Chapter Seven—
The Invisible Text as a Universal Equivalent:
Sergei Eisenstein

The system described in the last chapter, with its shifts and substitutions, its subtexts and the strategies for their concealment, is the basis of Tynianov's literary prose. In the third part of his biographical novel Pushkin, Tynianov describes the poet's secret love for E. A. Karamzina. Contemporaneous with the novel is Tynianov's article "A Nameless Love," in which the artistic intuition of the novelist is given a philological basis.^[1] Tynianov's findings did not meet with universal acceptance in the scholarly community. Boris Eikhenbaum tactfully called it the fruitful application of "artistic method" to scholarship.^[2]

Nonetheless, Tynianov's hypothesis about Pushkin's secret passion was enthusiastically received by Sergei Eisenstein. After reading part 3 of the novel, Eisenstein conveyed his enthusiasm in a letter that Tynianov was never to receive, since he died before it could even be sent.^[3]

Eisenstein's rapturous response seems all the more striking given his persistent refusal to discuss the literary theory of the OPOIAZ group or the film theory emanating from the formalist school. Like Tynianov, Eisenstein was intrigued by the theme of substitution, of a subtext that might be hidden, but from an angle quite remote from Tynianov's own preoccupations. Eisenstein's interest lay not so much in the situation of intertextuality itself (in the widest sense of the term, as when a text acquires its full meaning through some reference to an extratextual reality) as in the existence of some mysterious, hidden equivalent that permits the juxtaposition of these various extratextual realities.

In his letter to Tynianov, this question is framed in terms of one drive taking the place of another, as a kind of Freudian "transference"—in other words, in psychological terms. Eisenstein is seeking analogous situations in the realm of culture. As an analogy to the displacement of Pushkin's love

interest from Karamzina to Goncharova, Eisenstein discusses the "sentimental biography" of Charlie Chaplin. What interests Eisenstein here is the possibility of establishing the "indicators" that mark the emergence of a substitute:

And now I have a question for you, both as a scholar and as a novelist (i.e., as someone who can be freer in advancing hypotheses): if possible, then how, by what means, according to what indicators [priznakam] could Nathalie [Goncharova] have come to serve as a substitute or Ersatz?

Since you yourself proposed the idea, now please give me an answer! . . .

Where are the premises for this almost reflexive transference of [Pushkin's] passion from one woman onto another, and seemingly with the illusory conviction that at last the perfect Ersatz had truly, definitively been found.^[4]

This letter to Tynianov was written in 1943. In 1947, while working on his investigation of color, Eisenstein returned to this problem, in order to propose his own solution to the question he had asked Tynianov. We find this solution formulated in a fragment entitled "The Psychology of Composition," which concerns the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Here Eisenstein refers directly to Pushkin and Chaplin, promising to return to them in later chapters (which were never to be written).^[5]

Eisenstein illustrates his musings on the problem of transference in love with a recollection (whose authenticity seems questionable) of a certain "Berlin company" that he claims to have had dealings with. "The company," he writes, "could, through photographs, find an exact substitute for the girl who was the object of a man's hopeless fantasies. . . . One man would be dreaming about the inaccessible Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Another would be thinking of a girlfriend from his youth who had since married someone else. Yet another still yearned, like Poe, for the long deceased object of his adoration. The means for finding a substitute were quite varied. And the company managed to do its job brilliantly!"^[6]

Eisenstein here treats love (or at least the possibility of an amorous dalliance) as the search for a substitute, an ersatz, the replacement of an ideally desired body by another, as in a photo that has been doctored. On a metaphoric level, we can call this a sequence of simulacra or analogies. This is how Eisenstein understood the Don Juan phenomenon. Pushkin, interpreted through Tynianov's hypothesis, came to be seen as suffering from a Don Juan complex. Pushkin, like Chaplin and Don Juan himself, behaves not unlike the Berlin company of doubtful repute:

And in all women they try to find the same one.

Do they resemble her?

But they're all different.

And yet . . .

This one's hair. That one's gait. A third has a dimple on her cheek. A fourth has a pouting lip. A fifth has eyes spaced apart and slightly splayed. That one has full legs. But this one has a strange break in her waist. A voice. A certain way of holding her handkerchief. These are her favorite flowers. That one laughs easily. She has eyes that both get misty with tears when the clavichord strikes the same note. The same dangling lock of hair. Or the similar flash of an earring against the fiery gleam of a crystal candlestick.

The mechanisms of association are difficult to fathom: through them we are able suddenly to substitute one thing for another on the basis of a microscopic shared detail, a passing resemblance between two people, sometimes a barely perceptible trait that allows us to replace one human being with another.^[7]

Eisenstein was to project this same set of questions onto the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Following Tynianov's lead, Eisenstein embarked on a search for Poe's "nameless love," clearly seeking a parallel between Poe's biography and Pushkin's as Tynianov had understood it. According to Tynianov, Pushkin's had concealed his love not only because the object of his passion was the wife of the celebrated writer Nikolai Karamzin but also because of the considerable gap in age between the young poet and his beloved. Eisenstein went still further in emphasizing the inaccessibility of Poe's lover: "At the age of fourteen Poe conceived a fiery and romantic passion for the mother of one of his schoolmates Robert Stanard. But this did not last long—Jane Smith Stanard was soon to die."^[8]

Eisenstein's conclusions here rehearse the basic conflictual scenario that Tynianov had established. This itself not only reveals Eisenstein's indebtedness to Tynianov's works but also suggests a desire to prolong and widen the chain of substitutes that Tynianov had initiated, and then to ascribe to it some kind of cultural universality. Poe reproduces Pushkin's situation, and Chaplin too undertakes the same search for substitutes. At stake, for Eisenstein, is the possibility of some invariant that, unlike the case uncovered by Tynianov, might have a general theoretical value. Eisenstein by no means seeks to conceal his project. In "The Psychology of Composition," the specific dilemma of hidden passion is transformed into the general question of repetition in art, as it affects all levels of creation.

In the case of Poe, Eisenstein sees this desire to relive (and perhaps outlive) the experience of troubled passion, a passion marked by a taboo of silence, as leading to a fundamental metaphoric shift:

Who could forget the story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who, many years after his wife's death, had her grave opened and was able to savor the lugubrious sight of her hair, preserved in its cascading golden locks.

Edgar Allan Poe, of course, spumed this direct, primitive, "head-on" course of action in favor of another, more refined and original way of satisfying the same need. Instead of opening an actual tomb, he chose to anato-

mize a host of images that were dear to him, images that embodied his beloved theme, through an analysis of the creative process. This analysis, itself in many ways a poetic invention, was in fact intended, with the help of the scalpel of analysis, to "dissect like a corpse" the music of his favorite images.^[9]

The theme of the substitute or ersatz once more emerges in this context. The real body of the beloved is replaced by the "body" of the text, on which Poe performs an analytical vivisection. The ersatz being sought is found in the schematization of the artistic process.

