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Deconstructing the Rationality of Terror: William Blake and Daniil KharmsAuthor(s): Craig BrandistReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 59-75Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771421 .Accessed: 02/10/2012 09:38

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CRAIG BRANDIST

Deconstructing the

Rationality of Terror:

William Blake and

Daniil Kharms

SUCH TEMPORALLY and spatially diverse writers as

William Blake (1757-1827) and Daniil Kharms (1905-42) do not, at first

glance, appear strong candidates for a productive comparison. Yet continuities of orientation, theme, and even philosophy are

surprisingly abundant, and remarkable contextual parallels are also discernible. Regarded as bizarre eccentrics in their respective lifetimes, both writers recoiled with horror from the brutalities of industrialization and suffered from political repression. Not with- out reason, both writers saw the ruling ideology of their respective cultures as a combination of crude positivism, moralism, and pa- thos, the most serious effect of which was to ensnare the mind of the subject in a web of abstract and authoritative "truths" dissemi- nated by the ideological apparatuses of a repressive state. Reveal-

ing the mystifying qualities of this ideology was not, however, a

straightforward task. Although the framework of censorship and the arbitrariness of state repression was much harsher in Stalinist Russia than in England, the position of political dissenters under the anti-Jacobin measures adopted by the British state was also

precarious. (Indeed, Blake himself was tried for sedition.) In both cases, then, printed protest was an act likely to provoke serious

reprisals. Finally, both writers thought that presenting an alternative set of moral principles to be passively accepted by the reader simply tended to reproduce the forms of automatized consciousness they tried to oppose. In this sense, Blake and Kharms perceived their respective ages in remarkably similar ways, and developed parallel strategies to activate the critical capacities of their readers.

As E.P.Thompson has shown, William Blake was heir to a system of ideas and symbols handed down from the most radical sects of the English Revolution. These groups rejected the hierarchies and

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 60

institutions of the established church in favor of inner conscience or "inner light." The Antinomians, the most radical of these sects, argued that obedience to the corrupt laws of church and state could only destroy true faith and believed that any limitation on the individual's ability to act according to conscience was an ob- stacle to faith and grace.

While most of these radical groups splintered and were driven underground after the defeat of their immediate aspirations in the late seventeenth century, their tradition of radical dissent and lay prophecy survived, if only through secret meetings and under the threat of persecution. Because of the ferment of the French Revolution, however, their ideas suddenly found a much wider audience, especially among traders and artisans like Blake, who did not rely on patronage and had only contempt for deference to the ruling class and its "polite culture." As Thompson notes: "antinomianism's intellectual doctrines (the suspicion of 'reason,' justification by faith, hostility to the Moral Law) constituted in qui- etist periods a defense against the reigning hegemony, in more active periods a resource for an active critique not just of policies or personalities but of the deep assumptions of the social order"

("Anti-hegemony" 29). Blake's work is clearly imbued with this spirit, as is perhaps best

expressed in his "Annotations to Watson": "All Penal Laws court Transgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder ... State Religion ... is the source of all Cruelty" (393). To the clerics who sanctified such laws he wrote:

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision's greatest enemy ... Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white. (748)

Finally, like the Antinomians, Blake casts the Bible as a revolution- ary document: "To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast & the Whore rule without control" (383).

This antinomian and Muggletonian stance towards the domi- nant culture was, of course, shaped by late eighteenth century divi- sions between "a polite and a demotic culture." The former was based on the values of "reason" and "elegance" that typified the ideas of Newton, Locke, and the Augustan tradition. Together these conceptions redefined time as the steady improvement of the human condition through the dissemination of scientific ideas or "learning" rather than the decay of the fallen world or the cycli- cal repetition of events. By the end of the eighteenth century this complex of ideas permeated all areas of social life. As Thompson notes, "[d]ress, style, gesture, properties of speech, grammar and even punctuation were resonant with the signs of class; the polite culture was an elaborated code of social inclusion and exclusion"

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 61

("Anti-hegemony" 29).1 As such, "Reason" was a category that reso- nated with ideological significance, perhaps even being synony- mous with "ideology" itself in the sense of Bakhtin's "authoritative discourse" (Dialogic Imagination 342). Hostility to reason and suspi- cion of "learning," characteristic of both Antinomianism and Blake's work, was premised on a Platonic distrust of the written word, which was seen both as an invitation to misinterpretation due to its abstraction from an immediate context of utterance and as a cause of a passive notion of reading that restricted other, more valid forms of understanding. As Heather Glen notes, in a

society that was semi-literate, "the appeal to a vision superior to the knowledge transmitted through traditional learning is not

merely egalitarian, but potentially revolutionary: for the unlearned, who do not possess 'an opinion of wisdom instead of wisdom itself,' may actually be seen as more open to visionary illumination than the educated" (62). This populist twist of Pla- tonic reasoning, which strikingly anticipates Bakhtin's conflation of dominant ideology and abstract, unified language more than a

century later, demanded a form of composition that defended the vernacular against the "language of learning" and sought to chal-

lenge from within the writing itself the passive reception of ideas that writing encouraged.

