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Theory of Prose

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Dalkey Archive Press has decided to bring out Viktor Shklovsky in English, mostly as translated by Richard Sheldon; but they've gone back and reprinted this translation of Shklovsky's important essay collection from 1925 by Benjamin Sher, originally published in 1990. It's very good to have it in print, in a good-enough English translation. (My rating is based on the quality of the book; if I were rating it for the translation, I'd go a little lower. More on the translation in a moment.)

The book begins with Shklovsky's powerfully influential essay from 1917 "Art as Device," which develops the idea of estrangement (ostranenie, translated by Sher as "enstrangement") that influenced Bertolt Brecht in his formulation of the Verfremdungseffekt or estrangement effect. Surprisingly in a collection of formalist essays, perhaps, it is focused on the impact form has on reader psychology: artistic form, Shklovsky insists, exists to make readers FEEL the world more freshly, "to make the stone stony." This Bergsonian notion of deautomatization, the overcoming of the "algebraization" of perception by intensifying our felt perception of the world, is virtually mystical in Shklovsky, grounded in German Romanticism (Novalis), German Idealism (Hegel), Russian Symbolism (Bely), and Russian Futurism (Khlebnikov). In later essays his focus moves increasingly toward abstract form, but in the second and third essays he is still very much interested in reader psychology and the intensification of felt perception, in the second in a long quotation from the German aesthetician Broder Christiansen's 1909 book Der Philosophie der Kunst, in the third in a discussion of a passage from Chekhov's notebooks. Arguably, even though he does not continue theorizing reader psychology in the rest of the book's essays, his discussions of formal innovation in literature rest on the earlier reader-response considerations -- especially considering that he returns to them in Knight's Move (1923), Third Factory (1926), and even in the essay in which he supposedly "recants" his formalism, "Monument to a Scientific Error" (1930).

This is not, however, the established reading of the book. This edition begins, in fact, with an introduction by Gerald L. Bruns, who writes that the Russian formalists defined themselves in opposition to psychology, which is to say in opposition to persons: "Structuralism raises itself on an opposition between system and history, structure and event; Russian Formalism defines itself not against history but against psychology ... the idea here is to foreground the individual text in its intelligibility rather than to reconstruct what lies behind the text in the form of an originating expression or rule" (xii). Formalism, thus, as the reduction of the text to abstract form, depersonalized form, in fact as the reduction of literature from signs to things: "But to make the stone stony is to chip away the inscription someone carved on it; it is to turn signs back into things. Formalist poetry (not to say a good deal of modern writing) does this by foregrounding the materiality of language, disrupting the signifying function in order to free words from the symbolic order that rational people say we construct from them" (xii-xiii). The only way I can imagine an author turning a sign into a thing is through the social psychology or phenomenology of literature, the ideologically guided construction of signs and things as meaningful phenomena in a world collectively projected and internalized by human readers; but for Bruns, as for several generations before him of depersonalizing structuralist readers of the formalists, this collective "world" or social construct is precisely the personalized dross from which the author seeks to liberate the word-as-thing, the "the symbolic order that rational people say we construct from them" from which the word must be freed as a post-social or post-human thing. The fact that depersonalization is not just an extremely widespread psychological disorder but in some sense the modern condition, the capitalist alienation theorized by Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, and that Viktor Shklovsky explicitly set himself the Hegelian task of discovering in the somatics of literary reader response an antidote to that disorder, is thus swept aside by the philosophical symptomatology of the disorder itself. Shklovsky's insistence that literature exists to restore the full-bodied sensation of a thing, to generate in the reader the felt experience of the author's making of the thing, is depersonalized as the reduction of signs to dead things, material objects beyond the repersonalizing effects of sensation or feeling or experience, which for these alienated critics in some sense never existed in the first place.

I have to say that while most of the things rkroll from Princeton says about Theory of Prose seem a bit nuts or sorta bonkers to me--violent? badly organized?--he's right that Sher's translation of "Art as Device" is (mostly) worlds better than Lemon and Reis's 1965 version, "Art as Technique," which popularized the translation "defamiliarization" for ostranenie. Actually, Lemon and Reis write beautifully, poetically, powerfully, but their poetic power is pretty far from Shklovsky. The best way to show this is to compare three translations of the key passage from "Art as Device," a very close (almost literal) translation, to give you an idea of the Russian, with Lemon and Reis's and Sher's:

"And so, in order to return the sensation of life, to feel things, to make the stone stony, there exists what we call art. Art's purpose is to give us the sensation of a thing as seeing rather than as recognizing; art's device is a device for the 'estrangement' of things, a device of complicated form that increases the difficulty and duration of perception, because in art the perceptual process is self-purposive and should be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the making of a thing, but the thing made in art is not important." (my close translation)

"And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important." (Lemon and Reis)

"And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By 'enstranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and 'laborious'. The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant." (Sher)

The striking thing in Sher's translation is the word "enstranging," which really is ingenious: as he points out in his translator's preface, it is precisely the same kind of not-quite-idiomatic coinage as Shklovsky's coinage ostranenie. Unfortunately for Sher, it hasn't caught on (except that Shklovsky's main English translator, Richard Sheldon, uses it); most scholars render the term "estrangement." But look at the red herrings in the rest of that passage: it's return or restore the sensation of LIFE, not our limbs (Shklovsky isn't talking about muscle numbness); at http://www.websher.net/srl/tran.html Sher takes Lemon and Reis to task for translating "vesch'" as "object" rather than "thing" (it is, after all, the Russian term for the Kantian/Hegelian "das Ding"), but he himself renders it "object" twice in this passage (and in fact SIXTEEN times in the whole essay, as "thing" only eight times); it's SENSATION of a thing that art is supposed to give us, not "knowledge"; and "delan'ye veschi" is "the making of a thing," not "the process of creativity." Both "process" and "creativity" are utterly wrong (in fact, algebraic) for Shklovsky's theory.

And while Sher typically stays closer to Shklovsky's text than Lemon and Reis, these wild hairs I've pointed out here are pretty typical. He renders "veschi berutsya schyotom i prostranstvom," "things are taken as calculation and space," as "objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye." How on earth does he get from "calculation" to "the blink of an eye"? Shklovsky's reference is to Bergson on the reduction of perception to the blankness of NUMBER--it has nothing to do with rapidity. When Shklovsky says that Lev Petrazhitsky "otbrasyvaet ... popavshuyu poperyok dorogi ego mysli teoriyu Dzhemsa o telesnoy osnove affekta," "flings out of the road of his thought James's theory of the bodily basis of affect that has fallen across it," Sher gives us the algebraized and in the end simply erroneous "Petrazhitsky dismisses James's theory, in which the latter presents the case for the corporeal basis of the effect" (4). The poetic image of the branches that have fallen across the road and are being flung aside by Petrazhitsky is algebraized as "dismisses"; and Sher's eye slips, or something, and he sees the first letter of affect as an "e."

Another minor point: in quoting from Broder Christiansen's Philosophie der Kunst in "The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style," Shklovsky makes a tiny error himself, writes the first initial of Christiansen's given name as B, which is the Cyrillic for V. As a result, when Sher goes looking for that author, he can't find anybody named V. Christiansen, and so for some reason adds an S. to the name, and rather than giving the original Roman spelling, Christiansen, simply transliterates Fedotov's 1911 Cyrillic spelling of the name (in the Russian translation), yielding S. V. Khristiansen. This is strange, but not a massive mistake; still, Broder Christiansen was an extremely important source for all the formalists, and his aesthetics in fact strongly shaped Shklovsky's understanding of the somatics of reader psychology, and it's the sort of point that one might expect a trustworthy translator to get right.

I am from Brazil. In our country, in which the portuguese language is sponken, we have very feel books by the russian formalism. Thats why a decided to buy this book. This is a very important material to people who studie the prose theory, mainly to whom that believe that the "close reading" is a fundamental approach.

This book is a bit nuts. First, I want to say that the translation seems pretty good. I have read another version of one of the essays in here, and it was just awful. The reason I gave it three stars is that Shklovsky is sorta bonkers. His anti-mimetic stance on literature is violent and badly organized. He was trying to make a strong impression (and he did), but later Formalists seem to have their acts together a bit more than he did.