This metaphoric transference from the physical body onto a speculative structure, some other "textual" skeleton, was of fundamental importance to Eisenstein. One could also perhaps read this in a biographical vein, in which case the director's passion for "postmortem" analyses of his own films gains an added resonance. But this comparison of textual analysis to vivisection reveals something else that is crucial. The body's dissection is performed in search of a universal equivalent, one that permits the substitution of one body for another. Similarly, the "vivisection" of a text is pursued in search of an equivalent that might legitimate the workings of intertextuality, the process by which diverse texts can be brought together. Like bodies, texts do not simply replace one other. For this to be possible, in Eisenstein's view, our consciousness must possess some ideal model, a universal equivalent that serves as a connective mechanism.

In invoking the phenomenon of the Don Juan, or Rossetti's necrophilia, Eisenstein is in fact raising a question that is fundamental to intertextuality as a whole: On what basis can two texts (two substitutes) be linked, and is such a linkage possible at all, without the presence of a third text existing in theory, as their equivalent?

The very notion of transferring a problematic from a body onto a hidden textual structure or the mechanics of creation as a whole is rooted in the general complex of Eisenstein's theoretical ideas. These ideas considerably predate Eisenstein's reading of Tynianov's "A Nameless Love" or the letter he wrote in response.

Traditionally, film theory has always recognized resemblance, photographic or iconic reproduction, as "ontological" features of the cinema. Film is seen to be a mimetic form, imitative of reality. Eisenstein's thought is an exceptionally rare example of a radical negation of cinematic mimesis as it is customarily understood.

In 1929, Eisenstein devoted his speech at the Congress of Independent Cinema in La Sarraz to the problem of imitation, which he called the "key to mastering form." He went on to distinguish two kinds of imitation. One is magical, which he compared to cannibalism and essentially rejected, since "magical imitation copies form." It is embodied most clearly in the mirror. This first type of imitation is contrasted to a second, which imitates a princi-

ple "Whoever understands Aristotle to be imitating the form of things is mistaken,"^[10] says Eisenstein; he adds: "The age of form is passing. We are penetrating matter. We are going beyond the phenomenon to the principle behind the phenomenon, and thereby acquiring a mastery over it."^[11]

This statement contains two complementary postulates, both fundamental to Eisenstein's aesthetics: that contemporary culture has overcome the "stage of form," seen as the outer appearance of a thing, and hence the initial mode of "specular" mimesis; and that it is necessary now to imitate the principle. This last formulation remains somewhat mysterious. What is this principle (or, as Eisenstein often put it, the "order of things" [stroi veshchei] )? How is it ascertained? Where does it lie hidden? In the same speech, Eisenstein suggests that it is to be found through analysis: "That which is represented through myth yields its place to that which is analyzed as principle."^[12] But what is this analysis, whose results we are invited to imitate?

Eisenstein's talk at La Sarraz coincided with his escalating interest in "protological" forms of thought, whose role in his theoretical reflections had been increasing over time. In pursuing this interest, Eisenstein turned to a group of linguists, psychologists, and ethnographers who, during the first thirty years of the century, had once more posed the hoary problem of the origins of language and thought. Invoking the names of Bühler, Cassirer, Marr, Vygotskii, Levy-Bruhl, Piaget, and others, all names Eisenstein would have known, Walter Benjamin once called their thinking "mimetic in the broad sense of the word,"^[13] since most of them believed that language emerged from some primary act that was imitative in nature.

Significantly, this mimetic act, which occurs at an undifferentiated stage of thought, contains not only an external form but also its initial generalization—a "principle," according to Eisenstein's terminology. In his collection of books on the problems of "protologic," Eisenstein would constantly underline those passages dealing with the quasi-intellectual nature of primitive mimesis. He was particularly struck by a passage in which the French sociologist Émile Durkheim analyzes the abstract geometric representations of totems among Australian aborigines: "If the Australian is so strongly inclined to make figural representations of his totem this is not in order to have its portrait before his eyes constantly renewing its sensuous presence. Rather it is simply because he feels the need to represent the idea that he makes of it by means of a material sign."^[14]

A. Lang, whom Eisenstein also knew, also devoted a great deal of attention to the problem of imitation, concluding that "'savage realism' is the result of a desire to represent an object as it is known to be, and not as it appears."^[15] How did archaic forms of representation incorporate an idea or principle? To a considerable extent, it was through the movement of the hand, through drawing itself as an act. Eisenstein was almost transfixed by the passage in Levy-Bruhl's How Natives Think, in which the author re-

lates the conclusions of the book Manual Concepts by Frank Cushing: "Speaking with the hands is literally thinking with the hands; to a certain extent, therefore, the features of these 'manual concepts' will necessarily be reproduced in the verbal expression of thought."^[16] Now if these manual concepts are present in verbal expression, they should surely be all the more evident in visual representation. In Jack Lindsay's A Short History of Culture, Eisenstein underlined the following: "out of the harmoniously adapted movements of the body are mental patterns evolved."^[17]

The line is the graphic unit that fixes the gesture or movement from which the manual concept is generated. In his discussion of Cushing, Eisenstein also touches on the "linear discourse" whose form we must assimilate.^[18] The line, for Eisenstein, has a special significance. In drawing a line, or even retracing it with our eyes, we miraculously gain access to the "essence" of things, to their meaning. "To 'think' in a completely de-intellectualized fashion: by tracing the contours of objects with our eyes—an early form entirely connected to the—linear!—drawings found in figurations carved on rocks and caves."^[19]

Eisenstein arrives at a kind of pangraphism: the world, for all its diversity, is, under the phenomenal surface of things, governed by the semantically charged line. In music, the line is traced by the melody; in theater, through the movement of the actors; in a plot (siuzhet), through the bare chronology of the story line (fabula); in rhythm, through an invariant scheme; and so forth: "The line is movement. . . . The melody is a line, chords are the volumes of a sound, pierced and threaded together. The plot and its intrigue are like the contours of things, their reciprocal arrangement."^[20] Elsewhere Eisenstein states that "one must know how to seize the movement of a given piece of music, and take its trace, that is, its line or form, as the basis of that plastic composition which is intended to correspond to the given music."^[21] This line or scheme Eisenstein calls the "generalizing agent of meaning" (obobshchaiushchii osmyslitel'): it represents "relations in the most generalized form. If left in this form, the generalization is so vast that it becomes what we term an abstraction."^[22] We can grasp the meaning of even such abstractions as the numerical representations of the ancient Chinese if we "displace" them onto "the sphere of geometric outlines" and "represent them to ourselves graphically."^[23]

Eisenstein had no need to invoke the culture of primitive societies as the basis of his pangraphism. In fact, the source of his thinking lies closer at hand, in a tradition of modern European aesthetics inspired by Plato, specifically the Platonic idealization of beauty. This tradition has been carefully traced by Erwin Panofsky. To paraphrase Panofsky, a broadly similar notion of the sketch and the line is present in a range of Renaissance artists and theoreticians: Vasari, Borghini, Baldinucci, Armenini, Zuccari,

