Lecture
Literary genres (in the broad sense used in literary theory) are the large classes of works – epic, lyric, drama (dramaturgy), as well as the intermediate form of lyric-epic. A work’s belonging to one or another of these classes leaves its mark on the very course of analysis and dictates certain techniques, though it does not affect the general methodological principles.
It should be kept in mind that drama, unlike epic, lacks narrative speech, which deprives drama of many of the artistic possibilities inherent in epic. Drama is intended chiefly for staging, and by entering into synthesis with the art of the actor and the director it acquires additional pictorial and expressive possibilities. In the literary text of a drama proper the emphasis shifts to the characters’ actions and their speech; accordingly drama gravitates toward such stylistic dominants as plot-centeredness and heteroglossia (a diversity of voices). Compared with epic, drama is also distinguished by a heightened degree of artistic convention associated with theatrical action. The conventionality of drama consists in such features as the illusion of the "fourth wall," asides "to the side," characters’ monologues alone with themselves, as well as a heightened theatricality of speech and of gestural-mimic behavior.
The construction of the depicted world is likewise specific in drama. We receive all information about it from the characters’ conversations and from the author’s stage directions. Accordingly drama demands more imaginative work of the reader – the ability, from sparing hints, to picture the characters’ appearance, the material world, the landscape, and so on. The image of a character is drawn with means more sparing than in epic, but also brighter and stronger. What comes to the fore is characterization of the hero through plot, through actions, and the characters’ actions and words are always psychologically charged and thereby characterological. Another leading device for creating a character’s image is his speech characterization, his manner of speaking. Auxiliary devices are the portrait, the character’s self-characterization, and his characterization in the speech of other characters. To express the author’s evaluation, characterization through plot and through individual manner of speech is used chiefly.
Psychologism, too, is distinctive in drama. It lacks such forms common in epic as authorial psychological narration, interior monologue, the dialectic of the soul, and stream of consciousness. The interior monologue is brought outward, given shape in external speech, and therefore the character’s psychological world itself turns out to be more simplified and rationalized in drama than in epic. In general drama gravitates chiefly toward vivid and striking means of expressing strong and sharply outlined movements of the soul.
What is central in drama is action – the development of the initial situation – and action develops thanks to conflict. Dramatic composition is subordinated to the development of the conflict. The conflict is embodied either in the plot or in a system of compositional oppositions. Depending on the form in which the conflict is embodied, dramatic works can be divided into plays of action (Fonvizin, Griboedov, Ostrovsky), plays of mood (Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Chekhov), and plays of discussion (Ibsen, Gorky, Shaw).
It is chiefly in the plot that the content of the work is realized.
Plays of mood are constructed somewhat differently. In them, as a rule, the basis of the dramatic action is the hero’s conflict with a way of life hostile to him, which passes over into a psychological conflict expressed in the characters’ inner unsettledness, in a feeling of spiritual discomfort. Thus, in Chekhov’s play «Three Sisters» there is practically no continuous chain of events, yet all the scenes and episodes are linked to one another by a shared mood – a rather heavy and hopeless one. All the events, unconnected with one another, aim to reinforce the overall impression of a troubled, unsettled existence. Naturally, in plays of mood psychologism plays an important role in the style, but a distinctive, subtextual psychologism.
The third type is the play-discussion. Here the conflict is deep-seated, based on a difference of worldview positions, and the problematics are, as a rule, philosophical or moral-ideological.
It should be kept in mind that drama, unlike epic, lacks narrative speech, which deprives drama of many of the artistic possibilities inherent in epic. Drama is intended chiefly for staging, and by entering into synthesis with the art of the actor and the director it acquires additional pictorial and expressive possibilities. In the literary text of a drama proper the emphasis shifts to the characters’ actions and their speech; accordingly drama gravitates toward such stylistic dominants as plot-centeredness and heteroglossia. Compared with epic, drama is also distinguished by a heightened degree of artistic convention associated with theatrical action. The conventionality of drama consists in such features as the illusion of the "fourth wall," asides "to the side," characters’ monologues alone with themselves, as well as a heightened theatricality of speech and of gestural-mimic behavior.
