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HOBUU jмnоnогицecкиu BecmHUK. 2018. №4(47). --
V.A. Kolotaev (Moscow) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7190-5726
A.V. Markov (Moscow) ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
S.Yu. Schtein (Moscow) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4419-1369
THE SHINING PATH: THE THEORY OF COMICAL BY VICTOR ARDOV AND REDEFINITION OF THE LIMITS OF THE SOCIALIST
REALISM
Abstract. The contradiction between the representative and ideological tasks of the socialist realism was principally mediated with the rigid structure of the narrative and of the idealizing topic, going back to the models of the exercising of central political power in the classicist drama. But in the texts designed for everyday or comic perception a more complex technique was introduced, in which the basic contradiction between feeling and duty appeared as contradiction between narration and symbolic function of a mirror. We find a good example of such technique in the literary works and literary theory of Viktor Ardov. Ardov insisted on educational function of the comedy and the circus, but his key provision on necessary ideologization of all old circus scenes is not confirmed by enough examples or commentaries and so remains obscure. The mise en scene with real mirror and imaginable mirror, not being conceptualized theoretically, became part of his practice as canonical representer of the socialist realism: the script of The Shining Path and the later comic scene The Deaf-and-Dumb are best samples of the practical realization of this principle, not specially explained, but basic for his theoretical understandings. Comparison of the script not only with explicate subtext, the plot of the tale by Charles Perrault Cinderella, but also with the theoretical position of Charles Perrault in the history of French classicism, demands us to take into account Jacques Lacan's concept of the "mirror stage" of common psychics and the achievements of the art iconology interpretation of the framing space. This way of argumentation allows us to clarify the specificity of the "mimetic mirror" or "mime as mirrof' in the classicism and the socialist realism as a definite break of the narrative, which, at the same time, only allows the action to acquire real credibility and persuasiveness. Thus, the list of devices of plausibility in classicist and socialist realist literature and dramaturgy should be added with this originally circus device. We prove that the canonical form of the socialist realist design of the bundle narrative-emotion-believability completely corresponds to the Lacanian bundle real-symbolic-imaginary. So the socialist realism canon coudn't be reduced to the achievements of the triumphant propaganda of the Stalin era, but also continues in the later Soviet literature due to the genre diffusiveness of the Soviet comical.
Key words: feuilleton; narrative; mimesis; mise en scene; circus in literature; socialist realism; comic; mirror stage; reception of classicism; Ardov; Perrault.
В.А. Колотаев (Москва) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7190-5726
А.В. Марков (Москва) ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6874-1073
С.Ю. Штейн (Москва) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4419-1369
«Светлый путь»: теория комического Виктора Ардова и переопределение границ социалистического реализма
Аннотация. Противоречие между репрезентативными и идеологическими задачами социалистического реализма всегда решалось благодаря жесткому устройству повествования и топики, восходящим к моделям утверждения власти в драме классицизма. Но в произведениях, рассчитанных на бытовое или комическое восприятие, использовалась более сложная техника, в которой противоречие между чувством и долгом выступало как противоречие между наррацией и функцией зеркала. Пример такой техники мы находим в литературном творчестве и литературной теории Виктора Ардова. Ардов настаивал на воспитательной функции комедии и цирка, при этом ключевое положение о возможности полной идеологизации старых цирковых сцен не подтверждено примерами и оставляет впечатление недосказанности. Но не поясненная мизансцена, не войдя в теорию этого автора, вошла в его практику как канонического автора соцреализма: сценарий фильма «Светлый путь» и поздняя комическая сцена «Глухонемой» представляют собой практическую реализацию этого принципа, опередившую его теоретическое осмысление. Сопоставление сценария «Светлый путь» не только с сюжетом сказки Шарля Перро «Золушка», но и с теоретической позицией Шарля Перро в истории французского классицизма позволяет уточнить, с опорой на учение Лакана о «стадии зеркала» и на достижения искусствоведческой иконологической интерпретации пространства кадра, специфику «миметической зеркальности» в классицизме и соцреализме как определенного разрыва нарратива, который при этом только и позволяет действию обрести настоящее правдоподобие и убедительность. Тем самым, список приемов, создававших правдоподобие в класси-цистской и соцреалистической драматургии следует дополнить этим изначально цирковым приемом, а также уточнить канон соцреалистической организации связки нарратив-эмоция-правдоподобие, соответствующей лакановской связке реальное-символическое-воображаемое, доказав, что этот канон не является достоянием специфически триумфалистской пропаганды сталинского времени, но благодаря высокой жанровой универсальности советского комического продолжается и в более поздней советской литературе.