The other pillar of the ruling discourse, "elegance" in the arts, was also a target of those who sought to break the hold of patron- age and the academy over the artisan. As Bfirger has argued, the late eighteenth century saw the emergence of a distinct art-institu- tion whose status was rationalized by the idea that art was an au- tonomous realm, separate from other social practices. Thanks to the almost simultaneous emergence of philosophical aesthetics, this thesis was also theoretically elaborated (Bi~rger 27). Blake saw the conservative aesthetics codified by the Royal Academy and

propagated by Joshua Reynolds as rules by which artists were se- lected according to their sycophancy: "The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen's Opinions in Art & Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If Not, he must be Starved." Reynolds, according to Blake, was nothing more than a

"hireling" of the ruling class, brought on "to Depress Art," for "The Arts & Sciences are the Destruction of Tyrannies or Bad Gov- ernments. Why should A Good Government endeavour to Depress what is its Chief & only Support?" (445, 452-3). It was against these cultural values that insurgent forms of art, like Blake's, were ar- ticulated.

If we approach English culture in the late eighteenth century in

1 This perhaps explains Blake's bizarre and puzzling use of punctuation and, most notably, capital letters.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 62

this way, parallels between enlightenment "reason" and the ratio- nality of "dialectical materialism," on the one hand, and "polite culture" and the conservative aesthetic of "Socialist Realism," on the other, are not difficult to find. Nor, as we shall see, is it diffi- cult to discern parallel forms of insurgent art. The revolutionary process in Russia also unleashed a whole array of radical religious sects who were not, on the whole, antagonistic towards the Bolshe- viks, but were staunchly anti-clerical. Church complicity in the 1905 massacre and subsequent repression, as well as Church sanc- tification of the First World War, had thoroughly discredited state religion. The interpenetration of Marxist and religious currents was thus thoroughgoing, as religious spheres of concern were identified with other areas of culture in the work of the so-called God-builders (who included the Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharsky) and such groups as Voskresenie, to which the great cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin belonged.2 These groups re- jected the evolutionism of Second International Marxism but wel- comed what Gramsci called the Bolshevik "Revolution against Capital," even if they interpreted this revolution in mystical forms. Furthermore, the majority of these radical religious sects contin- ued to be operative until the 1928 round-up of dissenting intellec- tuals that accompanied the Stalinist "left turn." For many, artistic work was simultaneously an aesthetic, political, and religious activ- ity that strove to cleanse the perceptions of "the people" and forge a new spirit of communality, what the Symbolists called sobornost. From a base in art these radicals attempted to participate in the revolutionizing of social practice, to build a new world distinctly reminiscent of the New Jerusalem of Blake's time. As Iakov Druskin has noted, such an approach motivated the work of Daniil Kharms (Cornwell 26).

The avant-garde movements (such as Futurism), out of which Kharms emerged in the mid 1920s had been oriented to the spo- ken language of the masses and had sought to overwhelm written literature with oral poetry. Mayakovsky, rarely inclined to theo- rize, was moved to declare:

During the revolution, literary prose became completely extinct: no-one had time to write or to read it. And besides there was a common distrust of fiction. Poems continued to be composed-more poems than ever before. But they were not printed: there was no paper. Contact with the readers was maintained not

through books but directly-by the voice from the platform ... It was an advance . . The revolution has given us back the audible word . . . The platform and the

living voice of the poet will never yield to the printed book. They have superseded the book. (N. Bachtin 139-40)

2 While Bakhtin may not have been a Marxist it is clear that his formulations would not have been possible without the historical and conceptual link of what Antonio Gramsci called the "philosophy of praxis." On this see my article, "Gramsci."

BLAKE & KHARMS / 63

The so-called zaum (trans-rational) movement, to which Kharms's "teacher" Khlebnikov belonged, and to which Kharms subscribed in his early years, aspired to the creation of an absolute "language in the making" that could never be fixed in print-hence the slo-

gan of the Cubo-Futurists: "After reading tear to pieces" (Acouturier 17). Aesthetic activity and cultural artifacts were treated as antipodes that parallel the Romantic bifurcation of lan-

guage into energeia (vital, living discourse) and ergon (the static sys- tem of grammatical rules). Kharms's and Vvedenski's early works were extreme versions of this as they returned to Khlebnikov's lan-

guage tenets and extended the idea of the "self-sufficient" word by imparting to it a "fifth meaning" beyond logic and reason, ac-

quired through a "collision of meanings." As late as the 1928 mili- tant OBERIU declaration this collision was still championed, but for the purpose of cleansing the object of its "decrepit literary gilding" in order to "express the object with the exactness of me- chanical technology."3' Although this goal was quite unlike the contentless production aesthetics of zaum,4 it nevertheless main- tained a sound-oriented form and delivery that depended upon public performance.