The construction of the depicted world is likewise specific in drama. We receive all information about it from the characters’ conversations and from the author’s stage directions. Accordingly drama demands more imaginative work of the reader – the ability, from sparing hints, to picture the characters’ appearance, the material world, the landscape, and so on. The image of a character is drawn with means more sparing than in epic, but also brighter and stronger. What comes to the fore is characterization of the hero through plot, through actions, and the characters’ actions and words are always psychologically charged and thereby characterological. Another leading device for creating a character’s image is his speech characterization, his manner of speaking. Auxiliary devices are the portrait, the character’s self-characterization, and his characterization in the speech of other characters. To express the author’s evaluation, characterization through plot and through individual manner of speech is used chiefly.
Psychologism, too, is distinctive in drama. It lacks such forms common in epic as authorial psychological narration, interior monologue, the dialectic of the soul, and stream of consciousness. The interior monologue is brought outward, given shape in external speech, and therefore the character’s psychological world itself turns out to be more simplified and rationalized in drama than in epic. In general drama gravitates chiefly toward vivid and striking means of expressing strong and sharply outlined movements of the soul.
What is central in drama is action – the development of the initial situation – and action develops thanks to conflict. Dramatic composition is subordinated to the development of the conflict. The conflict is embodied either in the plot or in a system of compositional oppositions. Depending on the form in which the conflict is embodied, dramatic works can be divided into plays of action (Fonvizin, Griboedov, Ostrovsky), plays of mood (Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Chekhov), and plays of discussion (Ibsen, Gorky, Shaw).
It is chiefly in the plot that the content of the work is realized.
Plays of mood are constructed somewhat differently. In them, as a rule, the basis of the dramatic action is the hero’s conflict with a way of life hostile to him, which passes over into a psychological conflict expressed in the characters’ inner unsettledness, in a feeling of spiritual discomfort. Thus, in Chekhov’s play «Three Sisters» there is practically no continuous chain of events, yet all the scenes and episodes are linked to one another by a shared mood – a rather heavy and hopeless one. All the events, unconnected with one another, aim to reinforce the overall impression of a troubled, unsettled existence. Naturally, in plays of mood psychologism plays an important role in the style, but a distinctive, subtextual psychologism.
The third type is the play-discussion. Here the conflict is deep-seated, based on a difference of worldview positions, and the problematics are, as a rule, philosophical or moral-ideological.
Lyric poetry as a literary genre stands opposed to epic and to dramaturgy, and therefore in its analysis one must take the specificity of the genre into account to the highest degree. If epic and drama reproduce human existence, the objective side of life, then lyric poetry reproduces human consciousness and the subconscious, the subjective moment. Epic and drama depict; lyric poetry expresses. One might even say that lyric poetry belongs to an entirely different group of arts than epic and dramaturgy – not to the pictorial arts, but to the expressive ones.
What has been said concerns above all the depicted world, which in lyric poetry is constructed quite differently than in epic and drama. The stylistic dominant toward which lyric poetry gravitates is psychologism, but a distinctive psychologism. In epic, and partly in drama, we deal with the depiction of the hero’s inner world as if from the outside, whereas in lyric poetry psychologism is expressive – the subject of the utterance and the object of psychological depiction coincide. As a result lyric poetry engages with man’s inner world from a special angle: it takes chiefly the sphere of feeling, sentiment, emotion, and reveals it, as a rule, in a static state, but does so more deeply and vividly than is done in epic. The sphere of thought, too, is subject to lyric poetry; many lyric works are built on the unfolding not of feeling but of reflection (though it is always colored by one feeling or another). Such lyric poetry (Pushkin’s «Whether I wander along noisy streets...», Lermontov’s «Duma», Tyutchev’s «The Wave and the Thought», and the like) is called meditative. But in any case the depicted world of a lyric work is above all a psychological world. This circumstance should be kept especially in mind when analyzing individual pictorial (it would be more correct to call them «pseudo-pictorial») details that may occur in lyric poetry. Let us note first of all that a lyric work can do entirely without them – thus, for example, in Pushkin’s poem «I loved you...» every single detail without exception is psychological, and objective detail is entirely absent. If objective-pictorial details do appear, they perform that same function of psychological depiction: either indirectly creating the work’s emotional tone, or becoming an impression of the lyric hero, an object of his reflection, and so on. Such, in particular, are landscape details. For example, in A. Fet’s poem «Evening» there is, it seems, not a single properly psychological detail, only a description of landscape. But the function of the landscape here is, through the selection of details, to create a mood of calm, peace, and stillness. The same can be said of the portrait details and details of the world of things that occur in lyric works – in lyric poetry they perform an exclusively psychological function. In a lyric work we do not analyze plot, nor characters, nor object details apart from their psychological function – that is, we pay no attention to what is fundamentally important in epic. In lyric poetry, on the other hand, the analysis of the lyric hero acquires fundamental significance.
