Art as a Technique
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.
Bakhtin & Shklovsky
Bakhtin is proposing that the novel is the perfect “environment” for discourse, in its multiple forms, to be manifested but not only manifested singularly or intertwined, but to be made fun of, as in a spectacle; the overturning of values that express more due to these forms than just what the content may develop. The poetics of the novel, as opposed to the poetics of poetry, allow different kinds of social languages to be used as in a parody. This parody or making fun of is not intended to be thought of as literal, not always at least, but as figurative. It is figurative because the intent for languages is to be taken out of their “comfort zone”. This comfort zone is their social group, profession, epoch, age groups, etc. This can be seen as type of manipulation of the words that have their specific function in their language. Poetry cannot do this because the poetry of language is a “unitary language”. I understand this as a language that perhaps tries to not be understood, tries to only draw reference (this would be the content) from inside the speaker and not from the exterior; the forms of poetry that will accompany the content are generated within itself also, just like the speaker (poetic voice), and not look for forms that are conditioned by social life. I would like to think this as an opposition between the expressions of a singularity versus that of a plurality. In other words, the novel can be seen as a collage of languages that exist in social life. This brings the novel to an area where it can express a condensed view of the world, of its social life. It is true that the novel will have an author and said author will have some intentions, will try to manipulate as much as possible with the contested (dialoged, heteroglot, stratified) language that is before their eyes and ears, but it is also true that the author looses relevancy because of the multiplicity of discourses external to the intentions of the writer that are dragged along with the language that is used. The unity of form and content give rise to genres that become a novel, that give prose meaning beyond just a plot or the utterances between characters. This is the novels discourse, the novels particular social language; to unite other languages, discourses, and compose mini worlds, mini epochs.
In Viktor Shklovsky’s article I did not understand what he meant by rhythm. Is the presence of rhythm the same as his account of what becomes habitual and automatic? Does rhythm account for the loss of deautomatized perception? Does rhythm in poetry make it too familiar? The repetition of sounds and or rhyme in poetry can allow for an easier remembering of the words or even a melody in case of a song. But does this put in jeopardy the content of the poem, the meaning of those words? In his examples of Tolstoy, he also concentrates on form only but not on the meaning of the words, the concepts. He focuses on the “defamiliarization” caused by horse narrator. What implications does it have? What is the text criticizing or making comment of? Certainly there is more to Tolstoy’s text than just defamiliarization. In any case, it seems that his examples actually make things familiar. How is the act of flogging familiar? I would say that the description of the flogging makes me familiar with what flogging is; the horse narrator familiarizes me with a new type of narrator. How does this defamiliarize from something with which I’m not familiar?
How can poetry defamiliarize the reader or listener? Defamiliarize from what? If poetry is not to be understood in relation to language of the outside, like the speech of prose is to be. He writes that prose speech is ordinary, easy, economical, and poetic speech is “formed speech”. Where does this formed speech come from? Poetry, in order to be poetry, must have a form and that is different than other types of writing and language in society. What, although, about the words that compose it? Where do the words come from? Is poetry only concerned with renovations and innovations of forms? This is important to understand. He talks about the “roughening of poetic language”. This roughening would cause defamiliarization of that form from previous forms. That although doesn’t take, again, account of the actual words used. The difference is then to see the beauty or ugliness of words used. My question is if the meaning of a poem doesn’t matter? Perhaps defamiliarization only happens once. After we encountered that which is not familiar, we become familiar with it. Does this then account for repeated changes in forms throughout the development of literature? What is the value of defamiliarization today?
Shklovsky and Bakhtin
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.
The Dialogic Imagination—Discourse in the Novel
The major idea of this essay is the research of verbal art which connects “formal” and “ideological” approaches together. Verbal discourse, in linguistics definition– the use of language in speech and writing in order to produce meaning and to see how the different parts of a text are connected– must be a social phenomenon in all of its factors. As to “the stylistics of genre”, Bakhtin believes stylistics should not be separated from the fundamentally social modes. The essence of all style concepts is the concept of poetic discourse, which is conditioned by specific verbal-ideological discourse and specific historical destinies. The strength and the limitations of such basic stylistic categories help to create a unitary language, which comprises mutual understanding and makes the unity of dominant conversational and literary literature clear. In the process of sociopolitical and cultural centralization in every epoch, mutual understanding in ideological life is expressed by a common creative language, which is considered as a system of elementary forms.
Poetic genres are influenced by centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, however, the novel, is formed by decentralizing forces. The object of a word has contradictory acts of verbal recognition. Since the object’s dialectics are inextricably interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it, the prose artist will take heteroglot voices as the background, a prerequisite to make his own opinion be sound. Every living discourse has a natural dialogic orientation towards the “common opinion”.
Social stratification of literary language could be determined by different forms, their social significance, different generation or social circles, even families. Different languages coexist with each other, poetry depersonalizes them whereas prose underlines their difference. Then, new socially living “languages” of heteroglossia cohabit with one another, and they all have a totally different principle to form their meanings and values, as such, they could be utilized by novelists. Heteroglossia could exist in the “low” poetic genres, and even in the speeches of characters as a depicted thing.
Internal dialogism in semantics syntax and stylistics are significant for style shaping, that’s the reason why Bakhtin said “a word forms a concept of his own object in a dialogic way.” Discourse should not be detached from social modes since it lives in a living impulse, otherwise, we’ll learn nothing about it. Discourse is of different significance in various disciplines, a dialogic penetration of their ideological meanings is necessary, verbal-ideological centralization and unification with the process of decentralization and disunification.
Bakhtin believes there are highly specific dialogic relations between “languages”, they all are particular points of view on the world. The more social elements in the language, the more important and stable are the languages. Words have their intentions and contextual overtones, they form the language which is a concrete heteroglot conception. In the rhetorical genres, some words may present different social meaningful utterance, even protest against the specific verbal utterance toward which it is dialogically aimed. Then Bakhtin talked about the discourse in human speech and dialogized transmission in artistic reformulation.
Language is closely connect with human being and society. It has a historical life in the process of hereroglot development on the social-ideological area: language can talk to itself and represent another language to sound both within and outside it. Hybridizations, the dialogized interrelation of languages and pure dialogues are three basic devices in the novel for creating the image of a language. The language in the novel makes itself as a social language surrounded by a single cultural-political world, in which exists a radical revolution in the destinies of human discourse, literary languages must has a surrounding extraliterary environment and it comes with cultural-ideological systems.
It’s necessary to carry on a profound artistic and ideological penetration into the dialogic interrelationship in the novel, this should be guided by stylistic analysis. Besides, a historical-linguistic research in the language system will also help us to have a profound understanding of various intentions in the work.
Actually, real life of language exists in utterances, languages’ forms and styles and stylistics of genres all come from social practices and complicacy of human activities, which could not be isolated from utterances. The discourse in the language lasts and develops with its own ideology, and it is still unended. Bakhtin’s arguments about the discourse is an important idea of Russian Formalism and they still have a great influence on the research and development of linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language.
Shklovsky and truth
Jon has recommended the 400-word stream of consciousness mode of writing. I will try to stick to it (it is late!), but I know that I can easily get sucked into the details of the question. The Surrealists use it –automatic writing — and had some serious debates about what it brought out. Shklovsky might say: it brings out habits.
Shlovsky makes an interesting point: art is defamiliarization. But is defamiliarization art? I’m assuming he would say no. It is not sufficient to defamilarize in order to create art. (Any child can produce impeded form!) Defamiliarization is really a side-effect, or a cog in the artistic machine.
I looked into a similar question here: can art be produced automatically by computers? Let me (mechanically) reproduce the conclusion:
According to one successful writer, Stephen King, good writing is not about the mechanics of plot:
Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground […]. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground as intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, aTyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same. (2000: 163)
Getting a fossil out of the ground requires delicate tools, like a palm-pick, airhose, or toothbrush. Plot is the jackhammer of writers: “a good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice” (2000: 164). As an exercise for the aspiring writer King describes (in his own good style) a bare-bones narrative about a woman who is stalked in her home by her estranged husband:
It’s a pretty good story, yes? I think so, but not exactly unique. As I’ve already pointed out, estranged hubby beats up (or murders) ex-wife makes the paper every other week, sad but true. What I want you to do in this exercise is change the sexes of the antagonist and the protagonist before beginning to work out the situation in your narrative […]. Narrate this without plotting — let the situation and that one unexpected inversion carry you along. I predict you will succeed swimmingly… if, that is, you are honest about how your characters speak and behave. Honesty in story telling makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work of wooden-prose writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ayn Rand shows, but lying is the great unrepairable fault. (2000: 173)
The great gap between printing and writing seems indeed to concern that “honesty in story telling”; writers must use the finest brush to extract from the mass of our beliefs about the world a single compelling image of the way things inescapably are. But how can the writer be honest about fictional characters!? King’s honesty is about what our understanding of the world will allow us to put together reasonably (in his exercise, it is understanding the difference between the sexes in their manner of stalking). How things cohere in principle is a truth that writer and reader must both possess in order to understand each other. That coherence is no more nor less than who writer and reader are together, as one being. It defines the single honest way to set about thinking and speaking.
Let us assume, then, that the artistic text captures the higher truth of the way things are. It is priceless, lively, and live because, by being intensely, exactly itself, it subsumes the many variants of itself. A gender-bent text is artistic only when it implicitly says the straight text and underlines the inescapable reasoning that brings both texts under a same denomination and so subsumes by the same stroke the many possible variations on the theme. By showing what stalking might be, it shows what stalking must be, however the situation may vary. Artistic texts, clearly departing from the norm by a twist or a wriggle, scintillate with meaning and show dramatically the principle of how they came to be — their “makedness.” The deepest truth about anything is the way it comes to be, because there lies the secret of how it might continue to be.
If poetic art is indeed “impeded form” or “roughened language” (Shklovsky), it is because narrative leads the reader to tease out a synthetic position — a higher ground —that explains the world of perplexing opposites. Artistic narrative is “roughened reasoning” that leads up to a communal, true way to seeing as one the perplexing opposites of the world. Socrates’s complaint about Midas’s epitaph is that it does not go anywhere: there is no excavation project to exhume the truth of Midas. There is only the clanking tongue of a bronze maiden, just as petrified as Midas in his grave. Combinatory is not art. Narrative goes somewhere specific: up.
Can computers really write? Only if they can fly. They must move up out of their clanking linguistic machinery to a general truth about the world and to a vantage point that captures the text’s fundamental generativity. A good text — an artistic text —is the one that represents best many other texts.
Remarkable steps have been made to give machines the resources needed to build higher meaning, but it will take still more accumulation of data about how people see the world. Minsky estimates that even simple commonsense “is knowing maybe 30 or 60 million things about the world and having them represented so that when something happens, you can make analogies with others” (Dreifus 1998, cited in Liu and Singh forthcoming: 2). We will only see computers generate art from all that commonsense when they can be programmed to tell us something true.
I suppose that is my fundamental problem with Shlovsky: he doesn’ t seem to understand the relation between impeded form and truth, though he does raise truth as an aside. He sees habit as a place where we become zombies, yet in religious circles ritual is where the worshiper becomes most alive. I like King’s comment:
Honesty in story telling makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work of wooden-prose writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ayn Rand shows, but lying is the great unrepairable fault.
(It makes me want to read Ayn Rand, though I know I would find her philosophical position horrifying.)
King proposes a gender-bent scenario; Maupassant writes one of his own. Such scenarios are important not because there is defamiliarization (though that is a dimension), but rather because they make us elaborate a more evolved way of seeing the world. They lead us to a higher way of seeing the world. Religious myths do that too; is literature a secular myth (not unrelated to religious myths)?
Bakhtin and Shklovsky
“Language…shot through with intentions and accents.”
Bakhtin asserts context is the key to language, for every word is inseparable from the context it was first used in, the context of its first reading and every reading after that ad infinitum. For Bakhtin it is dialogized heteroglossia that characterizes the novel as art form.
Heteroglossia indicates the inclusion of multiple socio-cultural perspectives. In any given reading of a text, the stratified voices of past and present signifiers and the signified coexist to give it meaning which is constantly being reconstructed as new voices are added to the mix.
This ever-morphing text then can never have a fixed meaning because of the diversity of perceptions it both expresses and engenders. In fact, for a text to function as art, heteroglossia is inevitable as dialogue is not possible when there is one unified voice. The novel “denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language.”
With plurality there is dialogue and the possibility for new realities and conceptions of identity. Dialogue recognizes the existence of other consciousnesses beginning with the “two language intentions, two voices and two accents participating in an intentional and conscious artistic hybrid.”
In Toine, we read the language of the narrator and his literary language as well as the voices of the characters and their vernacular. In addition, it is impossible not to hear the voice of the author and the authority he criticizes. (We could also add the voice of the translator in translated texts. For example, cognac in the French original becomes pepino in the Spanish text.) The juxtaposition of voices in Toine “expresses the author’s intention in a refracted way” to undermine dominant or authoritative discourse.
Bakhtin points to the “multi-languagedness” of prose that “undermines the authority of custom …[and the]…system of national myth that is organically fused with language.”
In Maupassant’s text, the religious mythology of the Catholic Church and feudal culture is subverted with his use of a multiplicity of languages. The inversion of Christian images and values presents a warped view of the ‘known’ world and its inhabitants. The perplexed reader recognizes something of himself or herself in the ‘other’, adds his or her voice to the conversation, and the dialogue intensifies. (see notes on Shklovsky)
You could say that the reader is an author of the text.
The author is also a reader as when Maupassant writes, he is ‘reading’ the many voices of the past and present.
This does not mean that there is no author, or that Maupassant has no language of his own. His language is made up of many languages and has its own particular style that he uses to “refract” his intention.
The Problem
My difficulty with Bakhtin, if I understand him correctly, is his describing poetry as a static art form that unifies language. Is this because the poetry of his time was more restrictive?
Doesn’t poetry offer the author a form that allows for polyphony? Dialogism and heteroglossia are not foreign to poetry, or am I missing something? Many poets have used the language of others in their work to challenge authority. Poetry can also personalize the every day with language that reaches beyond the boundaries of space and time.
Thoughts on Shklovsky
Shklovsky argues that art must create “a shock effect that disrupts habitual ways of seeing and thinking” because if we perceive things automatically, it is as if they do not exist in any manifestation of their form.
“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life…The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”
In Toine peasant life as it is ‘known’, that is fixed in time by a supposed universal perception of it, is deconstructed by Maupassant’s use of the unfamiliar. Once the innkeeper becomes paralyzed, there is a shift in a previously construed understanding of the world. In this way, the reader is forced to question what he or she knows about society and in doing so is actively engaged in creating another view of present reality.
“The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”
When art makes objects or familiar situations unfamiliar, art and the observer necessarily engage as the observer attempts to reconcile what he or she perceives with his knowledge of the world. This interaction is what makes an object art, and it is therefore a continual process that is never fixed in time as the observer’s perception changes with the various experiences of life. Thus, when we read Toine next year, or ten years from now, we will perceive the text differently with past and present perceptions transforming the reader’s conception of what is perceived. When language is no longer habitual, each iteration is an experience of life.
“Defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found.” And an image “creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.”
So if we cannot know an object when we perceive it unconsciously, and we cannot know it through an image of its likeness, can we know it at all as having a fixed meaning? And does this not imply that nothing exists without an observer?
In other words it seems that we can’t perceive an object as existing without our conscious perception of it. (Why am I thinking of String Theory and Schrödinger’s cat?)
We give things meaning, and because we are always changing, meaning is always in flux.
(This view coincides with Bakhtin’s idea that language does not exist without a speaker.)
Mikhail Bakhtin: Diversity and the novel
Bakhtin’s text Discourse in the novel was very difficult to follow and understand, so I will share what I managed to understand from it. It appears that Bakhtin is attempting to redefine the meaning and purpose of the novel. He seems to also reconsider the structure of language. He compares the novel to other literary genres such as poetry and theatre in aims of showing that in the novel, “… the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object of social consciousness” (278). In other words, the novel produces much more variety in terms of style, speech and voice as opposed to the poetic genre, which “is always illuminated by one unitary and indisputable discourse” (278). It is precisely these different styles, voices and perspectives that make novels so unique. I guess this makes sense since by combining various different languages, dialects, and styles within novels, there is a possibility of producing various levels of meaning. However, I wonder if this is necessarily the case for all novels?
Another topic that Bakhtin discusses is the notion of heteroglossia. Simply put, this is the coexistence of multiple varieties or dialects within a single language. However, according to Bakhtin, heteroglossia is “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (324). I am however unsure exactly what Bakhtin means by another’s speech in another’s language? Reading further on, he states that such speech is double-voiced, expressing both the intentions of the author and that of the character speaking. Evidently, this will produce two different voices, meanings and expressions and thus, create a conflict between these elements. My only issue is that I am having trouble understanding the relevance of heteroglossia as it pertains to the novel. Maybe Bakhtin is trying to emphasize that the novel, given its multifaceted nature, is a direct example of heteroglossia. Moreover, Bakhtin seems to extend the notion of heteroglossia to language in general. He states, “For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” (293). In other words, all languages have their own set of ideals and meaning; there are no neutral words because all words have intentions and a purpose.
Therefore, novels are defined by diversity but the question is, what purpose does this distinction between the novel and poetry really serve? The only explanation I have is that maybe Bakhtin is attempting to draw our attention to new ways of understanding the novel and the structure of language itself since poetry does not seem to be providing us with these answers.
Viktor Shklovsky: The Power of Art
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.
Impressions on ”Art as Technique” by Shklovky
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.
Impressions on ”Discourse in the Novel” by Bakhtin
In his essay Discourse in the novel, Bakhtin argues that ‘‘form and content in discourse are one’’ since ‘‘verbal discourse is a social phenomenon.’’ This essay is very dense and I certainly did not grasp every concept presented, but I will discuss here three concepts that seem important: the non-neutrality of words, heteroglossia and double-voicedness.
To Bakhtin, no word is neutral ; each word embeds social, political, cultural, historical, geographic, demographic and even familial connotation. When using a word, a speaker does so in a sociohistorical context and the meaning and reach of that word goes beyond its dictionary definition. I believe it is in this context that languages evolve and that words may encounter shifts in meaning. Bakhtin mentions swearwords and it made me think of blasphemous words in Canadian French. In Canada, swearwords practically exclusively all come from Church lexicon. Hence, while a word like calice (chalice) simply means a cup in which is conserved the wine for religious ceremonial in most French-speaking communities, it is a strong swearword in French Canada. The same way, most speaking communities have specific swearwords that are defined by geosociohistoricopoliticocultural contexts. In this context, a language can be seen as a worldview. An example from inuktituk always comes to mind when this idea is discussed. Inuktituk speakers have up to 50 different words to describe the reality of snow; this is certainly a sign that snow is of central importance in their world.
Heteroglossia is certainly an important concept introduced by Bakhtin. In essence, heteroglossia is the presence in a given language of different varieties. These different varieties arise not only from geographic dispersion of language, but also exist in a community geographically located at the same place (by example, a lawyer would speak in a different way than a peasant). Moreover, heteroglossia happens at the individual level: a person speaking a given language may adopt different varieties of his language to adapt to the context in which his discourse is made. Heteroglossia could even be found in a single utterance. For Bakhtin, heteroglossia has to be found in a novel. This reminded me of the story Toine by Maupassant. In that story, heteroglossia is obvious: while the narrator describes the events in a very literary style, the dialogue amongst characters is of popular register (using colloquials, simple structures and ellipsis).
From my understanding, double-voicedness is a specific form of heteroglossia found in the novel. When a dialogue takes part in a novel, there is a double voice, a double intention. There is the direct voice and intention of the character who expresses himself, but there is also the indirect voice and intention of the author who gives voice to the character. Bakhtin argues that if a novelist ignores the authentic double-voicedness, he will be unable to fully reach ‘‘linguistic consciousness.’’
