Art as Tecnique. Viktor Shklovsky

The main issue that Shklovsky wants to develop is about what art means. But, his starting point is the problem of perception. The author says that in some moment we start to not be surprised about reality. We just are “use to it”. When that happen, we can make the exercise of  turn all ours perceptions into an algebraic” expression (following the example of Pogodin). For him, that is not the way art works. His answer to the question What is art? is that “art” is what make people to “recover the sensation of life” (p.16). That it means to get surprised –by art- about “reality”. In other word, make thing that are familiar to us into unfamiliar. In this way, art is the opposition to what he calls the “automatism of perception”. The examples he gives in the text show how some authors (especially Russian) are able to describe some issues (like war or property) from the point of view of someone who is completely surprised about it. So, what art must do, is to create a “new perception” about the reality for the “viewers” (or readers) of it.

For the Russian author, the purpose of studying art (especially literature in both forms, poetry and prose) from a phonetic and lexical point of view is just to prove that the artist is actually using and creating his work to desautomatized the perceptions of the audience. In this aspect, he follows Aristotle’s argument about the relevance of the poetic language as something “strange and wonderful” (p.19).

One of the main questions that I have after reading this text is about the role of creativity and expression. If the only thing you need to create art is to make your audience feel surprised about every day situations and objects, can we have art that actually mean “nothing”? Beside this, if art means really that, would imply that art only can “exist” in a specific time and place. Cancelling any chance that art can go from moment to another, just because perception varies every time and every where. In some moment, “people” was used about flogging, for example, but not today (in “western world” at least). So, actually, what he calls “automatic perception” is something that changes constantly. In other words, art may only be “contextual art”.

What is not clear at all, for me, is the distinction between poetic speech and prose. Even when the author doesn’t go deep on that point there is a difference that I couldn’t understand.

The dialogic imagination. M. Bakhtin

The main idea that Bakhtin wants to develop in this text (and that give the name to the book) is the notion of dialogue. For him, dialogue is property of any kind of discourse. But he doesn’t think only in one kind of dialogue, actually, he thinks in a big variety of dialogues coming together. Here is when the notions of “Heteroglossia” and “Utterance” are important. The first one is “the base” where any discourse is created. Heteroglossia refers to the situation (or context) where social and historical conditions interact. This means that discourse (and also Utterance) can not escape to this “jail” of time and place. If we think about the literary creation, the argument is that the literary work can’t escape to his socio linguistic and historic context. In Bakhtin`s words: “Everything that the poet sees, understands and thinks, de does through the eyes of a given language” (p.286).

The idea of dialogue works also on his idea of a “unitary language”. For the author, language is a unit in terms of the “abstract grammatical system of normative forms” (p. 288). But this “unit” is immediately shaped by the different genres that exist in any language. Genres make a stratification of language what turns this “unit” into a dialogue among them. And is because this wide variety of genres that languages are finally modified. The responsible of this is, again, the notion of dialogue inside the language.

One of the concepts that is very interesting for me is the “double-voiced discourse”. This means that at the same time we can perceive the existence of two speakers. Bakhtin refers to this point when he thinks about the novel. He says that in an specific moment, for example when some character is speaking in a novel, there actually two speakers. First the character and second the author. Both speakers have a dialogue in one discourse. According to Bakhtin, is a novelist doesn’t understand the dialogization of the discourse inside the novel, he would never be able to “create” a novel. This idea of dialogue inside the novel can go even further with the idea of “hybridization”, where to different types of languages (or genres) can be involved at the same time.

The final point that I would like to prfecise is the notion of “re-accentuates”. Here we find a new dialogue, but now, is in the relation of literature and history (or the pass of time). For the author, this concept is one of the keys to understand the history of literature. In his own words: “The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-acentutation” (p.421). In other words, there is always a dialogue between a new “age” and the past literature. The “image” of a novel is able to be transformed trough the time, keeping the dialogue not only with the context that produced the text, but also with the one who receives it.

As a conclusion, I think that the notion of dialogue is extremely important to understand any text. There is always some “relation” of a text whit it’s context, language, historic situation, etc., that can not be avoid.