Lyric poetry gravitates toward small volume and, as a consequence, toward a taut and complex composition. In lyric poetry, more often than in epic and drama, compositional devices of repetition, opposition, intensification, and montage are employed. The interaction of images acquires exceptional importance in the composition of a lyric work, often creating a two-tiered or multi-tiered artistic meaning.
The stylistic dominants of lyric poetry in the sphere of artistic speech are monologism, rhetoricity, and verse form. A lyric work in the overwhelming majority of cases is built as the monologue of a lyric hero, so there is no need for us to single out in it the speech of a narrator (it is absent) or to give a speech characterization of characters (there are none either). However, some lyric works are built in the form of a dialogue of «characters» («A Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet», «A Scene from Faust» by Pushkin, «A Journalist, a Reader, and a Writer» by Lermontov). In this case the «characters» entering into dialogue embody different facets of a single lyric consciousness, and therefore have no speech manner of their own; the principle of monologism is maintained here too. As a rule the speech of the lyric hero is characterized by literary correctness, so there is likewise no need to analyze it from the standpoint of a special speech manner.
The case in which lyric poetry uses not verse but prose form (the genre of the so-called prose poems in the work of A. Bertrand, Turgenev, and O. Wilde) is subject to obligatory study and analysis, since it points to an individual artistic distinctiveness.
The specificity of the lyric genre also influences the analysis of content. In dealing with a lyric poem, it is important above all to grasp its pathos, to sense and define the leading emotional tone. In many cases the correct determination of the pathos makes analysis of the other elements of artistic content unnecessary, especially of the idea, which often dissolves into the pathos and has no independent existence: thus, in Lermontov’s poem «Farewell, unwashed Russia» it suffices to define the pathos of invective; in Pushkin’s poem «The daylight sun has gone out...» – the pathos of romance; in Blok’s poem «I am Hamlet; my blood grows cold...» – the pathos of tragedy.
Lyric poetry as a literary genre stands opposed to epic and to dramaturgy, and therefore in its analysis one must take the specificity of the genre into account to the highest degree. If epic and drama reproduce human existence, the objective side of life, then lyric poetry reproduces human consciousness and the subconscious, the subjective moment. Epic and drama depict; lyric poetry expresses. One might even say that lyric poetry belongs to an entirely different group of arts than epic and dramaturgy – not to the pictorial arts, but to the expressive ones.
What has been said concerns above all the depicted world, which in lyric poetry is constructed quite differently than in epic and drama. The stylistic dominant toward which lyric poetry gravitates is psychologism, but a distinctive psychologism. In epic, and partly in drama, we deal with the depiction of the hero’s inner world as if from the outside, whereas in lyric poetry psychologism is expressive – the subject of the utterance and the object of psychological depiction coincide. As a result lyric poetry engages with man’s inner world from a special angle: it takes chiefly the sphere of feeling, sentiment, emotion, and reveals it, as a rule, in a static state, but does so more deeply and vividly than is done in epic. The sphere of thought, too, is subject to lyric poetry; many lyric works are built on the unfolding not of feeling but of reflection (though it is always colored by one feeling or another). Such lyric poetry (Pushkin’s «Whether I wander along noisy streets...», Lermontov’s «Duma», Tyutchev’s «The Wave and the Thought», and the like) is called meditative. But in any case the depicted world of a lyric work is above all a psychological world. This circumstance should be kept especially in mind when analyzing individual pictorial (it would be more correct to call them «pseudo-pictorial») details that may occur in lyric poetry. Let us note first of all that a lyric work can do entirely without them – thus, for example, in Pushkin’s poem «I loved you...» every single detail without exception is psychological, and objective detail is entirely absent. If objective-pictorial details do appear, they perform that same function of psychological depiction: either indirectly creating the work’s emotional tone, or becoming an impression of the lyric hero, an object of his reflection, and so on. Such, in particular, are landscape details. For example, in A. Fet’s poem «Evening» there is, it seems, not a single properly psychological detail, only a description of landscape. But the function of the landscape here is, through the selection of details, to create a mood of calm, peace, and stillness. The same can be said of the portrait details and details of the world of things that occur in lyric works – in lyric poetry they perform an exclusively psychological function. In a lyric work we do not analyze plot, nor characters, nor object details apart from their psychological function – that is, we pay no attention to what is fundamentally important in epic. In lyric poetry, on the other hand, the analysis of the lyric hero acquires fundamental significance.
