Category: Shklovsky

If there is something that we as human beings in the 21st century have experienced in our lives that is without a doubt automatization.  After riding the same bus for months, walking the same streets, dusting the same divan and saying the same “good morning”, situations, words, objects and even their concepts start to become habitual, automatic… almost meaningless.

In Art as Technique Shklovsky addresses the problem of automatization and postulates art as the tool to recover “the sensation of life”. Of course if we consider art as a tool,  there is always the possibility of it being used repeatedly in the same manner, assembled in conventional ways and of it falling once again in the dreaded circle of “automatic recognition”. Shklovsky’s answer for this matter is defamiliarization which is nothing more than, in the case of literay, manipulating the language in order to create images that disrupt the reader’s automatic recognition or in simpler terms, representing things in a new way, changing perception.

One really good example of this technique is given through a passage of Tolstoys’s “Kholstomer” in which a horse tries to understand the meaning of “property” in the human world. This is representative because it tackles a concept that is used so commonly, -what is mine? -what is not yours. But what does it really entitle, what is do we perceive from this concept. There is probably no absolute answer for these questions however, art can be used to transform the usual perception, gives the reader the possibility to understand it from an angle that is no too familiar.

Shklovsky says that defamiliarization is present “almost everywhere form is found”. Literary speech has particular phonetic and lexical structures, that makes it sound foreign, difficult,  impeded  and that make of it a formed language. Nonetheless it is possible for prose speech to transcend into literary speech but this doesn’t violate it’s condition of formed speech. Shklovsky constantly uses the term “roughened” as to explain how this kind of speech should always be challenging, even if it’s being permeated by prose. This automatically reminds me of Bakhtin talking about how poetic language (any kind of language for that matter) is always in constant change, but is also in a constat quest of cannonizing these changes to keep its differentiation from every other language.

Shklovsky separates prose from literary speech one last time when writes about rhyme. According to him the rhyme in prose is always the same and serves as yet another factor for automatization. In contrast the rythm of poetry, even when it may have a certain structure, it is disordered and attempting to systematize this disorder would completely contradict the roughening principle of this   kind of speech.

In the end for Shklovsky the purpose of art seems to be separating itself from reality, and allowing, in this case the reader, to experience life not as he knows it but through a deep sea of perceptive possibility.

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.

Viktor Shklovsky’s Art as Technique was an extremely interesting read. Shklovsky points out that what we perceive on a daily basis often becomes habitual and thus, becomes automatic. In fact, “life is reckoned as nothing” (16) because we perceive everything so quickly to the point that we do not feel anything. I can relate this idea to basic everyday habits such as driving, locking the front door, closing the garage door or brushing one’s teeth. Such unconscious automatic actions slow down our perception of things. Although the example of driving is naturally seen as automatic, one can imagine that if all aspects of life became unconscious perceptions, life would become completely banal. This extends to literature in the sense that if everything is rendered familiar and cliché, the true art of literature can never be appreciated.

Shklovsky argues that art “may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things …” (16). He argues that this can be achieved through the concept of defamiliarization whereby objects are made “unfamiliar”, forms made difficult, and perceptions rendered difficult and lengthy (16). He further explains that the “process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (16). In other words, it is the art that matters most and not the object itself. Shklovsky cites Tolstoy’s Kholstomer as a clear example of this. By using a narrator that is a horse, the work becomes strange and unfamiliar. The passage cited shows how the actions of men, as opposed to horses, are guided by words rather than deeds (16). Had such a message been conveyed through the eyes of a human narrator, it would have simply been classified as just another denunciation of human conventions. By using the process of defamiliarization, the work can be appreciated as a true piece of art and be removed from the ordinary and the cliché. Through art, literature can thus be revitalized while still maintaining meaning.

Shklovsky’s also explains that defamiliarization can also be achieved through the use of difficult and complex language. He cites Aristotle to emphasize that poetic language “must appear strange and wonderful” (19) and that it is often foreign. There are a plethora of examples that illustrate how language can transform a work into art such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (written in Middle English) or the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine. The former is a classic of French literature, using mostly animals as a means for providing a moral lesson. Whether it is by the portrayal of unique or animal characters or the use of difficult language, defamiliarization can transform an ordinary piece of literature into a fascinating piece of art.

To the general public, art is often associated with the concept of beauty. A good artist has to create beautiful pieces ; the standards of beauty being generally agreed upon by a given society. In Art as Technique Shklovsky argues that art is linked to the question of perception. It is not the object that is important, rather the different way in which the artist makes its audience perceives it. He mentions that as certain actions become habits, they become automated ; and the perception, that was first unique, becomes automatic as well. In some way, perception is lost. Shklovsky then wonders what is the purpose of people’s lives if they go unnoticed. Here is the essence of art : to recover the sensation of life. Art makes the familiar seems unfamiliar ; a concept called ‘‘defamiliarization’’.

Literary work is art and Shklovsky gives some examples of defamiliarization from Tolstoy’s work. The first example is when Tolstoy describes the concept of flogging while never naming it explicitely. To Schlovky, Tolstoy changes ‘‘its form (the flogging) without changing its nature.’’ Tolstoy often uses this technique, where something old seems new. Examples comprise descriptions of wars, drawing room, theater. By changing the narrator’s point of view from a person’s to a horse’s, Tolstoy also makes content seem unfamiliar. In Kholstomer, the horse discusses the concept of private property ; an obvious concept to us that is hardly understandable by the horse. In order to discuss this concept that is alien to him, the horse must express himself in a language that is alien to him as well. This links to Bakhtin’s essay ; he writes : ‘‘To shed light on an alien world, he (the poet) never resorts to an alien language, even though it might in fact be more adequate to that world ;’’ that is what the horse does here : using an alien language (that of his owner) to decribe an alien world (private property). Defamiliarization helps the reader see old ideas under new light, hence bringing back (once lost) perception.

A corrolary of what is brought forward by Shklovsky is that art cannot exist without an audience. Art does not reside solely in objects, pieces or installations. The existence of these ‘‘art objects’’ does not necessarely leads to perception and therefore it cannot be art. The pieces must be perceived by an audience ; it is the reaction to these pieces – the viewer’s perception – that is art.

Shklovsky, one of the founders of the Formalist study group, believes the nature of literature is their form, which comprises all literary devices and techniques, artistic materials and defamilization of forms are the essential characteristics of literature. Influenced by new opinions of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics, Shklovsky analysed this technique from the linguistic viewpoint.

To introduce and spread the concept of defamilization, which turns something that has become over-familiar into something reactivated, Shklovsky gave several examples to illustrate perception has become unconsciously automatic, he took it as a retreat of our habits. And he thought over-automatization of an object, the greatest economy of perceptive effect could impede our entire comprehension of objects.

In this essay, I noticed a sentence “…if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” I once saw a similar sentence “It never happens when something real had been forgotten”, people try hard to recollect scenes of the past when they look back, they are apt to forget routine matters which happen around them every day because of unconsciousness. To reverse this trend of modern living, Shklovsky proposed a technique of art which makes objects “unfamiliar”. Art is extracted from life, but superior to life in many respects. Art, as an essential method of writing, makes real objects look different through images and modes of expressions, then unexpected results are fed back to readers.

Shklovsky cited several Tolstoy’s passages to explain his theory. The first method is using different words to replace familiar names. Author has to use more words to explain an act or a phenomenon, this seems a little bit tedious and complicated, readers will notice other parts then the greatest possible effect will be produced. Such like that harsh example of flogging, it’s a typical Tolstoy’s way of pricking the curiosity and conscience of readers.

Personally, I prefer the second method of estrangement, authors make a story from different point of view. First of all, a story made from special angle of view intrigues people into reading it. Secondly, it’s easier for us to accept a totally different opinion. Specifically, people won’t have an attitude of exclusion towards “different arguments” of a horse, but they tend to refute the same argument from a person. This horse thought it was incorrect that people think animals should be naturally possessed by human being. People are guided by words, not by deeds in life, their instinct is narrow. I totally agree to what this horse has said, correct ideas are not innate in the mind, people seldom dare to face squarely their problems and they are unwilling to acknowledge their shortcomings and responsibilities.

Shklovsky cited Tolstoy’s other passages to show how common the method of narrative is used, seeing things out of their normal context makes writings more impressive. Many people considered it blasphemy to present as monstrous what they accepted as sacred, in my opinion, they merely declined to approve those habitual things in an unfamiliar way.

The third method used mainly in poetic speech is using artistic trademark as a way of lingering to impede perception; making the language appear strange, intricate and roughened. Sometimes, foreign languages, archaism and popular language, even dialects are new devices to create a properly poetic language. Speaking of the rhythm of poetry, which is totally different from the rhythm of prose— an essential automatizing element, the adjustment of poetry rhythm orders are necessary as well, even if it would not have too much effect for the roughening of language, the unpredictable disordering of rhythm should become a convention, anyway.

In brief, Shklovsky developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism. The concept of “defamilization” creates a special perception of objects, it’s an innovative writing technique which produces a great influence on theories of literature and the study of modern Russian poetic language.