The world of a literary work is always a conditional world created with the help of fiction, although reality serves as its “conscious” material. A work of art is always connected with reality and at the same time is not identical to it. V.G. Belinsky wrote: "Art is a reproduction of reality, created, as it were, a newly created world." Creating the world of the work, the writer structures it, placing it in a certain time and space. D.S. Likhachev noted that "the transformation of reality is connected with the idea of the work"60, and the task of the researcher is to see this transformation in the objective world. Life is both material reality and the life of the human spirit; that which is, that which was and will be, that which is "possible by virtue of probability or necessity" (Aristotle). You can't understand the nature of art if you don't ask philosophical question, what is it - "the whole world", is this a holistic phenomenon, how can it be recreated? After all, the most important task of the artist, according to I.-V. Goethe, "master the whole world and find expression for it."
The work of art is inner unity content and form. Content and form are inseparable bound friend with other concepts. The more complex the content, the richer the form should be. The variety of content can also be judged by the artistic form.
The categories "content" and "form" were developed in German classical aesthetics. Hegel argued that "the content of art is the ideal, and its form is a sensual figurative embodiment." In the interpenetration of the "ideal" and "image" Hegel saw the creative specificity of art. The leading pathos of his teaching is the subordination of all the details of the image, and above all the subject, to a certain spiritual content. The integrity of the work arises from the creative concept. The unity of a work is understood as the subordination of all its parts, details to the idea: it is internal, not external.
Form and content of literature- "fundamental literary concepts that generalize in themselves ideas about the external and internal aspects of a literary work and, at the same time, rely on the philosophical categories of form and content." In reality, form and content cannot be separated, for form is nothing but content in its directly perceived being, and content is nothing but the inner meaning of the form given to it. In the process of analyzing the content and form of literary works, its external and internal sides are distinguished, which are in organic unity. Content and form are inherent in any phenomenon of nature and society: each of them has external, formal elements and internal, meaningful ones.
Content and form have a complex multi-stage structure. For example, external organization speech (style, genre, composition, meter, rhythm, intonation, rhyme) acts as a form in relation to the internal artistic sense. In turn, the meaning of speech is a form of plot, and the plot is a form embodying characters and circumstances, and they appear as a form of manifestation of an artistic idea, a deep holistic meaning of a work. Form is the living flesh of content.
Content can only exist in matter, in the form. Any change in form is at the same time a change in content, and vice versa. The division is fraught with the danger of mechanical division (then the form is only a shell of the content). The study of a work as an organic unity of content and form, the understanding of form as content, and content as formed is a difficult task.
Concept pair " content and form” has firmly established itself in theoretical poetics. Even Aristotle singled out in his "Poetics" "what" (the subject of the image) and "how" (the means of the image). Form and content are philosophical categories. “Form I call the essence of the being of every thing,” wrote Aristotle.
Fiction is a set of literary works, each of which is an independent whole.
What is the unity of a literary work? The work exists as a separate text that has boundaries, as if enclosed in a frame: a beginning (usually a title) and an end. The work of art has another frame as well, since it functions as an aesthetic object, as a "unit" fiction. Reading a text generates in the reader's mind images, ideas about objects in their entirety.
The work is enclosed, as it were, in a double frame: as a conditional world created by the author, separated from the primary reality, and as a text, delimited from other texts. We must not forget about the playful nature of art, because within the same framework the writer creates and the reader perceives the work. Such is the ontology of a work of art.
There is another approach to the unity of the work - an axiological one, in which questions come to the fore about whether it was possible to reconcile the parts and the whole, to motivate this or that detail, because what harder composition artistic whole (multi-linearity of the plot, branching system of characters, change of time and place of action), the more difficult is the task for the writer.
The unity of the work is one of the cross-cutting problems in the history of aesthetic thought. Even in ancient literature, requirements were developed for various artistic genres, the aesthetics of classicism was normative. An interesting (and logical) overlap between the texts of the "poetic" Horace and Boileau, which L.V. draws attention to in his article. Chernets.
Horace advised:
The strength and charm of order, I think, lies in the fact that the writer Knows exactly what should be said where, and everything else - after, Where what goes; so that the creator of the poem knows what to take, what to throw away, Only so that he is not generous with words, but also stingy and picky.
Boileau also argued the need for a holistic unity of the work:
The poet should place everything thoughtfully,
Beginning and end into a single stream to merge And, subordinating the words to their undeniable power, Artfully combine disparate parts.
A deep substantiation of the unity of a literary work was developed in aesthetics. A work of art is an analogue of nature for I. Kant, because the integrity of phenomena is, as it were, repeated in the integrity of artistic images: "Beautiful art is such art, which at the same time appears to us by nature." The substantiation of the unity of a literary work as a criterion of its aesthetic perfection is given in Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which the beautiful in art is “higher” than the beautiful in nature, since in art there are no (should not be!) Details that are not connected with a number of details, but the essence artistic creativity and consists in the process of “cleansing” phenomena from features that do not reveal its essence, in creating a form corresponding to the content.
The criterion of artistic unity in the XIX century. united critics of different directions, but in the movement of aesthetic thought towards the "age-old rules of aesthetics" the demand for artistic unity, consistency of the whole and parts in the work remained inevitable.
