Where to begin?
“It is beautiful in Dresden, comrades,” writes Viktor Shklovsky late in his book On the Theory of Prose, in a chapter on the “Ornamental Prose” of Andrei Bely. “There is a high mountain with cherry trees that bloom each spring. The fields of Saxony stretch out below. … And lower down, pushing off from the mountain’s sandstone wall, the Elbe River rushes on toward Hamburg, dull as a butter knife.” On this mountain (called Cherry Mountain or Deer Mountain, the author isn’t sure) is a garden of trees, each one molded into a certain form “fashioned from iron rods.” One of the trees keeps an arm raised in a military salute, its branches conforming to the contour articulated by the rods.
What’s striking about this passage is how decisively un-academic it is. It seems closer to prose fiction than a formal scholarly work, employing an active descriptive voice, anchoring us to the perspective of a visitor on this mountain, looking down on the farmlands and the river, visiting a garden of arboreal sculpture. Shklovsky evokes the blue colors of the mountain forest, and continues to flaunt his inconclusive memory, as if he felt no need for precision in his criticism.
This passage encapsulates Shklovsky’s entire orientation toward literary theory and his critical practice. To review his work in his own spirit means diving into the deep end of the text, with no historical or philosophical context, no guiding apparatus of theme, symbol, or literary tradition. There is only an assemblage of descriptions and evocations held together by the medium of words. To lead in with remarks about how Shklovsky was a popular figure of the St. Petersburg avant-garde scene in the early 20s, and the most influential voice of the Russian Formalist tendency of the period along with Roman Jakobson, would make sense as exposition, but to ease ourselves into the subject this way would forswear the shocking encounters with strange things and ideas that Shklovsky was in such efforts to stage for us.
The first English edition of On the Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, didn’t appear until 1990. And yet, the concepts Shklovsky advanced in this book have animated anglophone theory and criticism since at least the 60s. Your host’s critical upbringing is unthinkable without Shlovksy’s notions of plot vs. story, and the background of formal conventions against which any artwork stands out. Dalkey Archive had published Sher’s translation, and has now rereleased Theory of Prose in a new translation by Shushan Avagyan, with an afterword by the great poet Lynn Hejinian. Avagyan had 50 years’ worth of precedents to consider when translating Shklovsky’s key terms (most importantly ostranenie [Остранение], a word he coined), but she has furnished a fresh translation that conveys Shklovsky’s infectious enthusiasm for modern art, and smooths out the scholarly stateliness of Sher’s version. Avagyan has given us something much closer to the breezy and energetic aspects of Shklovsky’s thought that his students and followers had so often celebrated.
The polemical thrust of formalism
was principally aimed at the hegemonic theory of poetics doled out to Russian students in the early 20th century. Shklovsky formulated its basic slogan at the beginning of his famous essay “Art as Device,” which opens Theory of Prose: “Art is thinking in images.” Images are the base unit of any given poem or story, and their principal task “is to help organize different objects and actions into groups in order to explain the unknown by means of the known.”
If the purpose of the image is to “bring the meaning of the image closer to our understanding,” in the words of the philologist Potebyna, then the image “ought” to be more familiar than the relatively unfamiliar thing it represents. Which means images are a mechanism for explaining the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, a guideline for the reader into whatever conceptual project the work is constructing. “It would be interesting to apply this principle to Tutchev’s comparison of lightning to deaf and dumb demons, or Gogol’s comparison of the sky to God’s mantle.” That is, such a quaint model of representation shouldn’t be able to cope with the surrealism of new poetry. Shklovsky and his formalist colleagues saw a unilaterally pedagogical conception of literature as a simple teaching aid, one that needed to be demolished.
Shklovsky’s first move against the Art = Image school of thought was to say that the image was not the basic component of literature, and that its true function—to leave a strong impression on the reader’s mind—was in fact identical to that of any other poetic device like metaphor, hyperbole, etc. A work of art is an intellectual system, but it doesn’t parcel out meaning with machinelike efficiency. This “law of economy of effort” in creativity may apply to ordinary practical language, but not to poetic language, and certainly not Russian poetry after Pushkin.
What successful poems actually do, especially modernist ones, is not to strictly educate us about the world, but to “restore sensation to life,” to make a stone feel stony again, to replenish our capacity to “recognize” external objects, and not merely “see” them. The devices of art marshaled by the poet have one principal aim: the ostranenie (estrangement in Avagyan’s translation, which is the more straightforward choice compared to Sher’s own “defamiliarized” coinage of en-strangement) of the objects in question. If art and literature after the turn of the century appear rough, abstract, and indiscernible, this is because the vocation of art in Shklovsky’s view is to explore human sense perception as such, to “magnify the difficulty and duration of perception, because the process of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged.”
