Kvetoslav Chvatik

Semiotics of the Literary Work of Art

Dedicated to the 95th birthday of Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1986)

I

       The semiotic analysis of a literary work of art keeps on coming up against a number of unclarified questions and evokes numerous - frequently justified - objections. The fact is often pointed out that in the new terminology, with the use of an excessive logical or statistical apparatus, all that one achieves is trivial facts already long known, or - a still graver objection - that the specific and unique quality of a literary work as a work of art vanishes completely from the description of such a literary work on the basis of a semiotic, communicative or general linguistic model of language.
Many authors of semiotic interpretations of literature do, in fact, overlook the fundamental thing that distinguishes a literary work of art from other texts: the language in a work of art does not function as a mere intermediary, it is not restricted to objective information on phenomena and events that exist independently of the speaker and the text, as is the case with the communicative function of language, but has another function as well. Or, more exactly, its communicative function is modified by other functions. For instance the language of a literary work of art tells of reality that itself - as a literary utterance - is only constituted in the structure of a possible potential sense. The tragedy of the life of Madame Bovary does not exist before, or outside, the text of Flaubert’s novel. There is not only a qualitative, but a fundamental ontological difference between the text of a court testimony in a murder case and the text of Dostoevskij’s Crime and Punishment. This difference remains whether the inspiration for the novel was an actual event or some basic experience in the life of the author. In Max Frisch’s Diary, in the part “Geschichten”, we read: 
“Man kann die Wahrheit nicht erzahlen. Die Wahrheit ist keine Geschichte. Alle Geschichten sind erfunden, Spiele der Einbildung, Bilder, sie sind wirklich nur als Bilder, als Spiegelungen. ... Erfahrung ist ein Einfall, nicht ein Ergebnis aus Vorfalien. ..... Geschichten sind Entwurfe in die Vergangenheit zuruck. Spiele der Einbildung, die wir als Wirklichkeit ausgeben. ... Indem ich weiss, dass jede Geschichte, wie sehr sie sich auch belegen lasst mit Fakten, meine Erfindung ist, bin ich Schriftsteller. ...
Wenn Menschen mehr Erfahrung haben als Vorkommnisse, die als Ursache anzugeben waren, bleibt ihnen nichts anderes ubrig als ehrlich zu sein: sie fabulieren”. (1974:138-140)
It is convincingly clear from Frisch’s words that a literary work of art can, and in most cases does, originate on the basis of some vital experience (and itself becomes for the reader a specific form of experiencing the world); but its idea, its story, its factuality, are the result of the play of the author’s imagination, a project of the past, of how things could have happened if...; it is a metaphor, a sign of some deep experience of the author’s. The theory of the sign system, multiplicity of meaning and fictitiousness of the text of a work of art by no means excludes a possible intense relationship of the work to the vital experience of the author and his ability to represent in the work a certain slice of reality, a certain attitude to the world and its problems, a certain aspect of the interpretation of the human world. On the contrary, one of the functional aims of a work of art is to achieve, through a specific arrangement of the text, an intensification of man’s relationship to the actual world, a sharper assimilation of reality. This however changes nothing in the fact that the world of a literary work of art is a fictive world, a world created by the author before our very eyes in its potentiality of meaning, and substantiated by us in the process of reading, in the process of the interpretation of the meaning of the signs of the text, written in a certain language. A certain system of meanings, of points of view, attitudes and values is presented to us through the intentional construction of the text - while this intention may even include intentional naturalness, simplicity, colloquialism, documentary character and “unintentionality” - and this is realized in the reader’s mind as the resultant sense of the work of art.
So the text of a literary work of art is a human creation, an artifact, something made by man with the material of language, in the same way that a statue is formed of stone or metal. The difference, of course, lies in the fact that language is not a natural material, but a highly structured cultural system. The essence of a literary work of art escapes linguistics and semiotics if its specific artistic formation is forgotten, determined by the problems of the aesthetic function and value of the work. An examination of these problems oversteps the borders of linguistics and semiotics, as it touches on the basic philosophic problems of people’s attitude to the world, the creative nature of human activity in history. Here semiotics must rely on close cooperation with aesthetics and philosophy¹.
Naturally I am well aware of the preliminary and debatable nature of these premises. I intentionally leave the distinction between artistic and nonartistic texts at the most general level and do not connect them, for instance, with imagery, or with clearly presented ideas or experiences, for it is possible to quote types of literary works and examples of reception that are not linked with sensual pictures and ideas or with emotional experience. The point from which our distinction starts is the fact of the realization of the system of meaning of the work in the reader’s mind, a system which, in varying degrees of intensity, constitutes a certain vision of a real or fictive world. The degree of fictiveness of the vision presented by the text itself becomes a component of the aesthetic function. An examination of how the aesthetic function conditions or modifies the process of semiosis in the sign construction of a work of art is the theme of this study. The fact that the distinction between artistic and nonartistic texts is of an expressly historical and social character is borne out, among other things, by the penetrating changes that have taken place in the extent of subjects of the history of literature from the period of Enlightenment, Romanticism and Positivism until our own day. Theoretically this distinction consists in the different functional structure and noetic status of a work of art and of informative and scientific texts. We can define them preliminarily by the specific oscillation on the axis of the presentation of reality-fiction and the dominance of the aesthetic function in artistic texts.