An example of an exemplary philological analysis of a work of art is “The experience of form analysis” B.A. Larina. The outstanding philologist called his method “ spectral analysis”, the purpose of which is “to reveal what is “given” in the writer’s text, in all its vacillating depths”. Let us give as an example the elements of his analysis of M. Sholokhov's story "The Fate of a Man":
“Here, for example, from his (Andrey Sokolov) memories of parting at the station on the day of departure for the front: I broke away from Irina. He took her face in his hands, kissed her, and her lips were like ice.
Which significant word"torn off" in this situation and in this context: and "broke out" of her convulsive embrace, shocked by his wife's mortal anxiety; and "rejected" from native family, a native home, like a leaf picked up by the wind and carried away away from its branch, tree, forest; and rushed away, overpowered, suppressed tenderness - tormented by a lacerated wound ...
"I took her face in my palms" - in these words both the rude caress of the hero "with foolish strength" next to his small, fragile wife, and the elusive image of farewell to the deceased in the coffin, generated last words: "...and her lips are like ice."
Andrey Sokolov speaks even more unpretentiously, as if quite awkwardly, simply about his mental catastrophe - about the consciousness of captivity:
Oh, brother, this is not an easy thing to understand that you are in captivity not of your own free will. Whoever has not experienced this in their own skin, you will not immediately enter into the soul, so that it humanly reaches him what this thing means.
“To understand” here is not only “to comprehend what was not clear”, but also “to assimilate to the end, without a shadow of a doubt”, “to be established by reflection in something urgently needed for peace of mind". The following selectively rude words explain this word in a bodily tangible way. Sparing with words, Andrei Sokolov seems to be repeating himself here, but you can’t immediately say it in such a way that it would “come humanly” to each of those “who don’t do this in their own skin experienced""
It seems that this passage clearly demonstrates the fruitfulness of Larin's analysis. The scientist, without destroying the whole text, comprehensively uses the techniques of both the linguistic and literary methods of interpretation, revealing the originality of the artistic fabric of the work, as well as the idea “given” in the text by M. Sholokhov. Aarin's method is called linguistic and poetic.
In modern literary criticism, in the works of S. Averintsev, M. Andreev, M. Gasparov, G. Kosikov, A. Kurilov, A. Mikhailov, a view was established on the history of literature as a change in the types of artistic consciousness: “mythopoetic”, “traditionalist”, "individual-author's", gravitating towards a creative experiment. During the period of domination of the individual-author's type of artistic consciousness, such a property of literature as dialogicity is realized. Each new interpretation of the work (in different times, by different researchers) is at the same time a new understanding of its artistic unity. The law of integrity presupposes the internal completeness (fullness) of the artistic whole.
This means the ultimate ordering of the form of a work in relation to its content as an aesthetic object.
M. Bakhtin argued that the art form does not make sense without its inseparable connection with the content, and operated on the concept of "substantial form". Artistic content is embodied in the whole work. Yu.M. Lotman wrote: “The idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the whole artistic structure. The researcher sometimes does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations; he is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls in search of a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building. The plan is the architect's idea, and the structure of the building is its realization."
A literary work is a holistic picture of life (in epic and dramatic works) or any holistic experience (in lyrical works). Each work of art, according to V.G. Belinsky - "it is a holistic, self-contained world." D.S. Merezhkovsky gave appreciated Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina", arguing that ""Anna Karenina" as a complete artistic whole is the most perfect of the works of L. Tolstoy. In "War and World" he wanted, perhaps, more, but did not achieve: and we saw that one of the main actors, Napoleon, did not succeed at all. In "Anna Karenina" - everything, or almost everything, succeeded; here, and only here, the artistic genius of L. Tolstoy reached his highest point, until complete self-control, until the final balance between design and execution. If ever he was stronger, then, in any case, he has never been more perfect, neither before nor after.
The holistic unity of a work of art is determined by a single author's intention and appears in all the complexity of the depicted events, characters, thoughts. Genuine work art is unique art world with its content and with the form expressing this content. The artistic reality objectified in the text is the form.
The inseparable connection between content and artistic form is the criterion(Other Greek kgkegup - sign, indicator) artistry of the work. This unity is determined by the socio-aesthetic integrity of the literary work.
Hegel wrote about the unity of content and form: “A work of art that lacks a proper form is, precisely for this reason, not a genuine, i. the works are good (or even superior) but lack proper form. Only those works of art in which content and form are identical are true works of art.
Only possible form the embodiment of life content is the word, and any word turns out to be artistically significant when it begins to convey not only factual, but also conceptual, subtext information. All these three types of information are complicated by aesthetic information.
The concept of artistic form should not be identified with the concept of writing technique. "What is it to trim a lyric poem,<...>to bring the form to its possible elegance? This is probably nothing more than to finish and bring to the possible in human nature finesse, one’s own, this or that feeling ... To work on a verse for a poet is the same as to work on one’s soul, ”wrote Ya.I. Polonsky. An opposition can be traced in the work of art: organization (“madeness”) and organicity (“birth”). Recall the article by V. Mayakovsky “How to make poetry?” and the lines of A. Akhmatova "If only you knew from what rubbish poetry grows ...".
In one of the letters to F.M. Dostoevsky conveys the words of V.G. Belinsky about the importance of form in art: “You, artists, with one line, at once, in an image, expose the very essence, so that it would be a hand to feel, so that everything suddenly becomes clear to the most unreasoning reader! This is the secret of artistry, this is the truth in art.
