Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/125

117 It is in its written form that language corresponds most closely to the conception of 'byt'. "Arrested or frozen speech", writes McLuhan, "is writing." It was therefore appropriate that Khlebnikov's poetic and linguistic practice-as a struggle against 'byt' in language—should have taken very largely the form of a revolt against the forms and conventions of literacy. Joyce's language in Finnegans Wake has been described as that of prehistoric man—language as it was prior to the development of literacy. It has also been described as the language of childhood—of an age in the life of the individual before reading and writing have been learned. It is also, according to most critics, the language of the dreaming mind—or of those deeper layers of the consciousness which the conventions of literacy fail to reach. In all these cases—and there is no very sharp dividing line between theme-the crucial point is that the language comes close to the ideal of "pure sound". These remarks apply to Khlebnikov to no less a degree. "The main point in Futurist aesthetics", writes Krystyna Pomorska,
 * was the theory of the word from the aspect of sound as the only material and theme of poetry.

The idea of Futurism as above all the championship of sound for its own sake would be a simplification, especially in relation to Khlebnikov. On the other hand, to contemporaries, this was largely the impression conveyed, particularly when the new poets were compared with their Symbolist predecessors. The Symbolists