Bisagno.^[24] A statement from Vasari effectively summarizes the concept of the sketch prevalent in the work of many Renaissance artists:

The drawing, which is the father of our three arts, produces, from a multiplicity of things, a universal judgment [giudizio universale ] comparable to a form or an idea that embraces all the things of nature, just as nature in all its proportions, is itself subject to rules. From this it follows that, with respect to everything relating to the bodies of humans and animals, as well as of plants, buildings, paintings and sculptures, the drawing knows the proportions that exist between the whole and its parts, and those uniting the parts to one another and to the whole. Now, this knowledge is the source of a determined judgment, which gives this thing its form in the mind, and whose contours the hand will later trace, and which is called a "drawing." One can thus conclude that the drawing is nothing but the creation of an intuitively clear form corresponding to the concept which the mind carries and represents within itself and of which the idea is in some sense the product.^[25]

For Vasari, as Panofsky explains it, the idea, "which the artist produces in his mind and manifests through his drawing, does not derive from him but is taken from nature via the mediation of a 'universal judgment.' From this it clearly follows that it finds itself prefigured in a state of potentiality in objects, although it is only known and realized through the actions of the subject."^[26] With the onset of mannerism, however, the idea-as-sketch becomes increasingly severed from nature, where it would of course seem to lie, and is displaced onto the consciousness of the artist-creator. Panofsky shows how the mannerists came to consider the sketch an "animating light," the "inner gaze of the mind."^[27] Over the course of time, the idea thus began to be seen as an "inner drawing."^[28]

Eisenstein's thinking operates entirely within the framework of these Platonic ideas. The elaboration of a line was for him the elaboration of a concept or idea that had to be derived from natural phenomena (this is the Vasari stage). However, in a range of other texts, he began to treat the sketch precisely as the mind's "inner drawing," to which nature is already superfluous.

It is a characteristic of Eisenstein's thought to unite systematically the graph, the line, and Vasari's idea of proportion as a universal judgment that correlates "all the things of nature," as well as the part and the whole. His article "The Organic and the Image" (Organichnost' i obraznost') begins with an analysis of the "imagery of the pure line," which he defines as "containing a profound meaning."^[29] Here Eisenstein again advances his beloved hypothesis that "a curve can serve as the graphic trace of any action"^[30] and then passes on to an analysis of the ideal, serpentine spiral curve:

It has fully earned its merit, for this is the spiral that defines the proportion of the so-called "golden section" of Euclid, the basis of the most remarkable

works of antiquity. Its unique aesthetic effect is due to its being the basic formula, translated into spatial proportions, for the process of organic growth and development in nature, embracing to an equal degree the Nautilus shell, the head of a sunflower, and the human skeleton. This proportion is, therefore, the fullest reflection [otrazhenie ] in the law for constructing a work [of art] of the law for constructing all the organic processes of development. Furthermore, it is the reflection [otobrazhenie] of a single regularity that is the foundation of both laws.^[31]

The analogies with Vasari are striking. The sketch is the vehicle of the judgment and the concept precisely because it correlates "all the things of nature." It knows the laws of proportion, the higher patterns of regularity hidden in nature. The sketch and the line enjoy the role once accorded to mystical seers, keepers of the Pythagorean mysteries, to whom the one law was subordinate.

Eisenstein's obvious recourse to Platonism allowed him to see the line as containing a knowledge of all proportions. The line was thus transformed into a mechanism capable of generally correlating all things (and all texts). Through the "spatial proportions of the basic formula for the process of organic growth," a line allowed one to connect a shell, the head of a sunflower, and a human skeleton, all without any sense of arbitrariness. Buñuel and Dali, we recall, needed some kind of external analogy or simulacrum to make the same connection. Eisenstein did not. The head of a sunflower looks like a skeleton and can replace it, or become its equivalent, because their commonality is expressed in a line contemplated by the artist's consciousness (or mind). Phenomena do not relate to one another by connecting directly: they are linked by an ideal "third text," invisible to the profane eye, and rendered explicit only through the work of analysis or an artistic intuition, a theoretical sketch or a grapheme existing in the sphere of ideas.

The line or scheme has the ability to combine the abstraction of geometry and mathematics (the sphere of pure ideas) with sensory evidence. But this work of combination occurs in a Platonic realm. It is no coincidence, then, that Eisenstein so often invokes the Platonic notion of "image," which lies at the heart of his mature aesthetics. Still more revealing is the fact the image itself is thought of as a graphic scheme, an "internal sketch." In the draft entitled "Three Whales," we are told of the three elements that form the basis of a visual text: "1. The visual representation [izobrazhenie ]. 2. The generalized image [obraz]. 3. Repetition. In its pure form, the first is naturalism, the second a geometric scheme, and the third an ornament."^[32] The image is here directly equated with a geometric scheme, which forms the basis of Eisenstein's theory of metonymy (the famous "pars pro toto"), since "one contour (N.B. a linear contour [chertaliniia ]!) herestands for the whole ."^[33]

The linearity of the "image" allowed Eisenstein to elaborate the notion of the universal equivalence of phenomena based on the similarities to be found in their internal schemes. This notion was based on a psychology of synesthesia and was essential to the construction of a theory of montage, whose purpose was to connect not visible things but their internal "graphs."

Eisenstein was to pursue this idea most consistently, and most controversially, in his study of audiovisual, or vertical, montage. In the article "Vertical Montage," Eisenstein recalls the battle scene on ice in Aleksandr Nevsky as proof that it is possible for there to be a complete correspondence between the musical movement of a score and the plastic composition of a set of frames. For this purpose he constructs a scheme, in which Prokofiev's music is placed notationally over the compositional structure of the visual sequence. Both elements are then united by the scheme of a movement (or gesture) in the form of a curve.

An earlier attempt to represent melodic movement as a spatial curve was made by J. Combarieu, who traced a curve corresponding to the adagio from Beethoven's Sonata no. 8 ("Pathétique"). Combarieu's stated aim was to test the well-known claims of the German musicologist Hanslick that the movement of music corresponded to the arabesque in plastic terms. The sketch that Combarieu finally drew was, in his own words, the "most displeasing, incoherent and absurd thing imaginable."^[34] Étienne Souriau, who rediscovered Combarieu's half-forgotten experiments, has shown convincingly that the very attempt to represent music spatially as a curved line derived from musical notation is no less absurd than Combarieu's specific experiment. Souriau's point is that the project is itself inconceivable without the aid of a system of graphics and a set of complex mathematical calculations indicating pitch, intervals, and so forth.