Outside of art, our sensuality has been degraded from regular use. The stone loses its stoniness after touching it thousands of times. Rather than perceiving the stone, we are merely aware of a stone taking up space in a process of “automatism of perception.” Art rescues us from drab automatic sensation precisely by estranging the things it represents from the automatism by which these things present themselves to us in the real world. Such a defamiliarization could be a shocking experience to the audience’s understanding, like a concert pianist who suddenly and completely loses her tactile memory of the piece she is performing. It is the staging of this effect that has, to a great extent, driven the aesthetic program of modernism, from surrealist painting to Brechtian theater. Artists have been making it strange for a hundred years since Shklovsky’s formulation.
Ostranenie or estrangement is the principal goal of what Shklovsky calls devices, and the rest of Theory of Prose after the theoretical opening chapter is devoted to describing practically what these devices are.
Lose the plot
Shklovsky argued that what is typically called the content or theme of a narrative is ultimately irrelevant to understanding narrative. There is only the form, the sum total of devices, techniques, and functions that construct the text, governed by certain “laws” of esthetic norms and conventions. “The fairy tale, the story, and the novel are all combinations of motifs [another synonym for devices]. …Hence, plot and plottedness represent form in the same way that rhyme does. The notion of ‘content’ is irrelevant when analyzing a work of art from the point of view of plot.” In this positivistic attitude, a given narrative can’t be “about” anything, but must simply be its own collection of formal devices.
This argument against content trades on a slightly different conception of plot from the one we might hold day to day, and the result has been one of Shklovsky’s most lasting influences. Plot here is not a sequence of important events, not the summary of highlights from the latest movie or TV series, but the entire narrative presentation as such. Don Quixote is not about a knight in a world that has left knighthood behind. It is about everything that occurs on the pages of Don Quixote, as it is encoded in the text, not just every event, but every digression and story within the story, which Shklovsky calls “interpolations.”
Plot—the linking of devices, the story as it is told to us—is distinct from story as such, which is the totality of narrative material used for constructing the plot. This is the famous sjuzet vs. fabula dichotomy that had come out of Shklovsky’s linguistics circle. The “arguments” of Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice can be reasonably summarized in a sentence (the story or fabula), but such a paraphrase wouldn’t do justice to the richness of detail and incident within these books (the plot or sjuzet). It’s hard to have even a rudimentary grasp of the grammar of film and television, with its flashbacks and cold openings and teasers, without this idea from the Formalists.
Gain the device
Shklovsky had demoted the image from its position as the base unit of literary art, and put in its place the device: the various verbal functions that articulate the text from start to finish. To say a text is simply its devices is to say that the devices and their arrangement are really all there is, with no sense of wholeness that could surpass the parts.
Shklovsky devotes a chapter of his book to analyzing Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne as a “parody novel,” understood as a novel whose playfulness and experimentalism comes from the drive to lay bare its devices. The insertion of the Author’s Note a hundred pages into the book, the black page and the marbled page, the massive digressions—these are so many flamboyant disclosures of the essential artificiality and conventionality of literature. These extreme devices do not condemn Sterne’s “parody novel” as an overly divergent failure. On the contrary, Tristram Shandy is not a non-novel, but “the most typical novel in world literature.” One also notes in this chapter how willing Shklovsky is to subsume nearly everything under the heading of Device, including not just techniques but things like sentimentality. Sentimentality is not content, because it is a function of point of view, which is a device.
In mainstream forms of storytelling, devices are not exposed in this matter but massaged into the work so that the audience remains absorbed. Devices have to be motivated in order to lend the work a sense of coherence and integrity. Specifically, they are usually motivated by the technical needs of storytelling, which pre-exist the device. Let’s return to Don Quixote as an example. Another reason why Cervantes’s book cannot be about a character named Don Quixote is because he is not a real agent in a substantial reality, but a device like all of the others, and the same goes for his squire Sancho Panza. “The fact is that Sancho serves a stringing device—he strings together all the folk wisdoms, while Don Quixote strings together all the bookish and high-society wisdoms.” It may seem to readers that narrative is primarily about characters engaged in activities and struggles, but in Shklovsky’s formalist logic, the priority is given to the exigencies of structure and composition, beyond any artist’s initiative, and of which the character-device is a byproduct.
