of our associations. We ascribe them associative meanings. Thus, in scrutinizing the pattern on the wallpaper or listening to non-program music, we ascribe specific meanings to the elements of these texts. The starker the syntagmatic organization, the more associative and free the semantic connections will become. Accordingly, the text along the “I—I” channel tends to become overgrown with individual meanings, and it begins to serve as an organizer of the scattered associations that accumulate in a given person’s consciousness. It restructures the personality that has been involved in the autocommunicative process.
In this way, the text carries a threefold significance: the primary level is in the language itself; the secondary comes about on account of the text’s syntagmatic reorganization and the tension among its primary units; and the third level arises from extratextual associations of varying degrees—from the most general to the extremely individual—being drawn into the message.
There is no need to prove that the mechanism we have described can simultaneously be presented as typical of the processes that form the basis of poetic creation.
The poetic principle, however, is one thing, but actual poetic texts are another. It would be an oversimplification to identify the latter with the messages being broadcast along the “I—I” channel. An actual poetic text is broadcast along two channels simultaneously (the exceptions being experimental texts, glossolalia, texts like asemantic children’s school rhymes and zaum,viii as well as texts in languages their audiences do not understand). It oscillates between the meanings transmitted across the “I—HE” channel and those formed in the process of autocommunication. Depending on its movement toward one axis or the other, and on the text’s orientation toward one kind of transmission or the other, it is taken to be a “poem” or “prose.”
Of course, the text’s orientation toward the primary linguistic message or a complex restructuring of meanings and the proliferation of information in itself does not mean that it will function as poetry or as prose: what comes into play here is the correlation with these concepts’ general cultural models within a given era.
And so we can conclude that the system of human communication can be constructed in two ways. In one instance, we are dealing with certain information given in advance and traversing from one person to another, and with a code that is constant within the limits of the entire communicative act. In the other, we have an increase in information, its transformation, its reformulation, during which it is not new messages but new codes that are introduced, and the receiver and the transmitter are combined in one person. In the process of such autocommunication the individual personality is itself reformulated, and a rather broad range of cultural functions is tied to this, from the sense of your own separate being that a person needs to have in certain kinds of culture, to self-consciousness and autopsychotherapy.
The role of such codes can be played by various kinds of formal structure—the more asemantic their organization, the more successfully they serve the function of reorganizing meanings. Such are spatial objects that, like patterns or architectural assemblages, are destined to be contemplated, or temporal ones, like music.
Verbal texts present a more complex issue. Insofar as the autocommunicative nature of a transmission can be masked by its assuming the forms of other aspects of communication (for example, a prayer can be perceived as a communication not with oneself, but with an external, almighty power; a repeat reading, the reading of a text that is already familiar—by analogy with the first reading—as a communication with the author, and so on), the addressee who is receiving the verbal text must decide what it is that has been transmitted to him—a code or a message. Here, to a significant degree, it will be a question of the receiver’s frame of mind, insofar as one and the same text can serve as message or code or, oscillating between these poles, one and the other simultaneously.
Here one ought to distinguish between two facets—the properties of the text that allow it to be interpreted as a code, and how the text functions, which allows it to be used in this way.
In the first case, the need to receive the text not as a usual message but as some coded model is marked by the formation of rhythmic series, of repetitions, by the appearance of supplemental patterns that are completely superfluous from the point of view of communication within the “I—HE” system. Rhythm is not a structural level in the construction of natural languages. It is no accident that while the poetic functions of phonology, grammar, and syntax find their bases and analogues in corresponding, non-artistic levels of the text, one can point to no such parallel for meter.
The rhythmic-metrical systems are transferred not from the “I—HE” communicative structure, but from the “I—I.” The projection of the principle of repetition into the phonological and other levels of natural language constitutes autocommunication’s aggression toward any linguistic sphere that is alien to it.ix
Functionally, whenever it adds no new information to what we already have and transforms the self-awareness of the individual who generates texts and transfers messages already in hand to a new system of meanings, the text is used not as a message but as a code. If Reader N is informed that a certain woman named Anna Karenina has thrown herself in front of a train because of a tragic love affair, and instead of attaching that message to those she already has in her memory she concludes, “Anna Karenina—that’s me,” and she reconsiders her own understanding of herself, her relationships with others, and sometimes even her own behavior, then it is obvious that she is using the text of the novel not as a message like any other, but as a kind of code within the process of communicating with herself.x
This is precisely how Pushkin’s Tatyana reads novels:xi
X
Imagining each heroine
Of her own most belovèd authors,
Clarissa, Julie, and Delphine,
Tatyana silent forests wanders,
In hand a risky volume caught,
In which she finds, there having sought,
Her secret ardor, reveries,
The fullest fruits of heartfelt dreams,
She sighs to make of stranger’s sorrow,
Of stranger’s rapture, her own plight,
And in absent whisper she recites
A letter to a tender hero …
Our hero, though, a man such as he
A Grandison could never be. (VI, 55)
X
Воображаясь героинeй
Своих возлюбленных творцов,
Кларисой, Юлией, Дельфиной,
Татьяна в тишине лесов
Одна с опасной книгой бродит,
Она в ней ищет и находит
Свой тайный жар, свои мечты,
Плоды сердечной полноты,
Вздыхает