Ключевые слова: фельетон; нарратив; мимесис; мизансцена; цирк в литературе; социалистический реализм; комическое; стадия зеркала; рецепция классицизма; Ардов; Перро.
One of the problems of studying socialist realism is that none of the historical and typological characteristics of it as a new classicism (Sinyavsky [Tertz
1982, 201]) or a new romanticism [Grays 1997, 78] is relevant for all its features, implying that Soviet literature was a program of totalizing life-making, driven only by class consciousness (klassovoe soznanie). We prove that such contradictions exist due to the classicist pattern of the socialist realism. In this aesthetics, just as in original disputes in the French classicism we find complex dispositions of truth and likelihood, or feeling and duty, or mimetic and emotional, or real and imaginary, masked with working enthusiasm.
Original Classicist contradictions turned out to be important for the psychoanalytic theory of art by Jacques Lacan, especially for his doctrine of the mirror stage [Miller (ed.) 1988, 22-29]. Application of the apparatus of Lacan to the literature of socialist realism will clarify its limits, without reducing it to the most well-known models, and its inter-medial impact inheriting the classicist theatricality at a new level.
Viktor Ardov was not only one of the greatest satirical writers and screenwriters of his time, but also producer of the Soviet theory of the comic. His theory is interdisciplinary: it implies that literature with its humorous scenarios becomes a kind of meta-description of comic theater, cinema, circus, all those institutions whose status in the official Soviet culture has not yet been fully approved. Therefore, literature as an institution of legitimization and at the same time of censorship and prevention of socially undesirable consequences of the comic, according to Ardov, gives an exhaustive description of everything that happens in the world of situational or performative production, subjecting all values to strong explanations of what right or wrong.
In his book on reprises, Ardov analyzes a number of standard circus acts [Ардов / Ardov 1968, 112 (translation is ours)], like the Broken Mirror, the Broken Statue or the Broken Armchair. In the Broken Statue a clumsy clown touches the statue in the park, and then tries to collect it from its fragments without great success. In the Broken Armchair, on the contrary, the armchair is tested for strength, and the master has to climb into the chair to hold it with his hand, and so any chair user sits down on his hands. Ardov notes that all these tricks were invented in the old circus, but the Soviet circus turns them into an instrument of satire against hooligans, bunglers and other favorite targets of the Soviet satire.
Ardov insists that the Soviet circus has achieved the highest technical equipment, so that any tricks and illusions are now possible. But this precisely demands the ideologization of the "trick-plot" at the next step. If formal execution is perfect, we now pay attention only to the content as political or social mean:
"A circus stunt has almost no limits in terms of technical or spectacular possibilities. Tricks, illusions, transformations, training, acrobatics, gymnastics, water "procedures", all are at the service of clowning as a material, as a medium, as an occasion for a stunt. Things and people in the circus can disappear, change the look. But all this "works" only if the trick-plot accurately expresses the thought (=idea) embedded in this clowning, effective in the circus arena" [Ардов / Ardov 1968, 113].
In addition to the ideological requirement of the embedded idea in the performance of clowns, which was for the old aesthetics a kind of abusive violation of the usual boundaries of everyday emotions, Ardov declares "spectacularity" in the arena, which can be compared with photo or film spectacularity.