Adorno and Eisler voiced a similar criticism of Eisenstein: "The similarity which Eisenstein's schematic depiction is meant to assert in fact lies not between the actual musical movement and the sequence of images, but between the musical notation and the sequence. But musical notation is itself already the fixing of musical movement proper, the static image of a dynamic one."^[35] Thus no direct correspondence is possible even here, between a graph constructed on the basis of musical notes and a visual representation. Music might well "imitate" the plunge of a cliff by "a sequence of three descending notes which, in musical notation, do in fact look like a downward curve. But this 'plunge' is realized in time, while the precipice remains stationary from the first to the last note. Since the reader is not reading the notes but listening to music, he has absolutely no means of associating the notes with the precipice."^[36]

Two months before his death, after reading the Adorno-Eisler critique, Eisenstein made the following note: "Eisler believes that there is no

commensurability, like a pair of galoshes and a drum (although even here, in plastic terms, it is possible). . . . The image passes into a gesture that underlies both. Then we can construct any kind of counterpoint."^[37] The linking of galoshes and a drum, a cliff edge and musical notation, is possible because what is being linked is not their external appearance but their images, the linear traces that organize them as gestures.

In "Vertical Montage," Eisenstein came to the realization that linking musical movement to a static frame might be particularly vulnerable to criticism. Anticipating objections, he pointed out that even a static picture is assimilated by the viewer's perceptive faculties in time: the eyes wander over it and thereby insert a temporal dimension, and a hidden gesture, into the static form.^[38] Elsewhere Eisenstein pursues this idea in a more paradoxical vein: "The principle of shifting focus onto different points in an object and then combining their representations in order to provide a whole image ideally reproduced the 'way an ear behaves.' Is sound aware of the same possibility of technically reproducing the conditions in which 'an ear behaves'?"^[39] Eisenstein finds in orchestration a means of recreating the dynamics of the ear. But the imagery his own thinking is forced to adopt is here revealing. The ear, he says, must "move" like the eye, in order to sketch out some visual arabesques of its own.

The equivalence between a musical and a visual text is finally established thanks to the analogous "behavior" manifested by the eye and the ear, both of which "sketch" unseen graphic texts that coincide completely with each other. Eisenstein's graphics are visible only in the first dimension: they have a clear tendency to become invisible and dissolve in the elusive flourishes sketched by the eye, ear, and brain. The graphic text is thus merely the first step on the way to the invisible text, the first stage as we move toward the image, which lies in the sphere of pure ideas. It is there that the various texts come together; this is where the primary text dwells, like the image of a woman long dead, embodying the principle of universal equivalence.

If the mimesis of form acts to undermines the pan-equivalence of all things, then the mimesis of principle opens up a world of unlimited possibilities. Eisenstein quotes Michel Jean-Marie Guyau: "The image is the repetition of one and the same idea in another form and in another environment."^[40] The form changes. Forms change. The idea, the principle, or image remains immutable.

To be sure, Eisenstein himself had doubts about the reduction of the "principle" to a linear outline (an arguable maneuver, to say the least). He acknowledged being "disturbed" by the fact that the highest level of abstraction (the generalized image) was being equated with the most elementary—the line. Eisenstein succeeded in avoiding a regression to the ar-

chaic stage of thought thanks to the salutary aid of the dialectic, which permitted him to conclude, for example, that, "in terms of content, these lines are polar opposites, but in appearance or form they are identical."^[41]

Elsewhere, Eisenstein invokes Lenin's rendering of the dialectic:

A contradiction seems to emerge here: the highest [form]—the generalized image—coincides, as if on the basis of a plastic trait [po plasticheskomu priznaku] with the most primitive type of integral perception. But this contradiction is only apparent. For in essence we are dealing here precisely with that "apparent return to the old," about which Lenin speaks in relation to the dialectics of phenomena. The fact is that a generalization is really integral [deislvitel'no tselostnoe ],that is, at the same time both the complex [kompleksnoe] (immediate) and differentiated (mediated) representation of the phenomenon [predstavlenie iavleniia] (and a representation about the phenomenon [predstavlenie ob iavlenii] ).^[42]

In these explanations, Eisenstein's dialectic basically involves making the lowest and highest forms simultaneously manifest in the act of generalization.

In the end, phenomenal appearance is condemned yet again for exposing too clearly the fragility of logical thinking. The line is understood to carry proto-concepts; at the same time it is also the highest form of abstraction. This "dialectic" in many ways resembles certain postulates found in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908), a similarity seen both in Worringer's posing of the problem and in his manner of resolving it: "A style perfect in its regularity, a style that is highly abstract and strictly excludes life, is characteristic of nations in their most primitive cultural stage. There must therefore be a causal connection between primitive culture and the highest, purest and most regulated form of art."^[43]

Eisenstein was to persist in his attempt to distinguish the protological from higher forms of abstraction present in the line. He analyzed cave paintings in search of what might separate the mechanical practice of copying silhouettes from the sketching of contour as abstraction.^[44] He also examined ornament as a synthesis of protologic (repetition) and "intellectualism" (geometry),^[45] Yet none of these attempts at distinguishing higher and lower forms appears very convincing. And although the "evincing of the principle" was proclaimed to be the outcome of analysis, in practice it was found through the work of imitation or mimesis. After all, in order to "think by the contour" (dumat' konturom), the eye has to repeat the movement of the hand that drew it. And in order to grasp the essence of a manual concept, Cushing himself "revived the primitive functions of his own hands, living over again with them their experiences of prehistorical days."^[46]To imitate the principle is indeed to master it. The work of analysis thus

acquires a unique status. Mastering the principle becomes a kind of sympathetic magic. The artist here inevitably acquires the features of a magician, shaman, or seer, and the "principle" or idea becomes a secret or puzzle that needs to be solved.

These tendencies in Eisenstein's thinking find their fullest elaboration in his essay "On Detective Fiction":

What is the nature of the "puzzle" [zagadki] as against the "answer" [otgadki] that solves it? The difference is that the answer names the object in a formulation, while a puzzle represents the same object in the form of an image that is woven out of a certain number of its features. . . . Someone who has been initiated into great mysteries is, as an initiate, granted the ability to master the discourse of concepts and the discourse of representation through images [rech'iu obraznykh predstavlenii], the language of logic and the language of feelings. The degree to which both are capable of reaching a unity and an interpenetration is an indication of the degree to which the "initiate" can encompass perfect dialectical thinking. . . . He who can solve a puzzle . . . knows the secret of movement itself and of the coming-into-being [stanoveleniia] of natural phenomena. . . . The sage and the priest must at all costs know how to "read" this ancient prior discourse of sensuous images, without limiting themselves to the younger discourse of logic!^[47]

The same magic trick is also performed by the detective, who is just another hypostasis of the "initiate": "And the detective novel? Its theme throughout is the transition from image-based appearance [obraznoi vidimosti] to conceptual essence [poniatiinoi sushchnosti]. The same form that we found in the simple puzzle is present, in nuce, in the detective novel."^[48]

The artist is thus quite similar to the magician or the detective: "The artist operates in the realm of form in precisely the same way, but resolves his puzzle in exactly the opposite way. The artist is "given" his answer to the puzzle as a conceptually formulated thesis, and his task is to transform it into a puzzle, that is, translate it into the form of imagery."^[49] The artist's reversal of the normal process (from schematic thesis to form) is also meant to shift modern art from the realm of protologic to a more rational sphere. Elsewhere, while commenting on his work on the film Aleksandr Nevsky, the director was forced to acknowledge that this reversal was not effective: "The hardest thing is to 'invent' an image, when the immediate 'demand' [spros] for it has been strictly, even 'formulaically,' formulated ['do formuly,' sformulirovan]. Here is the formula for what we need, make an image out of it. Organically, and more advantageously, the process takes place differently."^[50] In other words, the "puzzle" always emerges first.

