Context
Reading Viktor Shklovsky with a little bit about Jonathan Franzen
Martin Riker
Viktor Shklovsky is known here in the
United States, if he’s known at all, as one of the founders of Russian
Formalism, the critical movement that set out back in the early 1920s
to "identify thespecific set of things which distinguishes art from all
other domains of intellectual activity, and which makes them its
material or tools."1 The idea was to treat literature scientifically, with an emphasis on
technique and on the palpable qualities of writing. For Shklovsky, the
scientific study of literature was a very personal and passionate
undertaking—one that he managed in the midst of world wars and
revolutions, writing wherever he could—because he believed that art
serves a crucial function: to expose reality, tear down conventional
ways of seeing and stimulate our perception anew, to "revitalize the
world." As a critic, he was before all else a reader, and held the
optimistic view that reading is active, that literature is "a means of
experiencing the process of creativity," and that the purpose of
reading literature is not to escape reality, but to connect us to the
real circumstances in which we all live. Out of Shklovsky’s conviction came critical works of great beauty and complexity, but also several utterly remarkable literary works, all written during a brief, turbulent period in the early and
mid twenties. These are revolutionary books, in ways comparable to
William Carlos Williams’s prose from the same period, both authors
rebelling against social and artistic conventions, and both focused
unpretentiously on the realities of their immediate environments,
making art out of the rough pieces of their lives and surroundings. "I
want to write about things and thoughts," says Shklovsky, like words
out of Williams’s mouth. Stylistically they’re very different from one
another—Shklovsky’s a clown, more inclined toward anecdotes and
wisecracks, his language less violent in its cuts and jumps—but their
work has a similar raw energy, and the result in both cases is a
powerful sense of immediacy or "in-the-worldness." Each is a unique
voice speaking to the world about things that matter, and in their
writing, everything matters. Three books make up about
seventy-five percent of Shklovsky’s total literary output, including
all that’s been translated into English to date: A Sentimental Journey; Zoo, or Letters Not about Love; and Third Factory.
All three can be viewed together as an extended memoir, but a
memoir-in-forms, each book structurally unique, and each containing
elements of novel, poem, essay, and rant. They are also a good
introduction to Shklovsky’s writing as a whole, because they are his
most personal books, the most emotionally and stylistically extreme,
and because in them we see the passionate motives behind the study of
artistic forms that spanned the next sixty years of his life. What makes A Sentimental Journey seem more stylistically
conventional than the later books is that (not discounting the above
example) these kinds of juxtapositions are more often between
paragraphs or whole passages than within a single line. He’ll place a
personal anecdote alongside instructions on how to operate an armored
car, for example, or a landscape alongside a discourse on creativity
and freedom. He balances styles against each other—analytical
descriptions against impassioned wisecracks—and the resulting contrasts
make the experience of reading overtly participatory, at times even
jarring, as the reader becomes momentarily aware of the "strangeness"
of one kind of writing (or way of seeing) standing alongside (and in
relation to) another. At the extreme "sentimental" end of A Sentimental Journey’s stylistic spectrum are passages of melancholic despair, although
Shklovsky’s despair is less for himself than for mankind in general.
These passages are usually as funny as they are sad and are tied, like
all his literary writing, to his own experiences. In the following
dialogue, for example, Shklovsky has sat beside a Cheka officer on a
train, and the officer (ostensibly his enemy) has been describing his
own wartime activities: I said, "But how would you have found out about the money?" That is, I was asking about torture. And my heart was aching. "There are ways," my neighbor answered politely without ignoring the question. We were silent for a while. Then he asked sadly, "Do you know Gorky?" "Yes," I said. "Tell me, why didn’t he come over to our side right away?" "Well," I said, "you use torture and the land is ruined. Can’t you understand that it’s hard to be on your side?" This is a real conversation, not imagined. I have a good memory. If my memory were poorer, I would sleep better at night. In a work of art, thought is juxtaposed to thought, just as word is to word and image to image. Art
is fundamentally ironic and destructive. It revitalizes the world. Its
function is to create inequalities, which it does by means of contrasts. Among the Russian intellectuals in Berlin was Elsa Triolet
(called "Alya"), a woman with whom Shklovsky was very much in love.
Their relationship was complicated, and the realities of it aren’t
historically clear (it seems they fooled around for a while, then she
dumped him), but it did provide him with a form for his novel: it would
be a series of love letters to Alya, except that she (the character
Alya) would refuse to allow him (the character Viktor Shklovsky) to
write about love. "I had to motivate the appearance of unrelated
pieces," Shklovsky states in the book’s introduction. "I introduced the
theme of a prohibition against writing about love, and this prohibition
let into the book autobiographical passages and the love theme."
