CULTURE AS DYNAMITE

Dinda L. Gorle
that culture could be destmctive and chaotic, but also opened up creative explosions bursting into beauty and perfection. Lotman's own metaphor stood out in the negative polarity of technology and nature: "A minefield with unexpected explosive points and a river in spring with its powerful but directed stream." Culture transforms into all kinds of explosive substances, dynamizing the world and making us respond in life and art. Culture and Explosion polarized between gradual pattems and explosive ones. Not seen as separate or loose moments, but rather as events in their cultural context. Cultural events can in the past and future become bumt, withered, vitalized, destroyed, overlooked, rejected, stressed, disappeared, replaced, distorted, translated, changed, and exchanged. For example, the statues of victorious political figures highlight national symbols. Some statues of leaders remain in place, such as Emperor Augustus, Peter I the Great of Russia, and Kim Il-sung. The statues of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini have disappeared, no longer of good standing. Those of Valdimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin are on the way out. The statue of Saddam Hussein came tumbling down in the spring of 2003. High images of the mling elite can easily explode into a low state of being.

CULTURE AND EXPLOSION

Juri Lotman Edited by Marina Grishakova

Translated by Wilma Clark Mouton de Gmyter http://www.degmyter.de 195 pages; cloth, $155.00

Juri Lolman

Culture and Explosion

Culture and Explosion is the English translation of Kul'tura i vzryv (1992). Juri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the leaders in thefieldof interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies. Despite the exile of Estonia by the Communist Soviet Union, and despite the cultural collision of the Iron Curtain dividing Westem and Eastem Europe, Lotman's "new look" made him a world-renowned semiotician and culturologist (with the help of some Westem confreres). Culture and Explosion is his last book, and is a noble effort to gain cross-linguistic and cross-cultural insights in Russian and general culturology. The book prophesies the idea of cultural (political, ideological, informative, etc.) explosion. Though the central part of the book is Lotman's twenty shorter essays (174 pages), fully seventy pages of this volume are devoted to the introduction, foreword, afterword, and index, written by Lotman's associates. The chapters are abundantly illustrated with examples, mainly from the rich legacy of Russian culture. Reading the book, one feels inspired to imagine non-Russian examples from mythological and biblical figures, including figures from real life. As a young Russian of Jewish origin, Lotman was a creative intellectual in St. Petersburg. Ambitious to publish the secret societies of the Decembrist Revolt in Tsarist Russia (1825), his "culture as text" strategy was new historical criticism. Yet in the Stalinist era, he was regarded as a liberal element and seemed to become a political threat, getting involved in what the Russian authorities called conspiracy and revolution. The policy of oppression forced Lotman in 1950 to leave Russia; he was exiled to a provincial town in the Baltics: Tartu, Estonia. (The Russians had pressured Estonia to sign a "mutual assistance" pact that allowed the Red Army to occupy the country.) Discontent with the stronghold of autocracy, Lotman stood firm in (not against) the Russian policy. He became the founder of the Tartu-Moscow School, editor-in-chief of the joumal Sign Systems Studies (flourishing today in Tartu). He was the so-called almus pater of the University of Tartu, and late in his life, he became an advocate of Estonian independence. Lotman's own standing as an eminent scholar of Russian culture was established in broader dimensions: the global and diachronic dimensions of a whole culture or a cultural period, genre, or author. His earlier book. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (1990, introduced by Umberto Eco), had tumed Lotman into the official channel of communication between aesthetics, poetics, semiotic theory, the history of culture, mythology, and cinema. Linguistic culturology was for Lotman both a personal and a social concept-in-change, or better a concept-in-exile. His cultural criticism was not to resituate the cultural identity and the social biases of his unfortunate political situation, but rather to situate the "semiosphere" of cultural events in time and space. Cultural beliefs and knowledge energize our human activities all over the world. Lotman wrote

DE GRUYTER MOUTON

Juri Lotman was one of the leaders in thefieldof interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies.
Lotman analyzed theritualbehavior of animals, surrounded by nature. An animal's harmony can clash with man's (woman's) cultural and psychological impact, far away from nature. The eccentric disharmonies of man (such as hunting, alpinism, and other "mortal" explosions) disturb the force of nature. Technological man and natural animal fear each other and stay out of each other's reach. Ironically, the feelings stirred by hatred can also explode into love. This metamorphosis is how man has an affinity with domestic animals: they have "proper names" and are "trained" to behave both as man and animal. This "play" leads to real life, but is commonplace in fiction. In the Brothers Grimm's fairytale The Frog King, the frog's human speech and erotic entreaties to share the bed of the beautiful princess intrigue the readers. Lotman brought up the clever tricks of the cat in Charles Perrault's tale Puss in Boots. Puss "deceived the foolish cannibal-magician by first suggesting he becomes a lion, and then a mouse, which he quickly and victoriously eats." Little wonder that Puss organizes catastrophes in a "normal" but wise fashion. The behavior of "wiseman" Puss is a symbol of intelligence and skill. In chapter "The fool and the madman," Lotman discusses the "predictable" orientation of a wiseman to conflicts in contrast to the "predictable" and "unpredictable" acts of the fool, and the madman's "unpredictable" moods to conflicts around him. The concepts of "folly" and "normal" are illustrated with examples from the interplay between "reality-fiction" (Leo Tolstoy's "theatricality"). The mad Hamlet, Ulysses fleeing from the gigantic Cyclops, the sad and camivalesque adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Nero's crazy singing performances to the Roman audience, all have seemed to find a possible or impossible solution to the catastrophes. A work of art "transports man into a world of freedom" and "in the freedom of fantasy" elaborates its own "rituals of magic." Ex-

amples could be multiplied indefinitely. In everyday life, the Monica Lewinsky scandal of "wiseman" Bill Clinton was an episode dynamizing an otherwise rigid and immobile system of US presidency. In art, Lotman told the episode of a duel between friends in Alexander Pushkin's Eugen Onegin. Secretly, we miss a description of life and death in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877). Is Anna's controversial suicide a "special form of victory over death...contradictory to the natural (i.e. neutral) order of things," or is the metaphor of sex a sign of cultural decline (see chapter "The end? How sonorous is this word!")? Lotman's dualism in Russian literature is random and regular, real and unreal, stable and eccentric. In a symmetrical structure, Lotman discussed in theory and practice the impact of adventure and freedom, the masculine and feminine, the sick and the healthy, the simple and the pretentious, intimacy and courtesy, and other oppositions in European history. Or, putting it in poetic words, "the corpse as the double of the living, the authentic and the false, the ugly and the beautiful, the criminal and the saint, the negligible and the great." The catastrophe can provoke a mortality crisis, tuming from a dual structure into a three way one. In the end of Culture and Explosion, Lotman presents the "apocalyptic" vision of an explosive reality, pressed into a State ideal, moving towards the "utopia" of a human sense of "forgiveness, sacrifice, love." The reviewer was not able to read this book about art and morals quickly, but had to frequently stop to think about humankind's growing skills of exploring, meeting, playing, working, and loving culture through life and art. Reading this book, we realize that humanity is actually becoming human, trying to find a slippery way through good or evil explosions. All the way through Culture and Explosion were pertinent asides on matters of semiotic concem and cultural debate, so that this book provokes so much tangible information and intangible imagination that it deserves to be widely read and long pondered. Dinda L. Gorle (http://wwwjcs4all.nl/~gorlee/) is a semiotician and translation theoretician living in The Hague (the Netherlands) with research interests in interarts studies. She is associate editor o/American Book Review.

Mav-Iline 2010

Page 27

Copyright of American Book Review is the property of Writer's Review, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.