As a couple people have already remarked, I found Shklovsky’s text the most accessible. The concept of defamiliarisation and the idea of disharmony in a harmonious world are already quite “familiar” to me – while reading his comments on Tolstoy’s techniques I could not help but think of Sartre’s La Nausée in which this idea of étrangeté (strangeness) is particularly pervasive.
English Translation of an excerpt from La Nausée
I see my hand spread out on the table. It lives—it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. It looks like an animal turned upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by moving them very rapidly, like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back.
The crab is dead: the claws draw up and close over the belly of my hand. I see the nails—the only part of me that doesn't live. And once more. My hand turns over, spreads out flat on its stomach, offers me the sight of its back. A silvery back, shining a little—like a fish except for the red hairs on the knuckles. I feel my hand. I am these two beasts struggling at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of the other paw; I feel its weight on the table which is not me. It's long, long, this impression of weight, it doesn't pass. There is no reason for it to pass. It becomes intolerable ... I draw back my hand and put it in my pocket; but immediately I feel the warmth of my thigh through the stuff. I pull my hand out of my pocket and let it hang against the back of the chair. Now I feel a weight at the end of my arm. It pulls a little, softly, insinuatingly it exists. I don't insist: no matter where I put it will go on existing; I can't suppress it, nor can I suppress the rest of my body, the sweaty warmth which soils my shirt, nor all this warm obesity which turns lazily, as if someone were stirring it with a spoon, nor all the sensations going on inside, going, coming, mounting from my side to my armpit or quietly vegetating from morning to night, in their usual corner.
(http://users.telenet.be/sterf/texts/phil/Sartre-Nausea.pdf)
Those of us who have experimented with various psychedelic drugs may be familiar with this feeling of defamiliarisation – for whatever reason it almost always seems to be the hands that become the focus of this specific brand of drug-induced “de-automisation” to use Shklovsky’s terminology. Sartre of course was fond of mescaline which explains not only this particular episode but also his belief that there was a giant lobster living in the tunnels of Paris. I digress somewhat, but what is important in all this is the idea of a suspended reality – art (and some hallucinagenetic drugs it would seem) provides the means by which the “habitualization” or “automisation” of daily life may be slowed down and “impeded,” permitting one to “[recover] the sensations of life." André Gide wrote that it was precisely this “crochet dans la droite ligne,” (deviance from the straight line) -- that momentary evasion from reality that allowed one to cultivate the much elusive “authentic self.” Sartre I believe was also of this opinion – and while Shlovsky makes no allusion to the desire of seeking out the authentic self via art, there are nonetheless echoes of an existentialist angst – as somebody has already suggested below. Most notably, it was the reference to the nothingness of daily life (of life itself?) that conjured up this sense of angoisse: “Life is thus nothing […] habitualisation devours all.”
Despite the push for a “scientific” approach to literature, I find it interesting that there remains nonetheless the space for human “intuition” in formalism. In “Pre -Poststructuralist Poetics” for example, the author asks how to model what we innately know. If art as Tolstoy is quoted as saying is “a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings and also experience them” this human, innate knowledge must be considered when tackling a text theoretically. I appreciated therefore the response that the author gave, explaining that this problem with intuition is twofold:
1) one models one’s own (or other’s) intuitive behavior anyway
2) And that despite the fact that intuition is supposedly banned from the final product, it is undeniably an influence.
Finding the patterns or laws of enacted experiences or themes could (as the author claims) explain important intuitive perceptions. It also demands that the critic be more exacting, more precise in his/her analysis. Formalism does not deny intuition, as I had feared, it merely provides another framework for the analysis of texts. This I think brings us back to Shklovsky’s concept of automisation which also demands a more rigorous attention to detail in order to appreciate the “sensations of life” – despite the approach, I believe literature will always be about life and experience. Formalism is another way to approach the analysis of our expression. Ultimately, if art is life, literary theory is bound to studying life: how could a theory therefore ever impede or exclude life entirely? Theory, whether it demands a natural language or a special metalanguage, provides another angle and another means for us to appreciate the complexity of human experience and the way in which we choose to express it.
Questions for class…
I would like to address in class this distinction between competence and performance. What are examples of performative models? What has been said on this front? Is formalism the right umbrella word to describe these theories? Or is it too broad...Russian formalism, structuralism...pre post structuralism...
I have to say that what strikes me the most in all this is Shklovsky’s use of terminology: automisation and the de-automative power of art.
In order to tie this into the texts that we read, I found it interesting that the emphasis of post-structuralist poetics lay in the desire to formalize, organize and ultimately render more scientific the interpretation of a text. In “Concepts towards a theory of literary competence” it is further emphasized that a special meta-language is required in order to “[look] at every detail” and later: the “
This tendency to overlook words and experiences in everyday life as a process of automization and art as the attempt to reappropraite that experience, to slow down and impede that automization
The desire on the part of structuralists to create a special metalanguage to describe these literary texts could be viewed perhaps as a way to access that authentic expression which is ultimately so elusive, so difficult to put into “natural language.” I have to say that I really have no problem with the idea of create a “scientific” theory to describe these texts. The question the third text poses: how do we model what we innately know is an interesting question. I appreciated the response that the author gave, explaining that this problem with intuition is twofold: 1) one model’s one own’s intuitive behavior 2) That despite this being banned from the final product, it is undeniably an influence. Finding the laws of patterning of enacted experiences or themes could (as claims the author) explain important intuitive perceptions. It also demands that the critic be more exacting, more precise in his/her analysis. PE does not deny intuition, it merely provides another frameowork for the analysis of texts – I say the more the merrier the rucher the literary community is for it.
Question:
I would like to address in class this distinction between competence and performance. Are we any closer to a performative model? What has been said on this front?
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