Scientific or cold as this may sound, in practice the book is
brilliantly funny and touching. It is also a serious account of the
social and political circumstances in which Shklovsky found himself,
although the overriding theme of love keeps this material from weighing
the book down, i.e., becoming the point. Instead, the book’s
seriousness is couched in Shklovsky’s irrepressible enthusiasm and wit,
as we see in Letter Four, the first letter after Alya has asked him not
to write about love: The weather in Berlin is nice today. The sky is blue, the sun higher than the houses. The sun looks right into Pension Marzahn, into Aikhenvald’s room. Outdoors, it’s nice and cool. There was almost no snow in Berlin this year. Today is February 5 . . . I’m still writing not about love. And the precept to be light-hearted. But what about all the pain? Give everything a cosmic dimension, take your heart in your teeth, write a book. The
statement "I want to see life seriously" shows up in one form or
another in all three of these books, becoming a kind of mantra for
Shklovsky. In Third Factory (1926), it appears at the very
start, addressed to his son’s red rubber elephant toy. By itself it
sounds a bit vague or flimsy, but by speaking this line to his son’s
toy, Shklovsky places it within a series of metaphorical relationships
that give it specific direction, identifying his antagonist in the form
of this rubber elephant and, by association, the factory that churned
the toy out, and the society that churned out the factory, which is the
same society that is churning out Viktor Shklovsky. Third Factory is arguably the most autobiographical of these books, since it traces
Shklovsky’s history from childhood through his education and up to the
present day, but it’s also the most stylistically divergent from
narrative realism. His imagery has been growing more densely interwoven
from book to book, and at this point the prose style essentially
dictates a whole new form: one- or two-line paragraphs in sections of
only a page or two, with wryly funny bold-faced headers such as "The
Childhood of a Writer Who Eventually Learned to Be Succinct," "I Write
about Kisses," and "A Case Ineptly Pleaded by Me." He’s back in Russia
now, working as a film editor in a studio he calls a "factory." His
environment is still politically turbulent, but his daily life (work,
family) starts to look more and more domestic and regulated. This is
the world we find upon opening the book, the one Shklovsky is speaking
to through his son’s toy elephant. The elephant image continues, sewn into Third Factory’s first few pages along with a discussion of his son’s first impression
of a horse ("he thought it was doing four legs and a long nose just for
fun"), the letter-writing practices of Mark Twain and Pushkin, the last
days of autumn ("they echo with the sound of leaves withering in the
lanes"), the green arc of streetlamps, the plywood partitions of
editorial offices, and, finally, an explanation of the book’s title: Second of all, the name isn’t hard to explain. The first factory was my family and school. The second was Opoyaz.4 And the third—is processing me at this very moment. Do we really know how a man ought to be processed? Maybe it’s all right to make him stand in line for things. Maybe it’s all right for him to work outside his specialty. That’s not the elephant squeaking—that is my voice. All of this was his project from the very beginning, and his
intentions could not be clearer. In his early essay "Art as Device,"
for example, in a passage that might as well be describing the state of
things in contemporary America, he writes: "Held accountable for
nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at
things, at cloths, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war."
He then quotes his literary hero, Tolstoy: "If the complex life of many
people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s
as if this life had never been." When he concludes this passage by
stating that literature is "a means of experiencing the process of
creativity," he’s not talking about the writer’s creative process; he’s
talking about the reader’s. And nowhere is it more taken for granted than among popular
literary critics, whose assumptions about the nature of literary
art—how it works and what it accomplishes—can be really surprisingly
narrow-minded. A particularly ugly example is Jonathan Franzen’s
September 2002 New Yorker piece titled "Mr. Difficult," in which
Franzen assumes a very cynical view of why some readers and writers
value literature that is unconventional in style or form. He
effectively lumps the writers of such works together in what he calls
the "Status model" or "Status crowd" and says that in their books All of this is patronizing to readers as well as writers, and we
should all be offended by it. Jonathan Franzen may very well have
embraced more conventional modes of writing because he felt that
otherwise he’d simply be flattering himself, but why he would assume
that all writers are this self-congratulatory, I don’t know. I actually
doubt that there are many writers in the history of the world who fit
Franzen’s vision, and certainly Shklovsky is an example of one who
doesn’t. (More than an example, his work provides a way of thinking
about art and literature that is far more interesting and optimistic
than anything Franzen has to offer.) Yet many readers of the New Yorker will follow Franzen’s lead in taking this view of writers for granted,
so will be discouraged from reading "difficult" books based on the
false belief that such books are written in the hope of excluding them,
and will fail to recognize how cynical and reductive this view really
is. 2A
wonderful description of Shklovsky’s use of motifs in metaphorical
relation to one another would be John Cage’s summary of Schoenberg’s
twelve-tone compositional method, since Cage describes qualities that
are both "musical" and "democratic." Cage writes: "Schoenberg’s method
assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function
with respect to the group. (Harmony assigns to each material, in a
group of unequal materials, its function with respect to the
fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg’s
method is analogous to a society in which the emphasis is on the group
and the integration of the individual in the group" (Silence. Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 3In the later book Mayakovsky and His Circle,
Shklovsky describes clearly the nature of the writer’s (in this case,
Mayakovsky’s) control over his materials: "Impassioned by his work,
impassioned by his words, the poet is joyous when he speaks of grief.