The content is expressed through all sides of the form (system of images, plot, language). Thus, the content of the work appears primarily in the relationship of characters (characters), which are found in the events (plot). It is not easy to achieve complete unity of content and form. A.P. wrote about the difficulty of this. Chekhov: “You need to write a story for 5-6 days and think about it all the time while you are writing ... It is necessary that each phrase lie in the brain for two days and get oiled ... The manuscripts of all real masters are soiled, crossed out along and across, worn and covered with patches, in turn crossed out ... ".
Literary theory
In literary theory The problem of content and form is considered in two aspects: in the aspect of reflecting objective reality, when life acts as a content (object), and an artistic image as a form (a form of knowledge). Thanks to this, we can find out the place and role of fiction in a number of other ideological forms- politics, religions, mythology, etc.
The problem of content and form can also be considered in terms of clarifying the internal laws of literature, because the image that has developed in the mind of the author represents the content of a literary work. Here we are talking about internal structure artistic image or systems of images of a literary work. An artistic image can be regarded not as a form of reflection, but as a unity of its content and its form, as a specific unity of content and form. There is no content at all, there is only formalized, that is, having certain form content. Content is the essence of something (someone) something. Form is a structure, organization of content, and it is not something external in relation to content, but inherent in it. Form is the energy of the essence or the expression of the essence. Art itself is a form of knowledge of reality.
Hegel wrote in Logic: "Form is content, and in its developed definiteness it is the law of phenomena." Hegel's philosophical formula: "Content is nothing but the transition of form, and form is nothing but the transition of content into form." It warns us against a rough, simplified understanding of the complex, mobile, dialectical unity of the categories of form and content in general, and in the field of art in particular. It is important to understand that the boundary between content and form is not a spatial concept, but a logical one. The relationship of content and form is not the relationship of the whole and the part, the core and the shell, the inner and the outer, the quantity and quality, it is the relationship of opposites, passing into each other. L.S. Vygotsky in the book "Psychology of Art" analyzes the composition of I. Bunin's short story "Light Breath" and reveals its "main psychological law”: “The writer, selecting only the features of events that he needs, recycles in the strongest way ... life material” and turns the “story about everyday turbidity” into a “story about light breathing”. He notes: “The true theme of the story is not the story of the confused life of a provincial schoolgirl, but easy breath, a feeling of liberation and lightness, reflected™ and the perfect transparency of life, which cannot be taken out of the events themselves, ”which are connected in such a way that they lose their worldly burden; "complex temporal permutations turn the story of the life of a frivolous girl into the light breath of Bunin's story." He formulated the law of destruction by the form of content, which can be illustrated: the very first episode, which tells about the death of Olya Meshcherskaya, relieves the tension that the reader would experience upon learning about the murder of the girl, as a result of which the climax ceased to be a climax, the emotional coloring of the episode was extinguished . She was “lost” among the calm description of the platform, the crowd of people and the officer who came, “lost” and the most important word “shot”: the very structure of this phrase drowns out the shot.
The distinction between content and form is necessary at the initial stage of studying works, at the stage of analysis.
Analysis(Greek analysis - decomposition, dismemberment) literary - the study of the parts and elements of the work, as well as the relationships between them.
There are many methods work analysis. The most theoretically substantiated and universal is the analysis proceeding from the category of “substantial form” and revealing the functionality of the form in relation to the content.
A synthesis is built on the results of the analysis, that is, the most complete and correct understanding of both the content and the formal artistic originality and their unity. Literary synthesis in the field of content is described by the term "interpretation", in the field of form - by the term "style". Their interaction makes it possible to comprehend the work as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Each form element has its own specific “meaning”. Form is not something independent; the form is, in fact, the content. Perceiving the form, we comprehend the content. A. Bushmin wrote about the difficulties scientific analysis artistic image in the unity of content and form: "And there is still no other way out, how to deal precisely with analysis," splitting "of unity in the name of its subsequent synthesis."
When analyzing a work of art, it is necessary not to ignore both categories, but to catch their transition into each other, to understand content and form as a mobile interaction of opposites, sometimes diverging, sometimes approaching, up to identity.
It is appropriate to recall Sasha Cherny's poem about the unity of content and form:
Some shout: “What is the form? Trivia!
When slurry is poured into crystal -
Will the crystal become infinitely lower?
Others object: “Fools!
And the best wine in the night vessel
Decent people won't drink."
They can’t solve the dispute ... but it’s a pity!
After all, you can pour wine into crystal.
The ideal of literary analysis will always remain such a study of a work of art that captures the nature of interpenetrating ideological and figurative unity to the greatest extent.
The form in poetry (as opposed to the prose form) is naked, addressed to the physical senses of the reader (listener) and considers a number of "conflicts" that form the poetic form, which can be:
- lexico-semantic:
- 1) a word in speech - a word in verse;
- 2) a word in a sentence - a word in a verse (a word in a sentence is perceived in the flow of speech, in a verse it tends to be emphasized);
- intonation-sound:
- 1) between meter and rhythm;
- 2) between meter and syntax.
In the book of E. Etkind "The Matter of Verse" there are many interesting examples that convince of the validity of these provisions. Here is one of them. To prove the existence of the first conflict “a word in speech - a word in verse”, M. Tsvetaeva’s eight-verse, written in July 1918, is taken. Its text shows that pronouns for prose are an insignificant lexical category, and in poetic contexts they acquire new shades of meaning and come to the fore:
I am a page to your pen.
I will accept everything. I am white page.
I am the keeper of your good:
I will return and return a hundredfold.
I am a village, black earth.
You are my ray and rain moisture.
You are the Lord and Master, and I am
Chernozem and white paper.