II

       The first formulations of the semiotics of the literary work of art by the Prague School are contained in the Theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle from 1929.  Here the starting point is the functional distinction of language in its informative function (aimed at the object of expression) and in its poetical function (aimed at the expression itself) (Theses 1929:14). Jakobson’s well-known formulation from 1921 on “poetry, which is nothing other than utterance aimed at expression” (Jakobson 1921:30-31), is made more precise thus: “Poetic language ... has the form of poetic expression (parole), that is of an individual creative act valued against the background of the existing poetic tradition (poetic language - langue) on the one hand, and against a background of contemporary informative language on the other” (Theses 1929: 18). So that a poetic utterance is understood as the result of an individual creative act, taking place in the tension of two supra-individual structures, the poetic tradition and the contemporary state of informative language. The dynamic, historical and creative nature of this conception is evident too from the fact that one of the specific qualities of poetic language is called “the emphasizing of the moment of struggle to transform, while the character, direction and measure of the transformation are very varied”.² For instance, an attempt to bring poetic and informative language (characteristic, for instance, of Czech poetry from the time of Capek’s anthology French Poetry of Modern Times in 1920) closer together was, according to the Theses, motivated by the need for a developed reaction to the past artistic tradition of poetic language (in this case the symbolic  poetry of Brezina and others) .
Then, too, in the Theses a poetic work is characterized as a functional structure, in which “the individual elements cannot be understood without their connections with the whole. Objectively the same elements can, in different structures, take on completely different functions”. Finally, emphasis is laid once more on the singularizing function of the linguistic construction of a poetic utterance: “... all layers of the language system, having a purely subservient role in informative language, take on a more or less independent value in the language of poetry. Linguistic means grouped within these layers and the mutual relationship of these layers, leading to automatization in informative language, lead to foregrounding1 in the poetic language”. (Theses 1929: 18-19).
“Foregrounding” is, however, not only subject to the syntactic elements of the linguistic construction of a literary work of art, but - and herein lies in principle the novum of the Theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle - to the process of semiosis itself, the meaning: “... the organizing mark of art, in which it differs from other semiological structures, is the aim not at what it means, but at the sign itself. So the organizing mark of poetry is aimed at the words of expression. The sign is the dominant in an artistic system ...”. (Theses 1929:21). The concentration of attention on the sign itself as the dominant in the hierarchy of values of the structure of a literary work of art, on the word as a word, on its phonic, syntactic and semantic quality, on the lack of obviousness of its relationship to the thing or events which it signifies - that is the nucleus of the thesis on the so-called autonomous character of signs in a work of art, which has led to a number of misunderstandings.
A characteristic of poetry and poetic language as one of the semiotic structures marking the sharpening of attention on the sign and its structural construction is in the Theses of 1929 still subordinate to problems of language, especially to the problem of the function of language which emerges naturally from the character of the Theses, presented to the First Congress of Slavists.
The fundamental idea of the structural semiotics of art was formulated on a much broader basis by Jan Mukarovsky in his paper “L’art comme fait semiologique”, presented in 1934 at the International Philosophical Congress in Prague. Semiotics (here Mukarovsky uses de Saussure’s term semiologie) should serve as a general methodological starting point for the humanities and so definitely supersede the psychologism of the traditional ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, as its material has “the express character of signs, thanks to its double existence in the world perceivable by sense perception and in the consciousness of the community” (Mukarovsky 1934: 82). Not only linguistics and aesthetics, but the humanities altogether should examine their subject as a sign and value structure. In his conception of a sign Mukarovsky is inspired mainly by de Saussure, Husserl and Buhler. Parallel with the conceptual pair sign-meaning and Saussure’s pair signifiant-signifie, he introduces a differentiation of artifact-aesthetic object (‘work-thing’ and ‘aesthetic object’), with reference to Broder Christiansen (Christiansen 1909).³ Mukarovsky summed up the main points of his understanding of the semiotics of the work of art at the end of his paper in the pregnant thesis:
“B.  The work of art bears the character of a sign.   It can be identified neither with the individual state of consciousness of its creator nor with any such states in its perceiver nor with the work as artifact.  The work of art exists as an ‘aesthetic object’ located in the consciousness of an entire community...
C.  Every work of art is an autonomous sign composed of: 1. the ‘work-thing’   functioning as perceivable signifier; 2. an ‘aesthetic object’ which is registered in the collective consciousness and which functions as ‘signification’;   3. a relationship to a thing signified, which does not refer to any distinct existence... but to the total context of social phenomena (science, philosophy, religion, politics, economics etc.) of any given milieu.
D.  The representational arts, the arts with a ‘subject’ (theme, content), have in addition a second semiotic function,   which is  the informational  function, ... Through this quality,   the work of art thus resembles purely informational signs. Only the relationship between the work of art and the thing signified does not have existential value. With regard to the subject of a work of art, it is impossible to postulate the question as to its documentary authenticity, insofar as the work is held to be a product of art”. (Mukarovsky 1934: 87-88)
So the thesis of the autonomy of signs in the work of art is weakened by that of their dialectic, dynamic unity with communicative signs. At any rate, the very explanation of  the problem of denotation of a work of art, given by Mukarovsky, shows the problematic nature of  the  term “autonomous sign”, as it  is obvious from the definition of sign that  it orientates  the  interpreter  towards that given fact which  it represents, “signifies”, and Mukarovsky does not deny this ability of works of  art.
“According to its current definition, a sign is a reality perceivable by sense perception that has a relationship with another reality which the first reality is meant to evoke.  Thus we are obliged to pose the question as to what the second reality, for which the work of art stands, might be. True, we could merely assert that the work of art is an autonomous sign characterized solely by the fact of its serving as an intermediary among members of any community. However, to do so would mean to put aside unresolved the question of the contact of a work of art with the reality it refers to.   If signs not relating to any distinct reality are possible,   still a sign always does refer to something...  What,   then,   is the indistinct reality to which the work of art refers? It is the total context of all phenomena that may be called social, for example, philosophy, politics, religion, and economics and so on. It is for this reason that art, more than any other social phenomenon, has the power to characterize and represent the ‘age’.” (Mukarovsky 1934:84)⁴.
In his  later works, of course, Mukarovsky further developed and deepened  the basis  of  the  semiotics  of the work  of  art,   which had been  submitted  in  condensed form in  a paper  “Art  as a Semiological Fact”,  especially as concerns  the  noetic  character of  the  denotation of  a work of  art.⁵ His connection of  the problems  of artistic  semiosis with  those  of  its  aesthetic  function is   important,   as  he  gave  it  in his  book Aesthetic  Function, Norm  and  Value  as  Social  Facts  (Mukarovsky 1936), The summit of Mukarovsky’s semiotics of  the  literary work  of  art  is  the  study  on The Genesis of Meaning  in Macha’s  Poetry (Mukarovsky 1938)  which develops the ideas of semantic context, semantic gestures and  the total meaning of the work. The process of semiosis is made dynamic and understood as a historic process of the origin of the meaning of a literary work of art.
But here we are not concerned with a detailed observation of the development of the semiotic conception in the Prague School, but rather with a sketch of its topical theory.⁶