In a "Non-Indifferent Nature" [Neravnodushanaia priroda], Eisenstein points out yet another hypostasis of the detective: "Experts in graphology are a particular kind of detective."^[51] This latest disguise is logical enough, since a graphologist tries to solve the riddle of personality by looking at an

individual's graphic traces, that is, his or her handwriting. Eisenstein distinguishes two kinds of graphological detectives. The first is an analyst, personified by Ludwig Klages: "In his analyses Klages takes great pains to elucidate, among other indicators, the precise relationship that obtains in an individual's handwriting between the straight, sharp and angular elements and those that are rounded, smooth and elastically flowing."^[52] This work is like the deductive thinking of a detective, who has to start working from a clue, an abstraction. Eisenstein compares Klages to Sherlock Holmes. Then there is the second kind of detective:

The other kind of detective-graphologist works differently, "physiognomically" (in the broad sense of the word), or, if you will, synthetically.

In this group of graphologists we find Raphael Scherman. . . .

Scherman does not analyze the elements of a person's handwriting, but rather tries to extract from this handwriting some general—synthetic—graphic image (mainly from a client's signature, which in many ways is a person's graphic self-portrait, as it were).^[53]

Scherman is said to have had the ability to reproduce a person's handwriting just by setting eyes on him, and to re-create an artist's signature just by looking at his painting. Eisenstein explains: "Here we are dealing with imitation, or rather with that degree of imitation necessary for Scherman to 'grasp' you at first sight and instantaneously reproduce you ."^[54] In essence, Scherman seized the whole as a line, as a graphic outline. He saw each person as a "graphic self-portrait," discerning in one's body not just a structure or line but precisely that line that is contained in the body's potential for movement. Through the "text" of the body he read the invisible text of its hand movements, which he regarded as no different from the movements of the eye or ear.

Eisenstein identified himself with Scherman. It comes as no surprise that he sought to acquire the trappings of a magician or a detective by claiming a supreme knowledge, the magical ability to discern the scheme, line, or principle through and beyond the realm of the visible. He even wrote of the need to have a special "nocturnal vision," the eyes of a "tracker or the tracker's grand-nephew Sherlock Holmes."^[55] "I can see very distinctly in front of me," he declared.^[56] But this vision was specifically intellectual in nature, connected with an internal delineation of contour, that is, with the very genesis of conceptual thinking: "Even now, as I write, in essence I am almost 'outlining' with my hand the contours, as it were, of what is passing before me in an incessant stream of visual images and events."^[57] Hence the rather unexpected criticism of normal vision, unconnected to the tactile beginnings of the concept, that we find in "The Museums at Night," a chapter of Eisenstein's memoirs: "In general, museums should be visited at night. Only at night. . . is it possible to fuse with what

is seen, and not just look things over."^[58] "Just let the lamp burn out, and you are entirely in the power of dark, subterranean forces and forms of thought."^[59] For all his passion for painting, for all the visual bias inherent in his cinematic profession, Eisenstein finally opted for the blindness of the seer, recalling such poet-prophets of the past as Homer and Milton.

Eisenstein's comparison of the seer with the graphologist reminds one of the surrealists, who also saw écriture automatique as a means of plumbing some hidden depths. There are moments in Eisenstein's theoretical writings that bear a remarkable resemblance to André Breton's thoughts in "Le Message automatique" (1933). Like Eisenstein, Breton was fascinated by the idea of nocturnal vision. He writes about James Watt, who is said to have locked himself up in a dark room and seen the outlines of his steam engine. Breton also mentions the artist Fernand Desmoulin, who was accustomed to drawing for certain hours in total darkness, with a sack placed over his head. Like Eisenstein, Breton placed great store in graphic outlines and curved lines. But most astonishing of all is his assertion, with which Eisenstein would have readily agreed, that hearing is more important than sight: "It always has seemed, to me that in poetry verbo-auditive automatism creates for the reader the most exalting visual images. Verbo-visual automatism never has seemed to create for the reader visual images that are from any viewpoint comparable. It is enough to say that I believe as fully today as I did ten years ago—I believe blindly. . .blindly, with a blindness that potentially covers all visible things—in the triumph auditorily of what is unverifiable visually."^[60] Breton himself goes on to clarify the logic behind his championing of the auditory faculty. Hearing makes it easier to distinguish an imaginary object from a real one, so that "subjectively, their properties are demonstrably interchangeable." Essentially, at stake here is the very same quest for equivalence, for the complete interchangeability of elements through the establishment of an ideal intertext. It is quite logical, then, for Breton to arrive at the notion of an "eidetic image" (Eisenstein would have just said "image"), one common both to primitive cultures and to children. ^[61]

The eidetic image as a universal equivalent is revealed only to the blind. In the 1940s, Eisenstein made a series of sketches on the theme of blindness. Most of them, such as Blind Man, Blind Men, In the Realm of the Blind, and Forever without Sight! were conceived in 1944. In this series two sketches stand out—Belisarius (1941) and Tiresias (1944). Both depict blind men of antiquity, and both are constructed according to the same iconographic scheme: a venerable blind man holding a staff and being led by a young guide. In the case of the Byzantine military commander Belisarius, Eisenstein's scheme is justified by a long European tradition. A young guide appears alongside Belisarius in paintings by Van Dyck, Salvator Rosa, Gérard, and David (in the latter case, the blind man is shown with his guide collapsed in his arms, dying of a snakebite). No such extensive iconographic

tradition exists in the case of Tiresias. Perhaps the only time he appears with a guide is in Sophocles' Antigone, where he tells the story of how he once had to predict the future by using fire, which, being blind, he could not see. Sophocles motivates the story in the following way: "I learned from this boy of these abortive prophecies. . .: for he is my guide, as I am other men's."^[62]

Eisenstein's Tiresias can thus be seen as an illustration to Antigone. There is another reason for believing this. In January 1899, a version of Antigone was staged by the director Stanislavskii. In this production the part of Tiresias was played by Eisenstein's mentor, Vsevolod Meyerhold. A surviving photograph from the performance confirms that Eisenstein's drawing derives from this particular production (the photo itself may have even served as its iconographic source). The sketch shows a young guide whose clothing and hairstyle are precisely like Meyerhold's.^[63] Leonid Kozlov has shown that Eisenstein often looked to his mentor, who is subtextually present in many of Eisenstein's artistic conceptions, particularly Ivan the Terrible .^[64] We can reasonably assume that Tiresias functions as a substitute for Eisenstein's teacher, the wise genius and seer Meyerhold.