Distrust of the written word and learned culture in a semi-liter- ate society and an orientation on the spoken word are thus com- mon features of Blake's work and that of the early Kharms. Com- mon, too, is the idea of a deeper truth beyond logic and reason that can be revealed by the poet through a meeting or clash of verbal meanings. Following the Platonic attempt to minimize the

passivity of the reader through the Socratic dialogue, both poets sought to utilize a clash of perspectives to reveal the world with

greater profundity and to provoke independent thought. Blake's

description of the purpose of true poetry in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) particularly impressed Kharms. Here the poet attempts to "cleanse" the "doors of perception" and expose the "infinite" that is hidden beneath "apparent surfaces" through an "infernal" method of "printing" that uses the interaction of "con- traries" (Blake 154). For Kharms, Blake was one of those "great writers" who, along with Gogol and Khlebnikov, held their ideas above their artistic work as "sabres" with which to "assay" and "reg- ister" the world (Kharms, Dnevnikovie 477, Polet 439). The sword-

wielding poet, like Blake's Jesus in the parable of sheep and goats, comes to separate the "prolific" and the "devourer," those classes of men who should be enemies. In one of Blake's later poems, the revolutionary English poetJohn Milton is transported into the age

OBERIU was the group of left-wing writers in Leningrad to which Kharms, Vvedensky, Vaginov and others belonged in the late 1920s. It was forced to dis- band after considerable official pressure in 1929.

4 On this see J.Jaccard and A. Ustinov and Kharms et al. (458).

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 64

of the French revolution to justify Milton's own discourse and ex- pound a philosophy of composition that, above all, seeks to de- stroy the passive perception and acceptance of the ruling ideol-

ogy. The poet is now allied with the "devils" who spurn all stable, frozen relations in a centrifugal and Dionysian frenzy that opposes the tendency towards stasis propagated by the "angels" of officialdom. These ideas would obviously have appealed to a Rus- sian avant-garde not only obsessively conscious of the parallels be- tween the Russian and French revolutions but also undoubtedly conscious of the phenomenal popularity of Milton's Paradise Lost at the end of the nineteenth century. As Ken Hirschkop notes, in the work of the Russian avant-garde the French revolution was mythicized in a vision of endless dynamism tearing apart the fossil- ized official culture just as the "semi-feudal" Tsarist state, "bluntly hierarchical in its politics and ideology, was undermined by the ruthless dynamic of the industrial civil society which it helped to create" (106).

Romantic, eclectic, and utopian, the avant-garde project rested on the political hopes raised by the October Revolution. The Fu- turists in particular saw the revolution as the first stage in a "revo- lution of the spirit" which would bring about the transformation of social life and the destruction of the old, hierarchical culture. With the isolation and bureaucratization of the revolution, how- ever, culminating in the watershed of the first five-year plan, the avant-garde was beached. After a destructive cultural dictatorship was granted to bellicose advocates of proletarian culture, a new conservative aesthetic, a rationalistic ideology, and bureaucratic control of cultural production was established. With this develop- ment the cleavage of cultures that had characterized Tsarist soci-

ety was reactivated at a new level. Repression and censorship, much more severe than that of the anti-Jacobin measures of Blake's time, drove writers into conformity, silence, or "an under-

ground creative life over which the state had no control" to "es-

cape from the dreary official culture to real self-expression in se- cret" (Kagarlitsky 88). Furthermore, the frantic pace of the drive to industrialize destroyed the hitherto agriculturally patterned lives of the majority of the population, as collectivization repeated the effects of the British enclosure and vagrancy acts in more ex- treme and exaggerated forms. These factors were of decisive sig- nificance in shaping the terms of cultural struggle in both eras as oppositional culture became saturated with the carnivalesque fea- tures Bakhtin outlined in his study of Rabelais.

For Bakhtin, writing at the height of the Stalin period, carnival culture in Renaissance Europe broke out of the narrow confines of public holidays and entered "great literature," relativizing, in- verting, and parodying the official culture with an irreverence that

BLAKE & KHARMS / 65

allowed critical engagement with the ruling ideology. Subjecting normally "fear inspiring" and authoritative conceptions of the world to "folk laughter" was "a vital factor in laying down that pre- requisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to

approach the world realistically" (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 23). According to Kharms's friend Iakov Druskin, Kharms under- went an artistic crisis in the early 1930s that demanded a thorough reappraisal of his avant-garde "life making" (Cornwell 27); at this time there is a conspicuous shift from verse to prose and a more socially critical approach emerges from within carnivalesque play- fulness. The poetics of the absurd are employed in a deconstructive assault on the Stalinist monolith.