Is it possible to fulfill this ideological requirement in the Broken Mirror? The mimesis in this scene takes place in a certain framework of non-mimetic reality, so that any spectator tries to symbolically conceptualize this natural mirroring of the mirror in the void natural frame. The plot of the reprise is a living picture (tabula viva) as false mirror: the clown accidentally breaks the mirror, but does not have time to assemble it back, in contrast to the Broken Statue, where the statue is assembled badly for the fun of the public. Therefore, when the respectable visitor arrives, the clown has to stand behind the frame and to repeat all his movements when he looks in the mirror, having reached the utmost mime perfection. The visitor doesn't guess either by grimaces or haircut or even the exterior that this is not himself in the false mirror in the mirror frame. Only spectators look at this mimesis as non-mimesis, as collision of naturalizing interpretation of the exterior of the Other.
Ardov didn't explain what kind of thought could be included in this reprise. But we can reconstruct it from his most canonical socialist-realist work: the script of the film The Shining Path (1940). The analysis shows that Zizek's Lacanian interpretation of the Socialist Realism as transformation of love into work and work into love [Zizek 2006, 51] could be expanded, if we take our arguments not from economical principle of equivalents, but rather from political principles of mirror as metaphor of documentary legitimation.
The heroine of the film is a new Cinderella, tearing up with arrogant sisters and their trivial life and winning the prince, but unlike her fabulous prototype from Charles Perrault, she is incomparably more active. In Perrault's Cinderella only the Fairy determines the movement of events, and without her intervention the diligence and kindness of Cinderella would remain known only in her house.
In the terms of Lacan, her imaginary, the palace ball, is ripped apart her symbolic, her own preparation for the ball, including a certain body culture as perfect signifying (we mean the Saussure's opposition signifying / signified, basic for Lacan), thanks to which she saves her graceful forms, despite the exhaustive work in the house. Only the ball itself, according to Lacan, turns out to be the mirror stage, the stage of maturation as stitching of all gaps, and therefore the ball must be held in the hall with glass and mirrors. Although Perrault himself was convinced of the special bodily qualities of noble people, it is important that the real appears here as phantom of moral self-identification of the new nobility.
At the mirror stage we go from individual story to public appearance, reassembling the Lacanian bundle real-symbolic-imaginary. Cinderella disappears from the ball without a trace, turning in the prince's imaginary and the state's future symbolic: what will be the official norm of her as the princess. So the real is the disappeared protagonist or the broken mirror.
This understanding of any act of the protagonist as reassembling of the Lacanian bundle lays not in Perrault's psychological or cultural presumptions, but in his well-thought literary theory. In the controversy of the Ancients and the Moderns, Perrault was the leader of the Moderns, for whom the authority of Homer remained far from absolute. Perrault argued that the main flaw of Homer's epos is in the long remarks, which destroy the illusion of act and action: starting with simple epithets and ending with detailed explanations, they seem to prevent the hero from acting, make him "stand still with an outstretched hand" (tenu le bras levé), while the narrator himself explains the origin and the situation of the hero.
According to Perrault, if Homer lived in civilized France, not in ancient primitive Greece, he:
N'auraient pas si longtemps tenu le bras levé ; Et, lorsque le combat devrait être achevé, Ennuyé les lecteurs, d'une longue préface, Sur les faits éclatants des héros de leur race.
Would not allow him so long held the arm raised; And, when the fight should be over, Would not bore readers, from a long preface, On the dazzling facts about the all heroic race.
(Le Siècle de Louis-le-Grand, 1660).
In Homeric epic, according Perrault, the hero appears as such in an ideal mirror of the poetry, but at the same time this mirror is completely anti-mimetic, not allowing him to exercise such mimesis, that will be the ultimate reality and pragmatics of literature as life action. Therefore, his (or her, maybe) real action could be carried out only when the hero already demonstrated in his or her completely public action in an ideal mirror of ideas about him, shared by spectators or readers. He needs to stand and act in this mimetic mirror, where, using the terminology of Lacan, the bundle real-imaginary-symbolic lines up by the viewer and thereby gains legitimacy to explain all the motivations of the heroes.
