In his last letter to Roman Jakobson, sent from his deathbed in German occupied Warsaw in 1941, Siedlecki entreats Jakobson to keep Phenomenology aside from the structuralist project. Instead, a conventionalism which joins proverbial empirio-critictism and Marxism should be reinforced in order to ground the edifice of structural humanities and to safeguard the legacy of Opojaz [Jakobson, Siedlecki, 1968]. Needless to say, Jakobson disregarded Siedlecki’s premonitions. Twenty-some years later, it was this strange alliance of Phenomenology and structuralism that gave rise to deconstruction and poststructuralism and put an end to the structuralist dream.
In addition to these two camps, Manfred Kridl and his Vilna students (Jerzy Putrament, Maria Renata Mayenowa) tried to hover over precisely these opposite poles – Phenomenology and Formalism. The theory of Kridl may have been formulated somewhat earlier than the positions of the members of the Warsaw Circle, but it pays to present the intensity and extension of their rejection of Phenomenology, so that one may appreciate the thoroughness of the corrections of Phenomenology which were by Kridl in his attempt to fuse Formalism and Phenomenology.
Polish Formalism struggled against intersubjective, general noemata of Phenomenology in the name of perceptual habits, which may be broken, intimate (if not private) languages of poets, and individual psychological experiences. Just like the Petersburg Formalists rejected the essentialist Aesthetic fragments by Shpet and the conceptions of his Moscow followers, whom they perceived as traitors to the fundamental assumptions of the circle [Виноградов, 1975: 264], the anti-phenomenological Polish Formalists specified their stance in the polemic with Phenomenology: the most interesting theoretical debates in pre-war Poland were the two that took place between Roman Ingarden and Leon Chwistek on the one hand, and between Ingarden and the poet Julian Tuwim on the other, concerning the existence (or the lack) of general meanings of sentences in literature [Chwistek, 2004: 195 ff.; Tuwim, 1934; Ingarden, 1934]. The existence of general meanings would be a strong argument in favor of treating the presented world and the aesthetical and metaphysical values conveyed by it as the essence of the literary (the essence of literary cognition). Is the reception of a literary work first and foremost the cognition of the presented world, as Ingarden claimed, or is experiencing an unheard-of metaphor or an interesting grouping of sounds central in this regard? What is the highest or most important facet in the moment of reception? Is it Ingarden’s revelation of the metaphysical qualities, enclosed in the intersubjecive structure of the presented world, or the jouissance that arises when a form breaks a habit of perception? Both sides of the argument stress the cognitive values of literature, but one aims at noetic recognition while the other at energetic cognition.
A solution for this conflict was proposed by Manfred Kridl, whose integral method really seems to have achieved a compromise between Phenomenology and Formalism. Phenomenology had to give up its claim for the existence of noemata, whether general meanings of sentences or “inner forms” of works; Formalism, on its part, was obliged to acknowledge the central role of the presented world in literary works. In order to conduct the synthesis, Kridl took Phenomenology back to the positions of Kazimierz Twardowski, the seminal figure of the Lvov-Warsaw School [Twardowski, 1894][82]: this was a Phenomenology that did not recognize the intuition of abstract essences and took meanings to be individual mental products, so that this approach could be effectively combined with the formalist nominalism. Not only may this kind of Phenomenology be combined with Formalism, but it seems to suit better Formalism’s declared intentions to study artistic experiences, because it explicitly takes the first person position as its point of departure. In short, Kridl proposes that the method of studying literary works be phenomenological but he refrains from subscribing essentialist meanings to words that make up a literary work and, as far as form is concerned, he remains nominalist in proclaiming that only unique literary entities exist.
