Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/157

149 take the question of Khlebnikov's championship of the "We" as against the "I"—standpoint in language-—this, too, may be consistenty with his “anti—literacy". We have already noted how the written word allows a certain independence to the "I", isolating it from the more "normal" process of immediate reciprocity characteristic of language. Pomorska notes how the Formalist "Opoyaz" scholars based themselves in part on the work of Lev Shcherba, whose most important innovation in stylistic studies was his differentiation between oral style and written style. On the level of discourse, writes Pomorska,


 * these two different styles correspond to the structures of monologue and dialogue. Monologue is a tendency proper to a written style, whereas oral speech is primarily oriented towards dialogue.

This takes us back to our earlier discussion of Khlebnikov's break with the Symbolists. His revolt against his earlier "teachers" was not only a revolt against their excessive "literacy"—it was also a revolt against the way in which their "I" always "out—weighed" (as Mandel'stam put it) the "not-I". But if this tendency towards "monologue" is actually "proper to a written style", then the two things against which Khlebnikov was rebelling were in a sense one and the same. Over—literate language—"bookish-fossilized" or "rational" language as Khlebnikov called it—assumes the monologue rather than the dialogue as its form of discourse. Or, as Khlebnikov put it more simply, it "divides people".

The language which was to "unite people" was conceived by Khlebnikov in a number of rather different forms. In a passage quoted in chapter ten, Khlebnikov even conceived it as a "written language", whose "silent, graphic signs" would unite the multitongues of humanity. Khlebnikov seems very confused here, however, because in the same article ("Artists of the World") he makes it clear that what he is actually thinking of is his old idea of the universal meanings of consonant-sounds, which he represents with letters of the alphabet——i.e. with his