Estrangement, Infection, Laughter, Somatics, Tolstoy: A Forum with Caryl Emerson and Douglas Robinson

Provocative, alienating art is not designed to "fit in" or make us feel at home. If the audience feels at home, the project has failed. The same might be said about revolutionary theories of art: they are not obliged to reintegrate us into the world once they have woken us up to its flaws. But since creativity craves a whole, audiences are hungry for meaning, and art abhors mess, the secret agenda of alienation is very often radical transformation, new and binding form. Among the many virtues of Douglas Robinson's stunning new book is the fact that his three theorists, the world-class provocateurs Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Shklovsky, and Bertolt Brecht, are also primary creators. They are at home in abstract systems, but each in his heart pursues the transformation of individuals within a revived social fabric. It takes some courage to tie together such disruptive and distancing ideas under one conceptual roof and not blunt their cutting edge. Robinson builds such a roof—brilliantly, as a lucid and widely cast web, in part out of the hints of others (Schlegel, Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Bakhtin, Kristeva, neurophysiological brain research linked to Bateson's double-bind and Raymond Williams's structures of feeling) but largely on the strength of his own insights and corrections to the scholarly record, and he builds it from the bottom up. Since all academic humanists work professionally, at times with desperate disbelief, on the paradoxes that engage Robinson's three subjects, his is that rare book on literary theory that serves also as therapy for its most immediate readers.

The scope of the book is 1898–1935, and more specifically that period between the Great War and the "counterrevolutions" of Stalin and Hitler, when revolutionary Moscow connected with Weimar-period Berlin. The flourishing avant-garde in both locales promoted an "era of artistic estrangement" (177). Odd man out, it would seem, is Leo Tolstoy—but the idea that Tolstoy, who loathed the avant-garde, is nevertheless in some sly way a modernist has been around for a long time. In part responsible for this modernizing upgrade is Viktor Shklovsky, the "mechanic" of early Russian formalism, who dragged the highly subjective voice of Tolstoyan protest into the twentieth century by redescribing its crankily moralistic tone as "objective" (the famed examples of defamiliarization from Tolstoy's War and Peace and Strider: A Horse's Story in Shklovsky's 1916 manifesto "Art as Device"). Bertolt Brecht, in his use of this "objectivizing" device, is sometimes considered heir to the alienation theories of Hegel and Marx, sometimes a disciple of Shklovsky's—with a medium shift, of course, from the deautomatized word to the subversive or politicized stage. Such is the received wisdom that links these three thinker/creators. Robinson sees it for the blurry, intuitive cluster that it is and aims to ground it in more satisfying theoretical tissue. He digs out translation errors in key phrases, addresses carelessness or inconsistency in his subjects' arguments, and gently prods us toward his own synthesis.

That new synthesis resists, first, any dualism of body versus spirit, feeling versus thinking. If this book has a hero, it emerges unambiguously only on the final page and helps to explain how and why Robinson attached the severe, archaicizing Tolstoy to his two Marxist-inflected modernists. This hero is the triumphant, feeling body—vigorous, unembarrassed, freed from its "liberal" (read: womanish) associations with "physical and intellectual weakness and submissiveness" and reintegrated into a progressive community (256–57). Such a body must resist stasis as well as isolation; for this reason Robinson sets in motion all parts of his synthesis, which unfolds into an optimistic dialectic. Finally, Robinson disavows any crude behaviorism, insisting that regulatory social pressure, however brutal, can always be met with a constructivist response (that is, consciously articulate and retrievable by memory). His major achievements can be tagged to the first two nouns in his...