Address the following prompts
In the short stories, you are going to encounter protagonists attempting to reconnect and remember (as in “putting together again”) their Caribbean “home” spaces. How have their perceptions of their Caribbean homelands been shaped by their parents? What new perceptions do they gain and how does this transform their view of themselves and their history?
Victor Shklovsky argues that ostranenie (“making strange” in Russian, and also translated as estrangement/defamiliarization) is the essence of literature. Where in the two stories do we encounter descriptions of estranged perception? Analyze the significance of these moments in the stories. Be sure to consult and cite Shkovsky’s essay (especially his definition of ostranenie on page 80) to support your analysis.
For our annotation assignment, we learned how to notice patterns and overlooked meanings that helped us understand “Sonny’s Blues” more fully. In “The Pain Tree” and “Her Mother’s House” what patterns, connections or implied meanings did you notice structuring the stories?
The Pain Tree
OLIVE SENIOR
The person who had taken care of me as a child was a woman named Larissa.
She no longer worked for my family. And yet the moment I’d arrived home, I had
had this vision of Larissa instead of my mother standing there by the front steps
waiting to greet me with a gift in her hand. It startled me, it seemed so real, for it
was many years since I’d even thought of her. But suddenly I was a child again, so
palpable was her presence. It made me feel sad and I didn’t know why, for what I’d
remembered were the good times we’d had together. I felt cheated of the gift she
hadn’t delivered, though I knew this to be absurd. Larissa was a poor woman, with
nothing to give.
My mother loved to say I was coming home to possess my inheritance. She
wrote it like that in her letters.
She also told people I’d chosen to study archaeology because I’d been born
in a house with 17th century foundations.
Yes, I would say to myself, built of the finest cut-stone, the mortar hard as
iron because it was sweetened with molasses and slave blood.
My mother would have been extremely mortified if she’d heard me say that
aloud. For us, the past was a condensed version.
I didn’t want to possess anything.
When my parents sent me away to boarding school in England at the age of
ten, I had happily gone. I’d managed to stay away for fifteen years but coming
home now seemed the right thing since my father died and my mother was left
alone. Duty was something new to me. But I was their only child. I had never given
much thought to the life I was born into.
………..
For the first few weeks after my return I dutifully fell into whatever my
mother had planned for me, trying to get my bearings, but I had no real sense of
connecting with anyone or anything, life here seemed so untouched by the changes
in the world. My mother kept talking of what a grand opportunity I had for
building up the estate to the grandeur it once had, but all I could think of was how
165
much there was I had to break down. I was already feeling suffocated, only now
realising how often in my childhood I had escaped to Larissa.
“Is anyone living in Larissa’s old room?” I asked my mother at breakfast one
day.
“Of course not, dear. None of these girls want live-in jobs anymore. They’re
all day-workers. Just wait till this country gets the so-called Independence they’re
all clamoring for. Then there’ll be nobody to work for us at all.”
She said this with such petulance that I almost laughed. I looked hard at her,
at her impeccably made-up face, even at breakfast, her polished nails and her hair.
‘Well preserved’ is the way one would have described her. I thought irreverently
that that is perhaps why I had studied archaeology. My mother the well preserved.
Carefully layered. The way she had always looked. The way she would look in her
grave. I saw nothing of myself in her, in this house, in this life. But then, I saw
nothing of myself anywhere.
……….
One day, I left the house and walked down the slope to the old slave
barracks hidden behind the trees.
In my childhood, the barracks were used for storage, except for a few rooms
that housed the people who worked in the Great House. As I neared, I could see the
buildings were abandoned, maidenhair fern and wild fig sprouting from every
crack, the roof beginning to cave in.
I had no difficulty identifying Larissa’s from that long line of doors and
though I threw open the window as soon as I entered the room, the light that
streamed in barely penetrated the dust and cobweb. I went outside and broke off a
tree branch and used it to brush some away.
The old iron bed was still there, without a mattress, the wash-stand, the small
table and battered wooden chair. I sat on the chair, as I often did as a child, and
looked keenly at the walls which were completely covered with pages and pictures
cut out of newspapers and magazines and pasted down, all now faded and peeling.
This is a part of me, I thought with surprise, for I recognised many of the pictures
as those I had helped Larissa to cut out. I got the feeling nothing new had been
added since I left.
I used to help Larissa make the paste from cassava starch but the job of
sticking the pictures to the wall was hers alone. I brought the newspapers and
magazines my parents were done with, and we looked at the pictures together and
166
argued. I liked scenes of faroff lands and old buildings best while her favourites
were the Holy Family, the British Royal Family and beautiful clothes. But as time
went on, headlines, scenes, whole pages about the war in Europe had taken over.
Larissa now wanted me to read all the news to her before she fell to with scissors
and paste. With the rapidly changing events, even Jesus got pasted over.
The newspaper pages had looked so fresh when we put them up, the ink so
black and startling, the headlines imposing on the room names and images that
were heavy and ponderous like tolling bells: Dun-kirk, Stalin-grad, Roose-velt,
Church-ill. And the most important one, the one facing Larissa’s bed with the
caption above it saying: “The Contingent Embarking”. Larissa and I had spent
countless hours searching that picture in vain, trying to find among the hundreds of
young men on the deck of the ship, to decipher from the black dots composing the
picture, the faces of her two sons.
And it was I, then about eight years old, who had signed for and brought the
telegram to Larissa.
The moment she saw what was in my hand she said,
“Wait, make me sit down,” even though she was already sitting on the steps
outside the barracks.
She got up and slowly walked into her room, took off her apron, straightened
her cap, sat on the bed and smoothed down her dress, her back straight. I stood in
the doorway and read the message. Her youngest son was on a ship that went
down. I remember being struck by the phrase, “All hands”.
I never met Larissa’s sons for they were raised by her mother someplace
else but she talked of them constantly, especially the youngest whose name was
Zebedee. When the war came, both Moses and Zebedee like ten thousand other
young men, had rushed off to join the Contingents. So far as I know, Moses was
never heard of again, even after the war ended.
I can still see myself reading to Larissa about the loss of Zebedee Breeze.
“All hands. All hands,” kept echoing in my head.
Larissa didn’t cry. She sat there staring silently at the pictures which covered
the walls to a significant depth, for the layers represented not just the many years of
her own occupancy, but those of the nameless other women who had passed
through that room.
167
I went to sit very close beside her on the bed and she put her arm around me
and we sat like that for a long time. I wanted to speak but my mouth felt very dry
and I could hardly get the words out.
“He, Zebedee, was a hero,” was all I could think of saying.
Larissa hugged me tightly with both hands then pulled away and resumed
staring at the wall. She did it with such intensity, it was as if she expected all the
images to fly together and coalesce, finally, into one grand design, to signify
something meaningful.
“Zebedee Breeze”, I said to myself, over and over, and his name was like a
light wind passing. How could he have drowned?