But, though exalted, grief remains grief. The poet tames grief to come
and go at his beck and call. It does not have to be leashed." 4Opoyaz is the literary/critical circle Shklovsky founded with Osip Brik and Felix Mandelstam.
The first of the three—A Sentimental Journey (1922)—is the only one that calls itself a memoir and is closest to
what a reader might expect from one, with long narrative passages
describing Shklovsky’s experiences as commander of an armored-car
division through a world war and revolution—from Russia to Persia and
back, living intermittently as a writer and critic, eventually landing
in Germany. Shklovsky treats the sequence of these events loosely,
concerned less with their historical relevance than with capturing the
particulars of his own experience, material culled from every type of
source: the physical realities of the moment, the political and social
milieu, literary history, the war, the weather. He arranges these
materials the way a collage artist might, placing distinct pieces and
passages beside each other, these juxtapositions creating internal
tensions and a sense of movement as the narrative trips back and forth
between contrasting "things and thoughts." For example, on page nine of
A Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky writes: "Bread was bought from
the soldiers. The crusts and scraps which, along with the sour smell of
servitude, had been the trademark of barracks now disappeared." He
places "the sour smell of servitude" into a sentence about bread
crusts, making the sentence resonate in unexpected ways, even while the
bread crusts themselves remain bread crusts (i.e., a tactile image,
rather than becoming a symbol for servitude, or being overshadowed by
the political presence of the soldiers). Thus he encompasses a range of
images, ideas, perspectives, etc., without losing a sense of direct
engagement with the physical world.
"In the next district," said my neighbor—and he named
the district—"they caught a bandit. I was going there, since he was
supposed to have hidden a lot of money, but those fools took him out
and shot him. Now the money’s lost.”
At the extreme "analytical" end of the spectrum, then,
is the baring of device itself—the discussion, within the book, of how
that book’s effects are accomplished—a technique Shklovsky inherited
from eighteenth-century Irish author Laurence Sterne (from whom he also
borrowed the title A Sentimental Journey). Sterne had a
tremendous influence on Shklovsky. It was in Sterne’s writing that he
first identified many of the devices upon which he based his critical
work (see Shklovsky’s seminal essay "The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy"),
including the baring of device as well as the use of digressions to
impede a narrative’s progress and to allow in seemingly incongruous
pieces. Yet talking about his own literary devices is also perfectly
natural to Shklovsky, an inevitable result of his tremendous critical
enthusiasm, his love of artistic forms and of looking at literature
scientifically. Far from being dry, pedantic, or overdetermined,
Shklovsky’s critical digressions are playful, showing up out of the
blue but bringing with them also a sense of seriousness and conviction,
the author stepping outside for a moment to keep himself (and the text)
honest to his experience. What makes these passages balance with the
more sentimental passages—what makes both equally compelling, so that
there’s no lag in the reader’s interest—is that Shklovsky is so
incredibly good (clear, articulate) at writing about literary forms and
processes, including his own. For example, discussing shortages of
butter and sugar, and the human brain’s need for both, Shklovsky
writes: "Someday poems will be written about dried Soviet fish. To the
starving, it was manna from heaven." The mention of poems, however,
turns him to a digression on Russian literature and the Formal method:
The formal method is fundamentally very simple—a return to
craftsmanship. Its most remarkable feature is that it doesn’t deny the
idea content of art, but treats the so-called content as one of the
manifestations of form.
The use of contrasts to "revitalize the world" is what
Shklovsky, in his critical writing, called "estrangement" (also
translated as "enstrangement" and, less accurately, as
"defamiliarization"). It’s a concept I’ll come back to, as this way of
thinking about art is key to understanding how Shklovsky’s own writing
works, as well as why he chooses to write this way.
Shklovsky’s second literary book—Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (1923)—takes the form of an epistolary novel. He’s in Germany now,
having landed in political trouble for his writing, and is living among
a group of Russian intellectuals who, like him, have come to Berlin to
escape persecution. Being naturally fascinated by all aspects of his
environment, he finds himself writing on various, seemingly unrelated
topics. But then he wants to make a book, in fact a novel, out of this
material.
I’m not going to write about love. I’m going to write about the weather.
