Jan Mukařovský

The French edition of Jan Mukařovský’s “Writings,” Jan Mukařoský: Écrits 1928–1946, is a major contribution to thought on language and literature. The volume is edited by a Franco-American-Czech team—John Pier, Laurent Vallance, Petr A. Bílek, and Tomáš Kubíček—and elegantly translated with great clarity and rigor by Jean Boutan, Xavier Galmiche, Kristýna Matysová, and Laurent Vallance. The work assembles key texts that reflect the conceptual power, philosophical depth, linguistic erudition, and political importance of Mukařovský, who is among the great literary scholars of the twentieth century, such as Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and Henri Meschonnic. For Czechs well-versed in the Prague linguistic school, it comes as no great revelation that Mukařovský was one of those unique scholars able to link language to literature, social significance to engaged individual reflection and creation, and philosophy to linguistics. However, Mukařovský’s contribution has yet to be appreciated by a wider audience, and this is the crucial task that the authors of this book intend to achieve.The Prague school was not restricted to Prague and was arguably based equally in Brno (with Roman Jakobson) and in Bratislava, Slovakia, where Mukařovský worked in the 1930s, but Prague was a crucial meeting point for various languages, cultures, and traditions. It is often argued that during its heyday, the Prague linguistic circle functioned as a crossroads where the German, French, Swiss, Russian, and above all the Czech and Slovak traditions converged. But beyond Czechoslovakia, and today, beyond the Czech Republic, Jan Mukařovský’s recognition is hindered by three major obstacles. First, his work focused on Czech language, culture, and thought, and that is difficult to export. In addition, Mukařovský presented a challenge to the linguistics of his time by adding the aesthetic function to the triad of sender-message-receiver that was exported to structuralism around the world. And, finally, Mukařovský’s coworkers were great, arguably so great that they tended to overshadow his reputation and block the reception of his radically original contribution to poetics and linguistics.Although the two were on an equal footing in the 1930s, it was Roman Jakobson, not Jan Mukařovský, whose linguistic paradigms were imposed worldwide during the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, it appears that Jakobson made little attempt to credit the theoretical and philosophical groundwork that Mukařovský had laid and that enabled Jakobson to revise his linguistic thought in the 1950s and 1960s. The much celebrated encounter between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the United States in 1941 was an encounter between two great scholars, an anthropologist and a linguist, two exiles who shared a desire to uncover universal models (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss 2018). Their work needs no defense today. Claude Lévi-Strauss remains one of the great pillars of modern anthropology, and Jakobson's eight volumes of Selected Writings in English reveal eloquent writings in Czech, Russian, French, German, and English on the linguistic structures and poetic forms of Icelandic, Southern Slavic tongues, and ancient Czech prayers and religious poetry.But by leaving Czech behind after almost twenty years in Brno, the capital of Moravia, and turning from poems to the structure of poetry, Jakobson effectively relinquished some of the crucial objectives, methodology, and literary principles of the Prague school. The individual, creative innovation, aesthetics, poetics, social engagement, and the cultivation of a new nation were crucial to the Prague school and to Mukařovský above all. They were not, however, to become facets of the structuralism that was founded in English and French-speaking countries and exported around the world by Jakobson and his exponents.Jakobson, along with Yuri Tynianov, imported the Russian formalists to Prague, and Jakobson remained arguably much more “formalistic” than both the Czech structuralists and the Russian formalists. Certainly, as his career developed in the United States, Jakobson presented himself more as a master of universal linguistic processes, a specialist of linguistics and translation theory, concerned with formal constraints and structuralist poetics. Czech, Russian, Ancient Slavic, and a vast range of other languages and poetic traditions obviously appeared less urgent as a project to American linguistics than a potentially universal model of linguistic structure in the 1950s.Jan Mukařovský, by contrast, was from the outset an engaged intellectual, a linguist, a semiologist, and an aesthetician/philosopher, and he remained so throughout his career. The opening quotes1 provide a taste of his astute insights and the rigor of his prose. As this volume demonstrates, Mukařovský was a man equally at home in German linguistic theory and philosophy as he was in Russian philology (from Alexander Potebnja to the Russian formalists). He was also very much a Czech patriot who understood that poems, literary creations, and translations were essential for a people who want to develop and sustain their worldview and promote and preserve their culture. In this sense, poems for Jan Mukařovský were not the products of history and culture, they were not objects; they were dynamic