Victor Shklovsky and his 'making strange'

Victor Borisovich Shklovsky and his Technique of ‘Making Strange’

-A.Charumati Ramdas

The Russian formalism finds its origin in the emergence of two groups of scholars – the Moscow Linguistic Circle (which was founded by a group of students of Moscow University in 1915) and OPOYAZ (Society for the study of Poetic Language) in 1916. These two centres of formalist movement were at first simply small discussion groups, where young philologists exchanged ideas on fundamental problems of literary theory in an atmosphere free from official restrictions.

The driving force behind the Moscow Linguistic Circle was Roman Jakobson. His book “Modern Russian Poetry” (1921) contains the early Formalist notion of poetry and literary studies. While the Moscow Linguistic Circle represented the linguists’ collective venture into poetics, their counterparts in Petersburg, ‘Opoyaz’, attempted to solve the basic problems of their discipline by making use of modern linguistics. ‘Opoyaz’ was a sort of coalition of two distinct groups : the professional students of language, such as Lev Jakubinsky and E.D. Polivanov, and literary theorists like Victor Shklovsky, Boris Ejxenbaum and S.I. Bernstein.

The Opoyaz Studies in the “Theory of Poetic Language”, along with Roman Jakobson’s “Modern Russian Poetry” represent a comprehensive statement of the early Formalist position. Formalists believed that the literary scholar should address himself to the actual works of imaginative literature rather that to the external circumstances (social, religious, philosophical, political etc.) in which the literature was produced. Victor Shklovsky even said that ‘Art was always free from life and its colour never reflected the colours of the flag that waved over the fortress of the city.’ Roman Jakobson complains in the same tone : ‘Why should a poet have more responsibility for a conflict of ideas than for a battle with swords or pistols?’ According to Roman Jakobson ideas in literature are like colours on a canvas, means towards an end. The usual confusion of life and art, he says, turns us “into a medieval audience which wants to beat up the actor who played Judas.” “The subject of literary scholarship”, says Jakobson, “is not literature in its totality, but literariness, i.e. what makes a work literary.”

Jakobson (1876 – 1982) left Russia in 1920 and his pamphlet “Noveishaya Russkaya Poeziya” (Modern Russian Poetry, 1921) was published in Prague and the little treatise ‘O Cheshskom stikhe’ (Czech Versification, 1923) which proved important for comparative metrics was published in Berlin. Most of his later writings were in Czech, French and German. He is widely known in the West, but his contemporary Victor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893 – 1984), who did not migrate during the turbulent post-Revolution years is comparatively less known outside the Soviet Union. Jakobson in advancing his theory of communication was primarily concerned with an analysis of the formal features which can be isolated in a “speech event”, literary as well as non-literary; for Shklovsky, however, the unique nature of literary language was self-evident, hence his analysis of the devices employed in a text that make it literary.       

In this paper, an attempt is being made to discuss Shklovsky’s technique of ‘Making Strange’ and its application. First, a little information about Shklovsky. Victor Borisovich Shklovsky – literary scholar, essayist and novelist – was born into the family of a mathematics teacher. He studied philology at the university of Petersburg. In 1916, he co-founded the ‘Opoyaz’ which, as is seen earlier, developed into a Formalist movement. In 1920 and 1921 he taught creative writing at the Institute of Art History in Petersburg. In his capacity as a specialist in literary craft, he was informally associated with the Serapion Brothers and with the Futurist poets of the LEF group. The years 1922 and 1923 Shklovsky spent in Berlin where he published his two most successful novels: “Zoo or Letters about love” (1923) and “A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922.”

In the late 1920’s Shklovsky dissociated himself from the formalist movement to the point of recanting his former views in ‘Literaturnaya Gazeta’ in 1930. In post-Stalinist era, however, he returned to these views in a series of articles, and books. He obviously followed the approved path of scholarship during the years of repression and worked creatively in the period of ‘The Thaw.’

Shklovsky’s most important work is ‘On the Theory of Prose’ (1925). In this book Shklovsky puts forward his theories on literature and analyses them on the basis of individual works of different well known authors. His literary ideas are grounded in the belief that presentation of ‘real life’ in literature is not accomplished through the so-called content but through form. The formal aspect of literary work consists of such devices such as zatrudneniye ‘defacilitation, ostraneniye ‘defamiliarisation’ or ‘making strange’, zamedleniye ‘retardation’, parallelism, contrast and many others. In the opening essay of the collection ‘On the Theory of Prose’ Shklovsky declared that all works of art are merely sum totals of the devices used in them. Subsequent essays examined the ‘stringing together’ of literary devices in novels and stories.