III

         The  application of  semiotics  to aesthetics  is  usually  linked  in  the  first place with  the  article by C.W. Morris  “Aesthetics and the Theory of Signs” from 1939. Here the aesthetic sign is defined as “an iconic sign, the designate of which is value”. But  it  remains  unclear how an  iconic  sign can designate value, if  the semantic rules for the  use  of the  iconic  sign,   according  to Morris,  “consist  in  the  fact  that  it denotes that  object which  shows  the  same properties as it does itself   (in practice a  selection of properties  is   sufficient)”. So how can an iconic sign, denoting  the properties of an object identical with its own, denote a value, which Morris defines in  the  spirit  of pragmatic philosophy as meaning  “properties in relation to interests”, i.e. as  a category which  is  entirely subjective and varying from individual  to  individual?
Morris must have been aware of the untenability of his categorical formulations,   such as,   for instance, “If the interpreter perceives the bearer of an iconic sign, he perceives directly what is designated”, since le adds this skeptical footnote: “But perhaps not the whole value of what is designated ... A painted man is not a man of flesh and blood, and not everything that the picture designates can be directly seen in the picture. Such considerations are of special importance for literature, where the iconic and non-iconic aspects of signification are equally important. But here this must be pushed aside, for the sake of simplification, as it does indeed complicate the criterion of signs presented, though it does not falsify it”. (Morris 1939).
Here Morris is mistaken, for similar considerations, supported not only by the sign situation of literature, but also of symbolic and abstract painting and in the first place music, do not designate any class of objects, and prove the untenability of his basic criteria of aesthetic signs. Later Morris attempted to modify his conception, but even so he did not succeed in overcoming the problems connected with his linking of signs and values and the thesis on the iconicity of aesthetic signs (Morris-Hamilton 1964-65).⁷
The problem of iconic signs in art was subjected to a thorough analysis by Umberto Eco. He did this in the sphere in which the thesis, that the iconic sign is the mark of things which are similar in some aspects, seems especially indisputable, namely the sphere of visual codes. He came to the conclusion - with reference, among other things, to Gombrich’s analysis of representation in figural painting - that the role of convention in the coding and decoding of iconic signs is very considerable. (Eco 1972:197-230).
A different conception, which also results in the rejection of Morris’s thesis of the iconicity of signs in a work of art, is represented in M.Cervenka’s monograph “The Semantic Construction of the Work of Literature”. I consider this analysis of the construction of the meaning of the work of literature, based on a wealth of experience in the analysis of numerous poetic works, as a remarkable contribution to the development of literary theory of the Prague School. However, I have two remarks to make on the final semiotic-aesthetic generalization of these analyses. The first concerns the characteristics of the work of literature as an indexical sign, and the other one refers to the thesis that the denotation of this indexical sign is the personality of the author of the work. Cervenka was led to these conclusions, which I do not consider entirely convincing, by the logic of his own posing of questions and by experience from the analysis of lyrical poetry, in which the role of the lyrical subject expressly shows the importance of a defined personality, unifying the life work of a particular author. Cervenka was led to the characteristics of the work as an index by the necessity of replying in the affirmative to the question of whether a work of art in its totality can be considered a sign. But the recognition of the sign character of the whole work does not demand agreement with the thesis that the work as a whole forms a single sign (even though Mukarovsky sometimes used this shorthand formulation). On the contrary, the analysis of semantic dynamics and of semantic unification, taking place in the sign construction of the work of art, as presented by Cervenka in his book, comes logically to the conclusion that the resultant overall importance is the new quality, formed by the complicated layered structure of the subsidiary signs and meanings. In other words the whole work is a sign structure, not a single sign.⁸
From the thesis regarding the work as a single sign is deduced that of the work of art as an index denoting the personality of the author. On one page Cervenka writes: “Die Personlichkeit drlickt sich nicht durch das Werk aus, sie wird durch dieses konstituiert”, whereas on another page we read: “Wenn wir jedoch von der Personlichkeit als dem Urheber sprechen, der durch sein Produkt bezeichnet wird, befinden wir uns ganz offen-sichtlich im Bereich der Indizialzeichen oder Indices. Das Werk tritt hier als Merkmal der zugehorigen Personlichkeit auf, so wie eine Spur im Sand das Merkmal von jemands Schritten ist…”. (Cervenka 1978:172-173).
Naturally the question arises how the work-sign can signify - and indicatively too, that is, on the basis of causal connection - the personality of its originator which, according to Cervenka’s conception, is constituted only by the complex meaning of the work. Cervenka realized this logical contradiction and tried to remove it by the following thesis: “Das Werk als Zeichen ist demnach ein Indiz, das in sich selbst das tragt, was durch es indiziert wird…” (Cervenka 1978: 174). However, such an understanding of sign comes into conflict with the basic definition of the process of semiosis as “something taken into consideration by someone through the medium of something else” (Morris 1938).
The analysis of the semantic construction of the work of literature presented in the tenth chapter of Cervenka’s work permits another conclusion which, in our opinion, represents more adequately the sense of Mukarovsky’s theoretical impulses and of Cervenka’s own analyses: 1) The text of the work of literature as a certain meaningful whole is created by a complicated, dynamic, richly layered structure of signs, interpreted by the reader against the background of the concrete structure of the artistic codes of a certain society. 2) Very heterogeneous elements can enter into the process of artistic semiosis, constituting the resultant over-all meaning of the work as a new semantic quality, including various kinds and types of signs. The specificity of artistic semiosis does not consist in the use of one kind of sign (symbols, icons or indices), but in the specific manner of the construction of meaning contexts, in the dynamic oscillation on the axis real-fic-tive denotations and also in the specific nature of the semantic-aesthetic codes, especially those of genre and style.
We do not want to underestimate the importance of personality as a possible denotation (or partial denotation) of the resultant overall artistic importance of the work in modern art. However, we consider that 1) the personality is only one pole of the whole denoted relationship of man and the world; 2) the relationship of the two poles, being realized in various forms of the scale of the artistic point of view created in the work, in the personal vision, understanding and evaluation of the world of man, has historically expressly hanged from the impersonality of medieval art and folklore to the intensive subjectivity of Romantic art and to the crisis of personality in modern art; 3) the relationship of what is subjective and objective in the work of art is different, and that not only in different periods and individual styles but also in different kinds and genres of art. Opposed to the picture of the personality in lyrical poetry, for instance, stands the objectivity of the epic and the impersonality of the social novel, and the effort to suppress the image of e subject of the author in documentary prose, in various kinds of factual literature, collages etc. This dynamic, historic variability of the importance of the le of personality in art and literature was well presented by Jan Mukarovsky in his lecture “Personality in Art”. (Mukarovsky 1944).