negotiations with reality. Literary works were written by individuals responding aesthetically to their language, their culture, and the fellow speakers of their language. The great effervescence that came with the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 gave wings to Czech linguistic theory, philology, and thought on society, culture, and ideas.This book of Mukařovský’s writings is remarkably coherent and well-structured, and certainly covers a full range of Mukařovský’s basic interrogations concerning the importance of aesthetics for society, for culture, for individuals, and for any thought that focuses on communication and modes of signifying using linguistic signs. The book is divided into three sections. The first section is introduced by Petr A. Bílek and Tomáš Kubíček and offers a wonderful introduction for Westerners interested in probing beyond the limits of contemporary linguistics and beyond the immediate field of linguistics as it is understood in the Saussurean tradition. For those curious about the scope and energy of the Prague school, the two authors make it easier to understand how the Prague school was reacting to emerging theories of language in France and Switzerland and to their German and Russian contemporaries. As they rightly demonstrate, linguistics did not start with Saussure; Saussure is integrated into the ongoing work that Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945) and his colleagues developed in the early years of the twentieth century, that was inspired by various traditions.The second section focuses on the poetics of the text, a primary concern for Jan Mukařovský. At the heart of this section is the very nature of signifying, and Mukařovský reminds us that on all levels, signifying is always a dynamic process. The Prague school embraced this principle. However, the third and final section presents the essential contribution that Mukařovský made to the Prague linguistic circle. In this section, the editors gather key texts that focus on the question of meaning-making from the point of view of the literary work of art.This does not constitute a break with Mukařovský’s former work or a break in the continuity of the essays and articles collected in this work. In the first section, devoted to Czech structuralism, we can read Mukařovský’s essays on the concept of the literary work as a whole in artistic theory, and of the dialectical contradictions that are involved in the dynamic signifying process of literary expression. Semiological expression in art is considered. As we move into the second section the importance of founding literary works is considered, such as the poem Máj (May) by Karel Mácha (1810–36). But the Czech patriots who were celebrating their language and culture in the Prague linguistic circle were not parochial or narrow-minded. Like many great revolutionary intellectual movements, the members of the Prague circle were constantly assimilating “foreign” models and influences and integrating them into the Czech identity. For the Czechs, this is an essentially Czech response to living at the center of Europe among other languages heard on every street corner in Prague.For this reason, literary works are set alongside translations. For example, the changing reception of Karel Čapek's French poems is considered in its reedited form in one essay, and conclusions are drawn by Mukařovský about the aesthetic value of the translations, leading him to stress the significance of translating for the literary tradition. Mukařovský insists that it is only in exceptional circumstances that one literary tradition is influenced—or indeed dominated—by that of another culture. Invariably, he argues, there are a wide variety of languages and cultures being assimilated simultaneously in any literary tradition. Mukařovský stresses the mutual importance of German, Russian, French, Polish, and Slovak influences on Czech artistic creations (37).At the heart of this is a concern for the way individual artists, and a culture or nation, make sense of the world. Creativity in literary works takes place within the creative synthesis of the language. Like the text, the national language is a system; it is always open-ended and perfectly capable of assimilating foreign influences and integrating them into the shared medium as functional values working within it. Fundamental questions of form are considered in this second section, but not from a reductive formalist perspective. Mukařovský is always interested in the way forms contribute to making meaning, to formulating meaningful expression. What is at stake is how we respond intuitively, actively, and creatively to forms and structures.With the third, lengthiest section of the book, the depth and scope of Mukařovský’s contribution becomes clear. This section makes up approximately one half of the entire book (161–286) and is devoted to the aesthetics of the art work. In Jan Mukařovský’s opinion, literary work was neither a reflection of society nor a simple psychological testimony to the author's inner life; it was a space for negotiating meaning between creators and interpreters. In Jan Mukařovský’s aesthetics, the text is at all levels considered to be a system of values, interacting in an open-ended manner. This process of signifying, and the process of interpreting, is constantly renewed or reenacted as each individual enters into the aesthetic