Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht

Three. Shklovsky’s Modernist Poetics

79 3 Shklovsky’s Modernist Poetics In a 1966 article entitled “Obnovlenie ponyatiya,” “The Renewal of a Concept ,” the 73-year-old reformed Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky returned in print to his most famous critical coinage, the priyom ostraneniya or “estrangement device” from his 1917 article “Art as Device.” Specifically, he examined the cultural afterlife of that concept, in Bertolt Brecht’s transformation of it into his Verfremdungseffekt and the official Soviet reinterpretation of the concept as dangerous and misleading (both the Brechtian and the Soviet response only implicit in the article, to be read between the lines).1 I return to the Soviet reinterpretation below and to Brecht’s possible debt to Shklovsky in chapter 5; for now let’s simply let him introduce the notion: Estrangement [ostranenie] is a term signifying a specific way of perceiving or realizing an already automatized phenomenon. More than forty years ago I introduced—first, as I then thought—the concept of “estrangement” into poetics. The imagination of the ordinary as strange, as newly surprising, as it were “moved aside,” seemed to me a phenomenon common to Romantic, realistic, and so-called modernist art. Now I know that the term “ostranenie” is, first of all, incorrect, and second , not original. I’ll start with the second. In his Fragments, Novalis underscores a new quality of Romantic art, saying : “The art of making things in a pleasing way strange [iskusstvo priyatnym obrazom delat’ veschi strannymi], making them alien [delat’ ikh chuzhimi] 80 Ostranenie: Shklovsky’s Estrangement Theory and at the same time familiar and attractive—in this consists Romantic poetics.”2 Even if the term was new, in other words, the observations were not. (304–5, my translation) Novalis’s original German is: “Die Kunst, auf eine angenehme Art zu befremden , einen Gegenstand fremd zu machen und doch bekannt und anziehend, das ist die romantische Poetik” (685, #668; emphasis in original). But within the Shklovsky quotation I’ve translated the Novalis fragment indirectly, from the Russian translation that appeared in the early 1930s. Ironically, the translators of that text, Sil’man and Kopubovsky, translating Novalis nearly two decades after Shklovsky coined the noun ostranenie and its verb form ostranyat’ but only a couple of years after formalism was officially banned and Shklovsky was made to recant his theory publicly, somehow could not think of a Russian verb for Novalis’s befremden (the first verb Bertolt Brecht had used for estrangement when he began to theorize his estrangement effect in the mid1920s ), and had to render it delat’ strannymi “to make [them] strange.” Had they used Shklovsky’s term from 1917—rendered that first clause “iskusstvo priyatnym obrazom ostranyat’ veschi”—it would have been strangely awkward for Shklovsky to claim the newness even of his term! (Or perhaps Osip Brik’s. Nikolay Trubetskoy says in his notes that Roman Jakobson told him that Brik actually invented the term and gave it to Shklovsky.)3 A direct translation of Novalis’s German might go: “The art of pleasing estrangement, of making an object strange and yet familiar and attractive: that is Romantic poetics”—but then Shklovsky could not read German and so was dependent for his sense of Novalis’s term on the Russian translators, who were either ignorant of ostranenie or, more likely, avoided it for political reasons. Note also that, because they had to shift to delat’ strannymi “make strange” to cover Novalis’s befremden, Sil’man and Kopubovsky had to use delat’ chuzhimi “make alien” to cover his fremd machen, using precisely the Russian root chuzh-”alien” that Brecht’s Russian translators V. A. Nedelin and L. Yakovenko would use in 1960 in rendering Brecht’s Verfremdungseffect into Russian as effekt otchuzhdeniya “alienation effect.” Novalis is not the only inventor of Romantic estrangement, of course; the concept is one of the central ideas of German and English Romanticism and German Idealism, closely tied to Hegel’s dialectical exfoliation of Rousseau’s concept of alienation (to which we return in chapter 4) and Friedrich Schlegel ’s Romantic irony (to which we return in chapter 5). The basic idea is that conventionalization is psychologically alienating, anesthetizing, and that the 81 Shklovsky’s Modernist Poetics reader therefore stands in need of some sort of aesthetic shock to break him or her out of the anesthesis. Everywhere we look in Romantic and Idealist thought, in fact, we find pronouncements on the nature of poetry that...