6. His hostility to the "fossilization" of language.
In Chapter Six, Khlebnikov's efforts were interpreted as a struggle against 'byt' on the linguistic 1evel——a struggle against what Jakobson called the "hardening" of the forms of language into a "stereotype". It is evident that it is in its written form that language is most likely to seem "hardened" in this way. The freezing or hardening of language seems to operate on two levels. Firstly, as we have noted, the development of writing tends to standardize a language, obliterating dialect distinctions and, it would seem, slowing down the process of linguistic evolution by providing fixed points of reference or standards. Secondly, the freezing operates on the "microscopic" level, since each individual utterance, once written on paper, is in a sense preserved in a frozen state.
Khlebnikov fought against both these fossilizing tendencies. On the one hand, he insisted on re-animeting the evolutionary movement of language, producing new words and meanings in accordance with the principles (as he saw them) of Russian linguistic development. This is what he meant when he wrote:
- Poetry should be constructed according to the laws of Darwin.[1]
Mandel'stam writes of Khlebnikov:
- He has plotted the transitional, intermediate paths in the development of the language, paths that historically it never took; they are taken solely in Khlebnikov, and made firm in his zaum, which is nothing other than those transitional forms which have not had time to acquire the crust of meaning that a rightly and justly developing language acquires.[2]
- ↑ SP V p 270.
- ↑ Notes on Poetry, in: Davie and Livingstone, (eds), op. cit., p 70. The translation here uses the word 'metalogy', which I have changed back to the Russian zaum. Compare Mandel'stam's comment with Arnold Bennett's on Joyce: "He has obviously had a vision of the possible evolution of the English tongue", Evening Standard, Aug. 8 1929; in Denning, op cit p 494.