The paradox of the Soviet Cinderella is that although she achieves everything herself, and the Soviet Fairy, who was the chairwoman of the factory party committee, only helps her in efforts that cannot be discounted by anything, she does everything to win the favor of the handsome prince in whom she is in love, and for the sake of simple attention of him are all her deeds. In many Socialist realism novels and movies party coaching was normative as instrument to save the hesitant worker from the machinations of the enemy, instilling in him that form of behavior that would make him invincible for enemy temptations, and this form includes auto-reflection as an understanding of his role as a Soviet person. But it was no reason to save from the enemy our Soviet Cinderella Tanya Morozov, it was enough not to interfere on her way to perfection, not to alienate her [KonoTaeB / Kolotayev 2018, 41-50].
This kind of socialist realism inverts the old common place of Russian lyricism, from Pushkin to Blok, in which the lyrical he-narrator recognized his value as being completely dependent on the epiphany of his Dame. Instead of the old fortune-telling mirror a kind of mimetic mirror appears in the Soviet literature. In this mimetic, self-acting and self-idenifying mirror recognition by the heroine of her own perfection (symbolic) is a direct transition to action (real), any narrative about which is justified in the eyes of the public (imaginary). It is the way the Lacanian bundle works for propaganda.
At the same time, the way of Tanya Morozov begins from the fair Russian village (in one of the first scenes we see the St. Sergius Lavra from the air, then as the background of an ordinary old village, and design of the house-hotel as her first working place corresponds to the idea of the Russian terem). The heroine is clamoring to the sounds of a street radio producer, while the sisters (relatives) sleep and the sisters' dressing glass reflects her efforts. So the mirror becomes for the viewer the main marker of a condemned prosperous bourgeois life. The real (reflection in the mirror) and the symbolic (bourgeois) will meet in the imaginary (self-identification, launching the narrative).
But to launch a narrative, some kind of a change in the plot is needed from the outside, such as the appearance of the revolutionary among the philistine. Identification of the heroine occurs when she meets the main character, the emissary of the Great Break (Stalin's industrialization and kolhoz organization), who calls her "Cinderella". For her as simple servant, this very word is urban and therefore inappropriate: "The first time I saw a man, and he prates, what a nonsense".
Then the man becomes a mime, retelling for her in verse the canonical plot of the Cinderella, so the sisters watch, and she immediately accepts such identification laughing. The key episode is when the guest touches the heroine's nose, and precisely names where the soot is. The heroine looks into the samovar as into the first mirror and accepts such identification with Cinderella.
Then the hero casually drops cigarettes Moscow, and so to her real and imaginary identification a symbolic identification with fetish of her fate is added: now the Lacanian bundle is complete.
We see here just a "broken mirror": the man-mime forces the heroine constantly to accept herself as Cinderella, to represent herself as Cinderella and to identify in public as Cinderella. But in this broken mirror of pure self-identification she immediately goes into action, she realizes the need to change her destiny. A broken mirror in socialist realism cannot be a medium of statics, as e.g. Homer's heroes stand during a story about them, according to Perrault. So Ardov, as Perrault, insists on immediate action as only idea of such complex mimesis as producing phantoms and effects of the real. And as the more convincing the clown's mimesis is, the more social the action will be.
The identity of the heroine with Cinderella is repeated once again in one of the next scenes: she looks at the window with a view of the Lavra and cradles the child with her own song after the story of Perrault's fairy tale. She already uses the name Cinderella, and looking at the mirror she reports that she will not
wait her Fairy more, but she will act. The name Cinderella here is not a nickname, but a reward. It is the real as culmination of mimesis.
In these two scenes we see the principle of the further development of the action in the film, where the heroine must constantly confirm her Cinderella identity to be shock-worker and activist! Once again she sings a song about an old fairy tale as actual shock-worker, already dancing alone in the hall with crystal chandeliers and looking in the mirror in the refined frame, adding "The fairy tale is good, but the reality is better", she is genuinely surprised, but she sincerely imagines herself as Cinderella, not as communist activist!
Then, through the means of cinema montage, she appears in the mirror as the former Cinderella, as her own past, the timid shadow of he present triumphs, and thus the reflection is not a way of knowing, but only a way to relive all the former scenes of one's life, to treat them mimetically as imitation, not as guide to action. The mimesis of the past turns out to be only a machine of the depreciation of the past in comparison with the dominant ideological discourse of the present, which began as soon as here deeds began.