From here, the letter goes on to discuss how Shklovsky
doesn’t like cold weather, how the apostle Peter denied Christ because
of cold weather, and how Russia is very cold compared to Palestine, so
cold that if Christ had been crucified in Russia his disciples "would
have flocked to the fires . . . and would have stood in line to deny
Him." All this leads to a digression about Russian editorial offices
and the futurist poet Khlebnikov, and so on, until there are five
distinct narrative threads (the weather, Christ and his apostles,
Khlebnikov and his death, the Red Army, the sorrow of exile in a
foreign land), each of which is spun around and related metaphorically
to the others, but none of which can be considered the central or
primary material.2 Toward the end of the letter, then, he can’t help himself, and returns to talking about love:
All we have are the yellow walls of houses, lit by the sun;
we have our books and we have man’s entire civilization, built by us on
the way to love.
Love’s enthusiasm is contagious, it colors everything
the narrator sees . . . although the love we’re reading about no longer
seems to be the romantic kind. Of course romantic love is part of it,
but we’re also reading about a lot of other things, not all of which
are particularly worth celebrating. Love is not the subtext of Zoo, not the story that the book is "really" telling; instead, it’s
everywhere on the surface. It works thematically, as a kind of
vocabulary around which the book is constructed. In other words, love
is the book’s theme not because Shklovsky has something of superior
importance to tell us about it, but because it provides the form and
motivation for everything else he wants to say. At the same time, love
is still love, real and intoxicating. But Shklovsky "tames" love to
come and go as he needs it.3
"Red elephant, step aside. I want to see life seriously and to say to it something in a voice not filtered through a squeaker."
—ThirdFactory
First of all, I have a job at the third factory of Goskino.
Just as A Sentimental Journey’s theme is war, and Zoo’s is love, Third Factory is a book organized around the theme of industry, which Shklovsky uses
to talk about the automatization of human experience ("We are cranked
out in various shapes, but we speak with one voice when pressure is
applied"), but also about the materiality of art ("The artist doesn’t
produce an orderly arrangement of happiness. He produces a product").
For Shklovsky, conceptions of art and of human experience are
inextricably related; in fact, their relationship is the basis for his
entire career. It is in Third Factory, though, that this
relationship finds its most concise, most overt, and most personal
expression as he traces a path through the "factories" of his life and
the many limitations, influences, and processes—the "squeakers"—by
which he’s been shaped and molded. Shklovsky’s "squeakers" are obvious
things such as education, politics, and money, but they also include
authoritative literary conventions, ways of writing the "rightness" of
which is assumed ("of course you write this way") and that are
so familiar as to cause no disruption of the reader’s expectations or
sense of perception. His work diverges from such conventions because he
believes that art’s function is to combat the "of course’s" of the
world, and to "estrange" the reader’s perception through formal and
stylistic dissonance. Yet his goal is not strangeness for strangeness’
sake; it’s to make the real "realer" (or as he says, "to make a stone
feel stony"), which means that the word, the image, has to register in
the reader’s mind. It needs to be precise and directly engaging. For
Shklovsky, dissonance is a product of the writing’s clarity, not its
confusion.
All that Shklovsky represents, his ideas about literature and about
reading, the value he places on seeing life seriously, stands in
contrast to many of the assumptions that our own popular culture makes
about literary art, such as the assumption that "serious" is a synonym
for "elitist," and that most readers don’t want to have to think, and
that the experience of reading should always be satisfying in a
familiar way, as an escape from reality, emotionally moving but
ultimately harmless. This view of literature—which is tied to the idea
that conventional realism is the only legitimate form of literary
writing—is not at all new. Shklovsky fought against it all his life. If
contemporary American readers don’t even recognize this view as a view (i.e.,
don’t recognize such assumptions at work in their own lives), that’s
because none of this is argued over these days, at least not in
mainstream culture; it’s just taken for granted.
Difficulty tends to signal excellence; it suggests that
the novel’s author has disdained cheap compromise and stayed true to an
artistic vision. Easy fiction has little value, the argument goes.
Pleasure that demands hard work, the slow penetration of mystery, the
outlasting of lesser readers, is the pleasure most worth having; and if
. . . you can’t hack it, then to hell with you.
While parts of this vision sound accurate (the valuing
work and disdaining cheap compromise parts, for example), Franzen
neglects to mention why readerly work might provide pleasure—or
what kind of pleasure—implying instead that such work is pointless, a
literary equivalent of fraternity hazing, and that the pleasure it
brings has entirely to do with being "better" than other people. Based
on this absurd premise, Franzen then goes on to claim, "The Status
position is undeniably flattering to the writer’s sense of
importance"—making it clear that the real reason some writers don’t
always stick to established conventions is to placate their own egos.
——————————————
1This
definition is actually from the formalist writer Jurij Tynjanov and is
quoted in Boris Eikhenbaum’s "The Theory of the Formal Method" (in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views),
a short essay that provides a very good overview of the evolution of
the formal method and its key contributions to literary and critical
thought.