Lyric poetry gravitates toward small volume and, as a consequence, toward a taut and complex composition. In lyric poetry, more often than in epic and drama, compositional devices of repetition, opposition, intensification, and montage are employed. The interaction of images acquires exceptional importance in the composition of a lyric work, often creating a two-tiered or multi-tiered artistic meaning.
The stylistic dominants of lyric poetry in the sphere of artistic speech are monologism, rhetoricity, and verse form. A lyric work in the overwhelming majority of cases is built as the monologue of a lyric hero, so there is no need for us to single out in it the speech of a narrator (it is absent) or to give a speech characterization of characters (there are none either). However, some lyric works are built in the form of a dialogue of «characters» («A Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet», «A Scene from Faust» by Pushkin, «A Journalist, a Reader, and a Writer» by Lermontov). In this case the «characters» entering into dialogue embody different facets of a single lyric consciousness, and therefore have no speech manner of their own; the principle of monologism is maintained here too. As a rule the speech of the lyric hero is characterized by literary correctness, so there is likewise no need to analyze it from the standpoint of a special speech manner.
The case in which lyric poetry uses not verse but prose form (the genre of the so-called prose poems in the work of A. Bertrand, Turgenev, and O. Wilde) is subject to obligatory study and analysis, since it points to an individual artistic distinctiveness.
The specificity of the lyric genre also influences the analysis of content. In dealing with a lyric poem, it is important above all to grasp its pathos, to sense and define the leading emotional tone. In many cases the correct determination of the pathos makes analysis of the other elements of artistic content unnecessary, especially of the idea, which often dissolves into the pathos and has no independent existence: thus, in Lermontov’s poem «Farewell, unwashed Russia» it suffices to define the pathos of invective; in Pushkin’s poem «The daylight sun has gone out...» – the pathos of romance; in Blok’s poem «I am Hamlet; my blood grows cold...» – the pathos of tragedy.
Lyric-epic works represent, as is evident from the name, a synthesis of epic and lyric principles. From epic, lyric-epic takes the presence of narration, plot-centeredness (though weakened), a system of characters (less developed than in epic), and the reproduction of the material world. From lyric poetry it takes the expression of subjective feeling, the presence of a lyric hero (merged with the narrator into a single figure), a gravitation toward relatively small volume and verse speech, and often psychologism. In the analysis of lyric-epic works special attention should be paid not to distinguishing the epic and lyric principles (this is the first, preliminary stage of analysis), but to their synthesis within a single artistic world. For this the analysis of the image of the lyric hero-narrator is of fundamental importance.
Such a penetration of lyric subjectivity into epic narration is the most complex case to analyze, yet at the same time the most interesting case of a synthesis of epic and lyric principles. One must learn to see the lyric intonation and the hidden lyric hero within a text that at first glance is objectively epic. For example, in D. Kedrin’s poem «The Builders» there are no lyric monologues as such, yet the image of the lyric hero can nonetheless be «reconstructed» – it manifests itself above all in the lyric agitation and solemnity of the artistic speech, in the loving and heartfelt description of the church and its builders, in the emotionally charged final chord, which is excessive from the standpoint of plot but necessary for creating a lyric experience. One might say that the lyricism of the poem is manifested in how the well-known historical plot is narrated. There are also places in the text of special poetic tension, and in these fragments the emotional intensity and the presence of the lyric hero – the subject of the narration – are felt with particular vividness.