The heroine's triumph at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the announcement of the award, is the ultimate achievement of her mimetic state. According to the ideological meaning of this scene, the heroine must portray the seriousness of the mimicry that corresponds to the world-constructive sense of her triumph. But her strong and eccentric feeling immediately overflows into the sincere song, not in supposed gravity and normal behavior.
The scene takes place in the fantastic landscape looking like Piranesi's Ve -dutas of Canaletto's Cappricios. A statue of a shock-worker in a niche is at the left as substitute of the philistine mirror in the beginning standing left in the room. According to Warburg's iconology it is the place of the past [Gombrich 1986, 223], so to be a shock-worker for her is the past identity, and new identity is to be part of continuous action and production.
We see the launch of a continuous production machine on the background of a strange building, resembling the main pavilion of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition and the concept of the Palace of Soviets: the heroine sings a song about the global triumph of communism, "We have no barriers", on the podium with a continuously working weaving machine, making a canvas with a conditional pattern of the "friendship of peoples", recognizable as national, but not clear from what nation.
Such triumph of socialist classicism now is confirmed by the sculpture of Stalin on the right, according to the iconological method at the site of preferential "pathos" and "modernity". Only all-present Stalin limits mimetic desire in the heroine's position, justifying both her fun and her dreams on aviation, which were in the previous frames. The imaginary flight and the symbolic Order of Honor at her chest merge into the reality of production as Soviet miracle of quality and productivity.
So, the mimic mirror acts in all key scenes of the film, making convincing Tanya's deeds and her ideological position. It was enough for Ardov to turn the action, demanded by Charles Perrault immediately after the nomination, into
the scene of continuous production. Now the symbolic are emotions as sincere mirror of the communist triumph. The real is her real prince as agent of the Soviet well-being and nominator of all her deeds and achievements. The imaginary is her being as new princess, instructor of normatives for all the country and trend-setter of the shock-working.
The "broken mirror", as mimetic industrialization of emotions, consolidate the ideological position. The iconology of the Shock-worker and Stalin only enhances the time factor: images of the left and right, and, therefore, all reflections of the past and the future, reproduce the classicist court theater-ritual of the appearance of the Sun-King Louis XIV. This appearance of the Sun as Acting Mirror, shining for all, postulated subordinate position of all allegories of space and time as not limpid and not clear.
The late Ardov, after the Stalin's epoch, also develops the plot of the broken mirror, but already in a strongly modified form. The short comic play by Ardov The Deaf-and-Dumb represents the life of individual apartments, already familiar to residents of large cities, but unusual for visitors from small towns. A common friend comes to the spouses constantly quarreling on the basis of jealousy, asking them to take a deaf-and-dumb countryman for an hour, giving advice to use him a bit in the housekeeping.
But in a new apartment everyone can manage the housework, and the new well-being is guaranteed by machines, not servants. While a friend goes for the countryman, a bookman comes with scarce subscriptions, and him the spouses take for a deaf-and-dumb, and as a result he observes their scenes of jealousy because the spouses wrongly think that the deaf-and-dumb has no feelings at all and doesn't understand what's actually going on.
The bookman unwittingly enters the role and in "mimicry" reacts to everything (which means both "as deaf-and-dumb", and "depicting the deaf-and-dumb" and "depicting what is happening", the Lacanian triple bundle remains here), as it is directly said in this scene. When this misunderstanding becomes clear, this leads to an even greater quarrel between the spouses, so that the intelligent bookman has to act as the sole dramatic resonator.
Thus, we have before us a variation of the scheme of a broken mirror: the deaf-and-dumb one, whom the spouses are unwittingly not ashamed of, should have made their quarrels in a regular mirror. We would just see their quarrel as in a mirror.
But they don't get a simple one, but a mimic mirror, a bookman-resonator, which the more shows the intellectual modesty, the more ridiculous the spouses look for spectators. So, with all the differences between Stalin's ideological work and everyday feuilleton of the era of stagnation (zastoy), the idea turns out to be the same: the mimic mirror is contradiction in the narrative. But this contradiction launches an act and causes an extra-narrative emotion as continuous production. The reason of bookman as bearer of professional reader's competence is real. The use of instructive texts (books) is imaginable. The well-being of the spouses is symbolic.
