Thoughts on Russian Formalism
During a recent quarantine, I read the book Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee Lemon, and it made me reevaluate my writing and understanding of literature. Additionally, the book served as a solid introduction to Russian Formalism's important features. The most important being “defamiliarization”.
The last essay in the book is by Eichenbaum, who presents an excellent summary of Formalist ideas. Originally, he intended the essay as a defense of Formalism against the Soviet establishment, which didn’t see the method as harmonious with Marxist criticism. He reiterates many of the points made by Shklovsky and Tomashevsky, who authored the book’s remaining essays. Quoting Shklovsky, he describes art as arising from our perception of form, “perhaps not form alone, but certainly form.” Art is what shocks the reader or viewer into experiencing the form of the thing witnessed. Art increases the difficulty and attention an object demands of us “because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” Another way of putting it is that art doesn’t present an object’s approximate likeness but creates a prolonged, special perception of the object. This is defamiliarization.
The Formalists made a strong differentiation between story and plot. They defined story as the natural causal sequence of events - this happened and then this happened, etc. Plot is the story “defamiliarized (literally made strange in Russian) in the process of telling.” Shklovsky, one of the chief Formalists, saw this device as the key feature of literature as an art. Defamiliarization is what forces us to slow down and consider an object for what it is. Thus, understanding a novel or poem involves breaking down how the plot defamiliarizes the story for the reader, either by transposing events or otherwise interrupting the habitual reading of the story.
Tomashevsky added to this methodology a distinction between motifs, which the Formalists saw as the atomic building block of plot upon which all else is built. Bound motifs are required to tell the story (e.g., Lydia dying is required in Everything I Never Told You, the way she dies is not), while free motifs are added to the story at the author’s whim. A proper reading of a story should give greater weight to free motifs than bound ones because these give more insight into the author's psyche and intent.
Defamiliarization was also addressed by Tomashevsky, specifically as it relates to the introduction of non-literary material in a novel, such as social and political commentary. He argued that the introduction of these topics must be justified by a new presentation of the material. By presenting it defamiliarized, the material’s presence is artistically motivated and fully involved in the narrative. Otherwise, it will come across as heavy-handed and banal. Sufficiently artistic presentation is how authors get readers to accept contrary worldviews or sympathize with repugnant protagonists, at least for the duration of the reading.
As I read Tomashevky’s essay, I thought of John Galt’s monologue in Atlas Shrugged. I’ve always found it tedious and painful to read, and Tomashevsky’s theory provides a reason. The story’s delivery of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy was too direct. It reads like a philosophy tract and therefore isn’t part of the plot. Had she defamiliarized it, we would be mystified by it. Done artistically, it would have evoked her desired intent even in a reader who fundamentally disagrees with her philosophy. Instead, as it was delivered, we cannot break out of our habitual perception of the world, and it passes by. It remains background noise. This also explains why Anthem works better as a book. Ayn Rand communicates her philosophy through the plot. We identify with her main character, and, for a moment, the outside world breaks down. We see his struggle and make it our struggle. We feel, and we are changed by it.
I have a tremendous appreciation for Knausgaard’s book My Struggle: Death in the Family. However, the book’s impact left me puzzled. I wondered how any excruciatingly thorough description of a random mundane act could be better or worse than Knausgaard’s prose. Based on the book’s Goodread’s reviews, it’s a common thought. Formalism provides one interpretation. By detailing every moment and event and presenting them as significant and psychologically motivating, Knausgaard is doing exactly what the Formalists described. He defamiliarizes these mundane events, prolongs our perception, wrenches them from the realm of the commonplace, and demands we experience them as though for the first time. We crave this.
Russian Formalism was an attempt at a scientific approach to understanding the concept of literariness. It failed. We can’t predict the emotional impact of a book the way we predict the orbits of planets. However, these ideas gave me a new way to understand writing and revealed that I tend to write stories in their original story sequence without reformulating them into a plot. I suspect this weakens my writing, and I intend to experiment with defamiliarizing stories. However, more importantly, the Formalist school addresses an important aspect of the human experience. The world is racing past us, and we don’t notice because it’s become background noise. For a few moments, art allows us to achieve the state mystics strive towards — full presence in the now. Once there, we appreciate the objects of our attention in ways we have forgotten are possible, and we become fully human. Would that all moments could be made so strange.