After a while Larissa got up and washed her face, straightened her clothes,
and walked with me back to the house to resume her duties. My parents must have
spoken to her, but she took no time off. I never saw her cry that day or any other.
She never mentioned her sons.
And something comes to me now that would never have occurred to me
then: how when the son of one of my parents’ friends had died, his mother had
been treated so tenderly by everyone, the drama of his illness and death freely
shared, the funeral a community event. That mother had worn full black for a year
to underline her grief and cried often into her white lace handkerchief which made
us all want to cry with her.
Women like Larissa pulled far from their homes and families by the promise
of work were not expected to grieve; their sorrow, like their true selves, remaining
muted and hidden. Alone in countless little rooms like the one in which I was
sitting, they had papered over the layers, smoothed down the edges, till the flat and
unreflective surface mirrored the selves they showed to us, the people who
employed them.
Was that why we had come to believe that people like Larissa, people who
were not us, had no feelings?
I was suddenly flooded with the shame of a memory that I had long hidden
from myself. When I was going off to England, I had left without saying goodbye
to Larissa, closest companion of my first ten years!
I can see it now. Me the child with boundless energy, raring to go. Larissa
calmly grooming me, re-tying my ribbons, straightening my socks, spinning me
around to check that my slip didn’t show. Was it just my imagination that she was
doing it more slowly than usual? The trunks and suitcases were stowed. My
168
parents were already seated in the car. I was about to get in when Larissa suddenly
said,
“Wait! I forget. I have something for you.” And she rushed off.
I stood there for a moment or two. No one was hurrying me. But with a
child’s impatience, I couldn’t wait. I got into the car and the driver shut the door.
“Tell Larissa bye,” I shouted out the window to no one in particular.
“Wait! she coming,” one of the workers called out, for quite a group had
gathered to see us off. But the driver had put the car in gear and we were moving. I
didn’t even look back.
I had planned to write to Larissa but had never done so. For a few years I
sent her my love via letters to my mother and received hers in return, then even that
trickled away. I had never for one moment wondered what it was she had wanted
to give me and turned back for. I had completely forgotten about it, until now.
I felt shame, not just for the way I had treated Larissa, but for a whole way of
life I had inherited. People who mattered, we believed, resided in the Great House.
It was we who made History, a series of events unfolding with each generation.
And yet, I realised now, it was in this room, Larissa’s, that I had first learnt
that history is not dates or abstraction but a space where memory becomes layered
and textured. What is real is what you carry around inside of you.
This thought came unbidden: that only those who are born rich can afford
the luxury of not wanting to own anything. We can try it on as a way of avoiding
complicity. But in my heart of hearts I know: my inheritance already possesses me.
What Larissa wanted more than anything was the one thing a poor woman
could never afford: beautiful clothes.
Sometimes when she and I had come to paste new pictures on the wall, we
went a little bit crazy and ripped at torn edges with glee, digging deep down into
the layers and pulling up old pages that had stuck together, revealing earlier times
and treasures.
“Look Larissa,” I would cry, and read aloud:
‘Full white underskirts with 19 inch flounce carrying three insertions of Real
Linen Torchon lace three inches wide.’ Three inches, Larissa! ‘Edging at foot to
match. Only ten shillings and sixpence’ .”
“Oh Lord,” Larissa would say and clap her hands, “just the thing for me!”
169
After our laughter subsided, Larissa would carefully lay down her new
pictures to cover over what we had ripped up. She did it slowly and carefully but
sometimes her hands would pause, as if her thoughts were already travelling.
……….
Meeting the past like this in Larissa’s room, I began to feel almost faint: as if
the walls were crawling in towards me, the layers of fractured images thickening,
shrinking the space, absorbing the light coming through the window and from the
open door until I felt I was inside a tomb surrounded by hieroglyphics: images of
war and the crucified Christ, princesses and movie stars, cowboys and
curly-haired children, pampered cats and dogs, lions and zebras in zoos,
long-haired girls strutting the latest fashions, ads for beauty creams, toothpaste and
motor cars. Images of people who were never like the people who had occupied
this room.
What had these pictures meant to them, the women who had lived here?
What were they like, really, these women who were such close witnesses to our
lives? Women who were here one day then going – , gone – , like Larissa. Leaving
no forwarding address because we had never asked them for any.
……….
Larissa’s room with its silent layers of sorrow so humbly borne suffocated
me. I had this urge to strip the walls, tear the layers apart. I felt such rage, I rose
and put both hands against the wall facing me and I pushed, wanting to send it
tumbling, all of it. Such rage that my hands battered at the walls. War! I couldn’t
stop, couldn’t stop my fingers digging into the layers of paper, gouging and
ripping. This is where these women buried their rage. Here! I sent huge sheets
flying. Here! Half a wall of paper down in one big clump. Over there! Digging
down now, struggling with layers of centuries, almost falling over as the big pieces
came away in my hands. I couldn’t stop scratching at the fragments left behind,
wanting to destroy it all, till my nails were broken to the quick and bleeding.
……….
I came to my senses in that dust-laden room sobbing loudly and holding
clumps of rotting old paper in my hand, fragments flying about, clinging to my hair
and clothing, sticking to my nose, my mouth, clogging my throat. I coughed and
sneezed and spun around shaking my hair like a mad dog, setting the fragments
spinning too, joining the dust motes floating in the sunlight streaming in.
What a mess I was!
170
Ashamed, I finally summoned up the nerve to look at my handiwork. There
were places that could never be stripped, the layers so old they were forever
bonded to the walls, in some parts I had managed to strip the walls down to reveal
the dark ugly stains from centuries of glue and printers ink and whatever else can
stain. The walls were an abstract collage now: no single recognisable image was
left. Without meaning to, I had erased the previous occupants.
I felt sick at my behaviour, as if I had committed a desecration. Larissa’s
room. I had no right.
But the longer I sat in the room the more I realised it was giving off no
disturbing emanations. What I had done had neither added to nor diminished it.
The rage had not been the women’s but mine. In the wider scheme of things, it was
a gesture without meaning. The women like Larissa would always be one step
ahead, rooms like this serving only as temporary refuge. They knew from the
history of their mothers and their mothers before them, they would always move
on. To other rooms elsewhere. To raise for a while children not their own who –
like their own – would repay them with indifference or ingratitude – or death.
I thought I was taking possession, but the room had already been
condemned.
I got up and leaned out the window and was surprised at how fresh and clean
the air felt. I offered up my face, my hair, my arms to the wind that was lightly
blowing and I closed my eyes so it would wash away the last fragments of paper
and cobweb. O Zebedee Breeze! The name of Larissa’s son had seemed so
magical to me as a child I had often whispered it to myself, and as I whispered it
now, it conjured up the long-forgotten image of Larissa and the Pain Tree.
……….