The compositional core of this poem is the pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person. In stanza 1, their opposition is outlined: I - yours (twice in verses 1 and 3); in the second stanza it reaches full distinctness: I am you, you are me. You are at the beginning of the verse, I am at the end before a pause with a sharp transfer.
The contrast of "white" and "black" (paper - earth) reflects metaphors that are close and at the same time opposite to each other: a woman in love is a page of white paper; it captures the thought of the one who is Lord and Lord for it (passivity of reflection), and in the second metaphor - the activity of creativity. “I of a woman combines black and white, opposites that materialize in grammatical genders:
I am a page (g)
I am the keeper (m)
I am a village, black earth (f)
I am black soil (m)
The same applies to the second pronoun, and it combines contrasts materialized in the grammatical gender:
You are my ray and rain moisture.
Roll call of loved ones and at the same time opposite words we will find in such actually close, compared with each other words, such as the verbs: I will increase and In about the return and u., and nouns: Lord and Lord.
So I am you. But who is hiding behind both pronouns? Woman and Man - in general? Real M.I. Tsvetaeva and her lover? The poet and the world Man and God? Soul and body? Each of our answers is correct; but the vagueness of the poem is also important, which, due to the ambiguity of pronouns, can be interpreted in different ways, in other words, it has a semantic layering”74.
All material elements- words, sentences, stanzas - in greater or less lesser degree are semantized, become elements of content: “The unity of content and form — how often do we use this formula, which sounds like a spell, use it, do not think about its real meaning! Meanwhile, in relation to poetry, this unity has a special importance. In poetry, everything, without exception, turns out to be content - each, even the most insignificant element of the form builds a meaning, expresses it: the size, location and nature of the rhyme, the ratio of the phrase and the line, the ratio of vowels and consonants, the length of words and sentences, and much more ... ”- notes E. Etkind.
The ratio "content - form" in poetry is unchanged, but it changes from one art system to another. In classic poetry, one-dimensional meaning was put forward in the first place, associations were obligatory and unambiguous (Parnassus, Muse), style was neutralized by the law of the unity of style. AT romantic poetry the meaning deepens, the word loses its semantic unambiguity, different styles appear.
E. Etkind opposes the artificial separation of content and form in poetry: “There is no content outside the form, because each element of the form, no matter how small or external, builds the content of the work; there is no form outside the content, because every element of the form, no matter how empty, is charged with an idea.
Another important question: where should the analysis begin, with the content or with the form? The answer is simple: it doesn't matter. It all depends on the nature of the work. specific tasks research. It is not at all necessary to start the study with the content, guided only by the one thought that the content determines the form. the main task- in the analysis to catch the transition of these two categories into each other, their interdependence.
The artist creates a work in which content and form are two sides of one single whole. Work on form is at the same time work on content, and vice versa. In the article "How to make poetry?" V. Mayakovsky spoke about how he worked on a poem dedicated to S. Yesenin. The content of this poem was born in the very process of creating the form, in the process of the rhythmic and verbal matter of the line:
You went ra-ra-ra to another world...
You have gone to another world...
You have gone, Seryozha, to another world ... - this line is false.
You have gone irrevocably to another world - unless someone died turning. You have gone, Yesenin, to another world - this is too serious.
You have gone, as they say, into another world - the final design.
“The last line is true, “as they say”, without being a direct mockery, it subtly reduces the pathos of the verse and at the same time eliminates all suspicions about the author’s belief in all afterlife nonsense,” V. Mayakovsky notes.
Conclusion: on the one hand, we are talking about working on the form of verse, about choosing a rhythm, word, expression. But Mayakovsky is also working on the content. He does not just choose the size, but strives to make the line "sublime", and this is a semantic category, not a formal one. It replaces words in a line not just to more accurately or more vividly express a pre-prepared thought, but also to create this thought. By changing the form (size, word), Mayakovsky thereby changes the content of the line (ultimately, the poem as a whole).
This example of work on a verse demonstrates the basic law of creativity: work on form is at the same time work on content, and vice versa. The poet does not and cannot create form and content separately. He creates a work in which content and form are two sides of a single whole.
How is a poem born? Fet noticed that his work was born from a simple rhyme, "swelling" around him. In one of his letters, he wrote: "The whole image that arises in a creative kaleidoscope depends on elusive accidents, the result of which is success or failure." An example can be given that confirms the correctness of this recognition. A wonderful connoisseur of Pushkin's creativity S.M. Bondi told the strange story of the birth of the well-known Pushkin line:
On the hills of Georgia lies the darkness of the night...
Pushkin originally wrote:
Everything is quiet. The night shadow fell on the Caucasus...
Then, as is clear from the draft manuscript, the poet crossed out the words "night shadow" and wrote the words "the night is coming" above them, leaving the word "lay down" without any changes. How to understand this? S. Bondi proves that a random factor intervened in the creative process: the poet wrote the word “lay down” in a cursory handwriting, and the rounded part, the “loop” did not turn out in the letter “e”. The word "lay down" looked like the word "mist". And this random, extraneous reason prompted the poet to a different version of the line:
Everything is quiet. The darkness of the night is coming to the Caucasus...
In these phrases, very different in meaning, a different vision of nature was embodied. The random word "darkness" could act as a form of the creative process, a form of Pushkin's poetic thinking. This special case exposes common law creativity: content is not just embodied in form; it is born in it and can be born only in it.
