MIROSLAV BEKER

FRAMING THE SIGN

Illustrated on Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's critical work meant the begin- ning of a radical depature from the narrow principles of French classicism; he questioned the pre-eminence of French litera- ture, he objected to the idea that the role of the tragic hero should be reserved for a royal figure, and on account of his fa- mous treatise on the Laocoon sculpture he is considered a dis- tant forerunner of modern semiotics. And yet we do not usu- ally think Lessing to belong to the newly emerging romantic movement. The reason why we do not do that is the fact that Lessing still adhered to the principle that literature is primarily instructive and he thought literature to be useful in the spirit of the then influential enlightenment. It was only later (in the work of Friedrich Schiller) that another constitutive compo- nent of the creative impulse was brought forward, the compo- nent of play. The idea of a straight, uninterrupted line from the creative artist to his work was called in question by Schiller because play always means that there is some understanding to the effect that what is represented is not unmediated truth but the result of a convention, the product of some rules that cannot be interpreted as reflecting life. The mimetic princi- ple was neglected to be replaced by the awareness that art was a convention, that it sticks to but also experiments with rules and codes. Not that it was quite different in the past, it was only the awareness of this fact that grew towards the end of the eighteenth century. Quite a number of critics have since then maintained the view that art produces works that are not

NeoheliconXX/1 Ala~miai IGor, Bu~pest 10 MIROSLAV BEKER insights into life and the world but rather products of inven- tion and convention, the end-results of the hypothesis as/./'they were true. In our century an outstanding representative of such a concept of art was I. A. Richards who advocated the idea that art did not produce truthful pictures of life but created well- orchestrated works that were conducing to the co-ordination of human impulses that were otherwise in a state of disarray. To give an example: if Shakespeare wrote in his sonnets (for example in the sonnet beginning with the words "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments") that love was eternal and that it knew no obstacle, it does not follow that we should accept it as an important truth, but only that we should appreciate his verses as if they were true. In such cases we have a convention that stands between the artist and the fin- ished work, in other words, the final work owes its allegiance more to the convention (in Shakespeare's case to the conven- tion of sonnetry of his time) than to the nature of human emo- tions. Such works should be understood as if preceded by the premise: "This is only play", i.e. these statements should not be taken at their face value or, to give a more extended def- inition (by Gregory Bateson): "The actions in which we now engage do not denote what the actions for which they stand would denote". I Another name used for a convention or code that con- tributes to the shape of its product isframe.A frame is, after the description, or definiton, in Webster's New World D&tionary (in its first meaning): "a) anything made of parts fitted together ac- cording to a design; basic or skeletal structure; framework as of a house, ship, etc.; b) any of various machines built on or in a framework". As for the literary term we can quote the descrip- tion of the frame from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, 1990):

1 Gregory Bateson, 'A Theory of Play and Fantasy", in Semiotics; An Introductory Anthology, edited by Robert E. Innis (Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 133.