A few days after I had brought the news of Zebedee’s death to Larissa, I saw
her walking back and forth in the yard, searching the ground for something.
Finally, she bent and picked up what I discovered afterwards was a nail. Then she
took up a stone and walked a little way into the bushes. I was so curious, I followed
her, but something told me not to reveal myself.
She stopped when she reached the cedar tree and I watched as she stood for a
good while with her head bent close to the tree and her lips moving as if she were
praying. Then she pounded the trunk of the tree with the stone, threw the stone
down, and strode off without looking back. When I went and examined the tree, I
saw that she had hammered in a nail. But I was even more astonished when I
noticed there were many nails hammered right into the trunk.
171
At first, I sensed that this was something so private I should keep quiet about
it. But I couldn’t help it, one day I did ask Larissa why she had put the nail into the
tree.
“Don’t is the Pain Tree?” she asked in a surprised voice, as if that was
something everyone knew.
“What do you mean by Pain Tree?”
“Eh, where you come from, girl?” Larissa exclaimed. “Don’t is the tree you
give your pain to?”
I must have looked puzzled still for she took the trouble to explain. “Let us
say, Lorraine, I feel a heavy burden, too heavy for me to bear, if I give the nail to
the tree and ask it to take my burden from me, is so it go. Then I get relief.”
“So you one put all those nails in the tree?” I asked, for I could not imagine
one person having so much pain.
She looked embarassed then she said, “Not all of them. I find some when I
come here. That’s how I know is a Pain Tree.”
“You mean, other people do this?”
“Of course”, she said. “Plenty people do it.” Then she paused and said
almost to herself, “What else to do”?
After that, whenever I remembered, I would go and look at the tree but I
never detected any new nails. Perhaps if I had been older and wiser I would have
interpreted this differently, but at the time I took it to mean that Larissa felt no
more pain.
Once or twice when I was particularly unhappy, I had myself gone to the tree
to try and drive a nail in. But I did so without conviction and the magic didn’t work
for me, the nails bent and never went in properly and I ended up throwing both nail
and stone away in disgust.
“Maybe people like you don’t need the Pain Tree,” Larissa had said after my
second or third try.
It was the only time I ever felt uncomfortable with her.
……….
Leaving Larissa’s room, I deliberately left the door and window wide open
for the breeze to blow through and I went outside and stood on the steps of the
barracks to get my bearings, for the landscape had vastly changed. Then I literally
172
waded into the bushes, looking for a cedar. I had decided to try and find the Pain
Tree.
It took me a while and at first I couldn’t believe I had found the right tree for
what had been a sapling was now of massive growth, its trunk straight and tall, its
canopy high in the air.
I didn’t expect to see any nail marks, for the place where they had been
pounded in was now way above the ground, but I knew they were there and I kept
walking around the tree and looking up until finally with the sun striking at the
right angle – and, yes, it might have been my imagination – I caught a glint of
something metallic and what looked like pockmarks high up on the trunk.
Standing there, gazing upwards, it came to me why Larissa and all those
women had kept on giving the tree their pain, like prayers. Because they knew no
matter what else happened in their lives, the tree would keep on bearing them up,
higher and higher, year after year.
I had the uncomfortable feeling that I should be grieving not for them, but
for myself. People like me would always inherit the land, but they were the ones
who already possessed the Earth.
……….
Before I went back to the house, I spent a long time searching the ground for
a nail and when I found one, I picked up a stone and I went and stood close to the
tree and whispered to it and then I carefully positioned the nail and pounded it
with the stone, and it went straight in.
173
Viktor Shklovsky A Reader
Edited and Translated by Alexandra Berlina
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Introductory material, compilation, and notes © Alexandra Berlina, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shklovskiæi, Viktor, 1893-1984, author. | Berlina, Alexandra,
translator, editor. Title: Viktor Shklovsky : a reader / edited and translated by Alexandra
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Art as Device (1917/1919) 1
“Art is thinking in images.” You can hear his phrase from a schoolboy, and it also the starting point for a philologist beginning to construct a literary theory. !is idea has been planted into many minds; Potebnya must be considered one of its creators. “Without images, art—including poetry—is impossible” (Potebnya, Iz zapisok … 83), he writes; and elsewhere: “Poetry, like prose, is “rst and foremost a certain way of thinking and understanding” (ibid. 97).
Poetry is a particular method of thinking, namely, thinking in images; this method creates a certain economy of intellectual energy, “the sensation of relatively easy processing,” with the aesthetic sense being a re#ex of this economy. !is is how the Academy member Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky sums it up, and he must be right in his summary—a$er all, he has certainly read his mentor’s books with attention. Potebnya and his numerous followers consider poetry to be a special kind of thinking, namely, thinking in images; they believe that imagery is intended to bring together heterogonous acts and objects, explaining the unknown via the known. Or else, to quote Potebnya: “!e image relates to the object of explanation as follows: a) the image is a constant predicate of variable subjects, a constant
1 Source: “Iskusstvo kak priem” in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka III. Tipogra”ya Sokolinskogo, 1919.
74 Viktor Shklovsky
means of attracting2 variable objects of apperception …; b) the image is much simpler and clearer than the object of explanation” (ibid. 314), i.e. “the goal of imagery is to bring the meaning of the image closer to our understanding, without which imagery would have no sense; therefore, the image must be better known to us than the object of explanation” (ibid. 291).
One might wonder how this law applies when Tyutchev compares summer lightning to deaf-mute demons, or when Gogol likens the sky to God’s chasuble.
“No art is possible without an image.” “Art is thinking in images.” Monstrous twists have been made in the name of these de”nitions; people have attempted to analyze music, architecture, lyrical poetry as “thinking in images.” A$er wasting his energy for a quarter of a century, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky was “nally forced to single out lyric poetry, architecture, and music as special, imageless art forms, to de”ne them as lyric arts that immediately appeal to emotion. !us, an enormous sphere of art turned out not to be a method of thinking; one of the arts constituting this sphere, lyric poetry, is nevertheless very similar to “image-bearing” art: it uses words in the same way; most importantly, image-bearing art #ows into imageless art quite imperceptibly, and we experience the two in similar ways.
Still, the de”nition “art is thinking in images”—and therefore (I’m leaving out the intermediate links of well-known equations), “art is, above all, the creator of symbols”—persists, surviving the collapse of the theory on which it was based. Most of all, it’s alive in the symbolist movement. Particularly in the work of its theoreticians.
!us, many people still believe that thinking in images—“ways and shadows,” “furrows and boundaries”—is the main characteristic of
2 !e rare term attraktsia usually denotes the absence of grammatical connections between neighboring words; in this case, the missing connections seem to be semantic.