The first essay, ‘Art as Technique’, begins with refuting Alexander Potebnya’s views that ‘Art is thinking in images…without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry…Poetry as well as prose, is mainly a well-known way of thinking and knowing.” Shklovsky thinks that the definition “Art is thinking in images” – which implies that art creates symbols – has survived the downfall of the theories of symbolism, on which it was based. Many who still share Potebnya’s views should have believed that the history of this ‘imagery art’ is nothing but the history of changes in images. But it seems that the images are stationary. They are conveyed from century to century, from nation to nation, from poet to poet, without the slightest change. Images are ‘no one’s’, they are ‘God’s’. The more one understand an era, the more convinced one is that the images, considered to be created by a particular poet and used by him, were taken almost unchanged from another poet. In fact, the whole work of poetic schools leads to accumulating and revealing the new techniques and developing the literary material, specially the images, rather than creating them. The images are already given and in poetry there is more of their recollection, than creation.

Shklovsky thinks that there exist two types of images: image as a practical means of thinking, a means of placing objects in categories; and the poetic image, which serves as a means of creating a powerful impact. He explains this by giving a small example: “I walk along a street and see that a person in hat, going ahead of me, has dropped his packet. I shout: “Hey, hat, you dropped your packet!” This is an example of an image – a clearly prosaic trope. Another example: “A a few people are standing in a queue. The supervisor, having noticed that one of them stands badly (not in order) – (not like a man) tells him: Hey, hat (colloquial for clod, duffer), how are you standing!” The image here is a poetic trope (In the first example ‘hat’ is metonymic, while in the second it is metaphor).

Poetic image, according to Shklovsky, is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a technique, it is equivalent, in function, to other poetic techniques such as simple and negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, symmetry, hyperbole etc.; prose imagery, on the other hand, is a means of abstraction.

Shklovsky approaches the idea of defamiliarisation or making strange through the Law of economy of creative effort. He considers the expression of maximum ideas in minimum words as the merit of the style. The laws of expenditure and economy are different both for prose and poetry. He argues that an examination of laws of perception shows that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of unconsciously-automatic; this will be borne out if one remembers the feeling one had while holding the pen for the first time or speaking the first words of a foreign language and compares that feeling at performing the action for the ten-thousandth time. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech people leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. This process is ideally represented in Algebra, where objects are expressed by symbols. In rapid speech words are not pronounced completely, their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence ‘The Swiss mountains are beautuful’ in the form of a series of letters: T S m,a,b.’

This quality of thinking not only suggests the method of Algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially the initial ones). By this algebraic method of thinking objects are apprehended only as shapes with imprecise extensions; they are not seen in their entirety but recognized rather by their main characteristics. They seem to be enveloped in a sack. One knows what the object is by its configuration, but hardly sees its silhouette. The object perceived in this manner fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why a prose word is not often heard clearly and, hence (along with other slips of the tongue) not pronounced properly. The process of ‘algebraisation’, or the over automation of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. The objects are assigned only one proper feature – a number, for example – or else they function by formula and do not even appear in cognition.              

Here, to elaborate the idea further, Shklovsky quotes an example from the diary of L.N.Tolstoy:

“I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether I had dusted it or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was impossible to remember. If I had dusted it and forgot – i.e., had acted unconsciously, then it was as good as not having done it. If some conscious person had been watching, the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking unconsciously, then their existence has no meaning.”

And thus life is reckoned as nothing. Automatisation gobbles up objects, dress, furniture, wife and the fear of war.

And in order to restore the sensation of life, to make one feel  objects, to make stone stony, exists art. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are seen and not as they are known. The technique implied puts stress on making object ‘strange’, ‘unfamiliar’ and to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aim in itself and it should be prolonged as much as possible: “art is a way of experiencing the process of creation of objects, finished product is not important in art.”

After an object is seen several times, one begins to recognize it. The object is in front of the person and he knows about it, but does not seem to see it. Hence nothing significant can be said about it. Shklovsky stresses that Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. He illustrates the technique of ‘making strange’ used often by Leo Tolastoy, who presents things as if he himself saw them, in their entirety, and did not alter them.

“Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes the object as if he is seeing it for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. Tolstoy uses this technique of defamiliarisation or making strange (kholstomer), the narrator appears to be a horse, and the objects are defamiliarised not in our perception, but in the horse’s. Here is how the horse understands the institution of private property (vol. III, 1886, 547).