IV

     The basic question of the semiotics of the work of remains the problem of the specific meaning which not be communicated by other sign systems and is meted by sign structures functioning as the dominant position of the aesthetic function. We intentionally use the formula “functioning as the dominant position of the aesthetic function”, and not “formed for the purpose of aesthetic effect”, because texts and things originally formed for another purpose can, for a shorter or longer period, become the bearers of aesthetic effect. Compare, for instance, text collage, the surrealistic ‘objet trouve’, or the aesthetic effect of old buildings and objects, originally intended for a practical or magical function, etc.
The semiotic process modified by the aesthetic function can be analyzed from a number of points of view and aspects. Again we were careful in using the formulation “semiotic process modified by the aesthetic function”, not “aesthetic signs”, since a) words used in the text of a work of literature are also used in purely informative language; b) the basic characteristics of the process of semiosis, mediated by signs, indicating some third thing that lies outside the bearer of the sign, i.e. outside the verbal text, must be preserved; c) the aesthetic function does not always visibly come to the fore in the structure of the function of the work of literature; on the contrary it can accentuate and foreground some other function, for instance one of recognition, evaluation, ethics, etc. Its ‘dominant’ or rather organizing position is therefore only the basic ‘unsignified’ pole of the dynamic tension in the hierarchy of functions of a work of verbal art, it is a theoretical abstraction, a scientific model of an ‘ideal’ situation, in practice constantly modified and infringed.
In examining the process of semiosis, modified by the organizing position of the aesthetic function in the functional structure of a work of verbal art, we can keep to the classification of semiotic problems which has been established in literature since the time of the classic work by C.W.Morris “Foundations of the Theory of Signs” (Morris 1938), the classification into semantic, syntactic and pragmatic domains.
A superficial view identifies the usual structuralist semiotics of literature with the thesis of the autonomy of aesthetic signs, with emphasis on the “excessive” arrangement and polysemy of artistic texts. It is true that Roman Jakobson developed and deepened his thesis on poetic language as a language for the purpose of expression, on information for its own sake (for instance, in connection with music he speaks of the so-called “introverted semiosis”, which also occurs expressly in poetry). But the sense of his conception is better expressed by the following old formulation:
“A word is felt as a word and not as a mere representative of the object named or as an outburst of emotion ...  words and their composition,   their meaning,   their outer and inner form are not an indifferent indication of fact, but take on their own weight and value.  - Why is all this necessary?  - Because,  besides the direct consciousness of identity between the sign and the object (A is A?)   also a direct consciousness  is necessary of the  lack of this  identity   (A is not A?);  this antinomy is essential, because without this contradiction there is no movement of ideas,   there  is no movement of signs,   the relationship between the  idea and the  sign becomes automatic,   the  course of events  is  stopped,   the consciousness of reality dies  away”. (Jakobson 1934: 175)

          This includes, besides syntactic productivity (words and their  composition),  whose examination  is  Jakobson’s greatest  contribution, also noetic productivity (the consciousness  of  reality)   of  the process  of  semiosis with the dominance  of  the  aesthetic   function.   The elaboration of these aspects, not only from the linguistic aspect,   but also that of literary theory and aesthetics, is the contribution made by Jan Mukarovsky.
Mukarovsky does not confine himself  to the study of the “redundant” language  arrangement of  the text, but understands it merely as one -  albeit basic -  level of the richly  layered semantic construction of  the  literary work, to which are added the meaning of  subject and theme  layers, and as the highest  layer, the composite meaning of  the work. The  language  layer need not always  be  intentionally deformed -  the  relationship of  the  language of  a  literary work of  art to  the norm of  the  literary  language  is  the  structural component of the  aesthetic  effect and oscillates  from the pole of  “transformation” to the attempt  to follow the  literary norm, not only in the  rhythm of  the development reaction (“innovators  and archaists”), but also in the differing  individual  styles within the  same  epoch (three various types of  this  oscillation -  the poetic formation, the approach through colloquialisms and through  getting closer to the literary norm, were analyzed by Mukarovsky in examples of the prose  of Vancura,  Capek and Olbracht). The decisive layer, influencing the intentional  and unintentional  formation of  the text, becomes a certain  point of  view, an attitude to the world, sometimes an evaluating relationship to the pictured reality (even though it need not be  explicitly expressed  in the work), that is a noetic orientation of  the  semantic construction of  the work.
Mukarovsky analyzed  the problem of modification of the mentioned function of  the  sign  system of  the work of  art  through  the  aesthetic influence in  a comparison of  thematic and  nonthematic art (music  and architecture) . He showed that in objective  information  the main thing  is   factual  truth, the credibility of  the report, whereas  in  literature  the manner of presenting  reality becomes  an aesthetically  functioning  component of  the structure of  the work of art:
“The ‘fictiveness’ of poetry is therefore something quite different from the fiction function of information. All modifications of the objective relationship of the language expression,   which occur in informational speech, can also play their role in poetry,   for instance a lie.   But there they play the role of component of structure,   not a practically important vital value.   Baron Munchausen, if he had lived, would have been a mystifier,   and his speeches would have been lies;   but the poet who created Munchausen  and his  lies is not a liar but a poet ...”. (Mukarovsky 1936: 74)