At the same time, the figure is also Eisenstein's projection of Meyerhold onto himself. In blinding Tiresias, the goddess Athena "opened his ears, enabling him to understand all the sounds that birds make, and gave him a staff of cornel wood, with which he could walk as well as those who can see."^[65] For Tiresias, hearing and touching take the place of sight: this change is not so much a replacement or compensation, since it grants Tiresias access to secrets which the sighted are denied. Tiresias here functions as Eisenstein's mythic teacher, while Eisenstein himself serves as his guide, leading him by the hand into a hidden world beyond the visible. This is the realm of tactile and speculative representations; here lies the "basic" text of universal connections and equivalences, the long-sought sacred text of the universe, the primary intertext of all his work.

Eisenstein's series of drawings of blind men is preceded by yet another enigmatic graphic cycle. In this earlier series, schematically drawn homunculi are shown gazing into "Nothingness." These sketches, made during the Great Purges of 1937, are most likely grounded in a specific political context, but they also suggest a metaphysical content. Everything seems to suggest that these homunculi are blind. Their eyes are designated by large circles without pupils, which is precisely how blindness is indicated in the later sketches. The blind are assigned the task of looking into Nothingness, Hegel's indeterminate being that is the beginning of all things.

In an unpublished fragment of 1934, Eisenstein touches on the possibility of penetrating beyond the confines of the visible while discussing Swedenborg (yet another seer-magician) and "nocturnal sight." "Imagine," he writes, "a light extinguished for an instant, and how the surround-

ing reality immediately becomes tangible, a Tastwelt ."^[66] The world divides into the visible, the tangible, and the audible, beyond which emerges "a multiplicity of worlds, the real world [Handlungswelt ],the world of representation [Vorstellungswelt ] and the conceptual world [Begriffswelt ]."^[67] In this plethora of worlds, which we can reach by "switching off" our eyes, arises the world of things-in-themselves, which the artist-as-seer grasps through a kind of magical dialectic. In this mystical scenario we once more glimpse the shade of Wilhelm Worringer, who had asserted that "in primitive man the instinct, as it were, for the 'thing-in-itself' is strongest."^[68] Eisenstein here attributes a thousand-year history to his own consciousness. He claims to know the world as a man who has lived forever, like Tiresias, who was granted great longevity and a knowledge of the beginning of all things.

The genesis of meaning from gesture, meaning, and tactile sensation gives a text the quality of a body. Reading a text thus becomes a "physiognomic" exercise, as Eisenstein himself often points out: "We shall tirelessly inculcate in ourselves a sharp sense of the physiognomics of the expression of curves [fiziognomiki vyrazheniia krivykh ]."^[69] In other words, in each form we must see a body. Heinrich Wölfflin, whom Eisenstein saw as belonging to the genre of detective-graphologists along with Klages,^[70] had already shown the possibilities of such a reading in his analyses of Italian baroque architecture. Wölfflin had sought to understand in what way architecture might embody the spirit of its time. Insofar as the primary model of expressiveness is and has always been the human body, then architecture, too, acquires its expressive capabilities by establishing hidden analogies with the human body, whose movements and postures betray the spirit of the era. Wölfflin's project is a systematic reduction of all forms to the human body: "But the principal meaning of this reduction of stylistic forms to the human image lies in the fact that this image gives a direct expression of the spiritual."^[71]

This idea is extremely close to Scherman's method that discerns the spirit's presence in the body on the basis of a physiognomic intuition. Each plastic or phonic object can be understood as a covering that conceals a metaphoric human body within itself, in which, in turn, its expressive movement lies hidden (existing in it as a potential for form). According to Eisenstein, the coming together of form is preceded by a principle, a scheme, a line (i.e., the trace of a movement), which gradually acquire a body. Examining the experience of mystical ecstasy, Eisenstein points to the fact that the mystic initially finds himself outside any kind of image or thing (vneobraznost', vnepredmetnost' ). He then encounters an "entirely abstract image" that "painstakingly acquires objective traits [staratel'no opredmechivaetsia ]." In this way, "an imageless 'origin' quickly dons the image of a concretely objective 'personified' God."^[72] The principle here acquires a

kind of flesh, a body that grows out of the schematic concept: "The formulaic concept, gaining in sumptuousness, unfolding on the basis of its material, is transformed into image-as-form."^[73]

Characteristically, Eisenstein extended this metaphor to the evolution of organic bodies, whose surface he understood as a static cast taken of a body's movements, an outer casing containing the trace of a moving line.^[74] Since the manifestation of the principle, for Eisenstein, was meant to repeat in reverse sequence the process by which form is created, it could be seen essentially as a "decomposition" of the textual body, the removal, from an idea, of its bodily layers. That Eisenstein was interested in the body within the body, the casing within the casing—what he called the "kangaroo principle"—comes as no surprise.^[75] He was fascinated by an Indian drawing in which the silhouetted outline of an elephant was found to contain a series of female figures; by the fact that Napoleon's body had been transported inside four coffins, each within the other; and even by the Surikov painting Men'shikov in Berezovo, in which he uncovered the same metaphoric structure of repeating coffins.^[76]

The body, then, is reached by removing its outer covering; even its essence can be reached if the body is anatomically prepared. In "Psychology of Composition," Eisenstein elaborates in great detail the metaphor of writerly self-analysis (which he himself practiced a great deal) as a kind of autopsy. He also analyzed Poe's Philosophy of Composition in this light. Poe and Eisenstein in fact have a great deal in common: both develop the myth of the seer-detective, both cultivate physiognomy as a form of knowledge, and so on. Eisenstein compared Poe to an anatomist-pathologist: "Poe performs his 'autopsy' (dissection) in the form of a literary analysis of images of his own invention; in other cases in the form of analytical deductions of the kind a detective would make."^[77] Here Eisenstein also speaks of moving from "the inspection of the 'decomposition' of a body devoid of life . . . to a decomposition 'for the purpose of analyzing' the body of a poem."^[78]

The analytical dissection of a textual body supplements the physiognomic reading of it. The ideal being pursued here is the ability to see through the body into its organizing graphic structure. This method can be defined as a kind of artistic x-ray, which illuminates the hidden skeleton through the flesh.