In the epic genre of literature (Greek epos — word, speech) the organizing principle of the work is narration about characters (dramatis personae), their fates, actions, states of mind, about events in their lives that make up the plot. This is — a chain of verbal communications, or, more simply, an account of what happened earlier. Narration is characterized by a temporal distance between the act of speaking and the subject of the verbal designations. It is conducted from the outside and, as a rule, has the grammatical form of the past tense. The position characteristic of the one narrating (telling) is that of a person recalling something that took place earlier. The distance between the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about it constitutes perhaps the single most essential feature of the epic form. In epic works the narration draws into itself and, as it were, envelops the utterances of the characters – their dialogues and monologues, including interior ones – actively interacting with them, explaining, supplementing, and correcting them. And the literary text turns out to be a kind of alloy of narrative speech and the characters’ utterances, which are their deeds (actions). Works of the epic genre make full use of the arsenal of artistic means available to literature, and freely and effortlessly command reality in time and space. At the same time they know no limitations of textual volume. Epic as a literary genre includes both short stories (medieval and Renaissance novella-writing; the humor of O. Henry and the early A.P. Chekhov) and works meant for lengthy listening or reading – epics and novels that encompass life with extraordinary breadth. Such are the Indian «Mahabharata», the ancient Greek «Iliad» and «Odyssey», L.N. Tolstoy’s «War and Peace», J. Galsworthy’s «The Forsyte Saga», and M. Mitchell’s «Gone with the Wind».
In the epic genre of literature (Greek epos — word, speech) the organizing principle of the work is narration about characters (dramatis personae), their fates, actions, states of mind, about events in their lives that make up the plot. This is — a chain of verbal communications, or, more simply, an account of what happened earlier. Narration is characterized by a temporal distance between the act of speaking and the subject of the verbal designations. It is conducted from the outside and, as a rule, has the grammatical form of the past tense. The position characteristic of the one narrating (telling) is that of a person recalling something that took place earlier. The distance between the time of the depicted action and the time of the narration about it constitutes perhaps the single most essential feature of the epic form.
The word «narration» is used in various ways with reference to literature. In the narrow sense — it is the extended verbal designation of something that happened once and had temporal extent. In a broader sense narration also includes descriptions, that is, the recreation by means of words of something stable, static, or altogether motionless (such are most landscapes, characterizations of everyday surroundings, features of the characters’ appearance, and their states of mind). Descriptions also include verbal depictions of what recurs periodically. In the same way the narrative fabric includes the author’s discursive reflections, which play no small role in L.N. Tolstoy, A. France, and T. Mann.
In epic works the narration draws into itself and, as it were, envelops the utterances of the characters – their dialogues and monologues, including interior ones – actively interacting with them, explaining, supplementing, and correcting them. And the literary text turns out to be a kind of alloy of narrative speech and the characters’ utterances, which are their deeds (actions).
Works of the epic genre make full use of the arsenal of artistic means available to literature, and freely and effortlessly command reality in time and space. At the same time they know no limitations of textual volume. Epic as a literary genre includes both short stories (medieval and Renaissance novella-writing) and works meant for lengthy listening or reading – epics and novels that encompass life with extraordinary breadth. Such are the ancient Greek «Iliad» and «Odyssey», L.N. Tolstoy’s «War and Peace», and M. Mitchell’s «Gone with the Wind».
An epic work can «take in» such a quantity of characters, circumstances, events, fates, and details as is inaccessible to any other literary genre or to any other art form. At the same time the narrative form promotes the deepest penetration into a person’s inner world. It is fully capable of rendering characters who are complex, possessed of a multitude of traits and properties, unfinished and contradictory, in motion, in the process of becoming and developing.
In epic works the presence of the narrator is deeply significant. This is a highly specific form of the artistic representation of a person. The narrator is a mediator between what is depicted and the reader, often acting as witness and interpreter of the persons and events shown.