As is well known, the French and Russian Revolutions both in-

spired huge public festivals in which carnival elements were not

only common but also consciously political. Orest Tsekhnovitser noted in 1927 that in Russia, "carnival elements sharpen the politi- cal meaning of demonstrations, giving them a special strength, ex-

pressiveness and sharpness ... On the days of mass revolutionary celebrations like May 1st, elements of satire, buffonade and the

grotesque take first place" (6; my translation). While only the ear- liest festivals can be considered authentically carnivalesque in the sense of having no clear division between participants and specta- tors, J.R. von Geldern has shown that a clear connection between the avant-garde and the revolutionary masses was established at that time. (It is even arguable that the degeneration of these events removed the conditions necessary for the continuation of the avant-garde project. In the Stalinist period these festivals were transformed into official parades honoring the bureaucracy and

party and become increasingly devoid of the carnival elements central to the immediate post revolutionary period.) While in Brit- ain at the end of the eighteenth century there were no mass festi- vals of the French type, Thompson has shown that "the people clung to their customary wakes and feasts, and may even have en-

larged them in both vigor and extent" as the ruling class at-

tempted to break up the agricultural working year, which was still

"punctuated by traditional holidays and fairs," and impose the

regularity demanded by an industrial economy (Customs 378). In the aftermath of the French revolution such fairs and festivals gave dissenters an audience and were ideal focal points for opposition to agrarian reform, culminating in the rioting that Thompson de- tails. The effect was to lend carnival forms both a populist edge and political significance which permeated the work of the radical writers we are discussing.

Although in both cases the carnivalization of literature takes complex forms, it is based on the inversion of the hierarchy of sig- nificance and symbol in order to facilitate a deconstructive en-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 66

gagement with the ruling discourse. Coupled with this is a

decentering of literature, an orientation towards the boundaries of literary discourse, which deprives the canon of its assured and

respected place in society by treating it alongside popular genres. These aspects finally prepare the way for an ethical critique of the social order which, while remaining implicit, is all the more po- tent for not being voiced aloud. In each case the conspicuous ab- sence of a positively affirmed moral perspective throws a critical

light on the immorality of the contemporary order. The works we shall deal with in this regard are Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), and Kharms's later

works, including Sluchai (Incidences, 1933-39) and his final stories.

Although these works best illustrate my thesis, they by no means exhaust the possibilities of comparison.

Songs of Innocence begins with the transition from oral to written

poetry. In the "Introduction" the "piper," in response to a request that he "sit ... down and write/ In a book that all may read," shifts from spontaneous expression, through ajoyful and reciprocal dia-

logue, to a channeling and delimiting activity. At the same time

"piping" is replaced by exclusively verbal "singing," as repetition is demanded before moving on to writing; the 'joy" that results from direct contact with an audience "may" be conveyed to others only in a visible form, as spontaneity has been replaced by fixity. As Glen notes, "communication becomes more uncertain as it be- comes potentially more general: the sure, mutually responsive re-

lationship between singer and listener is lost in the rigidified book" (66-67). Generalization, rigidification, and abstraction are all aspects connected with the ruling discourse and "bookish" cul- ture. In The Book of Urizen the ominous figure of Urizen (both "your reason" and the abstract God of official religion) epitomizes the role of abstract scholasticism in mystifying popular conscious- ness. Songs of Innocence is, however, written so that "Every child may joy to hear." This book is therefore a two-edged thing, its joyful effect rendered unsure but possible by the printed medium, an

ambiguity embodied in the word "may." This is a type of "printing in the infernal method" that Marriage recommends a few years later; the words on the page facilitate the "child's" ability to "hear"

by cleansing the child's perception and restoring its innocence. In Glen's words:

The volume opens with an image of a creator working with tainted materials: it goes on to show-not by argument, but by a poetic realization of the contradic- tions within an actual society-how the "official" language of that society, to the polite reader transparent and unproblematic, is in fact far from transparent and deeply problematic. And since that society was one in which the dominant culture was literate and many of those on whom it sought to impose were not, the image of the book became for Blake a "minutely Appropriate" and tangible symbol of the process of abstraction and mystification and control he sought to condemn. (71)

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 67

The point is crucial, and could be applied with equal accuracy to Kharms's Sluchai. The opening piece of prose, "Blue Notebook No. 10," a mere ten lines in length, appears to demonstrate the impossibility of developing a traditional narrative as the evocation of the hero, the "red-haired man," collapses into absurdity. The red-haired man is shown to have actually no hair at all and can thereby be called "red-haired" only "conventionally" (uslovno); as the piece develops we are shown that the existence of any hero is based only on a series of conventions, the referent being com-

pletely absent. The opening of a set of "incidences" subverts the expectation that some sort of incident will take place, the founda- tion of such an expectation lying firmly within convention. Estab- lished language and literary forms are shown in this opening to be abstractions from real life and, in the absurd example with which we are presented, actually to bear no truthful or explanatory cor- relation with reality but, on the contrary, to mystify and confuse. What follows is thereby shown to be "tainted" with conventions that have a deeply problematic relationship with the social contra- dictions evoked in the text(s). As with Blake, the written literary language and form are symbolic of the automatism of official lan- guage and convention.