Creating a form that matches the content of a literary work is a complex process. It requires a high degree of skill. No wonder L.N. Tolstoy wrote: “A terrible thing is this concern for the perfection of form! No wonder she. But not without reason when the content is good. If Gogol had written his comedy (The Inspector General) rudely, weakly, even one millionth of those who read it now would not have read it. If the content of the work is "evil", and its artistic form is impeccable, then a kind of aestheticization of evil, vice occurs, as, for example, in the poetry of Baudelaire ("Flowers of Evil"), or in P. Suskind's novel "Perfumer".
The problem of the integrity of a work of art was considered by G.A. Gukovsky: “An ideologically valuable work of art does not include anything superfluous, that is, nothing that would not be necessary to express its content, ideas, nothing, not even a single word, not a single sound. Each element of the work means, and only in order to mean, it exists in the world ... The elements of the work as a whole constitute not arithmetic sum, a organic system, constitute the unity of its meaning... And it is impossible to understand this meaning, to understand the idea, the meaning of the work, ignoring some part of the components of this meaning.
The basic "rule" for analyzing a literary work is careful attitude to artistic integrity, revealing the content of its form. A literary work acquires great social significance only when it is artistic in its form, i.e., corresponds to the content expressed in it.
Integrity- the category of aesthetics, expressing the ontological problems of the art of the word. Each literary work is an independent, complete whole, not reducible to the sum of elements and indecomposable into them without a trace.
The law of integrity presupposes subject-semantic exhaustion, internal completeness (completeness) and non-redundancy of a work of art. With the help of the plot, composition, images, etc. an artistic whole is formed, complete in itself and expanded into the world. Especially big role composition plays here: all parts of the work must be arranged so that they fully express the idea.
Artistic unity, consistency of the whole and parts in the work were already noted by the ancient Greek philosophers of the 4th century BC. Plato and Aristotle. The latter wrote in his “Poetics”: “... The whole is that which has a beginning, middle and end”, “parts of events (Aristotle refers to drama) must be so composed that with a rearrangement or removal of one of the parts, the the whole was upset, for that, the presence or absence of which is imperceptible, is not a part of the whole. This rule of aesthetics is also recognized by modern literary criticism.
A work of literature is indecomposable at any level. Each image of the hero of a given aesthetic object, in turn, is also perceived as a whole, and not divided into separate components. Each detail exists thanks to the imprint of the whole lying on it, "each new trait only more expresses the whole figure ”(L. Tolstoy).
Despite this, when analyzing a work, it is still divided into separate parts. An important question is what exactly each of them is.
The question of the composition of a literary work, more precisely, of its constituent parts, has long attracted the attention of researchers. Thus, Aristotle in his Poetics distinguished between a certain “what” (an object of imitation) and a certain “how” (means of imitation) in works. In the 19th century, G.V.F. Hegel used the concepts of "form" and "content" in relation to art.
In modern literary criticism, there are two main trends in establishing the structure of a work. The first proceeds from the separation of a number of layers or levels in a work, just as in linguistics in a separate statement one can distinguish the level of phonetic, morphological, lexical syntactic. At the same time, different researchers unequally imagine both the set of levels and the nature of their correlation. So, M.M. Bakhtin sees in the work, first of all, two levels - "plot" and "plot", the depicted world and the world of the image itself, the reality of the author and the reality of the hero.
MM. Hirshman proposes a more complex, mostly three-level structure: rhythm, plot, hero; in addition, the subject-object organization of the work permeates “vertically” these levels, which ultimately creates not a linear structure, but rather a grid that is superimposed on the work of art (Style of a literary work. There are other models of a work of art that represent it in the form of a series of levels, slices.
The second approach to the structure of a work of art takes such general categories as content and form as a primary division. (In a number scientific schools they are replaced by other definitions. So, Yu.M. Lotman and other structuralists, these concepts correspond to "structure" and "idea", for semiotics - "sign" and "meaning", for post-structuralists - "text" and "meaning").
Thus, in literary criticism, along with the identification of two fundamental aspects of a work, there are other logical constructions. But it is obvious that the dichotomous approach corresponds much more to the real structure of the work and is much more justified from the point of view of philosophy and methodology.
Content and the form- philosophical categories that find application in different areas knowledge. They serve to designate the essential external and internal aspects inherent in all phenomena of reality. This pair of concepts meets the needs of people to understand the complexity of objects, phenomena, personalities, their diversity, and, above all, to comprehend their implicit, deep meaning. The concepts of content and form serve to mentally delimit the external - from the internal, essence and meaning - from their embodiment, from the modes of their existence, that is, they respond to the analytical impulse. human consciousness. content at the same time, the basis of the subject, its defining side, is called. The form the same is the organization and appearance of the object, its defined side.
The form understood in this way is secondary, derivative, dependent on content and at the same time is a condition for the existence of an object. Its secondary nature in relation to content does not mean its secondary significance: form and content are equally necessary aspects of the phenomena of being.
Forms expressing content can be associated with it (associated) in different ways: one thing is science and philosophy with their abstract semantic principles, and something completely different is the fruits of artistic creativity, marked by the predominance of the singular and uniquely individual.
In the literary concepts of “content” and “form”, ideas about the external and inner sides literary work. Hence the naturalness of defining the boundaries of form and content in works: spirituality is the content, and its material embodiment is the form.
The ideas about the inseparability of the content and form of works of art were fixed by G.V.F. Hegel at the turn of 1810 - 1820s. The German philosopher believed that concreteness should be inherent in "both sides of art, both the depicted content and the form of the image", it "is precisely the point at which they can coincide and correspond to each other." It was also significant that Hegel likened the work of art to a single, integral "organism".
