theme it is necessary to distinguish between concrete-historical and eternal themes. Concrete-historical themes are characters and circumstances born of and conditioned by a specific socio-historical situation in a given country; they do not recur beyond the bounds of that time and are more or less localized. Such, for example, is the theme of the «superfluous man» in nineteenth-century Russian literature, the theme of the proletariat in Gorky’s novel «Mother», the theme of the Great Patriotic War, and so on. Eternal themes fix recurring moments in the history of various national societies; in various modifications they recur in the lives of different generations, in different historical epochs. Such, for example, are the themes of love and friendship, the relationships between generations, the theme of the working man, and so forth. In analyzing theme it is extremely important to determine which of its aspects – the concrete-historical or the eternal – is more essential, on what, so to speak, the thematic foundation of the work rests. At the same time, attention to the eternal aspects of theme is very important methodologically, for it allows one to change one’s angle of view on the subject, to supplement the traditional sociological approach (which, as a rule, degenerates into a dreary cliché) with an understanding of the universal, humanistic content of classic works. Now, when universal human, humanistic, eternal values are being actualized in every sphere of social consciousness, this task becomes exceptionally important. In essence, the point is not to limit the analysis of a work’s theme to its local-historical meaning, not to reduce its content to an illustration of socio-historical processes, but to reveal in classic masterpieces their enduring meaning – one that genuinely moves people of different epochs, different generations, and different nations.
In cases where the concrete-historical aspect of a theme is being analyzed, that analysis must be – if you will forgive the pun – maximally historically concrete. The fact is that in students’ reasoning about the thematic aspect of a work, abstract talk about «the struggle of the new against the old», about «a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness», and the like predominates. Often, inattention to the historical concreteness of the theme leads directly to errors. To make the theme concrete, attention must be paid to three parameters: the properly social (class, group, social movement, etc.), the temporal (here it is of course desirable that the student perceive the corresponding epoch at least in its main, defining tendencies), and the national. Only a precise designation of all three parameters allows for a satisfactory analysis of a concrete-historical theme.
Finally, attention should be drawn to the following circumstance: in analyzing a concrete-historical theme one must see not only the socio-historical but also the psychological definiteness of the character. In analytical practice one often encounters works in which there is not one theme but many. (The totality of all the themes of a work is usually called its thematics.) In such cases it is advisable to single out one or two main themes and treat the rest as secondary. Secondary thematic lines usually «work for» the main one, enriching its resonance and helping one understand it better. In conclusion, let us note once again that it is not advisable to dwell too long on thematic analysis in teaching practice: there is much more of interest further on in the artistic work.
The concept of problematics. By the problematics of an artistic work, literary scholarship usually understands the sphere of comprehension, of the writer’s understanding of the reflected reality. This is the sphere in which the author’s conception of the world and of man is manifested, where the writer’s reflections and experiences are imprinted, where the theme is considered from a particular angle. Problematics can be called the central part of artistic content, because it is in it, as a rule, that lies what we turn to the work for – the author’s unique view of the world.
Unlike thematics, problematics is the subjective side of artistic content, and therefore it is in problematics that authorial individuality is most fully manifested – the author’s distinctive view of the world or, as L.N. Tolstoy wrote, «the author’s distinctive moral attitude to the subject». The number of themes that objective reality offers a writer is inevitably limited, so it is not uncommon for works by entirely different authors to be written on the same or a similar theme. But there are no two major writers whose works coincide in their problematics. The distinctiveness of problematics is, in a sense, the author’s calling card.
Questions of the typology of artistic problematics began to be worked out by literary scholars quite long ago. However, this problem was subjected to systematic scholarly development only in the twentieth century. One of the first fruitful attempts to distinguish types of artistic problematics was that of M.M. Bakhtin, who identified the novelistic and non-novelistic conceptions of reality. G.N. Pospelov probably went furthest in this respect, identifying four types of problematics: «mythological», «national-historical», «moral-descriptive» (otherwise – «ethological»), and novelistic (in G.N. Pospelov’s terminology – «romanic»).
Mythological problematics is a «fantastical-genetic comprehension» of «this or that phenomenon of nature or culture» – an explanation that the author of a work gives for the emergence of certain phenomena.
Mythological problematics was highly developed in the early stages of literature, as well as in pre-literary creativity – folklore. However, G.N. Pospelov is wrong when he denies later literature, up to the present day, the ability to create artistically significant myths. This is manifested above all in currents important for contemporary artistic thought, such as science fiction and, in particular, fantasy literature. An example of mythological problematics in fantasy literature can well be found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy «The Lord of the Rings».
The next type identified by G.N. Pospelov is national-historical problematics. The creators of works embodying this type of problematics «were concerned chiefly with the historical formation and destiny of entire peoples», with «national destiny».
Here it must immediately be clarified that G.N. Pospelov’s understanding of this type of problematics is somewhat narrow. The scholar assigns to it only those works devoted to, or called into being by, turning points in the history of a people or nation. However, if one takes into account that the most important problem in works of this type is the problem of the essence of national character – a problem more profound than that of the external historical existence of the nation or people – then the circle of works belonging to this type must be substantially widened. Alongside national epic poems reflecting the formation of national statehood (Homer’s «Iliad», «The Tale of Igor’s Campaign», Shota Rustaveli’s «The Knight in the Panther’s Skin»), and works in modern literature called into being by moments of interstate and intranational conflict (Pushkin’s «To the Slanderers of Russia», A.N. Tolstoy’s «The Road to Calvary», Tvardovsky’s «Vasily Tyorkin», and others), there are also works in which problems of national character and national distinctiveness (national mentality, as one would say today) are posed and resolved on entirely «peaceful», even everyday material. Such works include Tyutchev’s poem «Russia Cannot Be Understood with the Mind...», Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s «Ballad of the Russian Toy» and «Ballad of the Pechora Muromets», and the like. In this connection it also seems appropriate to modify slightly the term proposed by G.N. Pospelov, and to speak not of «national-historical» but simply of national problematics.