    The  analysis  of  the meaning  construction of  a  painting  led Mukafovsky   to  the  conclusion  that:
“…the  specific factual relationship linking the work of art as a sign with reality,   can be borne not only by its content but also by all other  components   ...   The formal components of a painting are  indices of meaning just as are the  language components of a work of poetry:   in themselves of course they are not linked by a factual relationship with certain things,  but - similarly to the components of a piece of music  - they bear a potential semantic energy,  which radiates  from the work as a whole, giving a certain attitude to  the world of reality”. (Mukarovsky 1936: 82)
The conception of  “an overall context of social phenomena”, defining  the  denotation of  a work of  art  in the study “Art as a Semiological Fact” rightly criticized for being too  general - is made more precise in the study of  the aesthetic function,   norm and value, by  a  concrete pragmatic  analysis  of  the  process  of  artistic  semiosis:
The realities with which a work of art may be confronted in the mind and in the subconsciousness of the perceiver are rooted in the overall intellectual, emotional and free attitude taken by the perceiver to reality at large. The experience which starts rippling in the perceiver with the impact of the work of art therefore transfers its movement to the whole image of reality in the mind of the perceiver.  (Mukarovsky 1936: 82-83)
So the formal or, more exactly, the sign construction of the work of art attracts the perceiver’s attention to itself, not just for the sake of doing so, but 30 as to ignite a process of signification in his mind, so as to give a new orientation to his attitude to the world, to intensify his experience of the world, to make his image of the world more dynamic. Aesthetic emotion thus becomes a source of the semantic and noetic energy of the work. This semantic dynamics (“The work as a formation of the meaning” - this thesis of M.Jankovic, in my opinion, characterizes these processes more adequately than Eco’s thesis of “the open work”, - Jankovic 1967, Eco 1973) has a specific axiological flavor in art:
“The evaluation, as we have just indicated, belongs to the very essence of a specific kind of artistic sign: the objective relationship of a work of art penetrates in its multiplicity not only into individual things, but into reality as a whole, and so touches on the overall attitude of the perceiver: and it is exactly he who is the source of the evaluation and gives direction to it.” (Mukarovsky 1936: 84)
The processes of constituting new semantic systems (the composite meaning of the work), founded on the objective sign construction of the work-thing and the semantic mutual penetration of its individual layers, continues with the activation and restructuring of the perceiver’s mind, the initiation of his new vision of, and evaluating attitude to, the world. So Mukarovsky’s structural semiotics of the work of art develops into structural noetics, axiology and anthropology, even though these are only indicated by Mukarovsky and not fully developed (Mukarovsky 1939). - However, does not the transfer of the act of unifying the meaning of the work to the recipient mean a retreat from the thesis of the unrestricted polysemy of the work of art? Does not the interpretation of the meaning of the work of art then become exclusively the affair of the individual power of reception of the reader?
Mukarovsky faces this possible objection in this way:
“The answer to it was anticipated by the finding that a work of art is a sign, and therefore in its essence a social fact; also the attitude that an individual up towards reality is not just his personal property ... but is to a great extent ... predestined by the social relationships into which the individual is bound.”  (Mukarovsky 1936: 83)
There is a question of how concretely the aesthetic function evokes that meaning-forming activity of works of art, pooling partial meanings from the whole culture, from philosophy, science, ideology, ethics, in brief from the whole sphere of meanings and values apart from art, but transforming them into a qualitatively new system of meanings. This ability to integrate and make accessible to sense perception meanings which are often largely abstract makes art, in fact, a kind of semiotic link to the whole culture.
This question brings us to the syntactic problem of artistic semiosis. On a general level it can be answered by saying that a work of art achieves semiotic productivity with the dominance of the aesthetic function through its specific semantic construction, bringing about the characteristic genesis of meaning proceeding from lower to higher components and layers and coming to a peak in the composite meaning of the work, in its unique semantic gesture, representing the dynamic unity of meaning and form of the work (Jankovic 1972).
The central position here is taken by the semantic context in whose development lies, to a great extent, the specificity constituting the meaning of works of art. The function of the artistic semantic context lies in its releasing the individual semantic element and layer from their immediate (documentary) relationship to the thing signified, so that the final meaning of the whole can bring the perceiver all the more intensively into relationship with the world as a whole:
“So far, however, as the designation of a semantic component is firmly planted in the context and stands out in intensive contact with its designated neighbors, the cohesion of the context is rid of immediate contact with the thing which it means in itself: only the completed context as a meaningful whole links directly into contact with reality”.    (Mukarovsky 1938)
Yet it is not only the inner context of the work of art that is semantically productive, but also its relationship to the outer context, against the background of which the work is perceived, interpreted and valued. Here we mean that dynamic structure of aesthetic and artistic norms which exists in the minds of a certain historical society as a system of style and genre directives for the construction and interpretation of works of art. The specific artistic sense of the work cannot be successfully interpreted without comparing the work with the appropriate style and genre code, relatively stabilized in the minds of a certain society.
The analysis of the concrete dynamics of meaning in Individual styles and various kinds and genres of art means a reinterpretation from the point of view of the structural semiotics of the whole history of art and :he history of the individual kinds and genres of art. Here we must confine ourselves to certain works analyzing the “laws of mean generality” in this field.⁹

