That judgmental glance... What does human activity look like from the perspective of a horse? Pretty weird, probably! A contemplative horse is the narrating observer of the human world in Leo Tolstoy’s *Kholstomer* (1886). Key figure in the Russian Formalism movement, Viktor Shklovsky, uses Tolstoy’s commenting horse as an example of ostranenie (the Russian word for defamiliarisation) meaning *making strange.* Defamiliarisation as a literary device was discussed in post-revolutionary Russian literary circles branching out from the literary movement Russian Formalism. So what does defamiliarisation do? It’s trying to make the world harder to understand – naturally!

Analysing the world

The hermeneutic principle is interested in discovering meaning through interpretation. You observe something, that could be a literary work, or something else, and then you try to produce meaning through thorough analysis. The hermeneutical analysis can be based on various literary instruments, such as logical deduction, close reading, your own five senses and your own knowledge of the world.

As a literary framework and as a literary way to deduct meaning from a topic, defamiliarisation is very different from hermeneutics. Defamiliarisation in fact seeks to hinder and halt our arrival at meaning, because it is more interested in what happens before the arrival at meaning.

Professor of English at Yale Paul Fry describes this hindering as ‘a roughening of surface’ on the road toward reaching a final conclusion. Defamiliarisation creates unfamiliar (defamiliar, if you will) data points to the reader, which are unfamiliar, and which hinders the arrival at meaning because of a certain estranged essence of the work at hand. The roughening of the surface makes it impossible for the reader to arrive at meaning smoothly, and it makes it hard to make sense of the subject matter. And that’s the point! Defamiliarisation is encouraging, even forcing, the reader to make himself think again anew. Paul Fry also describes this artefact as “defamiliarisation creating an arabesque instead of a straight line between us and the arrival at meaning”. (After Paul Fry, 2009)

Ready-to-digest, centrally produced, and pre-fabricated meanings were not interesting to the Russian formalists such as Roman Jakobsen and Viktor Shklovsky. They were rather interested in science, structure, the way the sentence is put together, and what might come out of that from the standpoint of the reader. This way of seeing art carries with it a shift in focus from the search of meaning, to pure structure.

Bear in mind, the ideas of Russian Formalism were formulated in the post-revolutionary Russia with Leninism and social realism dominating the arts. Some would see Russian Formalism as an attack on the ideals of social realism which had been established as the guiding principle in the communist state.

Defamiliarisation as a literary device is attempting at making you feel the roughened structure (feel the world, if you will), touch it, and understand anew what the true meaning of the ideation at hand is really about. (After Paul Fry, 2009)

With Russian Formalism comes a shift in focus from the search of meaning to structure.

(Paul Fry, 2009)

Above, two central figures in the Russian formalist movement Roman Jakobsen and Viktor Shklovsky.

Why must the surface be roughened?

Viktor Shklovsky argued that we no longer see what’s around us. (And by we, think citizens in USSR in the 1920’s). He called this phenomena ‘automatisation’, or ‘automism’, implying that our response to art, literature, and just everyday life around us had become automated, like it’s on autopilot. (O Teorii Prosy. 1929)

Now, who’s to decide what society means for the average citizen? Is that the task of the state? Is it the artist’s job? Or is it up to every single individual to figure out? In the USSR in the 1920’s, the state played a major role in defining the arts, and what a purposeful life was supposed to look like. But this is where Viktor Shklovsky comes in from the sideline to roughen the surface of various modes of literariness – and on a mission to defamiliarise Soviet citizens from the grey, dulled, automated world surrounding them – the Homo Sovieticus, the socialist archetype – and make them see things from another perspective than that of state-sanctioned artists and writers.

For example did Shklovsky and other writers in the Russian formalist movement oppose the notion that physical ornamentation and sound is subservient to meaning. Russian formalists oppose the claim that ornamentation and sound does not elucidate anything. To them, ‘artistic’ artefacts can be ends in themselves. (Paul Fry, 2009)

And Shklovsky warned sternly about the dangers of automatisation, and how the people might lose the ability to properly see things for what they are. He warned against taking the established reality for granted, accepting it too readily, and not questioning how reality if presented to us. (O Teorii Prosy, 1929)

Touching upon this, is here an excerpt from O Teorii Prosy:

This property of thinking not only suggested the path of algebra, but even suggested the choice of symbols (letters and specifically initial ones). With this algebraic method of thinking, things are taken into account by counting and space; they are not seen by us, but are recognized by their first features. A thing passes by us as if packaged, we know that it is there by the place it occupies, but we see only its surface. During the process of algebraization, the automation of a thing, the greatest economy of perceptive heals is obtained: things are either given only by their feature, for example, a number, or are carried out as if according to a formula, without even appearing in consciousness.

