The process of ‘defamiliarization’ in Nuestra América by Jose Marti:

Aesthetic and politic

The purpose of this essay is to identify Shklovsky’s process of ‘defamiliarization’ in Nuestra América by Jose Martí. In Art as a technic, Shklovsky proposes that the ‘defamiliarization’ is a way to create poetic images, and the poetic images are by ‘nature’ the essence of the work of art. Thus Martí uses several aesthetic figures (antitheses, metaphors, epithets, alliterations, etc.), to create the sense of ‘defamiliarization’ as a political strength through poetic images.

The first part of Shklovsky’s Art as a technic, that is not included in the English version but included in the Spanish one, emphasizes the importance of the poetic image: “La imagen poética es uno de los medio de crear una impresión máxima” (The poetic image is one of the ways to create a maximum of impression…) and in the case of Martí the political statement, the fight against “el tigre de afuera y el tigre de adentro” (the American imperialism and the lack of will and self-knowledge of the own Latin-Americans) require for logic the maximum of the impression possible.  

About the images Sklovsky said:

 “como medio y respecto a su función es igual a los otros procedimientos de la lengua poética, igual al paralelismo simple y negativo, igual a la comparación, a la repetición, a la simetría, a la hipérbole; igual a todo lo que se considera una figura, a todos los medios aptos para reforzar la sensación producida por un objeto  (en una obra, las palabras y aún los sonidos pueden ser igualmente objetos)”. In other words, all the aesthetic (poetic) figures are resources for the process of ‘defamiliarization’.

Un objeto puede ser “creado como prosaico y percibido como poético […] el carácter estético de un objeto […] es el resultado de nuestra manera de percibir […] los objetos creados mediante procedimientos particulares, cuya finalidad es la de asegurar para estos objetos una percepción estética”. Through the process of defamiliarization, our perception is more in the side of the aesthetic experience. And for the accumulations of aesthetic figures we can perceive the prose of  Nuestra América as a poetic manifestation.

Sklovsky also talks about the ‘economy of the creator strength” (la economía de la fuerza creadora) as:  “el merito del estílo consiste en ubicar el máximo de pensamiento en un mínimo de palabras”. And this economy is evident in the symbolic of the aesthetic figures, and for the concentrate figures (accumulations…) that concentrates several ideas in few words.