Art as Device (1917/1919) 75
poetry.3 !ey should have expected the history of this image-bound art to be a history of changing imagery. But images turn out to be almost immobile; they #ow, unchanging, from century to century, from country to country, from poet to poet. Images belong to “nobody,” to “God.” !e better you comprehend an epoch, the better can you see that the images you believed to be created by a particular poet are actually borrowed from others and almost unchanged. !e work done by schools of poetry consists in accumulating verbal material and “nding new ways of arranging and handling it; it’s much more about rearranging images than about creating them. Images are a given, and poetry is not so much thinking in images as remembering them.
In any case, thinking in images is not what unites all arts or even all literature; images are not the thing whose change drives poetry.
*
We know that expressions not created for artistic contemplation are o$en nevertheless experienced as poetic; compare Annensky’s belief in the poetic qualities of Slavonic or Andrey Bely’s admiration for the way Russian eighteenth-century poets place adjectives a$er nouns. Bely admires this as art, or rather as intentional art, though in reality it is merely a particularity of language (the in#uence of Church Slavonic). !erefore, a thing can be 1) created as prosaic and experienced as poetic; 2) created as poetic and experienced as prosaic. !is suggests that a given work depends in its artistry—in whether or not this work is poetry—on our perception. In the narrow sense, we shall designate as “works of art” only such works which have been created by special devices intended to have them perceived as artistic.
3 Allusions to symbolist writing: Furrows and Boundaries (1916) is a book of essays by Vyacheslav Ivanov; “ways and shadows” have been identi”ed (Galushkin, “Footnotes” 490) as an ironic montage of Valery Bryusov’s collections Ways and Crossroads (1908) and !e Mirror of Shadows (1912).
76 Viktor Shklovsky
Potebnya’s conclusion, which can be put as “poetry = imagery,” has given rise to the whole theory of “imagery = symbolism,” of the image as the invariable predicate of various subjects (this conclusion forms the basis of the theory of Symbolism; leading Symbolists—Andrey Bely and Merezhkovsky with his “eternal companions”—fell in love with it because of its similarity to their own ideas). !is conclusion partly stems from the fact that Potebnya made no distinction between the language of poetry and the language of prose. !is is why he failed to notice that two kinds of images exist: the image as a practical means of thinking, as a means of grouping objects—and the poetic image, as a means of intensifying an impression. Let me clarify with an example. Walking down the street, I see a man wearing an old crumpled hat drop his bag. I call him back: “You, old hat, you’ve dropped your bag!” !is is an example of a purely prosaic trope. Another example. “!is joke is old hat, I heard it ages ago.”4 !is image is a poetic trope. (In one case, the word “hat” was used metonymically, in the other, metaphorically. But this is not what I want to point out here.) !e poetic image is a way to create the strongest possible impression. It is a device that has the same task as other poetic devices, such as ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, symmetry, hyperbole; it is equal to that which is commonly designated as rhetorical “gures, equal to all these methods of increasing the impact of a thing (words and
4 To recreate the pun, the translation had to stray away from the original, which uses the double meaning of shlyapa—“hat” and “clumsy person.” !e use of metonymy, such as “[you] hat” or “[you] glasses,” as a somewhat rude form of addressing strangers is more usual in Russian than in English. !e fact that Shklovsky uses a dead metaphor as an example of a poetic image is problematic, as is the citing of clichéd sexual euphemisms as examples of ostranenie later in the essay. At other points, however, Shklovsky shows awareness of the fact that the e%ect of ostranenie can easily evaporate.
Art as Device (1917/1919) 77
even sounds of the text itself are things, too). But the poetic image bears only super”cial resemblance to images as fables, to patterns of thought,5 such as a girl calling a sphere “a little watermelon” (Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky 16–17). !e poetic image is a device of poetic language. !e prosaic image is a device of abstraction: a watermelon instead of a round lamp shade, or a watermelon instead of a head, merely abstracts a particular quality of an object. It’s like saying: head = sphere, watermelon = sphere. !is is thinking, but it has nothing in common with poetry.
*
!e law of the economy of creative e%ort is also generally accepted. Spencer, in his Philosophy of Style, wrote:
As the basis of all rules designating the choice and use of words we “nd one and the same main requirement: economy of attention … . Leading the mind to the intended concept by the easiest route is o$en their only and always their most important goal.6
And R. Avenarius (8):
If the soul possessed inexhaustible strength, then, of course, it would be indi%erent to how much might be spent from this inexhaustible source; only the expended time would play any role. But since its strength is limited, we can expect that the soul seeks
5 Obraz myslei (lit. the image of thought) is the Russian for “thought patterns” or “mentality.” 6 !e translation used by Shklovsky departs from the original in many aspects, for instance, downplaying the fact that Spencer refers to speech as much as to writing: “On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader’s or the hearer’s attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental e%ort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point” (Spencer 7).
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to carry out apperceptive processes as purposefully as possible— that is, with, in relative terms, the least expenditure of energy, or, to put the same thing di%erently, with the greatest result.
With a single reference to the general law of mental economy, Petrazhitsky dismisses James’s theory of the physical basis of a%ect, a theory which happened to be in his way. !e principle of the economy of creative e%ort, a seductive theory—particularly in the study of rhythm—has been a&rmed by Alexander Veselovsky who followed in Spencer’s footsteps: “!e merit of style consists precisely in delivering the greatest amount of thoughts in the fewest words.” Andrey Bely, who in his better works gave numerous examples of challenging, stumbling rhythm and (for instance, in the work of Baratynsky) showed the laboriousness of poetic epithets—even he believes it necessary to speak of the law of the economy in his book, which constitutes a heroic e%ort to create a theory of art based on unveri”ed facts from outdated books, on his vast knowledge of poetic techniques and on Krayevich’s high school physics textbook.
Regarding economy as a law and goal of creation might be right for a particular linguistic case, namely “practical” language, but ignorance of the di%erences between the laws of practical and poetic language led to the idea of economy being applied to the latter. When Japanese poetic language was found to contain sounds never used in practical Japanese, this was one of the “rst, if not the “rst factual indication that these two languages are not identical (Polivanov 38). Yakubinsky’s article (13–21), which states that the law of liquid consonant dissimilation is missing from poetic language and that in poetic language such hard-to-pronounce sound combinations are possible, is one of the “rst scienti”cally sound indications of the opposition (in this case, at least) between poetic language and practical language.
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!erefore, we need to discuss the laws of spending and economy in poetic language based on its own workings, not on prosaic language.
Considering the laws of perception, we see that routine actions become automatic. All our skills retreat into the unconscious- automatic domain; you will agree with this if you remember the feeling you had when holding a quill in your hand for the “rst time or speaking a foreign language for the “rst time, and compare it to the feeling you have when doing it for the ten thousandth time. It is the automatization process which explains the laws of our prosaic speech, its under-structured phrases and its half- pronounced words. !is process is ideally expressed in algebra, which replaces things with symbols. In quick practical speech, words are not spoken fully; only their initial sounds are registered by the mind. Pogodin (42) gives the example of a boy imagining the phrase “Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles” as a series of letters: L, m, d, 1, S, s, b.