Also like Blake, Kharms employs written forms closest to oral

popular culture. We thus find the anecdote (Istoria, Anekdoty, Istorichesky episod), examples of vaudeville and balagan (Pushkin i

Gogol), and the folk raik (Petrov i Kamarov)5just as in Blake we en- counter numerous examples of proverbs (An Ancient Proverb), folk- lore rhymes (The Lamb, A Cradle Song, The Wild Flower's Song), and

popular prophesy (all the prophetic books), especially in the note- books that formed the basis of the Songs.6 When Kharms employs more canonical genres we find that they appear alongside these oral traditions, and only then in parodic form; thus in "Sonet" a verse genre clashes with prose text, and in "Matematik i Andrei

Seminovich" and "Makarov i Petersen" the Socratic dialogue col-

lapses into meaninglessness, while the parodic aubade "Nachalo ochen khoroshego letnogo dnya- simfonia" reduces the modernist

heights of Bely's Symphonies to the status of illogical, grotesque and trivial folk tunes. Subjecting the "father of Russian Literature" to the carnivalesque logic of the balagan in Pushkin i Gogol and to the

5 Balagan refers to the fair-booth theater which typified pre-revolutionary holi- day culture. Drawing on the stock characters of the commedia del'arte and Russian traditions like the petruska puppet theater, actors developed parodies and satires that routinely violated any strict separation of performers and spectators. RaAk was a fairground peep-show presided over by an irreverent and often deliberately pro- vocative clown. On this see Nekrylova.

6 On this see Aizlewood in Cornwell (99-100) and Glen (358-59). Blake's note- books are in Blake's Writings 161-87. See also the early Poetical Sketches, Writings 1-63.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 68

anecdote in Anekdoty iz zhizni Pushkina strips Pushkin of the aura of

sanctity typical of the philistine cult of the classics, challenging the valorized image of official recognition and delivering the poet into the fearless hands of investigative experiment.' Here oral tra- ditions remove the negative aspects of "bookish" culture and allow a refreshed engagement with a literature that has been tainted by convention and received ideas. Pushkin is stripped of sophistica- tion and finesse and reduced to the producer of idiot sons and an enthusiast for throwing rocks; but this is also a reduction to a sort of primitivism that Kharms's own work embodies and which is common to much avant-garde art of the early Soviet period. As Aucouturier notes, this primitivism is paradoxical in that it ap- peals to the future:

[T]he nostalgia for a return to a primitive or precultural condition expresses a longing for living art, ie, for art as a vital function (instead of just cultural habit), as the immediate manifestation of a natural urge uninhibited by the conditions imposed by any finished and conventional genres, unlimited by the frames of any given material. (17) Such a paradox is central to Bakhtin's account of carnival as the reactivation of folk memories preceding the emergence of class

antagonisms (Rabelais 206ff) and is implicit in Blake's own choice of children's verse. As Blake noted in one of his annotations to Lavater's aphorisms (1788): "Those who are offended with any- thing in this book would be offended with the innocence of a child & for the same reason, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly" (87). This might stand as a fitting epigram for the work of Kharms as well as Blake.

For Kharms the suspension of the normal hierarchy of signifi- cance and the semiotic system of the official culture opens up a

utopian space where creative play can take place. This space, which Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque and particularly in the novels of Dostoyevsky, is typified by an almost messianic cessation of determinations and free unrestrained interaction-thus Kharms's tendency to play with language in his prose pieces by displacing words from their customary referential meanings in pa- rodic, complex, and critical ways. Likewise, in certain of Kharms's children's poems, such as the 1929 Igra (Play), the world of child- hood games is presented as a mode of relationship quite different from the official "adult" world. These games act as a counter-

system that lives within the dominant system, either parasitically or

creatively dependent on one's relation to that system. Blake adopts a remarkably similar strategy in such Songs as "InfantJoy," "The Echoing Green" and, most subversively, "The Chimney

I Bakhtin implicitly acknowledged Kharms's contribution to the Carnivalesque in 1940 (Dialogic Imagination 25). An extensive series of carnivalesque literary anecdotes dealing with canonized figures attributed to Kharms can be found in Kharms (Gorlo 219-36).

