Anshen on. defamiliarization, Shklovsky and Bakhtin

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two 

Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

THE EFFORT TO DEVELOP A MARXIST THEORY OF ART

Initiating a discussion of formalism, Anshen looks at Cleanth Brooks' defense of New Criticism.

....So, according to this view, attempts to situate the artistic politically or historically are not necessarily wrong, but they are not the job of literary critics.

....one might note that they find a unique function for themselves in the academic division of labour.

....it remains questionable whether analysis ever escapes political and social concerns; to avoid even explicit politics only happens in certain political situations and what constitutes politics derives from historically determined conceptions of the political.

Anshen then expands focus from formalism to discuss criticism that combines formalism and concerns of perennial interest to Marxists.

....to give the New Critics their due, they raised the rigorous question of what makes things 'literary' or 'poetic', and many Marxists have adopted this concern. This was a creative process which began in the early twentieth century, in the period surrounding the Russian socialist revolution, when critics known as the Russian Formalists developed ideas in conflict with, and in relationship to, Marxism. Interesting discussions and debates broke out about what comprises 'poetic' or 'aesthetic' language in contrast to everyday speech. Marxists threw themselves into these debates and much from this period remains interesting and relevant. For example, one of the most significant Formalist theorists, Victor Shklovsky, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1917), argues that things and social relations appear normal due to their everyday familiarity, becoming 'habitual' and 'automatic' (778) in perception. Artistic phenomena 'defamiliarised' these everyday objects, thereby also negating automatic responses to the world around us.

....For Shklovsky, art challenges the standard experiences of the world, disrupting conventional impressions through the aesthetic or artistic experience. Interestingly, Shklovsky stressed the purely aesthetic nature of his concerns, yet many of his examples borrow from literature depicting directly political questions. It almost seems that when Shklovsky strives to determine the precise nature of pure aesthetic criteria, the political world sneaks in. For example, he illustrates the aesthetic power of defamiliarisation through a short story by Tolstoy, told from the point of view of a horse. The horse, in Tolstoy's story, observes a servant receiving a beating by his master and cannot understand how this happens. The horse also cannot understand his own status as property and ponders, 'But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me "man's property"....

....Shklovsky's concern with what techniques make language artistic or poetic leads to the conclusion that the artistic can be defined as the presentation of the normal in a new way that 'makes [it] strange'. Art thereby transforms our perceptions of the world by its very nature as art.

....Shklovsky's contemporaries such as Mikhail Bakhtin merge aspects of Russian Formalism with Marxism to produce very interesting results. Bakhtin argues in his study Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1972) that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels display polyphonic features (a formal innovation), which means they contain no singular viewpoint on the world, and certainly not one related to Dostoevsky's poetics, which were conservative if not reactionary. Despite Dostoevsky's personal views, Bakhtin notes: '[…] Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, […] opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society' (27).

....Bakhtin, like the Formalists, starts with the artistic structure of texts in their formal specificity before moving to content or sociological analysis. Bakhtin notices how formal devices in Dostoevsky unpack a critique of society, despite Dostoevsky's personal convictions.

....Bakhtin does not feel compelled to separate literature from social life, but rather builds from the narrative features of Dostoevsky's novels to explain how real-world historical, social and political struggles find themselves embedded in aesthetic features. Dostoevsky's works remain dialogic or structured along dialogues that form the conflicts the novels play out. Such conflicts get verbally fought out, offering contrary ideological positions ultimately reducible to different class reactions within a distinct historical period and its changing values. Bakhtin doesn't begin with the political, ideological views of the author, but rather moves from the text, beyond and against the author to what presents itself as the underlying 'polyphonic' or multiple voices within the text. These opposing viewpoints given voice in the novel are articulations of differing class viewpoints. In this way, the political and the formal complement each other.

....Despite Dostoevsky's intentions, the different ideas receive fair treatment. As Bakhtin explains, 'Dostoevsky […] creates not voiceless slaves [….] but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even rebelling against him' (6) [italics in original]. Characters fight out their views and no narrative perspective firmly dictates the readers' judgment. The result is that a war of ideas is presented through the novel, though the genre has been taken, traditionally, as imposing a viewpoint on the ideal reader. This illustrates that the naïve view of Marxist approaches to reading, which assumes the Marxist critics should reproduce the world view and social milieu of the writer to explain the text, misses some of the complex interplay between author, text and reader that sophisticated Marxism considers and allows.

....Shklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' remains very close to the aesthetic theory and practice of one of the most significant and influential Marxist aesthetic theorists and practitioners who was discussed in Chapter 1, Bertolt Brecht....

Jay

2 November 2021