V

       A work of literature is a text written in a certain language; this text, respecting general linguistic rules, is built on a dynamic hierarchy of artistic and aesthetic norms, the observation and violation of which forms a secondary meaningful artistic system.¹⁰
The difficulty of the theoretical modeling of the semantic system of a work of art, and the difference between various interpretations of its meaning, consists in the existence of the two degrees of that system (the system of linguistic meanings and that of specifically artistic ones, constituting the work in the complete context) multiplied by the double objective structure, conditioned by the constitution of the resultant meaning: they are the inner structure of the artefact and the outer structure of the artistic and aesthetic norms existing outside the text in the consciousness of the society in which the work originates d in which it is accepted. Only against the background of these dynamic, variable structures of norms d codes does the work become concretized into an aesthetic object, and its whole meaning and sense thus comes interpreted. This double bond of the work explains why one and the same work can be, at various historical phases of its “life”, i.e. of its reception by readers and its effect on them, differently interpreted and aesthetically valued. Finally the scientific understanding of a work of art is made more difficult by the fact that works of art are unique entities, they are classes of phenomena, composed by one exclusive element. The rules on the basis of which they are instructed are variable and the value of the work depends to a great extent on how much the new work transforms the existing hierarchy of norms, “adds” to it its contribution of a new vision and transformation of the world.
If we apply the point of view of Saussure’s linguistics to the examination of the semantic construction and semiotic dynamics of a work of art, the literary work of art appears to us as an utterance¹¹ (parole) in a certain language, arranged, moreover, according to further specifically artistic rules which, from the linguistic point of view, may appear excessive. These rules, however much they may be the result of the creative activity of the author’s personality, are not dictated by the “creative will” of the individual, they are not the fruit of the will of a great personality (as the romantic theory of genius assumed), but necessarily react to a certain state of the historically established hierarchy of the artistic and aesthetic norms of the given art. However, the opposite extreme, characteristic of the approach of determinist positivism according to which a certain form arises with inevitable necessity from a given system of social values and norms, does not apply either. Art is undoubtedly a sphere of the creative freedom of man, a sphere of choice from the whole scale of objectively possible solutions; it is an intersection of necessity and chance, of intention and nonintention. The origin of a work is the result of the creative activity of a unique, unsubjugatable individual.¹²
Thus the question arises whether there exists in art a system comparable with the linguistic idea of langue. The flood of works on “the language of art”, the “language” of painting, music, film etc. seems to confirm this opinion unequivocally. However, numerous inexactitudes, arising during the mechanical application of linguistic points of view in aesthetics, oblige one to be careful.
If there did not exist specific aesthetic semantic codes rooted in the consciousness of a certain society, which we call the literary public (including authors, publishing house editorial staffs, literary critics and readers),¹³ a literary work would be merely an intermediary of objective meanings and it would communicate only the linguistic meaning of words. Arts not using language, for instance instrumental music, dance, pantomime, would be unable to communicate anything.
This condition of the existence of a specific aesthetic-semantic code is therefore essential if we want to defend the thesis that a work of art communicates some characteristic sense, however difficult it may be to transform it into the metalanguage of conceptual interpretation. A literary work of art, working with language as the most general and most developed system of human communication, naturally builds its whole ense on the already linguistically fixed philosophical, scientific, ideological and ethical systems of its day. Such works as Goethe’s Faust, Tolstoj’s War and Peace, Dostoevskij’s The Brothers Karamazov, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and others are undoubtedly encyclopedias of the philosophical and moral problems of their day, even though the philosophical points of view and theories in them, de-sloped by the individual characters, are valid as components of the overall polyphonic structure of the work, not of the actual standpoint of the author. But there are also texts in which ‘world’ outlooks are not expressed explicitly, but merely metaphorically, figuratively, as a potential of a certain interpretation of the whole meaning of the literary structure, the sense of which remains dark, capable of many meanings, challenging to ever new attempts at interpretation; in Modern times this undoubtedly applies to the work of Franz Kafka. Finally we know texts, especially in poetry, that touch the reader by the inherent qualities of the original language layers and in a certain vision of the world present in the first place on the basis of specific aesthetic-semantic codes. The Japanese five-line poem:

Across the drizzling sky
a flight of wild geese sail:
on the grey paper
characters pale
in fading China ink.¹⁴

or in European literature the poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarme is verbal art in a style similar to music. This means that meaning and sense are bound here primarily to a certain semantic tradition of the genre, their own genre forms, in this case the verbal forms of lyric poetry; so it is a matter of meaning linked with the experience of the formation of the work.
The tradition of form presupposes an “initiated” reader, capable of decoding the sense of the form; the reader’s reward is a cultivation of his aesthetic sensibility. We must thus not confuse this with the semantic conventions, on the constant cliches of which and their passive implementation is built the meaning of genres such as detective stories, Wild West stories, thrillers, texts for dance tunes etc.
The examples given represent merely the extreme, “pure” poles of the semantic activity of a literary text; in fact the various possibilities of semantic construction are dovetailed, they multiply and, in addition to the formation of new meaning, they also appeal to the semantic system which is already conventionalized. So we can sum up by saying that the “language” of art forms dynamic systems of hierarchically arranged artistic and aesthetic norms and aesthetic-semantic codes, and that it does this not only on an elementary technical level (on the level of the technical skills and laws of composition, which art- and musical students learn to master at the academies), but also on structurally higher levels, i.e. on the levels of the composite meaning of the work, its kind and genre and historical and individual style.¹⁵  Assuming the dominance of the aesthetic function, the rules of the construction of the whole context of the work, the historically established and socially stabilized rules of a certain genre and style also become meaningfully productive, carry out its whole sense, indivisible from its sign construction, from its “form”.
Of course we must not overlook either the basic differences dividing the functioning or character of artistic norms and aesthetic-semantic codes from the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic rules of the language. Whereas the langue of the language is relatively stable and uniform for the whole national culture, and through the influence of ontogenesis and phylogenesis has a spontaneous and binding effect (and its norms are formulated in the grammar of the particular language), the systems of artistic norms and aesthetic-semantic codes are maximally dynamic, richly differentiated and hierarchized, and the development of art goes on through their constant restructuring, i.e. the development of tension between the implementation of the valid system of norms and the establishment of a new system. The positive aesthetic value is not linked exclusively with the implementation of fulfilled norms, but also with their violation and the constitution of new norms. (Therefore, there is seldom any verbal formulation of norms in normative poetics, since truly creative works cross their frontiers and bear new norms within themselves.)¹⁶
Finally, the most fundamental specific feature of semiosis of art is its creative character. An utterance in informative language has a purely functional, instrumental character; its aim lies outside itself. An utterance in verbal art constitutes, on the contrary, a relatively independent world; for a work of art, like a statue, picture or symphony, lasts and carries its being, its value and sense within itself. The meaning of a work of art does not disturb the value of its form, its sign structure. In the process of artistic semiosis the very act of presentation of things and events becomes deeply meaningful. The values potentially penetrating all components of the construction of the work are realized in its whole meaning in its impulse to take up an evaluating attitude to the world. One is captivated by the work because it presents a new vision of things many times passed by; a question is born in one’s mind of the sense and the value of being.
The semantic construction of a literary work of art is, then, not a smooth process of operating with the tools of meaning of language and its one-way objective signification. A work of art sets in motion, by its own characteristic construction, not only the processes of semantic integration and unification of sense, but constitutes also its inimitable being, its lasting, its “objective existence” and often does so just with the help of components that resist semantic unification. It is not only a sign, but also a “thing”. A work of art disturbs man to the very core with questions of the sense of existence, not only through its technical composition, its aesthetic value and objective meaning, but also through its simple “immediate” presence, the tension between the original mute existence of things and their human “takeover” and gift of meaning.
The creation of a work is not a mere technological operation - even though it requires perfect mastery of technique - ; it is not a panel construction, manipulation with prefabricated meanings, truths and values. True creation is a hazardous search, testing and groping in unmapped territory; it is the creation of new values and of new sense by way of renewing and making problematic the original relationship between words and things.

References

Appendix

Notes