(O Teorii Prosy, p. 12)

Shklovsky uses math and algebra as a metaphor for the automised life, which has been reduced to numbers and formulae in a (perhaps) over-bureaucratised system.

And at the end I think a quite interesting remark about losing the fear of war:

This is how life disappears into nothingness. Automation eats everything, clothes, furniture, your relationship with your wife and your fear of war.

(O Teorii Prosy, p. 13)

A grey, dull, automated, pre-understood life which has lost – among other things – its fear of war.

Viktor Shklovsky on Tolstoy

Shklovsky does not take credit for inventing defamiliarisation. In O Teorii Prosy, Shklovsky for example uses Leo Tolstoy’s way of defamiliarising as an example for understanding it in a current (for his time) context. Tolstoy, Shklovsky claims, has mastered the art of not calling a thing by its current name, but more describe it as if he had seen it for the first time – for what is really is. Tolstoy, he continues, talks as if an incident had happened for the first time in history of man. Thereby, Tolstoy is describing a thing not by using our current, commonly agreed-upon terminology, but names each phenomena or object as if they had no reference in particular to the situation at hand, except reference to an outer world which is unfamiliar to the given situation and which is purely giving names to said phenomena or objects, completely untainted by the described situation. (O Teorii Prosy)

In “Kholstomer”, we meet a conscious and very well spoken horse, alone pondering and commenting on the peculiarities of human life and human speech. Here’s part of the horse’s monologue, questioning his own status as subservient to the humans. The horse also raises the more general question of why humans use words which carry implications that are way beyond the scope of the true, original meaning of said words.

Below, an excerpt from “Kholstomer”, a monologue by the horse.

I did understand what they were saying about Christianity, but I was completely lost when they started uttering the words ‘his’ this and ‘his’ that. For example did I not understand the meaning of the word combination ‘his foal’, from which I saw that people assumed some kind of connection between me and the stablemaster. What this connection was, I didn’t understand at the time. Only much later, when I was separated from the other horses, did I finally understand what it meant. For long, I didn’t grasp what it meant to be called a person’s property. The words ‘my horse’, referring to me, a living horse, seemed as strange to me as concepts such as: ‘my earth’, ‘my air’, and ‘my water’.

Those words had a huge impact on me. I kept thinking about this for a long time, and only after getting to know many different humans did I finally understand the meaning that they’d ascribe to these strange words. Here’s what I found out about the notion of meaning in the human world: People are guided in life not by deeds, but by words. They love not so much the opportunity to do or not do something, as the opportunity to speak about different subjects in the words mutually agreed upon amongst them. One of the most important words in the human vocabulary is the little word ‘my’, which they apply to various things, creatures and objects, even about the earth, about people and about horses. They all seem to agree about this, so that only one person speaks—mine. And the person who is able to apply the word ‘my‘ to the greatest number of objects is considered to be the happiest person. Why this is so, I don’t know. But it is so.

[…]

Many of those humans who called me ‘their’ horse, did not even ride me! It was completely different humans who rode me. It was not the same ones who fed me either, but different ones, shiftingly.

[…]

A human will say: ‘my house’, and then continue to not even live in said house, but merely tend to and maintain it. A merchant will say: ‘my store’, or ‘my clothing store,’ for example, and yet, the merchant in question will then continue to not even wear clothes made from the best cloth that his own store has to offer. There are also humans who claim certain lands to be theirs, yet they have never even betrodden the lands in question, or as much as laid their eyes on them.

(Kholstomer, chapter 6)

Sources

Paul Fry. Introduction to Theory of Literature, Yale University. 2009. Yale Lecture on available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11_oVlwfv2M (Yale, 2009))

Viktor Shklovsky. O Teorii Prosy. 1929. https://monoskop.org/images/7/75/Shklovsky_Viktor_O_teorii_prozy_1929.pdf

Leo Tolstoy. Kholstomer. 1886. https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Холстомер_(Толстой)

Images

Main image, horse: Licensed via squarespace.com

Apartment blocks: Licensed via squarespace.com

Roman Jakobsen: Philweb Bibliographical Archive via wikimedia.org

Viktor Shklovsky: Public domain in Russia (via wikimedia.org: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Viktor_Shklovsky.jpg)

Leo Tolstoy on a horse: Underwood & Underwood. The World's Work, November 1908: https://archive.org/stream/worldswork17gard#page/n19/mode/2up

Russian Formalism and Defamiliarisation

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