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 69

Sweeper." Here Blake utilizes the utopian dream of a young, op- pressed sweep as an antithesis to everyday drudgery; the dream re- news his vitality and echoes the activity of the poet by deliberately recalling the child upon the cloud in the "Introduction": "Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run/. .. naked & white, all their bags left behind,/ They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind." The sweeper's dream replaces weeping with laughter, black coffins with white clouds, and confinement with freedom; but, like carnival, it is only a holiday from an everyday life, which resumes with inexorable regularity in the poem's final stanza. This return to the point of origin is ambivalent, however, as the moral typical of the genre is rather less straightforward than it might seem: "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm." After a woeful tale of a father selling his child and an accusatory finger being pointed at the polite reader ("So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep"), the close recalls the threats penned in the name of Captain Swing against members of the ruling class,s and throws the received no- tion of "duty" into sharp relief. As in "The Divine Image," the reader is presented with a disjuncture between "the mode of expe- rience presented in these poems and the official moral language of the society they depict" (Glen 149).

Refusing to confirm and indeed frustrating the assumptions of readers who had passively internalized the literary strategies of the dominant culture, both Blake and Kharms sought to bring those

assumptions to the attention of the reader and to demonstrate their negative effects on cognition. This is not a mere process of defamiliarization as outlined by Russian formalists; Kharms's ef- fort in the 1928 declaration to differentiate his work from zaumniki is, in essence, an attempt to assert the social vision of OBERIU art over formalistic nihilism. Blake's chosen genre, the children's poem, conventionally supplied moral instruction to the

young through a simplified and univocal presentation of a social order that was in fact riven with conflict and oppression. Any dis-

ruption of the functioning of such a discourse was simultaneously a disruption of the hegemonic strategies of a ruling authority based on an apparently untroubled relationship between signifier and referent.

Kharms's disruption of the same semiotic transparency and au-

thority in the first Sluchai prepares the reader for the suspension of normal causality and of any coherent sense of moral authority in what follows. A frustrated evocation of a hero is followed by a series of arbitrarily connected "incidents" that describe a world gone tragically insane and concludes with the words "Good people

8 "Captain Swing" was the name appended to threatening notes sent to trans- gressing employers by workers denied legal forms of collective organization in Britain. In the 1830s a series of riots took place in the name of "Swing."

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 70

but they don't know how to keep their feet on the ground." The

gross inadequacy of such a response compels the reader to look for satisfactory causes between the lines of the text and address its moral vacuum. The next three pieces present relentless scenes of violent death and injury shorn of consequence, significance, and

any sympathy for the victims. "The Falling-out Old Women" does this by treating the curiosity just aroused as reason for death itself, leading women to fall from their windows and smash bloodlessly on the ground below. For the narrator the spectacle is merely a casual distraction, comparable to the utter banality of a presenta- tion of a knitted scarf to a blind man. In "An Event on the Street" a man lies trapped beneath a tram while a policeman is concerned only with the cause, feeling the wheels with his hand and writing the name of the street in his book. A crowd gathers, but nobody is concerned with the crushed man-indeed, another falls beneath the wheels; all, inexplicably, is finally "sorted out" and the crowd

disperses. Dispersal occurs in "Sonet" after a small boy "fortu-

nately" falls and breaks both jaws, "distracting" childlike victims of an unexplained collective amnesia from their argument about the counting sequence after six. Here normal categories of cognition might have been lost, but violence saves the day and the protago- nists go home like children for their tea. The reader is left to con- sider what other aspects of humanity have been lost in such a world.

The movement between such works as Igra, Anekdoty, and these darker works are akin to Blake's transition from Innocence to Experi- ence. The creative potential inherent in play has disappeared from view, while outrage and protest ("The Chimney Sweeper," "Holy Thursday") or gloating ("A Poison Tree") dominate. Implicit in these poems is a poetic critique of the speakers, their outlooks dominated by the "mind forg'd manacles" against which they rail. Unlike the speakers in Songs of Innocence, the "experienced" speak- ers in "The Chimney Sweeper" and "Holy Thursday" overlook the beautiful and positive aspects which inhere in the present world and which could form the basis of a communal culture. That is

why Blake, revealingly, only published Songs of Experience with its

companion volume, while Songs of Innocence was also published separately. Similarly Kharms's Sluchai contains both "innocent" and "experienced" pieces, within a general movement from the

symbolic death of the author and traditional literature in the opening pieces to the rebirth of the writer, through a new unity of the natural and spiritual worlds at the end of "Starukha" ("The Old Woman").