Shklovsky favors devices laid bare, since they are more honest than the flimsy pretext Cervantes used for his devices. Motivated devices point back to our own world where the text was produced and we are reading it, the ground zero of our communion with art. If the governing laws of narrative composition have so little to do with this world of production, then novels shouldn’t lean on illusionistic appeals to reality as a kind of epistemic crutch. Better to foreground the sense that narrative is always arbitrary. In a discussion of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Shklovsky boldly claims that Dr. Watson—one of the most famous literary counterparts ever—didn’t need to exist as a character at all. Watson’s function “slows down the action and simultaneously regulates the flow of events,” and it could have been served by different chapter breaks.
But there are great works whose fictive worlds expressly reflect the real social world, and construct situations we all recognize. In Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, William Dorrit resides in a debtor’s prison, where multiple scenes take place, and the plot itself is launched with characters quarantined in Marseilles. Surely the Dickensian landscape, charged with class struggle and populated by armies of workers and unemployed, presents some kind of contact between art and social reality. Not for Shklovsky. A prison in a story does not have the same function as prisons in our society. The fictitious prison happens to be an expedient method to get characters to encounter each other.
Literature for the Formalists is not so easily contaminated by external ideas or social aspects. Even the density of realistic detail in such works are not meant to point us back to our everyday existence in the world of production, but principally as a tactic of delay, which is another main function of literary devices.
The mystery novel allowed for the inclusion of long descriptions of everyday life, which, while primarily serving as impediments, relieved the pressure of the plot and were perceived as part of the artistic work. The descriptions of the debtor’s prison…were inserted into Little Dorrit with this in mind. And this is why the mystery novel was later incorporated into the “social novel.”
Fiction is full of red herrings, riddles, and moments of suspense, and these, along with philosophical conversations and cross-cutting between multiple plotlines, all count as delay devices. There have been countless times, in my own fiction-writing practice, when it somehow felt right to insert more material in the narrative, not to move the plot along or convey anything particularly resonant. Somehow, the story needed a little more space before something else happened, in order for that something else to be fully effective. Shklovsky’s thinking seems most compelling when it reads as a kind of codification of a storyteller’s intuition, the proliferation of devices reflecting the granular choices the writer constantly makes, given a technical and scientistic vernacular that was popular in the early 20th century.
Motivated devices, delaying devices, and devices laid bare are the general modes for this basic constituent unit of literary discourse. The devices laid bare are the ones that propel the project of defamiliarizing the everyday world that we have habituated ourselves to, refreshing our perceptions of it. To speak of a project, or a certain aim or goal that literature “ought” to strive for, suggests that an ideology of some kind is afoot. But in Shklovsky’s thinking, ideology is never part of a work’s content. A worldview could motivate a device, but it’s an unworkable idea to inject ideology into a work without upholding content. The practical result is the loss of literary merit. Ideology and politics are at best an external influence of distortion, like the guiding rods of the arboreal sculpture garden on the mountain in Dresden.
The legacy of Formalism
Shklovsky’s basic ideas have become indispensable ingredients for practical cultural critique; even his terminology has remained. His work underscored a point well worth making in today’s landscape: a work is neither a mechanical reflection of reality (pace those who decry “problematic” content and pine for stories peopled with models of social conduct), nor a spontaneous piece of raw self-expression (against a naïve iconoclasm in art that tries to make a show of shrugging off any social responsibility whatsoever).
A work of art is an invention, a product of our society. His notion of the background field of historically established conventions is still generally correct, and has even been systematized in discussions regarding genre narratives. Viewers today intuitively understand that we come with a different set of expectations and standards for an episode of Downton Abbey than we do for The Human Centipede.
However, the balance sheet on Shklovsky’s Formalism has some glaring minuses. As the critical literature has pointed out over the decades, to say that a text is only the grand total of its devices is extremely reductive and one-sided. It’s as if Shklovsky got rid of the “content” term of the insoluble content vs. form problem by simply declaring its irrelevance or nonexistence. Why can’t the chain of devices stand in for the content? Are the devices not contained inside the text?
The problem is that the terms content and form are not static entities, but depend on each other to make up a whole, even in their opposition. When Shklovsky removed content, his understanding of form became imprecise so that we are no longer sure how form enters the analysis. Is the form inherent to a given work, or is a given work endowed with the form?
