Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/66

58 :art is not a copy of nature; its task is to distort nature so that it is fixed in a different consciousness. For Khlebnikov, the "self-sufficient word" was not a well-used, familiar word whose meaning had long since been conventionally agreed. It was—like a Cubist painting—an unfamiliar combination of elements. Its meaning was not "somewhere else"—beyond the word, in the "object" to which it referred. It was actually in the sound—sequence itself, which created new meanings of its own. The speech-act itself-—the material fact of articulating sounds——was now all-important, whereas formerly it had been taken for granted.

The "cutting" and "dislocation" of reality—practised by the Cubist painters to assert the primacy of painting over the external world—was quite consciously imitated by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh as is shown in their manifesto "The Word as Such":


 * futurist painters love to utilize cut parts of bodies, while the futurist speech—creators make use of broken words, words cut in half, and their capricious, subtle combinations...

That the meaning of the "self-sufficient word" was conceived of as being "in" the word itself—intrinsic to the sounds of which it is composed—is clear from a reading of any of Khlebnikov's many articles on the subject. Khlebnikov devoted an enormous labour of love to the attempt to determine the precise intrinsic meaning of various consonants, likening his findings to Mendeleyev‘s periodic table of the e1ements.

Jakobson writes: