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| Viktor Shklovsky |
If we start to examine the general laws of
perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.
Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously
automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a
foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at
performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such
habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases
unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in
algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in
rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin
offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains
are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]
This characteristic of thought not only
suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols
(letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of
thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do
not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main
characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We
know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The
object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not
leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is
forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its
entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2]) and, hence, why (along with other
slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of
"algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the
greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one
proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by
formula and do not even appear in cognition:
I was cleaning and, meandering about,
approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it.
Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I could not remember and
felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot
- that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If
some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established.
If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole
complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if
they had never been.[3]
And so life is reckoned as nothing.
Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of
war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then
such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may
recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the
stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they
are perceived and not as they are known. 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
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the
artfulness of an object: the object is not important...
After we see an object several times, we
begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but
we do not see it[4] -hence we cannot say anything, significant about it. Art
removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want
to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for
Merezhkovsky at least, seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw
them in their entirety, and did not alter them…
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by
not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it
for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In
describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead
names corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in "Shame"
Tolstoy "defamiliarizes" the idea of flogging in this way: "to
strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and "to
rap on their bottoms with switches," and, after a few lines, "to lash
about on the naked buttocks." Then he remarks:
Just why precisely this stupid, savage
means of causing pain and not any other - why not prick the shoulders or any
part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or
anything like that?
I apologize for this harsh example, but it
is typical of Tolstoy's way of pricking the conscience. The familiar act of
flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to
change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of
"defamiliarization", constantly. The narrator of
"Kholstomer," for example, is a horse, and it is the horse's point of
view (rather than a person's) that makes the 'content of the story seem
unfamiliar. Here is how the horse regards the institution of private property:
I understood well what they said about
whipping and Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What's the
meaning of "his own," "his colt"? From these phrases I saw
that people thought there was some sort of connection between me and the
stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much
later, when they separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand.
But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me
"man's property."
The words "my horse" referred to
me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words "my
land," "my air," "my water."
But the words made a strong impression on
me. I thought about them constantly, and only after the most diverse
experiences with people did I understand, finally, what they meant. They meant
this: In life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It's not so much that
they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the
possibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various
topics. Such are the words "my" and "mine," which they
apply to different things, creatures, objects, and even to land, people, and
horses. They agree that only one may say "mine" about this, that or
the other thing. And the one who says "mine" about the greatest
number of things is, according to the game which they've agreed to among
themselves, the one they consider the most happy. I don't know the point of all
this, but it's true. For a long time I tried to explain it to myself in terms
of some kind of real pin ' ' but I had to reject that explanation because it
was wrong.
Many of those, for instance, who called me
their own never rode on me - although others did. And so with those who fed me.
Then again, the coachman, the veterinarians, and the outsiders in general
treated me kindly, yet those who called me their own did not. In due time,
-having widened the scope of my observations, I satisfied myself that the
notion "my," not only has relation'to us horses, has no other basis
than a narrow human instinct which is called a sense of or right to private
property. A man says "this house is mine" and never lives in it; he
only worries about its construction and upkeep. A merchant says "my
shop," or "my dry goods shop," for instance, and does not even
wear clothes made from the better cloth he keeps in hi's own shop.
- There are people who call a tract of land
their own; but they never set eyes on it and never take a stroll on it. There
are people who call others their own, yet never see them. And the whole
relationship between them is that the so-called "owners" treat the
others unjustly.
There are people who call women their own,
or their "wives," but their women live with other men. And people
strive not for the good in life, but for goods they can call their own.
I am now convinced that this is the
essential difference between people and ourselves. And therefore, not even
considering the other ways in which we are superior ' -but considering just
this one virtue, we can bravely claim to stand higher than men on the ladder of
living creatures. The actions of men, at least those with whom I have had
dealings, are guided by words - ours by deeds.
The horse is killed before the end of the
story, but the manner of the narrative, its technique, does not change:
Much later they put Serpukhovsky's body,
which had experienced the world, which had eaten and drunk, into the ground.
They could profitably send neither his hide, nor his flesh, nor his bones
anywhere.
But since his dead body, which had gone
about in the world for twenty years, was a great burden to everyone, its burial
was only a superfluous embarrassment for the people. For a long time no one had
needed him; for a long time he had been a burden on all. But nevertheless, the
dead who buried the dead found it necessary to dress this bloated body, which
immediately began to rot, in a good uniform and good boots; to lay it in a good
new coffin with new tassels at the four corners, then to place this new coffin
in another of lead and ship it to Moscow; there to exhume ancient bones and at
just that spot, to hide this putrefying body, swarming with maggots, in its new
uniform and clean boots, and to cover it over completely with dirt.
Thus we see that at the end of the story,
Tolstoy continues to use the technique even though the motivation for it (the
reason for its use) is gone.
In War and Peace Tolstoy uses the same
technique in describing whole battles as if battles were something new. These
descriptions are too long to quote; it would be necessary to extract a
considerable part of the four-volume novel. But Tolstoy uses the same method in
describing the drawing room and the theater:
The middle of the stage consisted of flat
boards; by the sides stood painted pictures representing trees, and at the back
a linen cloth was stretched down to the floorboards. Maidens in red bodices and
white skirts sat on the middle of the stage. One, very fat, in a white silk
dress, sat apart on a narrow bench to which a green pasteboard box was glued
from behind. They were all singing something. When they had finished, the
maiden in white approached the prompter's box. A man in silk with tight-fitting
pants on his fat legs approached her with a plume and began to sing and spread
his arms in dismay. The man in the tight pants finished his song alone; then
the girl sang. After that both remained silent as the music resounded; and the
man, obviously waiting to begin singing his part with her again, began to run
his fingers over the hand of the girl in the white dress. They finished their
song together, and everyone in the theater began to clap and shout. But the men
and women on stage, who represented lovers, started to bow, smiling and raising
their hands.
In the second act were pictures
representing monuments and openings in the linen cloth representing the
moonlight, and they raised lampshades on a frame. As the musicians started to
play the bass horn and counter-bass, a large number of people in black mantels
poured onto the stage from right and left. The people, with something like
daggers in their hands, started to wave their arms. Then still more people came
running out and began to drag away the maiden who had been wearing a white
dress but who now wore one of sky blue. They did not drag her off immediately,
but sang with her for a long time before dragging her away. Three times they
struck on something metallic behind the side scenes, and everyone got down on
his knees and began to chant a prayer. Several times all of this activity was
interrupted by enthusiastic shouts from the spectators…
Anyone who knows Tolstoy can find several
hundred such passages in his work. His method of seeing things out of their
normal context is also apparent in his last works. Tolstoy described the dogmas
and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday
meanings for the customarily religious meanings of the words common in church
ritual. Many persons were painfully wounded; they considered it blasphemy to
present as strange and monstrous what they accepted as sacred. Their reaction
was due chiefly to the technique through which Tolstoy perceived and reported
his environment. And after turning to what he had long avoided, Tolstoy found
that his perceptions had unsettled his faith.
The technique of defamiliarization is not
Tolstoy's alone. I cited Tolstoy because his work is generally known.
Now, having explained the nature of this
technique, let us try to determine the approximate limits of its application. I
personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is
found… An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of
life which are revealed through it, its purpose is not to make us perceive
meaning, but to create a special perception of the object - it creates a vision
of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it…
Such constructions as "the pestle and
the mortar," or "Old Nick and the infernal regions" (Decameron)
are also examples of the technique of defamiliarization. And in my article on
plot construction I write about defamiliarization in psychological parallelism.
Here, then, I repeat that the perception of disharmony in a harmonious context
is important in parallelism. The purpose of parallelism, like the general
purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the
sphere of new perception - that is, to make a unique semantic modification.
In studying poetic speech in its phonetic
and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words,
and in the characteristic thought structures compounded-from the words, we find
everywhere the artistic trademark - that is, we find material obviously created
to remove the automatism or perception; the author's purpose is to create the
vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created
"artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest
possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result
of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but,
so to speak, in its continuity. Thus "poetic language" gives
satisfaction. According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and
wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the Sumerian used by the
Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages, the Arabisms of the
Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or the elevated, almost
literary language of folk songs. The common archaisms of poetic language, the
intricacy of the sweet new style [dolce stil nuovo][5]the obscure style of the
language of Arnaut Daniel with the "roughened" [harte] forms which
make pronunciation difficult - these are used in much the same way. Leo
Jakubinsky has demonstrated the principle of phonetic "roughening" of
poetic language in the particular case of the repetition of identical sounds.
The language of, poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language. In
a few special instances the language of poetry approximates the language of
prose, but this does not violate the principle of "roughened" form.
Her sister was called Tatyana
For the first time we shall
Willfully brighten the delicate
Pages of a novel with such a name,
wrote Pushkin. The usual poetic language
for Pushkin's contemporaries was the elegant style of Derzhavin; but Pushkin's
style, because it seemed trivial then, was unexpectedly, difficult for them. We
should remember the consternation of Pushkin's contemporaries over the
vulgarity of his expressions. He used the popular language as a special device
for prolonging attention, just as his contemporaries generally used Russian
words in their usually French speech (see Tolstoy's examples in War and Peace).
Just now a still more characteristic
phenomenon is under way. Russian literary language, which was originally
foreign to Russia, has so permeated the language of the people that it has
blended with their conversation. On the other hand, literature has now begun to
show a tendency towards the use of dialects (Remizov, Klyuyev, Essenin, and
others,[6] so unequal in talent and so alike in language, are intentionally
provincial) and or barbarisms (which gave rise to the Severyanin group[7]). And
currently Maxim Gorky is changing his diction from the old literary language to
the new literary colloquialism of Leskov.[8] Ordinary speech and literary
language have thereby changed places (see the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and
many others). And finally, a strong tendency, led by Khlebnikov, to create a
new and properly poetic language has emerged. In the light of these
developments we can define poetry as attenuated, tortuous speech. Poetic speech
is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech - economical, easy, proper, the
goddess of prose [dea prosae] is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the
"direct" expression of a child. I shall discuss roughened form and
retardation as the general law of art at greater length in an article on plot
construction. [9]
Nevertheless, the position of those who
urge the idea of the economy of artistic energy as something which exists in
and even distinguishes poetic language seems, at first glance, tenable for the
problem rhythm. Spencer's description of rhythm would seem to be absolutely
incontestable:
Just as the body in receiving a series of
varying concussions, must keep the muscles ready to meet the most violent of
them, as not knowing when such may come: so, the mind in receiving unarranged
articulations, must keep its perspectives active enough to recognize the least
easily caught sounds. And as, if the concussions recur in definite order, the
body may husband its forces by adjusting the resistance needful for each
concussion; so, if the syllables be rhythmically arranged, the mind may
economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each
syllable.[10]
This apparent observation suffers from the
common fallacy, the confusion of the laws of poetic and prosaic language. In
The Philosophy of Style Spencer failed utterly to distinguish between them. But
rhythm may have two functions. The rhythm of prose, or a work song like
"Dubinushka," permits the members of the work crew to do their
necessary "groaning together" and also eases the work by making it
automatic. And, in fact, it is easier to march with music than without it, and
to march during an animated conversation is even easier, for the walking is
done unconsciously. Thus the rhythm of prose is an important automatizing
element; the rhythm of poetry is not. There is "order" in art, yet
not a single column of a Greek temple stands exactly in its proper order;
poetic rhythm is similarly disordered rhythm. Attempts to systematize the
irregularities have been made, and such attempts are part of the current
problem in the theory of rhythm. It is obvious that the systematization will
not work, for in reality the problem is not one of complicating the rhythm but
of disordering the rhythm - a disordering which cannot be predicted. Should the
disordering of rhythm become a convention, it would be ineffective as a
procedure for the roughening of language. But I will not discuss rhythm in more
detail since I intend to write a book about it.
Notes
1 Alexander Pogodin, Yazyk, kak tvorchestvo
[Language as Art) (Kharkov, 1913), p. 42. [The original sentence was in French,
"Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles," with the appropriate
initials.]
2 Leo Jakubinsky, Sborniki, 1 (1916).
3 Leo Tolstoy's Diary, entry dated February
29, 1897. [The date is transcribed incorrectly; it should read March 1, 1897.]
4 Viktor Shklovsky, Voskresheniye slova
[The Resurrection of the Word] (Petersburg, 1914).
Dante, Purgatorio, 24:56. Dante refers to
the new lyric style of his contemporaries.[Trans.]
6 Alexy Remizov (1877-1957) is best known as
a novelist and satirist; Nicholas Klyuyev (1885~1937) and Sergey Essenin
(1895-1925) were "peasant poets." All three were noted for their
faithful reproduction of Russian dialects and colloquial language.[Trans.]
7 A group noted for its opulent and sensuous
verse style. [Trans.)
8 Nicholas Leskov (1831-95), novelist and
short story writer, helped popularize the skaz, or yarn, and hence, because of
the part dialect peculiarities play in the skaz, also altered Russian literary
language. [Trans.]
9 Shklovsky is probably referring to his
Razvyortyvaniye syuzheta [Plot Development](Petrograd, 1921). [Trans.]
10 Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
[(Humboldt Library, Vol. XXXIV; New York, 1882), p. 169. The Russian text is
slightly shortened from the original].
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