According to Hegel, science and philosophy, which constitute the sphere of abstract thought, "possess a form not posited by itself, external to it." It is legitimate to add that the content here does not change when it is restructured: the same thought can be captured in different ways. Something completely different is represented by works of art, where, as Hegel argued, the content (idea) and its (her) embodiment correspond to each other as much as possible: artistic idea, being concrete, "carries in itself the principle and mode of its manifestation, and it freely creates its own form."
Similar statements are also found in V.G. Belinsky. According to the critic, the idea in the poet’s work is “not an abstract thought, not a dead form, but a living creation, in which (...) there is no feature that indicates a stitching or adhesion, there is no border between the idea and the form, but both are whole and a single organic creation."
A similar point of view is shared by most modern literary critics. Wherein content literary work is defined as its essence, spiritual being, and the form - as a way of existence of this content. The content, in other words, is the "statement" of the writer about the world, a certain emotional and mental reaction to certain phenomena of reality. The form- the system of methods and means in which this reaction finds expression, embodiment. Simplifying somewhat, we can say that the content is what the writer wanted to say with his work, and the form is how he did it.
The form of a work of art has two main functions. The first is carried out within the artistic whole, so it can be called internal: it is a form of expression of content. The second function is found in the impact of the work on the reader, so it can be called external (in relation to the work). It consists in the fact that the form has an aesthetic impact on the reader, because it is the form that acts as the bearer of the aesthetic qualities of a work of art. The content itself cannot be beautiful or ugly in a strict, aesthetic sense - these are properties that arise exclusively at the level of form.
Modern science proceeds from the idea of the primacy of content over form. In relation to a work of art, this is true as for a creative process (the writer looks for the appropriate form, even if for a vague, but already existing content, but in no case vice versa - he does not first create a “ready-made form”, and then pours some content into it) , and for the work as such (features of the content determine and explain the specifics of the form). However, in in a certain sense, namely, in relation to the perceiving consciousness, it is the form that is primary, and the content is secondary. Since sensory perception always outstrips the emotional reaction, and even more so the rational comprehension of the subject, moreover, serves as the basis for them, readers perceive in the work first its form, and only then and through it - the corresponding artistic content.
In the history of European aesthetics, there were other points of view, statements about the priority of form over content in art. Ascending to ideas German philosopher I. Kant, they were further developed in the works of the writer F. Schiller and representatives formal school. In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller wrote that in a truly beautiful work (such are the creations of ancient masters), “everything should depend on the form, and nothing on the content, because only the form affects the whole person as a whole, while the content only affects separate forces. Content, no matter how sublime and all-encompassing, always acts on the spirit in a restrictive way, and true aesthetic freedom can only be expected from form. So, the real secret of the art of the master is to destroy the content with the form. Thus, Schiller exaggerated such a property of form as its relative independence.
Such views have been developed in early works Russian formalists (for example, V.B. Shklovsky), who generally proposed to replace the concepts of “content” and “form” with others - “material” and “reception”. Formalists saw the content as a non-artistic category and therefore evaluated the form as the only bearer of artistic specificity, considered a work of art as the “sum” of its constituent techniques.
In the future, in an effort to point out the specifics of the relationship between content and form in art, literary critics proposed special term, specially designed to reflect the continuity of the fusion of the sides of the artistic whole - “ meaningful form". In Russian literary criticism, the concept of meaningful form, which is hardly central to the composition of theoretical poetics, was substantiated by M.M. Bakhtin in the works of the 1920s. He argued that the artistic form has no meaning outside of its correlation with the content, which was defined by the scientist as the cognitive and ethical moment of the aesthetic object, as the identified and evaluated reality: the "moment of content" allows "to comprehend the form in a more significant way" than roughly hedonistically.
In another wording about the same thing: the art form needs "extra-aesthetic significance of the content." Using the phrases "meaningful form", "formed content", "form-forming ideology", Bakhtin emphasized the inseparability and inseparability of form and content. “In every smallest element of the poetic structure,” he wrote, “in every metaphor, in every epithet, we will find a chemical combination of cognitive definition, ethical assessment and artistically completed design.”
The above words convincingly and clearly characterize the most important principle artistic activity- installation on unity of content and form in created works. The fully implemented unity of form and content makes the work organically integral, as if it were a living being, born, and not rationally (mechanically) constructed.
The fact that artistic content is embodied (materialized) not in any individual words, phrases, phrases, and in the aggregate of everything that is present in the work, other researchers also spoke. So, according to Yu.M. Lotman, “the idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the entire artistic structure. The researcher who does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls, looking for a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building.
However, this or that formal element would not be so meaningful, no matter how close the connection between content and form may be, this connection does not turn into identity. Content and form are not the same, they are different, singled out in the process of abstraction and analysis of the side of the artistic whole. They have different tasks and different functions. The true content of the form is revealed only when the fundamental differences these two sides of a work of art, when, consequently, it becomes possible to establish certain relationships and regular interactions between them.
Thus, in a work of art, the beginnings are distinguishable formal-meaningful and proper content .
Artistic content is a unity of objective and subjective principles. This is a combination of what came to the author from outside and was known to him (the subject of art), and what he expressed and comes from his views, intuition, personality traits.