Shklovsky’s on-the-fly style of work has many charms, but Theory of Prose paints a picture of a theorist more interested in understanding and rationalizing the art produced around him in Petersburg’s Futurist art community than with creating a systematic critical method (that job would be taken up by his colleague Roman Jakobson). Shklovsky himself acknowledged his hasty quality, along with his students. But considering the stultifying academic environment of pre-revolutionary Russia, Shklovsky’s ideas were exciting enough that inconsistencies and errors could be overlooked in favor of the striving for a new modern theory that his book had promoted. “He always worked by intuition,” the literary historian Grigory Gukovsky once said about his teacher. “He was apt to misstate some details. …But nobody could cavil at Shklovsky either for his factual errors or the paucity of concrete material. …In his hasty and brilliant formulas he embodied the yearnings of Russian scholarly and literary thought of the Futurist era.”
Shklovsky removed content to formulate his theory for Soviet-era Futurism, and the ultimate result was a move to surpass the form-content duality altogether via a third term, the device. Few things seem more appealing than a third option that emerges where we had thought only an either/or choice existed. But to see why this argument runs into problems, we need to backpedal to Shklovsky’s opening essay on “Art as Device,” where he engages directly with questions of philosophy.
It was in that paper where Shklovsky evoked “the laws of expenditure and economy in poetic language not on the basis of prosaic language, but on the basis of the laws of poetic language.”
If we study the general laws of perception, we will see that habitual actions become automatic. So, for example, all of our skills move into the realm of the unconscious-automatic; if one remembers the sensation of holding a pen in one’s hand or speaking a foreign language for the first time and compares that with the sensation of performing the action for the ten thousandth time, then one agrees with us. This process of automatization explains the laws of our prosaic speech, with its unfinished phrases and half-articulated words.
Art, then, intervenes in this “automatization” of sensual experience, and “removes” the familiar object from the tired perception process. The removal is precisely the estrangement, or alienation effect.
Shklovsky points to “general laws” governing both perception and creative activity. It comes from an intellectual climate bathed in subjective idealism, especially pragmatist philosophy. Along with William James, Shklovsky cites the philosopher Richard Avenarius: “the soul hastens to carry out the apperceptive processes as expediently as possible” and hence the notion of economy of effort.
Nobody in our culture seems to like very much the idea of general laws governing aesthetics, but Shklovsky’s ideas, despite being formulated in this positivistic climate, created the conditions to move decisively away from such certain contact with objective reality. Accurate cognition is off the agenda: there is only the degrade world of habitual perception that must be refreshed by imaginative work. Such is the dialectics of literary history!
Defamiliarization is everywhere now. Artists feel the need to justify their work in terms of “rethinking” this, “problematizing” that. In a recent book, the media theorist McKenzie Wark reflects on the degrading state of the information economy, the answer to which is to “get creative” and invent new terms of analysis, for this new world that is clearly not regular old capitalism anymore, but vectoralism in contradiction with the hacker class, or what have you.
What if we took a more daring, modernist, defamiliarizing approach to writing theory? What if we asked of theory as a genre that it be as interesting, as strange, as poetically or narratively rich as we ask our other kinds of literature to be?
This is a critical theory that has given up on explaining things to settle for a role as self-help therapy for refreshing your senses, to “restore sensation to life” as the Russian critic put it. Shklovsky’s work has become the lingua franca. Everyone is trying to invent and reinvent everything. Make it new is now old hat.
Despite the theoretical playground Wark appeals to above, that’s only the superficial aspect of Shklovsky’s estrangement. Ultimately, it cuts a hard functionalist path that I would prefer not to follow. I don’t believe a novel is just the sigma of all its utilized devices, any more than a government is simply the executive, legislative, and judicial branches put together.
To insist on form alone is to flatten the whole thing. The form is the structure of something else (the content). Content and form is not an insoluble contradiction, rather the contradiction proper is the content, and the way that contradiction develops is articulated in the form.
The impression seems to be reinforced by the new afterword by Lyn Hejinian, of the Language poets. In her reminiscence, Shklovsky’s ideas struck like a meteor in the 70s, prompting many poets to move “away from New Criticism’s insistence on the separation of works of literature from life and toward what, in an important but radical re-understanding of Formalism’s central precepts, to become a social aesthetic.”
To do that successfully, in my view, would involve a long road back to a materialist conception of reality being independent of our consciousness. But the Language poets never really got out of the subjectivism that gives priority to first-person perceptions, to “the interplay of states of mind alert to stages of sensation,” in Hejinian’s words. Without understanding the world, we can’t change society. Instead, society must be reconceptualized. That is precisely how Hejinian ends her afterword to Shklovsky’s book.
The social here is not conceptual, not even generalizable, and certainly not universal [!]. It is indeed, strangely, and paradoxically, intimate.
They wanted to create a Marxist Formalism, but they ended up with a formalized Marxism.