This skeletal metaphor is of some importance to Eisenstein's understanding of the principle, and the means we have to know it. To imitate the principle is to negate the body in order to uncover its skeleton. To be sure, this rather macabre metaphor is older than Eisenstein himself. We scarcely need to recall the various medieval and Renaissance allegories of death, in which the skeleton embodies a truth that lies concealed under a body that is fated to decay. More recently, Charles Baudelaire has described the skeleton in a way that is strikingly close to Eisenstein. For Baudelaire also,

the skeleton is a structure or scheme that has to be extrapolated from the natural body: "The sculptor understood very quickly how much mysterious and abstract beauty there is to be found in this thin carcass, for which the flesh serves as clothing, and which is like the plan of the poem of humanity. And this caressing, biting, almost scientific grace in turn finds its place, clear and purified of the filth of decay, among the innumerable graces that Art had already extracted from ignorant Nature."^[79]

The same notion of the skeleton as a beautiful abstraction to be rescued from the flesh appears in Baudelaire's poem "Danse macabre." Here the poet addresses a beautiful woman:

Aucuns t'apelleront une caricature
Qui ne comprennent pas, amants ivres de chair
L'élégance sans nom de l'humaine armature.
Tu réponds, grand squelette, à mon goût le plus cher!

(Some will call you a caricature
Lovers drunk on flesh, who do not understand
The nameless elegance of the human armature.
You respond, great skeleton, to my dearest taste!)^[80]

This metaphor gained currency in Russia too, among the symbolist writers of the early twentieth century who were close to the theosophical and anthroposophical movements. Like Eisenstein's theory, these new mystical doctrines were oriented toward a rather unique kind of evolutionism. According to Rudolph Steiner, older genetic forms are preserved as astral bodies, visible only to the "initiate." In all seriousness, the theosophists sought to fix invisible geometric sketches of what Annie Besant called "thought-forms," referring specifically to x-ray experiments.^[81] The Russian poet and artist Maksimilian Voloshin, who was close to the anthroposophists, wrote an article characteristically entitled "The Skeleton of Art" (Skelet zhivopisi; 1904), in which he urged all artists to "reduce the entire multicolored world to the basic combinations of angles and curves."^[82] In other words, by removing the visible layer of the flesh, they would reveal the graphic skeleton that lay below. Voloshin also claimed to discern prehistoric skeletons buried in the painting of K. F. Bogaevskii, which he went on to interpret as a paleontological code.^[83]

In his novel Petersburg, a book filled with split bodies undertaking astral journeys, the anthroposophist Andrei Belyi describes the movement from formula to embodiment in a way that recalls Eisenstein: "Logic had turned into bones, and syllogisms were wrapped all around like sinews. The contents of logic were now covered with flesh."^[84] We might note that this passage appears at the end of an episode that is effectively paraphrased in a

scene from Eisenstein's film October called "The Gods." In both cases, we move through a series of divine metamorphoses—Confucius, Buddha, Chronos, down to the busts of primitive idols. Moving from sumptuous flesh to the skeleton is like moving through the surface appearance of the most recent divinities back to their more schematic precursors. This pattern of thinking is close to Eisenstein's; indeed, the move from theosophy to higher abstraction was a path common to many artists of the time, from Kandinsky to Mondrian.

Like his predecessors, Eisenstein singled out in painting anything related to the metaphorics of anatomy. He wrote a lengthy piece on Hogarth, an artist who strove to abstract an ideal curve out of the structure of bones.^[85] He paused to examine the pedagogical elaborations of Paul Klee, which he interpreted according to the metaphor of graphology.^[86] It was Klee, in fact, who was most eager to pursue an "anatomical" approach to the structure of a work of art: "Just like a human being, a painting has a skeleton, muscles and skin. One might speak of the specific anatomy of a painting."^[87] Klee also recommended "autopsy" as the best way of understanding the inner structure of things: "A thing splits apart, its inside is exposed in its planes of cleavage. Its character is organized according to how many and what kind of cleavages have been necessary. This is a visible internalization, produced either with the help of a simple knife, or with the help of subtler instruments capable of clearly baring the structure and material functioning of the thing."^[88]

In Eisenstein's case, it was drawing that made him interested in skeletons. He acknowledged as much in the following statement: "I have been attracted to bones and skeletons since childhood. An attraction that is something of a illness."^[89] The sketches of his student days later repelled him for their orientation toward the fleshly body: "The finished sketch requires volume, shade, half-shade and reflex, while there is a complete 'taboo' on the graphic outline of the skeleton or ribs."^[90] For Eisenstein, the place of flesh in painting was suspect, in that it concealed the more essential bones. He copied out the following passage from Chiang-Yee's The Chinese Eye, in which the author discusses the work of Chinese painters: "'And then a moment of illumination occurs, they look at the water and the very same rocks and realize that they are face to face with bare "reality," no longer obscured by the Shadow of Life. They must immediately take up their brushes and draw the "bones" as they are in their true form: there is no need to go into detail.' "^[91] Eisenstein then comments: "Here we encounter the term 'bones.' This bony outline [lineinyi kostiak ] is required to embody the 'true form,' the 'generalized essence of the phenomenon.'"^[92] Here we see the linear scheme directly linked to the metaphor of the skeleton. Elsewhere, Eisenstein clarifies the comparison: This 'determining skeleton' [reshaiushchii kostiak ] can be then clothed in any particular kind

of painterly resolution."^[93] Here the skeleton appears to acquire an autonomy from the artistic flesh that clothes it.

For Eisenstein himself, any postulate was proved right if it could be projected successfully onto an evolutionary model. Hence the skeletal metaphor was also elaborated in this way. Among Eisenstein's notes we find a fantastic passage taken from Representative Men, Emerson's adaptation of Swedenborg's philosophy, in which all of evolutionary history from the snake and the worm to humankind is depicted as a history of skeletons, through all their permutations and improvements.^[94] In a note dating from 1933, he announces his enthusiastic discovery of a quite fantastic evolutionary law, according to which the skeleton is shown to correspond to a thought process: "Self-imitation. (Hurrah!). Surely that was what I was writing about when I discussed the process by which consciousness developed: the nervous tissue reproduces the skeleton, etc., and thought reproduces action."^[95] The nervous system, as the agent of thought, graphically re-creates a sketch of the skeleton as the agent of action. Each person realizes an internal specular mimesis of the schemes, structures, and principles that engender consciousness.