!is property of thinking has suggested not only the path of algebra, but even the particular choice of symbols (letters, and especially initial letters). !is algebraic way of thinking takes in things by counting and spatializing them;7 we do not see them but recognize them by their initial features. A thing passes us as if packaged; we know of its existence by the space it takes up, but we only see its surface. Perceived in this way, the thing dries up, “rst in experience, and then its very making su%ers;8 because of this perception, prosaic speech is not fully heard (cf. Yakubinsky’s article), and therefore not fully spoken (this is the reason for slips of the tongue). Algebraizing,
7 !e original berutsia schetom i prostranstvom (lit. “taken by counting and space”) is highly unidiomatic. It appears to mean “we recognize the object by its quantity and position in space” (without really seeing it)—but other readings are possible. 8 !is phrase might appear puzzling to a Russian reader, too; “the making of a thing” seems to refer to artistic creation and perhaps also to artistic perception.
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automatizing a thing, we save the greatest amount of perceptual e%ort: things are either given as a single feature, for instance, a number, or else they follow a formula of sorts without ever reaching consciousness. “I was dusting in the room; having come full circle, I approached the sofa and could not remember if I had dusted it o% or not. I couldn’t because these movements are routine and not conscious, and I felt I never could remember it. So if I had cleaned the sofa but forgotten it, that is if this was really unconscious, it is as if this never happened. If somebody had watched consciously, reconstruction would have been possible. But if nobody watched, if nobody watched consciously, if the whole life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been” (Tolstoy 354; diary entry, February 29, 1897).9
!is is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war.
“If the whole complex life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been.”
And so, what we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make the stone stony. !e goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the “ostranenie” of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is its own end in art and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art.10
9 Actually, March 1. 10 !is sentence (italicized in other publications) seems to be echoing the words of a poet: “Khlebnikov told me that the making matters, and not what has been made; what has been made are but wood shavings” (Shklovsky, Gamburgskiy schet [1990] 469). Khlebnikov was talking about the process of writing; while the completed text might not matter to the
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!e life of a poetic (artistic) text proceeds from seeing to recog- nizing, from poetry to prose, from the concrete to the general, from Don Quixote—a scholar and poor aristocrat, half-consciously su%ering humiliation at a duke’s court—to Turgenev’s generalized and hollow Don Quixote, from Charles the Great to the mere name of “king.”11 Art and its works expand when dying: a fable is more symbolic than a poem, a saying more symbolic than a fable. !is is why Potebnya’s theory is least self-contradictory when discussing the fable, a genre which he was, in his own view, able to analyze in full. His theory did not “t “thingish” artistic texts, and thus Potebnya’s book couldn’t be “nished.12 As we know, Notes on Literary !eory were published in 1905, thirteen years a$er the death of their author. Potebnya himself could only complete the chapter on the fable (Potebnya, Iz lektsii …).
!ings that have been experienced several times begin to be experienced in terms of recognition: a thing is in front of us, we know this, but we do not see it (Shklovsky, Voskresheniye slova). !is is why we cannot say anything about it. Art has di%erent ways of de-automatizing things; in this article I would like to show one of the methods very frequently used by L. Tolstoy—the writer who, in Merezhkovsky’s judgment, presents things the way he sees them, who sees things fully but does not change them.
Tolstoy’s device of ostranenie consists in not calling a thing or event by its name but describing it as if seen for the “rst time, as if
writer, it certainly does to the reader. Alternatively, “what has been made” could refer to the images created by the reader in the process of reading. 11 Shklovsky is referring to the essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (Turgenev); the Russian word for “king” (korol) derives from “Karl.” 12 !e word veshchnyy (“material,” “concrete,” lit. “thingish”) appears as a neologism to most Russian readers. However, Shklovsky probably was familiar with its use by Russian philosophers, above all the existentialist Nikolay Berdyaev. Shklovsky and Berdyaev shared in the tight-knit Russian community in Berlin; Shklovsky has listened to at least one of his lectures (Gul 223).
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happening for the “rst time. While doing so, he also avoids calling parts of this thing by their usual appellations; instead, he names corresponding parts of other things. Here is an example. In the article “Ashamed,” L. Tolstoy enstranges the concept of #ogging: “people who have broken the law are denuded, thrown down on the #oor, and beaten on their behinds with sticks,” and a couple of lines later: “lashed across their bare buttocks.” !ere is a postscript: “And why this particular stupid, barbaric way of in#icting pain, and not some other: pricking the shoulder or some other body part with needles, squeezing arms or legs in a vice, or something else of this sort.”
I apologize for this disturbing example, but it is typical of Tolstoy’s way to reach conscience. !e customary act of #ogging is enstranged both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its essence. Tolstoy used the method of ostranenie constantly: in one case, “Strider”,13 the narrator is a horse, and things are enstranged not by our own perception, but by that of a horse. Here is what the horse made of the institution of property:
What they were saying about #ogging and Christianity, I understood well, but I was quite in the dark about the words “his own,” “his colt,” which made me realize that people saw some kind of connection between me and the equerry. What this connection was, I just couldn’t understand back then. Only much later, separated from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But back then I simply could not understand what it meant when they called me someone’s property. !e words “my horse” described me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words “my land,” “my air,” “my water.”
However, these words had a strong e%ect on me. !inking about this all the time, and only a$er the most diverse experiences with
13 !e short story has also been published in English under its original title, “Kholstomer.”
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people, did I “nally understand what meaning they ascribe to these strange words. !eir meaning is this: in life, people are ruled not by acts but by words. !ey love not so much the possibility of doing or not doing something as the possibility of talking about di%erent things using certain words, on which they agree beforehand. Such are the words “my” and “mine,” which they use to talk about di%erent things, creatures, topics, and even about land, about people, and about horses. !ey agree that only one person may say “mine” about any particular thing. And the one who says “mine” about the greatest number of things, in this game whose rules they’ve made up among themselves, is considered the happiest. Why this should be so, I don’t know, but this is how it is. For a long time, I’ve been trying to explain it to myself in terms of some direct bene”t, but this turned out to be wrong.
For instance, many of those who called me their horse never rode me, while completely di%erent people did. Neither did they feed me, but yet others did. !e ones who were good to me were not those who called me their horse, either, but the coachman, the horse doctor, and people who didn’t know me at all. Later, having widened the scope of my observations, I realized that, not only in relation to us horses, the notion of mine had no basis apart from a low animal instinct people have, which they call property sense or property right. A man says “my house” and never lives in it but only worries about its building and upkeep. A merchant says “my shop,” “my cloth shop,” for instance, and does not have any clothes made from the best cloth in his own shop.
