A Poetics of Composition

Uspenski, Boriss 1983. A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Translated by Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Berkeley: University of California Press.

...we will distuinguish in our analysis the basic semantic spheres in which viewpoint may generally be manifested, and the planes of investigation in terms of which point of view may be fixed. For our purpose, these planes will be designated as the plane of ideology, the plane of phraseology, the spatial and temporal plane, and the psychological plane. (Uspenski 1983: 6)

Introductory distinction.

We are interested in this problem: whose point of view does the author assume when he evaluates and perceives ideologically the world which he describes. This point of view, either concealed or openly acknowledged, may belong to the author himself; or it may be the normative system of the narrator, as distinct from that of the author (and perhaps in conflict with the author's norm); or it may belong to one of the characters. Various ideological points of view may be involved in the composition of a text. When we speak of the system of ideas that shape the worl, we are speaking about the deep compositional structure, as opposed to the surface compositional structure which may be traced on the psychological, spatio-temporal, or phraseological levels. (Uspenski 1983: 8)

In F451, there are two main ideological points of view: Montag's fickle stance as a fireman in doubt, and Beatty who has all the anwers to everything.

...within the same work the author may first describe one character from the point of view of another character, then he may use his own point of view (that is, he may speak in his own voice), then he may resort to the point of view of a third person who is neither the author nor an immediate participant in the action, and so forth. In many cases the plane of phraseology (or the plane of speech characteristics) may be the only plane in the work on which we can detect changes in the authorial position. (Uspenski 1983: 17)

The point of view from the phraseological plane amounts to who describes whom, from whose position is the description uttered.

An example of the integration of two points of view in a single word occurs in Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, in a chapter entitled "Akulka's Husband." Shishkov, a man who has been condemned for the murder of his wife, is relating the story of the killing: "Kak tilisnu [a coined word] (ee) po gorlu nozhom" ["So I slit het throat with a knife!"]. Zielinsky, commenting on this passage, asks: "Is there a correspondence between the articulatory movements in pronouncing the word tilisnut' and the movement of a knife slipping over the human body and penetrating it? No, there is not: the articulation of this word best corresponds to the contortion of the facial muscles which is instinctively brought about by the nervous pain one would feel in imagining a knife slipping over one's skin (and not penetrating the body): the lips are pulled up in a grimace; the throat is pinched; the teeth grit; at such a moment the only sounds that can be produced are consonants t, l, and s, and the vowel i. [...]" (Uspenski 1983: 40)

In this vivid passage, Uspenski is quoting F. F. Zelinskii's "Wilhelm Wundt and the psychology of language: gestures and sounds" in Iz zhizni idei (1911).

Theatre (or film) demands the actualization of features that may be irrelevant in a literary text. (Uspenski 1983: 79)

Stating the obvious, but stating it well. He continues further, that the literary text "undergoes a striking series of transformations".

Generally speaking, human behavior may be described in two basically distinct ways. First, it may be described from the point of view of an outside observer whose position in the work may be either clearly defined or unspecified, and who describes only the behavior which is visible to an onlooker. Second, behavior may be described from the point of view of the person himself or from the point of view of an omniscient observer who is permitted to penetrate the consciousness of that person. In this kind of description we find revealed the internal processes (thoughts, feelings, sensory perceptions, emotions) which are not normally accessible to an external observer (who can only speculate about such processes, projecting his own experience onto the external manifestations of someone else's behavior). This point of view is internal to the person who is being described.
Accordingly, it is possible to speak about external and internal points of view (in relation to the object of description). The opposition of external and internal points of view is of a general nature, and is not restricted to the single level of psychological perception. (Uspenski 1983: 83)

This is a familiar discussion from social-anthropological literature about explaining behavior or action. It should be noted that these viewpoints differ heavily in litrary text and film: the internal descriptions in literary text are translated/interpreted to visible/audible activity in film which can be externally observed.

If we return to the example discussed earlier, Anna Pavlovna's apparent reaction to Pierre's entrance into her salon, we can see that the narrator has substituted his psychological viewpoint for hers. He speaks not so much about what she actually felt, but rather about what he assumes that she must have been feeling. In other words, the narrator interprets the expression on Anna Pavlovna's face as if he were seeing through her (he puts into her those feelings and pereptions which he would have had in hr place). At the same time this interpretation appears to be rather close to the fictional reality; it seems probable that these feelings correspond to what Anna Pavlovna felt. (Uspenski 1983: 117)

This is called sembling, or emphatic interpretation.

The external point of view, as a compositional device, draws its significance from its affiliation with the phenomenon of ostranenie, or estrangement. The essence of this phenomenon resides primarily in the use of a new or estranged viewpoint on a familiar thing, when the artist "does not refer to a thing by its name, but describes it as if it had been seen for the first time - and in the case of an event, as if it were happening for the first time." In the context of our approach, the device of estrangement may be understood as the adoption of a point of view of an outside observer, a position basically external to the thing described. (Uspenski 1983: 131)

He is here, of course, citing V. Shklovskii's "Iskusstvo kak priem" [Art as device], published in Poetika, Sborniki po teorii petischeskogo iazyka (1919).

In one type of description in a literary work, the authorial position is clearly fixed, and we can consider it as we would consider the position of the artist who paints in the system of direct perspective. In this case, we are justified inposing two important questions: where was the author when he described the events, and how did he learn about the behavior of his characters? In other words, the question which concerns us here has to do with the reader'ś reliance on the author's view; in the same way we might conjecture about the position of the artist in relation to the event he represents in a painting, from the perspective that he uses in the representation. (Uspenski 1983: 168)

These are the two major questions or even methods of this work, and most of it has to do with drawing conclusions about the author's position from different planes.