Eisenstein often wrote about how the scheme, the line, and the skeleton can show through the body of a text. This magical x-ray faculty was deeply rooted in the specific workings of Eisenstein's own psyche. From Frank Harris's memoirs. My Life and Loves, Eisenstein would recall "only one scene": the one in which a man laughed so much that "from the shaking his flesh 'began to come off his bones'[!]"^[96] Here the bones literally break through the layer of flesh. In the autobiographical fragment "On Folklore," Eisenstein recalls comparing a certain Comrade E. to a "rose-colored skeleton dressed in a suit," and then tries to reconstruct the logic by which he arrived at this "sinister image": "First one formed an image of a skull protruding out of a head, or the mask of a skull coming through the surface of a face."^[97] Later on the director himself acknowledged that the image of a "skull thrusting its way to the surface of a face" was his metaphor for expressive movement, a model for the work of mimicry. From this we can more clearly grasp the place of physiognomy in Eisenstein's work as a means of reading essences. The science of physiognomy seeks to read the skeleton through the layer of the flesh. From this point it is also only one more step to Eisenstein's concept of ecstasy, which involves a kind of bodily release: the skeleton leaves the body, just as the principle is abstracted from the text, just like a "skull thrusting its way to the surface of a face."^[98]

The motif of the skeleton also appears in Eisenstein's films, such as Aleksandr Nevsky and especially ¡Que viva México! In the All Saints' Day sequence in the Mexican film, the "determining skeleton" turns into a highly elaborate baroque metaphor. Under the death masks used in the carnival one can see real skulls, a fact that Eisenstein himself saw as crucially im-

portant: "The face is a kind of simulacrum of the skull, and the skull is a kind of face on its own. . . . One living over the other. One hiding under the other. One living an autonomous life through the other. And each showing through the other in turns. The one and the other repeating the physical scheme of the process by manipulating the images of face and skull which keep exchanging masks."^[99]

In this constant play of physiognomic readings, meaning shows through the flesh (a mask) in order then to become a mask itself. The interchangeability of mask and face is a metaphor for the play of substitutes, the universal equivalences of meaning.

At the beginning of this chapter, I discussed Iurii Tynianov's hypothesis concerning Pushkin's romantic life, which Eisenstein adapted to his own complex set of long-cherished ideas. The hypothesis revealed an almost imperceptible play of substitutes, which Eisenstein was quick to insert into his own operative context, projecting Pushkin's "nameless love" onto the life of Edgar Allan Poe. This projection was almost slavishly faithful to Pushkin's scenario, albeit with one alteration. Poe's sweetheart Jane Smith Stanard died while he was still a boy. The place of the living Karamzina was taken by the dead Jane, and with this Tynianov's original thesis acquired an added range of macabre motifs, discussed earlier. Metaphorically speaking, the movement toward a universal substitute must pass through the stage of death, and the disintegration of the body. While no single body can replace another, a skeleton readily takes on the function of substitute. To pursue this metaphor to its gruesome conclusion, one could say that Goncharova could replace Karamzina because their skeletons are similar. This, at the limit of its logic, was Eisenstein's own answer to the question he had posed Tynianov.

Earlier in this book, while examining the problem of the simulacrum, or external resemblance, in Un Chien andalou (chapter 5), we discovered that the universal equivalence of things is possible only if their external form is "softened" and then transformed. While remaining within the figurative realm of the body, Eisenstein takes the metaphor several steps further. Equivalence, we discover, is possible only when form has disintegrated, and all that remains is its bare scheme, the skeleton. In a 1939 sketch entitled Life Leaving the Body Forever, we see life represented paradoxically as a schematic line resembling a skeleton and coming out of the inert material frame that once encased it. If we were to project this idea onto the problematics of a text, then we could say that the life of a text begins when it frees itself of the body, from the external form that clothed it.

Two texts (or fragments thereof) can actively interact with each other if they are connected not formally (as bodies) but structurally. Here Eisenstein is quite in tune with contemporary theories of intertextuality, such as Riffaterre's, for which "text and intertext are invariables of one and the

same structure."^[100] Only a commonality of structure allows for the correlation of text and intertext.

The fact of correlation between two texts—the basis of intertextuality—also raises the further and urgent question of the criteria needed for their correlation. How are we to establish that a given text is a transformation or variant of an intertext? The necessary criterion is resemblance, precisely the point that Eisenstein will adopt as the focus of his analysis.

In the autobiographical fragment "On Bones" (Na kostiakh),^[101] Eisenstein mentions Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-morte, a book devoted almost entirely to the idea of a resemblance between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Interestingly, Rodenbach analyzes the mechanism of resemblance, to observe: "The resemblances are ever only in the figures and in the overall impression. If one strains over details, everything differs."^[102]

Rodenbach's observation, that the careful examination of detail inevitably shows up only differences, points to the essential paradox of similarity. As Walter Benjamin had astutely remarked:

When we say that one face resembles another, we mean that we can discern certain features of the second face in the first, while the latter does not cease to be what it is. But the possibilities of phenomena of this kind are not subject to any criterion, and are thus unlimited. The category of resemblance has only a very limited meaning for waking consciousness, but acquires limitless meaning in the world of hashish. Each thing here has a face, and rightly so; each thing is endowed with such a level of physical presence that we can seek to discern in it, as in a face, the appearance of certain features. . . . the truth becomes something living; and it lives by rhythm alone, in accordance with which a statement is placed over a contrary statement, allowing us by that very fact to think ourselves.^[103]

Benjamin's point is that the category of similarity is not useful when consciousness is fully lucid, while highly effective in the ecstatic state of mind that was Eisenstein's desired goal. Without ecstasy, the superimposition of face on face does not "allow itself to be thought" as truth.

It was this solution to the problem of resemblance between bodies, texts, and objects that impelled Eisenstein to suppose the existence of an invisible inner text, a kind of graphic memory. For Eisenstein, text and intertext could not be correlated unless an invisible text could be extrapolated from them, which could then bring their correlation into effect. For Riffaterre we are simply dealing with a structural invariable. For Eisenstein this invariable becomes a "third text," a speculative, almost mystical interpretant, existing in the Platonic sphere of pure ideas, which only the blind Tiresias is able to divine.

This abstract text is profoundly linked to the language, and montage, of Eisenstein's films. The densely "intellectual" juxtaposition of objects in Eisenstein's montage appears anomalous from the point of view of normal narrative logic, something like a quote that interrupts the flow of linear narrative. These montage sequences, each responsible for creating conceptual coherence out of the clash of fragmented images, provoke the mechanism of intertextuality in order to find normative status within the film's semantics. Eisenstein himself often pointed out that the task of bringing together these diverse montage fragments devolved onto a dominant plastic form, such as the abstract line that unites Prokofiev's music and the sheer cliff in Aleksandr Nevsky. An invisible and rather enigmatic "third text" thus makes Eisenstein's montage read as a normative text.

Eisenstein saw montage as a stage in the production of meaning, one that would not have been possible without an earlier moment. This initial stage involved imitating the "principle," elucidating the scheme, the intellectual grapheme that fixes an image, the beginnings of meaning. This beginning stage is based on the intuitive, magical physiognomic discovery of something hidden in the body—a thing, a text or line, a "skeleton." These "skeletons" then enter into contact and begin to function reciprocally as substitutes. The artist must reach the more abstractly intellectual stage of montage through a "corporeal" stage of creation: this is described as a decomposition, an x-ray, or an autopsy of the visible flesh. Before the work of combining generalized schemes of imagery can begin, a skeleton visible only to the initiate must make its way through the face of the world. This is the invisible "third text" that finally resolves the dilemma of external resemblances.