!ere are people who call a piece of land their own, but they have never seen this piece of land and never walked upon it. !ere are people who call other people their own though they have never seen these others, and all they do to these other people is harm
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them. !ere are people who call women their women or their wives, but these women live with other men. And people do not strive to do what they consider good but to call as many things as possible their own. I am convinced now that this is the essential di%erence between people and us. !is alone, not to mention other things in which we are better than people, is reason enough to say that we are higher up in the chain of being: their doings—at least to judge by those I knew—are guided by words, ours by deeds.
Toward the end of the story, the horse is killed, but the narrative method, the device, does not change:
Much later, Serpukhovsky’s body, which had been walking about in the world, eating and drinking, was put into the ground. His skin, his meat and his bones were of no use.
Just as his dead body had been a great burden to everyone for 20 years while it was still walking about, so the putting away of this body into the ground created nothing but trouble. No one had cared about him for a long time, all this time he had been a burden to everyone; and yet the dead who bury their dead found it necessary to dress this bulky body, which had begun to rot so quickly, in a good uniform and good boots, to lay it in a new, good co&n with new tassels at all 4 corners, then to put this new co&n in another, leaden one, and to ship it to Moscow, and there to dig out old human bones and then use this particular place to hide this body, putrefying, swarming with maggots, in its new uniform and polished boots, and strew earth all over it.
!us we see that at the end of the story, the device is liberated from the accidental motivation for its use.
Tolstoy also applies this device to all battles in War and Peace. !ey are all presented as, “rst and foremost, strange. I will not
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quote these long descriptions—this would mean copying out quite a considerable part of a four-volume novel. Tolstoy also uses this method in describing salons and the theater:14
Most of the stage was covered with #at boards; by the sides stood painted pictures showing trees, and at the back, a cloth was stretched on boards. Girls in red bodices and white skirts were sitting in the middle of the stage. A very fat one in a white silk dress was sitting separately on a narrow bench, which had some green cardboard glued behind. !ey were all singing something. When they had “nished their song, the girl in white approached the prompter’s box, and a man in silken pants stretched tightly over his fat legs, with a plume, approached her, and began singing and spreading his arms. !e man in the tight pants sang “rst, and then the girl sang. A$er that, both stopped, music boomed out, and the man began to “nger the hand of the girl in the white dress, apparently waiting, as before, to begin singing his part with her. !en they sang together, and everyone in the theater began to clap and shout, and the men and women on stage, who had been pretending to be lovers, were bowing, smiling and spreading their arms.
In the second act, there were paintings pretending to be monuments, and there were holes in the cloth pretending to be the moon, and the shades on the footlights were raised, and trumpets and basses were playing, and from right and le$ came many people wearing black gowns. !e people started waving their arms, and they were
14 None of the existing translations of War and Peace fully recreates the ostranenie of such intentionally clumsy expressions as “painted pictures.” !e quotation below follows Shklovsky’s text, which makes several omissions and di%ers from Tolstoy’s in using “gures instead of words in reference to numbers. However, I did take the liberty to correct the most obvious typos such as “ramke” (frame) instead of “rampe” (footlights).
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holding daggers of sorts; then still more people came running out and proceeded to drag away the girl who had been wearing a white dress, but now had on a blue one. !ey did not do so at once, though, but “rst sang with her for a long while, and only then dragged her away, and then something metallic was struck three times in the back, and everybody got down on their knees chanting a prayer. Several times, these activities were interrupted by exultant shouts from the spectators.
Same in the third act:
But suddenly there was a storm, chromatic scales and diminished seventh chords resounded from the orchestra, and everybody ran o%, again dragging one of the people present backstage, and the curtain came down.15
In the fourth act, “there was some devil who sang, waving his arms, until boards were pulled out from under him and he descended down there.”
!is is also how Tolstoy described the city and the court of law in “Resurrection.” !is is how he describes marriage in “!e Kreutzer Sonata.” “Why, if people are soul mates, are they meant to sleep together.” But he used the device of ostranenie not only in order to let his readers see things he disapproved of.
Pierre rose and walked away from his new comrades, between the “res onto the other side of the street where, he was told, the captive soldiers were staying. He wished to talk to them. But on the way a French sentinel stopped him and ordered him to return. Pierre returned, but not to the “re and his comrades, but to an
15 One might wonder how the sophisticated discussion of music and the correct use of such concepts as “orchestra,” “prompter’s box,” and “theatre curtains” accord with ostranenie.
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unharnessed carriage with no people near it. He sat down on the cold earth by the wheel of the carriage, his legs tucked under and his head bowed, and sat there immobile for a long time, thinking. More than an hour passed. Nobody disturbed Pierre. Suddenly he broke out in his thick good-natured laugh, so loudly, that the evident strangeness of this laughter made people turn and look from all directions.
Ha, ha, ha, Pierre laughed. And he began to say to himself: the soldier didn’t let me through. I’m caught, I’m shut in. I. Me—my immortal soul. Ha, ha, ha, he laughed while tears came to his eyes …
Pierre looked up at the sky, at the depth of receding sparkling stars. “All this is mine, all this is in me, all this is me,” thought Pierre, “and all this, they caught and put into a barracoon, shut o% with boards.” He smiled and started walking toward his comrades, ready for sleep.
Anybody who knows Tolstoy well can “nd many hundreds of such examples in his work. !is method of seeing things outside of their context led Tolstoy to the ostranenie of rites and dogmas in his late works, to the replacement of habitual religious terms with usual words—the result was strange, monstrous; many sincerely regarded it as sacrilegious and were deeply o%ended. But it was the same device that Tolstoy used elsewhere to experience and show his surroundings. Tolstoy’s perception unraveled his own faith, getting to things he had been long unwilling to approach.
*
!e device of ostranenie is not particular to Tolstoy. I described it using Tolstoy’s material for purely practical reasons, because this material is familiar to everyone.
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And now, having elucidated the essence of this device, let us try to delineate the limits of its use. I personally believe that ostranenie is present almost wherever there is an image.
Accordingly, we can formulate the di%erence between Potebnya’s perspective and our own as follows: the image is not a constant subject with changing predicates. !e goal of an image is not to bring its meaning closer to our understanding, but to create a special way of experiencing an object, to make one not “recognize” but “see” it.
!e goal of imagery can be traced most clearly in erotic art. Here, the erotic object is commonly presented as something seen
for the “rst time. Take Gogol’s “Night before Christmas”:
He then came closer, coughed, chuckled, touched her full naked arm and said both slyly and smugly:
—What have you got here, then, magni”cent Solokha?—Having spoken thus, he jumped back a little.
—What a question! My arm, Osip Nikiforovich!—replied Solokha.
—Hm! Your arm! Heh-heh-heh!—replied the sexton, heartily content with his opening move, and made a tour of the room.
—What have you got here, dearest Solokha!—said he, still with the same expression, approaching her again, lightly putting his hand around her neck, and then jumping back, as before.