By the phenomenological method Kridl means a description that focuses on special features of a work. Nevertheless, the description does not have to use concepts or notions, or even words, it may be an anschauliche Abstraktion (a view-abstraction) or thinking in images. The most seminal aspect in the analysis is not to lose the “living union” with the phenomenon [Kridl, 1936(a): 181–182]. The stress on the living union with a phenomenon is the Goethean element present both in Husserl’s reflection on image (Bild) [Kapust, 2009: 258; Thiel, 2003] and in Kridl’s integral method, since Goethe never failed to stress its importance and the deadness of the abstractions of modern mathematical physics. Referring to Ingarden’s own statement that Phenomenology allows for different cognitive acts according to different types of objects (a declaration he quoted four years before from Kohler and Husserl [Kridl, 1936(b): 159–160], Kridl states: “this theory will surely be even more suitable to our discipline, where there are no types but only individuals.”[Kridl, 1936(a): 183] All the numerous cognitive acts (that not necessarily consist in conceptual operations) lead, as is to be expected from formalist approaches, to determining the dominant of a work [Ibid.]. Finding the dominant of a work may become the main task of the phenomenological method, as well, as soon as it has become synthetized with Formalism. In many a work, the dominant is Ingarden’s fictive character of quasi-judgments that render the presented world, but Kridl, as an ardent nominalist and formalist, cannot seriously claim that he found an essence of the literary work of art. The presented world together with its metaphysical qualities are a dominant of a given, unique work, made up from this and not other sentences that happen to be quasi-judgements – there are other dominants possible for the literary but historically not realized – and not its essential features, whose lack pushes a language phenomenon out of the realm of literature. It follows from the concept of dominant alone hat it cannot be something fixed, permanent, unchangeable. The nature of the literary work is that it most probably has a dominant: the dominant is nevertheless a space of historicity or even of the fortitudinous within the confines of the literary. It is this “liberal” (a term already used in his 1933 manifesto [Kridl, 1933][83]) anti-essentialism – pertaining to the notion of the dominant and fuelled additionally by Kridl – that Ingarden attacked in his review of Kridl’s book when he stated that it lacks uniform epistemological foundation (i.e. does not specify the essence of the cognized object) [Ingarden, 1936]. The unwillingness to determine the ontological nature of the literary works leads to the absence of one, clearly outlined method of reading that would also serve as a method to discern which lecture (concretization) of a work is correct and which is not. Postwar commentators of Kridl – especially Henryk Markiewicz and Andrzej Karcz – adopted Ingarden’s prejudice, in that they took Kridl’s method to be eclectic and internally inconsistent rather than integral, “elastic”, following rather a unique object than a network of preconceived categories [Karcz, 2000; Markiewicz, 2010]. I argue that Kridl deliberately disregarded the ontology of “intentional objects” for the benefit of the “living union” with a literary work perceives as form.
The crucial issue is thus the placing of the phenomenological moment of Kridl’s integral method in its proper context, so that the function of Phenomenology within the integral method could be revealed. Taking into consideration the dynamics that characterize the intellectual morphic field of literary theory, one is compelled to acknowledge Kridl’s phenomenological approach as a compensation for the receptive side of chwyt, or “device”. The first person approach – adapted by Brentano and bequeathed to all subsequent Phenomenology – serves here as a symbolic replacing of the reception missing in the reception of Russian Formalism in Poland. A form may be experienced as a form thanks to an extra energy that springs from realization of the new individual possibilities – on the backdrop of boredom that one should fend off. Kridl’s integral method carries out a formalistic restitutio ad integrum.
In sum: In Poland, Phenomenology served not only as a foe in relation to which the Formalist may have specified his stance, but also as a means to expound the receptive element in the literary process as understood by formalists, one that had been lost in the translation of “прием” into “chwyt”. Conversely, the very fact that such a gigantic intellectual movement as Phenomenology could be even referenced as a substitute for only one side of the priem stresses the importance of the receptive component inherent in formalist approaches. Both the Polish resolved anti-phenomenologists and Kridl’s middle ground approach to the matter – which is not at all barren – furnish a set of surprisingly obvious solutions to the problems that tore Russian Formalism apart and to which the Russian Formalists themselves remained insensitive, probably because they were never really forced to tackle the problem of reception in the priem, the problem that became apparent in Poland. This is also the reason why so many scholars could not tell apart indispensable phenomenalism from Phenomenology. The difference seemed obvious to the Polish Formalist: Dawid Hopensztand, for instance, projected the Polish contention between conventionalism (phenomenalism) and realism (Phenomenology) onto the very moment of emergence of Russian Formalism, which according to Hopensztand was born twice at the same time. Once as a philosophy of conventionalism (the Chlebnikov-Jakubinsky line which gave rise to the phonological school) and once as a philosophy of expression (the Kruchenykh-Shklovsky line that soon lost touch with linguistics and started research on abstract essences like