A strong case could be made that Kharms's cycle, like Blake's Marriage, has all the main features of the Menippean satire. Both cycles are saturated with a carnival sense of the world, the key in-

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 71

version in Marriage being that of Angels and Devils. Both also have a series of grotesque and comic episodes, juxtapose prose and po- etic genres, and yet maintain a level of philosophical debate akin to Platonic dialogues. Similarly each of the songs in Songs of Inno- cence and Songs of Experience are related not by the poet as such but by a series of narrators whose viewpoints interact within the overall structure set by a largely silent presence. In this way Blake, as much as Kharms, can be said to novelize the terms of composition in a Bakhtinian sense, refracting his own intentions through those already embedded in language.

In Kharms's last stories, however, the playfulness and sense of liberation have given way to much more stark, shocking portrayals of amorality, violence, repression, and ideological distortion. In "Pomekha" ("Hindrance," 1940) for example, the grotesque sexual advances of a man are obstructed by the arrival of a leather- coated officer and soldiers who arrest both man and woman, for- bid them to speak, seal the room, and leave the building after

slamming the door. In "Griaznaya lichnost" ("Dirty Personality," 1937) a totally "unscrupulous" (bessovestnii) character casually en- gages in brutality, murder, and intimidation that is repeated in a motiveless cycle. Perhaps most disturbing of all, in "Reabilitatsia" ("Vindication or Rehabilitation," 1941) a first-person narrator who addresses the reader in a manner similar to Dostoyevsky's "Underground Man," admits to terrible crimes while justifying ev-

erything with reference to the relativity of all values. Thus the kill-

ing of a dog can be dismissed because it is considered alongside three human murders, while rape can be justified because the vic- tim was not a virgin, and defecation on murder victims can be

passed off as the fulfillment of a perfectly "natural" need. This ma-

nipulation of values and ideological categories to justify appalling crimes, disregard of moral considerations, or liquidation of de- bate holds no trace of liberating or comic play. The limits of novel- ization, of ambivalence and of reaccentuation are illuminated in these texts; the defamiliarization of the reality of Stalinist society reveals a society of atomized, powerless victims facing victimizers for whom basic ethical considerations are irrelevant.

When Kharms took up the "sabres" of Goethe, Blake, Lomonosov, and the father of Russian carnivalization, Gogol, to

"assay" the modern world, he inherited an approach that drew

heavily on the redefinition of evil and the role of the demon in Romanticism. Transforming evil into "energy" and the fallen an- gel into a promethean figure, Romanticism had emphasized both their revolutionary character and the kinship of the demon and writer, which fascinated Kharms and other avant-garde writers. The extremely conservative ideology and the authoritarian charac- ter of high Stalinism, however, allowed the inverted poetics of the

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 72

demon to be wielded in opposition to the "revolutionary" pathos of the Stalin regime. As the officially branded embodiment of evil and the proud non-conformist, the demon served to reset the moral coordinates against which the represented action could be assessed. Within a recognizable social setting, this could be ex- tended to the society where the action was set. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Bulgakov's now famous novel Master and Margarita (completed in 1940) in which the moral coordinates of "everyday" Moscow are inverted by the arrival of the Devil and his entourage. Kharms's work enacts the same inversion not by intro- ducing a supernatural character but by transforming figures from a recognizable Soviet society into the living embodiment of evil.

While Stalinist society replayed the brutalities of youthful capi- talism against which Blake railed, it did so with the efficiency char- acteristic of aged capitalism. Kharms was attracted to Blake as a critic of a hypocritically moralistic society in which women and children were forced to work in horrific conditions, peasants were dispossessed, and other injustices were officially perpetrated, all to satisfy an unlimited appetite for surplus value. However, while the periods in which both writers lived were characterized by the use of compulsion in addition to the automatic mechanism of "ra- tional" economic laws, the pressures of siege coupled with eco- nomic backwardness created a much higher level of coercion in Russia. The Stalinist bureaucracy atomized the working class and forced all social-political life into a totalitarian mold with hitherto unmatched thoroughness. Furthermore, all this was done with ref- erence to a revolutionary ideology and a philosophy of freedom, so that the reality of industrialization and collectivization turned out to be in absolute contradiction to the hopes of the masses and the illusions held by the bureaucracy itself. These factors had a definite effect on Kharms's work, which synthesized avant-garde formal techniques born of the revolutionary period and a mode of social criticism drawn from nineteenth-century Romantic litera- ture. This criticism was, however, directed towards and from within a society driven by the needs of youthful capitalism but per- vaded with an atmosphere of terror characteristic of capitalism's most advanced stage.

In Kharms's last works the absurd persists, but its links with the comic have gone, replaced by a gruesome reality beyond playful laughter. These works had no chance of publication in the fore- seeable future, and maintain an impression of words cast into the void. The playful inversions that characterize the Bakhtinian read- ing of carnival and that entered Kharms's early work through the conventions of the balagan and the works of Gogol give way to something approaching the tradition of jurodstvo typical of Rus- sian medieval culture. As Likhachev and Panchenko have shown,

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 73

the Russian "holy fool," whose behavior runs counter to the social norm, evoked a response that was on the edge of the comic and tragic: the "spectacle of the holy fool [jurodstvo] as it were renews the 'eternal truths,' resurrects the passion" (108) and in so doing illuminates the immorality of the contemporary world. The tone of the laughter is altogether darker, the ambivalence different.