—As if you couldn’t see, Osip Nikiforovich!—replied Solokha,— my neck, and on my neck a necklace.
—Hm! A necklace on your neck! Heh-heh-heh!—and the sexton proceeded to take another tour of the room, rubbing his hands.
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—What have you got here, then, incomparable Solokha … ?— Who knows what the sexton was about to touch this time with those long “ngers of his …16
Or in Hamsun’s Hunger:
“Two white marvels showed through her chemise.”
Or else, erotic objects are paraphrased, clearly not with the goal of “bringing [the reader] closer to our understanding.”
In the same vein, we “nd the depiction of sex organs as a lock and key, as devices for weaving (Sadovnikov 102–7, 588–91), as a bow and an arrow, or a ring and a spike, as used in a game in the epic of Staver (Rybnikov 30).
In it, the husband fails to recognize his wife who is dressed up as a warrior. She poses him a riddle:
“D’you remember, Staver, can you not recall How we went into the street, we little ones, How we played the game of spikes in the open street, And you had a silver spike, and I a gilded ring? And I hit the ring only now and then, But you hit the ring every single time.” Staver, Godin’s son, gives a strict reply: “I have never played rings and spikes with you!” Vasilisa, daughter of Mikula, speaks again to ask him and challenge him: “D’you remember, Staver, can you not recall How we learned to write, me and you the same, And I had a silver inkwell, you a gilded quill?
16 It could be argued that neither the reader nor the protagonist experience ostranenie here. Rather, the latter coyly pretends to experience it, putting the “sex” in “sexton.”
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And I dipped the quill only now and then, But you dipped the quill every single time.” 17
Another version of the epic provided a solution:
!en the fearsome ambassador Vasily Raised his clothes up, raised them all the way. And the young Staver, Staver Godin’s son, Recognized the familiar gilded ring.
But ostranenie is not only used in euphemistic erotic riddles, it is also the basis and the only sense of all riddles. Every riddle describes an object with words which de”ne and depict it but are not usually used in reference to it (“two stings, two rings, a nail in the middle” for scissors), or else it is a kind of ostranenie through sound, a parroting parody—“tloor and teiling” instead of “#oor and ceiling” etc.
Erotic images which are not riddles are still examples of ostranenie, such as all cabaret “maces,” “aeroplanes,” “little dolls,” “little brothers” etc.
!ey have much in common with the folk image of trampled grass and broken viburnum bushes.18
!e device of ostranenie clearly appears in another wide-spread image—the motif of the erotic pose, in which a bear or another animal (or the devil, as another motivation for non-recognition)
17 Sic; the fact that the sexual imagery seems somewhat confused here (with “Vasily” “hitting the ring”) is not a matter of translation. Arguably, the less-than-obvious meaning of “now and then” versus “every time” makes the image more di&cult to process and therefore more attractive to Shklovsky. 18 It could be argued that these traditional images are the very opposite of ostranenie: a$er all, they are so familiar that the reference to sexuality is immediately “recognized,” not “seen.” “Trampled grass” is obvious enough; red viburnum berries (“kalinka,” as in the song “Kalinka-Malinka”) refer to de#oration in Russian folklore. On the other hand, when used—or heard—for the “rst time, such an image can indeed be enstranging.
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fails to recognize a human. !is is how the non-recognition, the strangeness of this pose, is presented in a Belorussian fairy tale (Romanov 344):
He then led his wife to the bathhouse, and, before having quite reached the steam room, spoke: “Now, wife of mine, take o% all your clothes and remain as naked as your mother bore you!” “How can I strip naked before we reach the steam room?” “Well, you have to!” So she shames him: how can she strip naked before they reach the steam room? But he says: “If you don’t, you’ll be a widow, and I’ll kick the bucket.” So the wife undressed, let her hair loose and went down on her hands and knees; he sat down on top of her, facing her behind. !e door was opened. !e devils looked: who is he riding? He said: “Look here, you devils—if you can tell who I’m riding, I’m yours; and if not, get out of here, all of you!” And he slapped [his wife’s] behind. !ey walked around and around—and couldn’t guess. !ey could tell there was a tail—but what was that other thing? “Well, that’s a piece of work, you dear; we’ll give you whatever you want, and we’ll stay away from here!”
Very typical is non-recognition in the following fairy tale (Zelenin N70):
A peasant was plowing his “eld with a piebald mare. A bear came to him and asked: “uncle, who has made this mare piebald for you?” “I myself.” “But how?” “Shall I make you piebald, too?” !e bear agreed. !e peasant tied up his legs, took the ploughshare, heated it in the “re and went on to apply it to the bear’s #anks: the hot ploughshare scorched o% his fur right to his #esh, making him piebald. He untied the bear, and the bear went away to lie under a tree. A magpie came down and wanted to peck at some meat on the peasant’s “eld. !e peasant caught it and broke its leg. !e magpie
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#ew away and alighted on the tree under which the bear was lying. !en, a$er the magpie, a spider (a big #y)19 #ew onto the peasant’s “eld and began biting the mare. !e peasant took the spider, shoved a stick up its bum, and let it go. !e spider #ew o% to the tree where the magpie and the bear were. So there they were, all three of them. !e man’s wife came to the “eld, bringing him lunch. !e husband and his wife had their lunch in the fresh air, and then he toppled her onto the ground. !e bear saw this and said to the magpie and the spider: “oh my! He’s about to make someone piebald again.” !e magpie said: “no, he’s about to break someone’s leg.” And the spider: “no, he wants to put a stick up someone’s bum.”
!is device is identical to the one used in “Strider”: this, I believe, is obvious to everyone.20
Ostranenie of the act itself is very frequent in literature. Decameron is an example: “the scraping of the barrel,” “the catching of the nightingale,” “the merry wool-beating work” (the latter image is not developed into a plot line). Sexual organs are enstranged just as frequently.
A whole series of plots is based on their “non-recognition.” Afanasiev’s fairy tales such as “!e Bashful Lady” provide examples:
19 Sic; all original absurdities are preserved. !e word pauk (spider) is rendered as “#y” in both published translations. !e addition of “a big #y” in brackets refers to a somewhat more plausible version of the tale. Still, penetrating an insect with a stick is a feat worthy of Leskov’s “Le$y,” the master who horseshoed a #y. 20 It does not actually seem that obvious how the depiction of human society from an alien perspective is “identical” to the punchline of a joke in which sexual intercourse is mistaken for violence (the acts of laying bare the skin on someone’s #anks, putting their legs at an angle and sticking a lengthy object into their lower parts are united in a denouement which each animal associates with his own misadventure). !ough animal perspectives are employed in both cases, it is doubtful whether the bawdy tale leads the reader (or, originally, listener) to perceive the strangeness of sex as intensely as Tolstoy’s readers might perceive the strangeness of society. !e device—showing something familiar as unfamiliar—is indeed arguably identical; the e%ect isn’t.
