Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/32

24 LINKED WITH THE IDEA OF CONQUERING FATE was the notion of "uniting humanity" and escaping from imprisonment within the framework of the solitary "I". It would not be until after 1917 that Khlebnikov would explain this as the basis of his "transrational language". But from the beginning of his break from the Symbolists, a peculiar “universalism", "impersonalism" or "collectivism" characterized Khlebnikov's literary work. It is not difficult to see how this characteristic originated in part in a revolt against the extreme individualism of the Symbolists.

According to Husserl, language is intersubjective. It takes place between one "I" and another, or others. This somewhat elementary point can be related to the theme of Khlebnikov's poem in which the "I" cedes place to a "We": language enable this "socializing" process to take place.

But Lukacs has pointed out how the view of man as
 * by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings

underlies the work of Joyce, Kafka and in fact a very large part of the modernist movement which has prevailed over Western literature for most of this century. The fundamental insight of these writers, in Lukacs' view, is their awareness not of any unifying or communicative power of human language under the conditions of modern city life, but of its utter inadequacy to bridge the chasm separating one human mind from another.