Not the intrigue, but only satire can restore the Soviet ideal of production,
destroyed by bad emotions. The mission of satire at the stage now only to target ignorance and arrogance, converting production of the knowledge into plausible well-being.
So, the "broken mirror" as a kind of mimic mirror involuntarily accepted by the audience not partly or analytically, but as guide to action, is the emancipation of the imaginary, and at the same time of the real and of the symbolic. So it turns out to be a productive model of the ideological narrative of socialist realism, stable despite all changes of the style from the Stalinist era to the era of stagnation. Such stable constructions are more useful for understanding socialist realism than any possible stylistic notions.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN)
1. Ардов В. Разговорные жанры эстрады и цирка: заметки писателя. М., 1968.
2. Колотаев В.А. Социокультурное проектирование советского субъекта средствами киноискусства 1930 - 1950-х гг.: эстетика отчуждения // Вестник РГГУ Серия: История. Филология. Культурология. Востоковедение. 2018. № 8. Ч. 2. С. 41-50.
3. Gombrich E.H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London, 1986.
4. Groys B. A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism // Socialist Realism without Shores / ed. by T. Lahusen, E. Dobrenko. Durham, 1997. P. 76-90.
5. Miller J.-A. (ed.). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique. New York, 1988.
6. Tertz A. The Trial Begins, and on Socialist Realism. Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1982.
7. Zizek S. How to Read Lacan. London, 2006.
REFERENCES (Articles from Scientific Journals)
1. Kolotayev V.A. Sotsiokul'turnoye proyektirovaniye sovetskogo sub"yekta sred-stvami kinoiskusstva 1930 - 1950-kh gg.: estetika otchuzhdeniya [Socio-cultural design of the Soviet subject by means of cinema of the 1930s - 1950s: aesthetics of alienation]. Vestnik RGGU, Series: Istoriya. Filologiya. Kul'turologiya. Vostokovedeniye [History. Philology. Culturology. Oriental Studies], 2018, no. 8, part 2, pp. 41-50. (In Russian).
(Articles from Proceedings and Collections of Research Papers)
2. Groys B. A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism. Lahusen T., Dobrenko E. (eds.). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, 1997, pp. 76-90. (In English)
(Monographs)
3. Ardov V. Razgovornyye zhanry estrady i tsirka: zametki pisatelya [Conversa-
tional Genres of Variety and Circus: Writer's Notes]. Moscow, 1968. (In Russian).
4. Gombrich E.H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London, 1986. (In English).
5. Miller J-A. (ed.). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique. New York, 1988. (In English).
6. Tertz A. The Trial Begins, and on Socialist Realism. Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1982. (Translated from Russian to English).
7. Zizek S. How to Read Lacan. London, 2006. (In English).
Vladimir A. Kolotaev, Russian State University for the Humanities.
Dr. Habil. in Philology, Full Professor, dean of the Faculty of the History of Art.
E-mail: vakolotaev@gmail.com
Alexander V. Markov, Russian State University for the Humanities.
Dr. Habil. in Philology, Full Professor, Department of the Cinema and Contemporary Art Studies, Faculty of the History of Art.
E-mail: markovius@gmail.com
Sergey Yu. Schtein, Russian State University for the Humanities.
Candidate of Art Studies, Associate Professor, Department of the Cinema and Contemporary Art Studies, Faculty of the History of Art.
E-mail: sergey@schtein.ru
Колотаев Владимир Алексеевич, Российский государственный гуманитарный университет.
Доктор филологических наук, декан факультета истории искусства.
E-mail: vakolotaev@gmail.com
Марков Александр Викторович, Российский государственный гуманитарный университет.
Доктор филологических наук, профессор кафедры кино и современного искусства факультета истории искусства.
E-mail: markovius@gmail.com
Штейн Сергей Юрьевич, Российский государственный гуманитарный университет.
Кандидат искусствоведения, доцент кафедры кино и современного искусства факультета истории искусства.
E-mail: sergey@schtein.ru
