Article

Name: Unfolding, Realization

Authors: A. A. Hansen-Löve

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften

Abstract: The terms “unfolding” and “realization” were widely used by the formalists. In this article, Aage Hansen-Löve provides a summary of the formal school’s use of these terms and develops them further into a universal ontological concept. The author treats the word (as opposed to narration) as the primary unit of a literary structure and, in doing so, deemphasizes the plot-fabula substrate of the text. It goes without saying that the formal and avant-garde approaches to text tend to look for poetic meanings at the word level rather than the plot-motif level. They do so by focusing on a word’s phonetic, grammatical and other formal qualities, the word in and of itself, the logos which is able, in a pars pro toto fashion, to symbolize or iconically represent the meaning of speech, language or utterance. Thus, the art of the word (Wortkunst) is counterposed to the art of narration (Erzählkunst). The author’s emphasis on the primacy of the word over narration tends to divorce the word from its denotation by hampering the habitual mental transition from words to the reality objects that they relate to. At the same time, such approach makes words themselves more “objective”, in line with the general tendency of art, especially the avant-garde art, to turn words into objects. The “dematerializing” departure from denotation sets in motion the mechanism of language reflection and uncovers the deep archaic and paremiological layers of language where the unconscious, the dream-like, the absurd becomes more evident than the habitual visible objects that are normally associated with direct lexical meanings of words. Consequently, the “unfolding” is understood not as a one-time resultative event that involves a subject and an object (i.e., something unfolding into something else) but rather as a form of existence of language where it continuously renews itself, similar to a live organism. This is true of the purely linguistic stratum of language which contains a primordial paremiological seed capable of germination (hence Hansen-Löve’s characterization of the word as a seed), but it is also true of the poetic language which lends to words the ability of infinite splitting of meaning and engenders the infinite semantization and re-combination of the micro-units of meaning that result from the split. The “realization” comes into play when the textual micro-units become objectivized through the processes of personification, embodiment and naming. The article’s title deliberately puts together “unfolding” and “realization” as these are similar and mutually dependent phenomena. While th author characterizes “realization” as “the generative principle of the art of the word”, towards the end of the article he also proposes to utilize both “realization” and “unfolding” as chronological instruments that take measurements of the currents of recoding and diachrony as these flow through culture, language and texts, contributing to their greater perception and understanding.

Keywords: avant-garde, formalism, Roman Jakobson, realization, unfolding, Wortkunst, Erzählkunst, narration, name, desemantization, simultaneity, successivity, personification, embodiment, diachrony

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