More Unique, Difficult Being in Khlebnikov, and Khlebnikov's Book
It's striking how similar Khlebnikov and Mallarmé are in some respects. In speaking of Khlebnikov, I could almost repeat what I said in the previous chapter, substituting Khlebnikov for Mallarmé . Mallarmé's notion of language had led us back to its "unique, difficult being," to use Foucault's expression, because the evacuation of meaning (traditionally conceived) and the disappearance of the author had "yield [ed] the initiative to words," to use Mallarmé's own expression, and left us confronting plain language. Khlebnikov's theories do the same thing. I have talked about the two conceptions of zaum' language and about how both had the effect of objectivizing language. The first, "nativist" theory of zaum' language saw the poetic word as sharing in the existential autonomy of the object that it ideally designated, whereas the second theory saw the poetic word as existentially autonomous because it was the point of departure from the reality it created. Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh had spoken repeatedly of the word "as such," as if their ideas about poetic language, like Mallarmé's, had left us in the presence of these objects in all their naked existential isolation. (See above, pp. 54–57.)
Khlebnikov was fascinated with numbers, in part because of the comparison he saw between them and words. Much of what he wrote about numbers suggested that he saw them as fulfilling the function that words can never quite fulfill, namely the function of ideally signifying. Khlebnikov was also interested in the mode of being of mathematical entities, as he indicates in a peculiar notation from a series of thoughts collected
under the title "Proposals." Each "proposal" is written with its main verb in the infinitive because it is a proposal to do something. "Keeping in mind," he says, "that nO is the sign for a point, that n1 is the sign for a line, and that n2 and n3 are the signs for area and volume, to look for the spaces of the fractional degrees: n1/2 n2/3 n1/3 , where are they?"[3] Tzvetan Todorov quotes this passage in an essay he wrote on Khlebnikov and included in his book Poétique de la prose . He, too, sees the movement in Khlebnikov toward a conception of language as independent; and he believes that Khlebnikov's reflections on numbers and words are what led him to this conception. Precisely because words fulfill their function less well than numbers, says Todorov, paraphrasing Khlebnikov, they can "assume the function that really is their own: to be autonomous words."[4] Signifiers of all sorts were thus a source of ontological speculation for Khlebnikov.
Something else is true of Khlebnikov that was true of Mallarmé. Mallarmé's theory of language had a way of forcing us to confront language from an ontological perspective. But this is more a historical comment than it is a characterization of Mallarmé's views. Once again for Khlebnikov, as for Mallarmé, we find that those views themselves are ontological in nature. In the introduction to what used to be the standard English-language anthology of Khlebnikov's works, Edward J. Brown drew a distinction between Khlebnikov's theory of language and the Russian symbolist theory of language. For the symbolists, he says, language was a "vehicle for transcendental experience." For Khlebnikov, however, it was a vehicle "to discover the world." Brown feels that the world, "our own world," is always "vividly present" in Khlebnikov's poetry and prose.[5] I don't agree that language is always a vehicle for discovering the world in Khlebnikov, nor do I think that our own world is always present in his works. Brown's comment applies more to the first of the two versions of zaum' than to the second. But he is right to bring the world into the discussion. The theory of language we find in Khlebnikov (and Kruchenykh), with all of its complexities and ambiguities, begins to look a little bit like a pre-Heideggerian ontology. Certainly any investigation of language will bring up questions of the world, but Khlebnikov's theories, like those of many of his contemporaries, blurred the traditional sign-referent conception so much as to lead us and him into a probing of the mode of being of word and world.
Khlebnikov also dreamed of a book not entirely unlike Mallarmé's "Livre." There is nothing in Khlebnikov quite like the essays or manu-
script notes by Mallarmé, but the notion occurs with surprising frequency in short, mysterious passages that show the same ontological perspective as Mallarmé's writings. Khlebnikov often referred to nature and the world as a book. Notations he made here and there show him pondering the idea of the world as a manuscript or poem. He also apparently dreamed of creating a book of nature, or a book of life, like the Bible or the Koran. One of Khlebnikov's commentators, Raymond Cooke, has shown with many examples that this was a forceful mystical aspiration of Khlebnikov.[6] Of course, the book of nature raises the same issues we find in zaum' theory and the same ones Gerald Bruns raises when he talks about Mallarmé's Book. The view of the poetic work as coextensive with the world, either because it created that world or because it simply "writes" the world, shows a view of language that, if nothing else, must be characterized as ontological. Language is confronted with the very idea of being and is made to be identical to it. This is certainly not the same notion we find in Heidegger, but the orientation of the thought behind it is quite similar.