The point of view on the form, which many modern scientists adhere to, was substantiated by G.N. Pospelov, who identified in literary texts“subject figurativeness”, verbal structure, composition (Problems of literary style - M .. 1970, p. 80; Holistic and systemic understanding of literary works // Questions of methodology and poetics.
According to this point of view, which is shared by many researchers, in the composition of the form that carries the content, three sides are traditionally distinguished, which must be present in any literary work. “This is, first of all, subject(subject-pictorial) Start: all those single phenomena and facts that are indicated with the help of words and in their totality constitute the world of a work of art (there are also expressions “poetic world”, “ inner world"works, "immediate content"). This, secondly, is the actual verbal fabric of the work: artistic speech, often fixed by the terms "poetic language", "stylistics", "text". And, thirdly, this is the correlation and arrangement in the work of units of the subject and verbal “rows”, that is, the composition” (Khalizev V.E. Theory of Literature.
The emphasis in the work of its three sides goes back to ancient rhetoric. It has been repeatedly noted that the speaker needs to:
1) find material (that is, choose a subject that will be presented and characterized by speech); somehow arrange (build this material;
2) to embody it in such words that will make the proper impression on the listeners.
It should be noted that, taking the point of view that two components of a work are distinguished - form and content - some researchers distinguish between them somewhat differently. So, in the textbook T.T. Davydova, V.A. Pronin "Theory of Literature" states: "The content components of a literary work are the theme, characters, circumstances, problem, idea"; “The formal components of a literary work are style, genre, composition, artistic speech, rhythm; content-formal - plot and plot, conflict. The lack of a unified position of literary critics is explained by the complexity of such cultural phenomena like works of art.
reading view
We understand the concepts of "form" and "content" of a literary work. What it is? Does one follow from the other, and can one exist without the other?
In the theory of literature since the time of the ancient Greeks, the terms "form and content" have been used. At the same time, "form" and "content" as applied to literary texts have been repeatedly disputed. Formalists were convinced that the concept of "content" for literature is superfluous, and "form" must be correlated with neutral artistic life material. Yu.M. Lotman suggested replacing the traditional and, as he believed, one-sidedly "dualistic" terms with the "monistic" terms "structure and idea". In the same "structuralist" era in literary criticism came the words "sign and meaning", and later - "text and meaning".
Despite everything, the form and content continue to live, although they are often taken in ironic quotation marks, preceded by the words “so-called”. R. Welleck and O. Warren wrote that the usual division of the work "into content and form" is regarded as "confusing analysis and in need of elimination"; but later, turning to stylistic specifics, the authors noted the need for a literary critic to isolate the elements of a work and separate from each other "form and content, expression of thought and style."
There are also other logical constructions in literary criticism. A.A. Potebnya characterized three aspects of the creations of art, which are: external form, internal form, content (as applied to literature: word, image, idea). R. Ingarden singled out four layers in the composition of a literary work: 1) the sound of speech; 2) the meaning of words; 3) the level of the depicted objects; 4) the level of types of objects, their auditory and visual appearance, perceived from a certain point of view. The multilevel approach has its supporters in domestic science as well.
The German philosopher N. Hartmann argued that in terms of structure, works are inevitably multi-layered, but “in terms of the way of being” they are “immutably two-layered”: their foreground is material-sensual objectivity (figuration), the background is “spiritual content”.
Consider the composition and structure of a literary work, taking as a basis traditional concepts form and content.
Form and content are philosophical categories that find application in various fields of knowledge. In ancient philosophy, form was opposed to matter. The latter was conceived as chaotic, subject to processing, as a result of which ordered objects appear, which are forms. The meaning of the word "form" at the same time turned out to be close to the meaning of the words "essence", "idea".
“Every true form,” wrote Aug. Schlegel, is organic, that is, determined by the content of a work of art. In short, form is nothing but full value appearance is the physiognomy of each thing, expressive and not distorted by any random signs, truthfully testifying to its hidden essence.
In other words, a truly artistic work excludes the possibility of re-arrangement, which would be neutral to the content. Make an edit in Gogol's words "The Dnieper is wonderful in calm weather": "The Dnieper is wonderful in calm weather" - and the charm of Gogol's landscape disappears. According to Blok, the spiritual structure of the poet is expressed in everything, down to punctuation marks. And according to the formulation of the series early scientists 20th century in works of art, the content-filled form plays a decisive role.
In Russian literary criticism, it is said that the art form does not make sense outside of its correlation with the content. The most important principle artistic activity: installation on the unity of content and form in the created works. The unity of form and content makes the work organically integral, like a living being, born, and not mechanically constructed.
So, in a work of art, the beginnings of formal content and content proper are distinguishable. As part of the form that carries the content, there are three sides that must be present in any literary work. This is, firstly, the subject-pictorial principle, those phenomena and facts that are indicated with the help of words and together make up the world of a work of art. Secondly, the verbal fabric of the work: artistic speech, often denoted by the terms "poetic language", "stylistics", "text". And, thirdly, this is the correlation and arrangement in the work of units of the subject and verbal "series", i.e. composition.
The selection of three main aspects in the work goes back to ancient rhetoric. It was noted that the speaker needs to: 1) find material (ie, choose a subject that will be presented and characterized by speech); 2) somehow arrange (build) this material; 3) to embody it in such words that will make the proper impression on the listeners.
A special place in the work belongs to the content layer. It is legitimate to characterize it not as another (fourth) side of the work, but as its substance. Artistic content is a unity of objective and subjective principles. This is a combination of what came to the author from outside and is known to him, and what is expressed by him and comes from his views, intuition, traits.