That is not to say, however, that the radical edge to these works has been replaced by a conservative critique of the moral experi- ment of the 1920s and 1930s, as Anthony Anemone claims. The 1930s were not a simple continuation and realization of the avant- garde project but rather a denial of its content while continuing to maintain its form. Kharms, like Bakhtin, responded to the conser- vatism and despotism of the time with a sharpening and recasting of the artistc means available to oppose automatism of thought. The Stalin regime was thus viewed as a distorting incrustation on the dynamism and sociality of popular consciousness. If Kharms's last works show a greater pessimism towards breaking the hold of Stalinist ideology, this perhaps only reflects a more accurate as- sessment of the powers of the writer in conditions of isolation and

unpublishability. Bakhtin, on the other hand, never seemed to lose his faith in the utopian impulse he saw as inherent in popular skepticism.

With this synthesis we can see another aspect that unites Blake, Kharms, and Bakhtin: all three share the conviction that the pro- duction of discourse is a spontaneous process that is distorted by any attempt to structure or institutionalize it. Thus for Blake it is not the reactionary British state that represses popular enlighten- ment but a perpetually resurgent attempt by the deluded forces of stasis to control and limit the otherwise boundless creative energy of the producers. For Bakhtin the endlessly creative and dialogic nature of discourse is denied by those who make misguided at-

tempts to halt its free productivity. As in Blake, the adherence of the ruling class to a particular form of rationality imposes a grim logic that distorts the whole social world. And in Kharms, Druskin notes, the "Sluchai are directed not against the Stalinist regime, but against any regime whatever. They were not anti-Soviet but

anti-political, anti-social. In other words they were religious" (Cornwell 26). Indeed, all three writers might be called religious in this sense. Aspects of society dependent upon institutional con- text are interpreted in absolute terms; what is actually a political question is posed in terms of a moral and religious one. Discursive production is seen as a creative process that places men in a recip- rocal, loving relation to one another analogous to that between God and man, while those influences that deny that reciprocity also deny man's spiritual nature. Thus Blake's corrosive "infernal method" is simultaneously a way to ensure that the "notion that

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 74

man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged" (154).9 These are all characteristically Romantic responses to repres-

sion. Man's spiritual capacity is seen as inherent in his creativity and natural (to invent the word) communability, which finally, like Rousseau's subject, is oppressed by civilization. Political organiza- tion is seen to be a denial of the spontaneous, creative capacity of the people rather than a potentially structuring and enabling fac- tor. Similarly, against the highly centralized and mechanized so- cial organization of modern industrial society Blake and Bakhtin pose the cyclical rhythms of agricultural production that maintain links with pre-class society. As we have seen, such a position is also implicit in Kharms's carnivalesque treatment of play. Whereas death and rebirth, labor and its products are intimately inter- twined in the agricultural cycle, they are separated from each other in machine-society. Thus the task of a truly democratic art is to provide visions of that potential cyclical reality by showing how the images of death and oppression that characterize machine- society are only one aspect of the agricultural cycle. When re- newal, the dialectical antithesis of death, is manifested, the people will not be so oppressed by their rulers and their one-sided con- sciousness. For Bakhtin, Kharms, and Blake, to think critically is to be aware of the reverse of the actual, for then the hold of the "au- thoritative word" is released. As Bakhtin noted, the "grotesque"

liberates man from all the forms of inhuman necessity that direct the prevailing concept of the world. This concept is uncrowned by the grotesque and reduced to the relative and limited. Necessity, in every concept which prevails at any time, is always one piece, serious, unconditional and indisputable. But historically the idea of necessity is relative and variable. The principle of laughter and carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities. (Rabelais 48) These writers thus see the ruling discourse as one-sided, over-gen- eralized, and in essence anti-social; for them, the main tool in sub- verting that discourse's hegemony is the exposure of its one- sidedness and abstraction. Yet, as Kharms implicitly recognized, this view severely overstates the effectiveness of the novelist (Bakhtin) and poet (Blake) and recalls Lukacs's early idealist con- tention that "the act of consciousness overthrows the objective form of its object" (178). Such, however, is the result of an attempt at aesthetic radicalism when political organization is impossible.

St. Antony's College, Oxford

I Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, meanwhile, bears a strong resemblance to a kenoticized version of Hermann Cohen's messianic "correlation." On this see my "Dialectics and Dialogue," Chapter 1.7.

BLAKE & KHARMS/ 75

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