Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

By the phenomenological method Kridl means a description that focuses on special features of a work. Nevertheless, the description does not have to use concepts or notions, or even words, it may be an anschauliche Abstraktion (a view-abstraction) or thinking in images. The most seminal aspect in the analysis is not to lose the “living union” with the phenomenon [Kridl, 1936(a): 181–182]. The stress on the living union with a phenomenon is the Goethean element present both in Husserl’s reflection on image (Bild) [Kapust, 2009: 258; Thiel, 2003] and in Kridl’s integral method, since Goethe never failed to stress its importance and the deadness of the abstractions of modern mathematical physics. Referring to Ingarden’s own statement that Phenomenology allows for different cognitive acts according to different types of objects (a declaration he quoted four years before from Kohler and Husserl [Kridl, 1936(b): 159–160], Kridl states: “this theory will surely be even more suitable to our discipline, where there are no types but only individuals.”[Kridl, 1936(a): 183] All the numerous cognitive acts (that not necessarily consist in conceptual operations) lead, as is to be expected from formalist approaches, to determining the dominant of a work [Ibid.]. Finding the dominant of a work may become the main task of the phenomenological method, as well, as soon as it has become synthetized with Formalism. In many a work, the dominant is Ingarden’s fictive character of quasi-judgments that render the presented world, but Kridl, as an ardent nominalist and formalist, cannot seriously claim that he found an essence of the literary work of art. The presented world together with its metaphysical qualities are a dominant of a given, unique work, made up from this and not other sentences that happen to be quasi-judgements – there are other dominants possible for the literary but historically not realized – and not its essential features, whose lack pushes a language phenomenon out of the realm of literature. It follows from the concept of dominant alone hat it cannot be something fixed, permanent, unchangeable. The nature of the literary work is that it most probably has a dominant: the dominant is nevertheless a space of historicity or even of the fortitudinous within the confines of the literary. It is this “liberal” (a term already used in his 1933 manifesto [Kridl, 1933][83]) anti-essentialism – pertaining to the notion of the dominant and fuelled additionally by Kridl – that Ingarden attacked in his review of Kridl’s book when he stated that it lacks uniform epistemological foundation (i.e. does not specify the essence of the cognized object) [Ingarden, 1936]. The unwillingness to determine the ontological nature of the literary works leads to the absence of one, clearly outlined method of reading that would also serve as a method to discern which lecture (concretization) of a work is correct and which is not. Postwar commentators of Kridl – especially Henryk Markiewicz and Andrzej Karcz – adopted Ingarden’s prejudice, in that they took Kridl’s method to be eclectic and internally inconsistent rather than integral, “elastic”, following rather a unique object than a network of preconceived categories [Karcz, 2000; Markiewicz, 2010]. I argue that Kridl deliberately disregarded the ontology of “intentional objects” for the benefit of the “living union” with a literary work perceives as form.

The crucial issue is thus the placing of the phenomenological moment of Kridl’s integral method in its proper context, so that the function of Phenomenology within the integral method could be revealed. Taking into consideration the dynamics that characterize the intellectual morphic field of literary theory, one is compelled to acknowledge Kridl’s phenomenological approach as a compensation for the receptive side of chwyt, or “device”. The first person approach – adapted by Brentano and bequeathed to all subsequent Phenomenology – serves here as a symbolic replacing of the reception missing in the reception of Russian Formalism in Poland. A form may be experienced as a form thanks to an extra energy that springs from realization of the new individual possibilities – on the backdrop of boredom that one should fend off. Kridl’s integral method carries out a formalistic restitutio ad integrum.