The term "content" (artistic content) is almost synonymous with the words "concept" (or "author's concept"), "idea", "sense", "last semantic instance". Artistic content is embodied not in individual words, phrases, but in the totality of the text. Yu.M. Lotman: “The idea is not contained in any, even well-chosen quotations, but is expressed in the entire artistic structure. The researcher who does not understand this and looks for an idea in individual quotations is like a person who, having learned that a house has a plan, would begin to break down the walls in search of a place where this plan is walled up. The plan is not walled up in the walls, but implemented in the proportions of the building. The plan is the architect's idea, the structure of the building is its implementation.
August 18, 2016Illustration for: The form and content of a literary work
The form and content of a work of art.
Any literary phenomenon reflects reality. Considering the work, we compare what is displayed in it with reality itself. But for each person and artist, objective reality is reflected in different forms.
Content is not only objective reality but also the reality reflected in the mind of the author. Those. perceived subjectively. Those. the content of a work of art contains a certain assessment of reality, which it receives in its form. It is important for the form that any of its elements helps to reveal the content of the work. At the same time, the content is looking for a form for itself, thanks to which it can be expressed fully and vividly. It is not the artist who creates the form, but the content, being refracted in the creative mind of the author, receives a certain form of expression.
It is difficult to distinguish between content and form, it is possible only theoretically.
What does it represent What does it express
Objective phenomenon Subjective phenomenon
The subject of the image - the objective side - is drawn up as the theme of the work. The subjective side determines the problems of the work. The identity of the objective and the subjective lies in the idea of the work.
Content elements: theme, idea, problem, pathos, characters, characters.
Form elements: specific images, composition, language, speech of characters, style, rhythm - the forming elements of prose and verse, genre, gender, type. The form of a work of art is a way of expressing its ideological and thematic content.
There are intermediate categories expressing the unity of form and content. This is the plot - the event side of the work, and the conflict that belongs to both form and content.
Theme, the problem of a work of art.
The theme is what is the basis of any work of art - what and what. Determining the topic does not mean retelling the plot, because a theme is a generalization in which sub-themes are connected. For example, in Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" the theme is the life of Russian society during the war with Napoleon. Private topics: the life of the people, the fate of individual heroes, the Russian nobility, etc. All these branches make up the theme of the work. The subject is determined by the views of the writer, his worldview, era, cultural and historical connections.
The problem is the ideological comprehension of the writer of the reality that he depicts. The artist not only mechanically transfers life into his work, but also explains it in a certain way. General concept problems includes the division into particular problems, which constitutes the problematics of the work.
Artistic idea.
An idea is what a work is written for. AT creative process the idea always precedes the topic. The ideological content is associated with the position of the author, his worldview, life philosophy.. The idea is revealed through specific images. For example, in lyrical works, an artistic idea is revealed through feelings, emotional condition. To understand an idea means to comprehend and feel the inner content.
That. The artistic content of a work includes 3 levels:
1. Life content, which is reflected in the work.
2. Artistic embodiment life content, which is revealed in the plot.
3. Formative level, which deals with the relationship between idea and form.
Therefore, the analysis of a work of art includes: 1. Theme; 2.Problem; 3. Plot, composition; 4.Idea; 5. Artistic means.
In art, everything becomes content, every element of form. Poets do not get tired of looking for new ways of expressing meaning - unusual, vivid, memorable. And what is the first thing that “strikes you” when we open a book of poetry? - Of course, the type and arrangement of the lines: couplets or quatrains, long lines or short ones, a “ladder” (like V. Mayakovsky) or something completely unusual ...
Back in the 17th century, Simeon Polotsky, one of the founders of Russian poetry and dramaturgy, wrote poems in the form of a cross; not a trick, but another opportunity to convey, to clarify the meaning the poet needs.
Read the poem 19th poet century A. Apukhtin.
The path of life is paved by barren steppes,
And wilderness, and darkness ... no hut, no bush ...
Sleeping heart; chained
Both mind and mouth
And the distance is before us
And suddenly the road will not seem so hard,
I want to sing and think again,
There are so many stars in the sky
The blood is flowing so fast...
Dreams, anxiety.
Oh, where are those dreams? Where are the joys, sorrows,
Shining brightly for us for so many years?
From their lights in the foggy distance
A faint light is visible...
And they disappeared...
Why do you think the poet needed such an unusual, immediately conspicuous form of line arrangement? What would you name this figure? Does she remind you of anything? Does the form of a poem affect its meaning?
It can be assumed that A.N. Apukhtin arranged the lines of his poem in a cone so that this form would remind the reader of a funnel into which a lot is poured, but little comes out, or an hourglass through which not sand, but Time itself, pours...
In the text, these meanings are expressed very weakly: the words are empty (distance), disappeared (dreams), they are not. Agree that these words are very general, that is, “none”, the reader may not perceive all their importance for understanding the meaning of the poem. The poet, obviously, feels this himself - and helps the reader by creating visual image funnels or hourglass. Our explanations are not the final and not the only possible interpretation of this poem. You can offer your own by arguing with us or clarifying our observations. But in any case: notice how important it is to be able to “read” the form in order to understand the meaning.
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Discussion "Which can be considered "The Picture of Dorian Gray" as a "moral" or "immoral" book?"... ¦ “Try not to think about those who care about us” (Epik-tet); ¦ “It is unlikely that there is more need for knowledge, for a quiet life and ...