 I understand well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But I was then completely in the dark about the meaning of words ‘his own’, ‘his colt’. From these phrases I saw that people suggested some sort of connection between me and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand that 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 strong impression on me. I thought about them constantly, and only after the most diverse experience with people did I understand, finally what they meant. They meant like this: In life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It’s not so much that they love the possibility of speaking with 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 have agreed to among themselves, the one they consider 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 gain, 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 in 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’. ‘my dry goods shop’, for instance, and does not even wear clothes made from the better cloth he keeps in his 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 objects 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 hid 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 of defamiliarisation though the reason for its use exists no more.

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 will mean extracting considerable part of the four-volume novel. But Tolstoy uses the same method in describing the drawing room and the theatre:

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 floor boards. Maidens in red blouses 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 the 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 on the hand of the girl, in white dress. They finished their song together and everyone in the theatre 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 there were pictures representing monuments and openings in the linen cloth representing the moonlight, and they raised lamp shades on a frame. As the musicians started to play the bass horn and counter bass, a large number of people in black mantles poured onto the stage from right and left. The people, with something like daggers in their hands, stared 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 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.

In ‘Resurrection’ Tolstoy describes the city and the court in the same way. He uses similar technique in ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ when he describes a marriage. Anyone who knows Tolstoy can find several hundred such passages in his works.

Shklovsky feels that ‘defamiliarisation’ or ‘making strange’ is found everywhere where there is an image. Purpose of the image is not to make us perceive its meaning, but to create a special perception of the object – to create a vision of the object rather than its understanding. He not only tries to locate this technique in the works of other authors, but applies it to his own works as well. Shklovsky’s biographies and novels are attempts to put into practice the principles to which he adhered as critic. Most striking example of this is his novel in letters “Zoo or Letters not about love” – a collection of thirty letters exchanged between an autobiographical character (probably Shklovsky himself) and one Alya (Elsa Triolet). It offers virtually no plot but provides fragmentary insights into the moods and thoughts of the author. A lot can be read between the lines, which throws light on the contemporary socio-political atmosphere of Revolutionary Russia. The author is in love with Alya, who has no time for him and who prohibits him to write about love. So the letters speak about nature, legends, contemporary literary figures, the aspiration towards freedom of expression, about Berlin, about old friends, floods etc. Nowhere can one find a single line wherein the author expresses his love for Alya. He prefers short paragraphs, sometimes consisting of only one sentence, amply uses asides and shifts of subject matter. On the whole these letters can be formed as practical application of Shklovsky’s principle of ‘defamiliarisation’, ‘defacilitation, and ‘retardation’. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all the three of his principles and to quote examples showing their application. We will confine ourselves here to one of the techniques, that of ‘defamiliarisation’ or ‘making strange’ and quote a few examples from “Zoo or Letters not about love” to show how Shklovsky himself uses the technique.

Letter No. 22, which consists of three parts, stresses that women in the night clubs of Berlin can hold a fork:

Strange are the night clubs in Berlin. I found myself in Nachtlokal.

Room is ordinary, there are photographs on the wall.

It smells of kitchen. Piano is drowning all other sounds. Violinist is scraping a strange violin with engraved soundboards. The public is calmly drunk. A nude woman, wearing only black stockings comes out and dances, throwing her hands out in a haphazard manner; then comes out another without stockings.

I didn’t know who else is sitting in the room. Violinist goes around the tables, collects money. He approaches a gloomy drunkard sitting in a corner. That one tells him something.

Violinist takes his bosomless violin and a thin ‘God save the king’ hangs over in the air. It’s a long time since I have heard that hymn.

The woman danced out, put on a quite pretty dress and sits at the neighbouring table, eats something.

‘Look, she can hold the fork,’ told me Bogatyriev. The art of eating was a fashionable thing for us.

We left for home. In the lounge same woman gives us back our overcoats. While showing her the token I threw a glance at her. It was the same woman, who had danced in the stockings. Everything here seems to be going on in a harmonious fashion. ..There is probably no debauchery. There are people with and without words. People with words don’t go away, and believe me, I spent my life quite happily.

You can’t get anything from the bottom with words.

Many examples can be quoted from the novel, but that will make the paper unwieldy. But the interesting point may be that by analyzing his own narrative devices Shklovsky formulated his notion of ‘making strange’ and then, as a literary theorist, he discovered that such a technique is omnipresent in literary texts, especially in those of Tolstoy. It could well be that in his engagement as a formalist critic with the works of creative writers, he learnt the technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ and then applied it to his own practice. In either case, there is a remarkable integrity between Shklovsky the creative writer and Shklovsky the literary theorist.

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