«"Ethological" literature contains <...> a comprehension of the civic-moral order of social life, of the condition of society and of its individual strata.
Thus, the specific aspect of reality comprehended within the system of sociocultural problematics is the stable social relations, conditions, and way of life of a given part of society, the opinions, habits, and organization of everyday life established in the sphere of mass, ordinary consciousness. The main feature of sociocultural problematics is an emphasis on the stable, established, recurring traits of people’s existence and consciousness; what matters here is not dynamics but the statics of life. A second essential feature of works with this problematics is that, as a rule, they comprehend properties and qualities characteristic of a very broad group of people – in other words, they comprehend the condition of a milieu, a multitude, rather than the individual uniqueness of a separate personality. This does not mean, however, that exceptional heroes of one kind or another cannot appear here, but their exceptionality is, so to speak, quantitative in character: qualities in principle inherent in all representatives of a given milieu are raised in the character of the hero to a certain degree, hyperbolized (such, for example, is the character of Gogol’s Plyushkin, which at times acquires grotesque outlines). But in this case the hero never possesses qualities that are absent in the mass, in the people of the social milieu he represents.
The sociocultural type unites a very broad group of works, and the specific orientation of the problematics within them can vary. Writers may emphasize in their works the political moment (Shchedrin’s «The History of a Town», Radishchev’s ode «Liberty», and others); the moral condition of society (the medieval «Romance of the Rose», Chulkov’s tale «The Comely Cook»); the actual social relations between different strata of society (Krylov’s «The Wolf and the Lamb», Gogol’s «The Government Inspector», Pomyalovsky’s «Petty-Bourgeois Happiness»); or traits of everyday life and culture (Gogol’s «Dead Souls», Leskov’s «Trifles of Episcopal Life»).
Finally, the fourth type of problematics, which G.N. Pospelov calls «romanic» and which is more often called novelistic, is the ideological interest of writers in the «"personal" principle both in themselves and in the society around them». That the most important problem of novelistic thought is the problem of personality is a point on which virtually all researchers of this type of problematics agree. Another essential feature of novelistic problematics, distinguishing it above all from sociocultural problematics, is the emphasis not on statics but on dynamics, on various kinds of change – whether in a person’s external position, in their emotional world, or in their «philosophy», their point of view on reality.
In the history of literature we encounter at least two problematic types of novelistic content. The historically first such type may be considered the problematics in which writers placed the main emphasis on the dynamics of external changes in the fate and position of the personality; works with this kind of problematics are often called adventure novels. The second type of novelistic problematics places at the center of attention the deep foundation of the human personality – the ideological-moral essence of character – and so we shall call this problematics ideological-moral. In it the writer’s interest is concentrated on a person’s life stance and on the processes by which that stance changes; at the center of the work is philosophical and ethical searching, the person’s attempts to answer questions about the meaning of life, about good and evil, truth and justice. The processes of a personality’s moral and ideological self-determination, a person in search of truth – this is what is most important from the standpoint of ideological-moral problematics.
Here it is important that the search is for a specifically personal truth – that is, one based not on authority but on one’s own deeply felt and emotionally lived life experience. In working out their own life stance and system of ideological-moral values, a person thereby also resolves the question of personal moral responsibility.
At least one more type must be introduced into the classification. I have in mind works with so-called philosophical problematics. The ideological interest of writers in this case is directed at comprehending the most general, universal laws of the existence of society and nature, both in their ontological and in their epistemological aspects.
Until now, problematics of this kind has not been singled out as an independent type but has been attributed to one of the already existing ones. Here the orientation of writers’ interests is fundamentally different: not the way of life of this or that social group, but truth «in the final instance». One may therefore confidently speak of fundamental, typological differences between philosophical and sociocultural problematics.
As for the novel, especially in its ideological-moral variety, here, it would seem, there are more points of contact – the same search for truth, for «truthfulness», conceptions of life come to the fore. But there are also substantial differences, again concerning the most fundamental features of novelistic problematics. The first is that whereas ideological-moral problematics is concerned, perhaps, not so much with truth itself as with the process of a personality’s search for truth, philosophical problematics takes up one or another point of view on the world in a manner practically indifferent to its bearers. Whereas ideological-moral problematics is characterized by a person’s personal, lived experience of their life stance, philosophical problematics is «concerned» above all with the logical and factual demonstrability of its final conclusions. Thus the main problem of novelistic thought – the problem of personality – is practically not posed in the philosophical type of problematics; whereas ideological-moral problematics demonstrates the most immediate, closest connection between a person and an «idea», philosophical problematics connects them only in the final analysis, and sometimes such a connection is realized entirely outside the work itself – at the level of the relations «author–work» and «work–reader».
The presence within the content of a work of different types of problematics is one of the moments of that work’s artistic distinctiveness.
Comments