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the whole tale consists of not naming the object,21 of pretending not to recognize it. Same in his “!e Bear and the Hare.” !e Bear and the Hare mend “a wound.” Same in Onchukov’s “A Woman’s Blemish.”
Constructions such as “the pestle and the mortar” or “the devil and hell” (Decameron) are also devices of ostranenie.
Ostranenie in psychological parallelism is discussed in my article on plot formation.
Here, let me repeat that, in a parallelism, the sense of non-identity despite a&nity is crucial.
!e goal of parallelism—the goal of all imagery—is transferring an object from its usual sphere of experience to a new one, a kind of semantic change.
When studying poetic language—be it phonetically or lexically, syntactically or semantically—we always encounter the same charac- teristic of art: it is created with the explicit purpose of de-automatizing perception. Vision is the artist’s goal; the artistic [object] is “arti”- cially” created in such a way that perception lingers and reaches its greatest strength and length, so that the thing is experienced not spatially but, as it were, continually.22 “Poetic language” meets these conditions. According to Aristotle, “poetic language” must have the character of the foreign, the surprising.23 It o$en is quite literally a foreign language—Sumerian for Assyrians, Old Bulgarian as the basis of literary Russian—or else, it might be elevated language, like the almost literary language of folk songs. Here, we can also name
21 Shklovsky applied this device to romantic love rather than sexuality in his novel Zoo, or Letters not about Love. By attempting to refrain from talking about love, the narrator does nothing but talk about love. 22 !e somewhat puzzling opposition of space and continuity is reminiscent of a state Shklovsky would later ascribe to his toddler son: “He doesn’t walk yet: he runs. His life is still continuous. It doesn’t consist of single drops. It’s experienced as a whole” (Shklovsky, Tretya Fabrika 134). 23 Shklovsky appears to be referring to the concept of xenikón (Aristotle XXII).
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the widespread use of archaisms in poetic language, the di&culties of the dolce stil nuovo (XII), Arnaut Daniel’s dark style, and hard forms which presuppose pronunciation di”culties (Diez 213). Yakubinsky in his article proved the law of phonetic di&culty in poetic language, using the example of sound repetition.24 !e language of poetry is di&cult, laborious language, which puts the brakes on perception. In some particular cases the language of poetry approaches the language of prose, but this does not violate the law of di&culty. Pushkin wrote:
Tatyana was her name … I own it, self-willed it may be just the same; but it’s the “rst time you’ll have known it, a novel graced with such a name.
(translation by Charles H. Johnston)25
For Pushkin’s contemporaries, Derzhavin’s elevated diction was the usual language of poetry, so that Pushkin’s style was unexpectedly di&cult for them in its triviality. Recall that Pushkin’s contemporaries were horri”ed by his vulgar expressions. Pushkin used the vernacular as a device to arrest attention, just as his contemporaries used Russian words in their everyday French speech (for examples, see Tolstoy’s War and Peace).
Today, an even more characteristic phenomenon takes place. Russian literary language, originally alien to Russia, has penetrated into the human masses so deeply as to level many dialectical varieties. Literature, meanwhile, began to care for dialects (Remizov, Klyuev,
24 Expressions such as “proved the law” are worth noticing, being typical of the young formalist. 25 !is version was chosen from the many English translations of Eugene Onegin, as in this particular stanza it arguably mirrors best the original light tone and playful rhyming— features crucial to this example. Tatyana was a “simple” name, not considered elegant enough for poetry—just as Pushkin’s style itself was too colloquial for his time.
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Esenin, and others, unequal in talent but close in their intentionally provincial language) and barbarisms (which made Severyanin’s school possible). Maxim Gorky, too, is making a transition from literary language to dialect, not any less literary, in the manner of Leskov.26 In this way, folk language and literary language have changed places (cf. Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others). Moreover, there is a strong tendency to create new language speci”cally intended for poetry; as we know, Vladimir27 Khlebnikov is leading this school. !us, we arrive at a de”nition of poetry as decelerated, contorted speech. Poetic speech is constructed speech. Prose, on the other hand, is ordinary speech: economical, easy, correct (dea prosae is the goddess of correct, easy birth, of the baby’s “straight” position). I will speak in more detail about deceleration and delay as a general law of art in my article on plot construction.
In regard to rhythm, the position of people who believe economy to be a driving and even de”ning force in poetry seems strong at “rst sight. Spencer’s interpretation of the role of rhythm seems incon- testable: “Irregular blows force us to keep our muscles in excessive, sometimes unnecessary tension as we cannot foresee the repetition of the blow; regular blows help us economize energy.”28 !is seemingly
26 In Russian, barbarizmy refer exclusively to the use of foreign words or calqued expres- sions (of which Severyanin was particularly fond). Shklovsky uses the word govor (idiom, dialect); however, as he talks not of authentic dialect but of its literary imitation, he appears to be anticipating the concept of skaz (Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel’ Gogolya”) which describes the literary approximation of “folksy” speech. 27 Khlebnikov’s real name was Viktor, but he began calling himself Velimir in 1909. Shklovsky’s slip of the pen (or tongue, as he dictated the text) might be connected to Khlebnikov’s patronymic: his father’s name was indeed Vladimir. 28 Shklovsky is quoting an abbreviated paraphrase of Herbert Spencer’s !e Philosophy of Style (Veselovsky, Sobraniye sochineniy 445). !e original is as follows: “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 perceptives active enough to recognize the least easily caught sounds. And as, if the concussions recur in de”nite order, the body may husband its forces
96 Viktor Shklovsky
convincing observation su%ers from the usual fallacy—the confusion of the laws of poetic and prosaic language. In !e Philosophy of Style, Spencer made no distinction between them, though there might well be two kinds of rhythm. !e rhythm of prose, of a work song like “Dubinushka,” can replace a command;29 it also simpli”es work by automatizing it. It really is easier to walk with music than without it, but it’s just as easy to walk while engaged in animated conversation, when the act of walking vanishes from our consciousness. !erefore, prosaic rhythm is important as an automatizing factor. !e rhythm of poetry is di%erent. !ere is “order” in art, but not a single column of a Greek temple corresponds to it exactly; poetic rhythm consists in the distortion of prosaic rhythm. Attempts to systematize such distortions have been made; they are the current task of the theory of rhythm. It seems probable that such systematization will not succeed, for we are talking not of complicating but of disrupting the rhythm, of disrupting it unpredictably; if such a disruption is canonized, it will lose its power as a device of deceleration. But I will not discuss rhythm in more detail; a separate book will be dedicated to the topic.30
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” (Spencer 51). 29 !e song’s refrain can be very roughly translated as “Move it!”; it was used as a signal for strenuous collective actions. “Dubinushka” is similar to such work songs as sea shanties and African-American call-and-response songs. 30 Shklovsky never came around to writing that book.
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