apprehension of a work of art, and each period encounters it on its own terms. The third section thus brings together essays on aesthetics and language, the individual's role in the evolution of the literary tradition, intentionality and nonintentionality in art, the art work as a dynamic whole of interacting values, aesthetic norms, and the potential universality of aesthetic value.The editors of the volume focus on the golden years of the Prague school prior to the communist era, and although this is natural, it reveals a certain prejudice. They are not entirely fair in their emphasis on the suffering that Prague linguistics endured under communist rule. While several Prague school linguists lost their posts in the early years before the de-Stalinization of the late 1950s paved the way for the free thinking of the 1960s, Jan Mukařovský was not among them. He was rector of the prestigious Charles University from 1948 to 1953, and Mukařovský never lost the respect of the key linguists of his times. His books were widely available, and were reedited in the 1960s.Generally speaking, if there is one small failing, the volume suffers somewhat from an attempt to make Jan Mukařovský relevant for our times. This involves the emphasis on what he has in common with us today. Inevitably, perhaps, the editors play down the fact that Mukařovský was an engaged Marxist. But the problem is also more fundamental. The editors want to find a place for Mukařovský by somehow fitting him into our traditions, our fields, and the references we feel at home in, and this ultimately distorts Mukařovský’s contribution. The real value of Jan Mukařoský lies elsewhere; reading him will transform our perspectives of language, literature, and the limits of our own literary and linguistic traditions. Jan Mukařovský will not fit in. He is radically new, and as fresh today as he was in the 1930s. Mukařovský will force us to rethink our conceptual frameworks for understanding language, literature, and individual expression.Ironically, this book also clearly demonstrates this by the judicious choice of texts presented. The individual essays and articles force us to break out of familiar paradigms and ask ourselves fundamental questions which simply do not arise in literary circles and the current linguistic debates in Western countries and around the world. The authors stress the importance of Saussure and Jakobson, probably because they know many readers will be familiar with certain ideas of those authors. The contribution of both Saussure and Jakobson is unquestionable, and there are noteworthy parallels between Mukařovský and each of them. But while Mukařovský adopts much of Saussure's thought on the linguistic sign, he also adopts the idea of the literary work as a linguistic signifying process that takes place in society; Saussure does not.Mukařovský worked closely with Jakobson in the 1930s on poetic form, on the history of literary traditions, and on shared forms in Slavic poetic traditions. But Mukařovský never forgets that individuals challenge traditions, and sustain their traditions by challenging them. He is not interested in crises, and he does not celebrate literary works as individual revolts against tradition, as has become standard practice in the establishment when it comes to both the modernist or postmodernist traditions, just as it has become standard practice in the marketing and promotion of literary icons. Mukařovský sees literary innovation as part of the dynamic expression of individuals writing within the dynamic literary tradition. Innovation is part of the language of a community, and each innovation contributes to reawakening the potential for linguistic expression which makes the shared medium a living language. There is no dialectical tension between constraints and creativity from this perspective, but a healthy dramatic dynamism, full of tension and potential expressive power. Mukařovský is interested in how individuals live in language, and how language lives in individuals: Jakobson is not.Therefore, ultimately Mukařovský surpasses Saussure and Jakobson when it comes to thinking about what language is and what we do with language and when we read or study literary works. This should certainly not imply belittling the significant contributions of Saussure and Jakobson, but this concise volume of writings by Mukařovský highlights that while Saussure and Jakobson were indisputably great linguists, Jan Mukařovský was a great thinker. And great thinkers who think about language deeply, rigorously, and with the scientific erudition of their times are rare. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Jan Mukařovský are two examples, and by thinking about how we think in language, they invent questions that neither Saussure nor Jakobson were able to take on.Czech is commonly considered a minority language, although today, with ten million speakers, it has twice the population of England during Shakespearean times at the end of the sixteenth century. Inevitably, however, readers around the world will have to be patient when grappling with the essays devoted to what Czech poets were doing to develop the Czech language and worldview. Generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics rarely make such culture-specific demands on readers. These are universalizing theoretical approaches that often pay only passing attention to individual speech, individual creative works, and specific languages. But individual creative expression in specific languages is a crucial question for all linguistic communities and for all literary traditions. And the fact that Jakobson eclipses Mukařovský in structuralist poetics is not innocent regarding this point. Jakobson's ascendency entails a transformation of the linguistic project, tending toward the universal at the expense of the specific writer writing in time and space. And this lays the foundations for a problematic relationship between language study and literary scholars, although Jakobson himself advocated that the two disciplines should work together.Roman Jakobson was unquestionably a world citizen. Jan Mukařovský was an insider thinking about how individuals function as part of society, part of language, and part of culture. Jakobson worked for twenty years in Brno and spent the of his career in But he was an of an thinking about the universal structures of language, and art as linguistic expression. Saussure thought more of and less of and he had any when it came to the dynamic of creative individuals that but constantly transform facets of Saussurean linguistics has never much to us understand how literary works are and how they contribute to language. For Humboldt in in the early century, for in at the of the twentieth century, and for his contemporary Jan Mukařovský, creative innovation was As of the individual's literary works the essential creativity that is to language. Creativity is to from the and all creative of language to sustain the shared medium of expression as a of This is the creative potential that into and on a of Mukařovský’s key thought on language, linguistic dynamism, and the value and importance of aesthetics for understanding the aesthetic function of language, this book offers us a work of importance and great significance for poetics, linguistics, and It remains to be this challenging work on or a small in poetics, aesthetics, linguistic thought, and literary and the of certain languages, as as certain in linguistics and certain in literary theory, have not a that is to what Mukařovský’s writings have to As Pier, one of the out in the the American and the German traditions have more to Jan Mukařovský than the French tradition, but neither the nor the French more than a of the great questions that Jan Mukařovský years his the question it to Jan Certainly, the editors and of this new volume have a great in making key works This volume us to ask essential questions in a new are literary works of crucial importance to language, to cultures, to and to What do individuals and do with language and with literary do and and with one another in and in questions the scope of our and they force us as individuals, thinking and within linguistic to respond to literary texts as works of language, works of individuals, and works emerging out of traditions in space and changing Mukařovský from both the German and Russian traditions that were in the sense that they together a concern for individuals as the culture of the nation people or linguistic and for the of translations on the way languages Mukařovský’s dynamic model of and literary values and his aesthetic of the text are never understood as of literary traditions. And in Mukařovský’s those traditions in a constantly creation, and are part of the language and the literary tradition that the choice to Jan Mukařovský’s reflection on the significance of Karel Čapek's French poems and the Czech translation of the work of the Russian formalist is of crucial a nation respond to French poetry, and how that response be by the of a work that had enabled the Czechs to from the What had a Russian formalist writing at the time of the Russian to the Czechs and the of the this inspired of Jan Mukařovský’s writings a to the the and the individual, and often But Jan Mukařovský had as and he much more and much more than any of our contemporary thinkers on language, literature, and culture. In a very Jan Mukařovský was concerned with how cultures and sustain individuals, and engaged many and will find much to in Mukařovský’s it be to place him in their Mukařovský was no to and He was interested in how we make meaning of and of literary works. He was not interested in the free play of the He was interested in the of engaged reading and Jan Mukařovský never because he does not structures to be frameworks of understanding that us or us from He structures to be the that us to respond to tradition, respond to other individuals, and respond to other individual works of the real challenge of this and work will be to force us to what we have by Mukařovský’s work. what we has to out the debates and of our and literary we with on the of the text, if we with in the literary as the center of language and the center of the signifying we to be which we that a literary tradition only in with other literary traditions the crucial importance of translations, we find ourselves with those structuralists in Prague who celebrated the of language and the dynamic poetics of individual expression. structuralism, in or was not Jan Mukařovský takes us to language, to literature, and to the His poetics the literary text and the social importance of aesthetics as a of us to his thought, the editors and of Jan Écrits us to beyond debates and on an in language and

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