The text of an epic work by no means always contains information about the narrator’s fate, about his relations with the characters, about when, where, and under what circumstances he is telling his story, or about his thoughts and feelings. The spirit of narration, in T. Mann’s words, is often «weightless, bodiless, and omnipresent»; «for it there is no division between «here» and «there»»1. And yet the narrator’s speech possesses not only descriptive power but also expressive significance; it characterizes not only the object of the utterance but the speaker himself. In any epic work there is imprinted the manner of perceiving reality peculiar to the one who narrates, his characteristic view of the world and mode of thought. In this sense it is legitimate to speak of the image of the narrator. This concept became firmly established in the practice of literary scholarship thanks to B.M. Eikhenbaum, V.V. Vinogradov, and M.M. Bakhtin (works of the 1920s). Summarizing the views of these scholars, G.A. Gukovsky wrote in the 1940s: «Every depiction in art forms an idea not only of what is depicted, but also <...> of the one depicting, the bearer of the exposition <...>. The narrator is not only a more or less concrete image <...>, but also a certain figurative idea, a principle and countenance of the bearer of speech, or in other words — inevitably a certain point of view on what is set forth, a point of view that is psychological, ideological, and simply geographical, since it is impossible to describe from nowhere, and there can be no description without a describer»1.
The epic form, in other words, reproduces not only what is narrated but also the one narrating; it artistically captures the manner of speaking and of perceiving the world, and, ultimately, the narrator’s cast of mind and feeling. The narrator’s countenance is revealed not in his actions and not in direct outpourings of the soul, but in a distinctive narrative monologue. The expressive elements of such a monologue, being its secondary function, are nonetheless very important.
There can be no full-fledged perception of folk tales without close attention to their narrative manner, in which, beneath the naivety and artlessness of the one telling the story, one senses irony and cunning, life experience and wisdom. It is impossible to feel the charm of the heroic epics of antiquity without grasping the elevated cast of thoughts and feelings of the rhapsode and the bard. And it is all the more unthinkable to understand the works of A.S. Pushkin and N.V. Gogol, L.N. Tolstoy and F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov and I.S. Turgenev, A.P. Chekhov and I.A. Bunin, M.A. Bulgakov and A.P. Platonov without apprehending the narrator’s «voice». Literature has various modes of narration available to it. Most deeply rooted and represented in its history is the type of narration in which there exists, so to speak, an absolute distance between the characters and the one narrating about them. The narrator recounts events with imperturbable calm. Everything is intelligible to him, he possesses the gift of «omniscience», and his image – the image of a being raised above the world – lends the work a coloring of maximal objectivity. It is telling that Homer was often likened to the Olympian gods and called «divine».
The artistic possibilities of such narration were examined in German classical aesthetics of the Romantic era. In epic, «a narrator is needed,» we read in Schelling, «who, by the imperturbability of his narration, would constantly draw us away from too great an involvement with the characters and direct the listeners’ attention toward the pure result». And further: «The narrator is alien to the characters <...> he not only surpasses the listeners in his balanced contemplation and attunes them to this mode through his narration, but as it were takes the place of necessity»1.
In the literature of the last two or three centuries subjective narration has all but come to predominate. The narrator has come to look at the world through the eyes of one of the characters, becoming imbued with his thoughts and impressions. A vivid example of this is the detailed picture of the Battle of Waterloo in Stendhal’s «The Charterhouse of Parma». This battle is reproduced in a manner anything but Homeric: the narrator, as it were, transforms himself into the hero, young Fabrizio, and looks at what is happening through his eyes.
The distance between narrator and character practically disappears, and the two points of view merge. Tolstoy sometimes paid tribute to this manner of depiction. The Battle of Borodino in one of the chapters of «War and Peace» is shown through the perception of Pierre Bezukhov, who is inexperienced in military matters; the council of war at Fili is presented as the impressions of the girl Malasha. The merging of the points of view of narrator and characters in the literature of the 19th–20th centuries was brought about by an increased artistic interest in the distinctiveness of people’s inner worlds, and above all by an understanding of life as a totality of attitudes toward reality that are unlike one another – qualitatively different horizons and value orientations.
The most widespread form of epic narration is third-person narrative. But the narrator may well appear in a work as a kind of «I». Such personified narrators, speaking in their own, «first» person, are naturally called storytellers (narrators-as-characters). The storyteller is often at the same time a character of the work (Maxim Maximych in the tale «Bela» from Lermontov’s «A Hero of Our Time», Grinev in Pushkin’s «The Captain’s Daughter», Ivan Vasilyevich in L.N. Tolstoy’s story «After the Ball», Arkady Dolgoruky in F.M. Dostoevsky’s «The Adolescent»).
Comments