Earlier on, I was in a coffee shop (having got my moving expenses today, and such a thing being once more possible) reading the beginning of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (Benjamin Sher's translation, from Dalkey Archive Press). Talking of "automatization," the process by which things become so familiar as to be unconscious (defamiliarization, or "enstrangement" as the translator would have it, thus being the way in which art brings the object back to conscious experience), he quotes Tolstoy's diary:
"As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, 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."
Presumably the experience is familiar to everyone. As well as the things I forget immediately, there are whole days which sink into oblivion. Don't we write blogs, diaries, letters, or tell our days to someone else in order to make time "lived"? These last few days might as well never have been for me - I've had nothing to say.
I then read on to Shklovsky's comment following the quotation, as follows:
"And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of wax."
I like the suggestion of automatization as an infestation of destructive moths here, but I was particularly drawn to the last item. "Our fear of wax" was so unexpected, and yet in the instant of reading made so much sense. I could see at once the chilling verisimilitude of waxworks, and the waxen appearance of the dead.
Then I looked back at the passage and found that I had transposed an 'x' from a word in the following line, and that it really said "our fear of war."
Shklovsky had just been talking of fragmentary hearings, misunderstandings, and slips of the tongue, too. Misreadings, I'd say, can have an unintentional defamiliarizing effect all of their own, and the possibilities add cathedrals of space to what we read.
"As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, 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."
Presumably the experience is familiar to everyone. As well as the things I forget immediately, there are whole days which sink into oblivion. Don't we write blogs, diaries, letters, or tell our days to someone else in order to make time "lived"? These last few days might as well never have been for me - I've had nothing to say.
I then read on to Shklovsky's comment following the quotation, as follows:
"And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of wax."
I like the suggestion of automatization as an infestation of destructive moths here, but I was particularly drawn to the last item. "Our fear of wax" was so unexpected, and yet in the instant of reading made so much sense. I could see at once the chilling verisimilitude of waxworks, and the waxen appearance of the dead.
Then I looked back at the passage and found that I had transposed an 'x' from a word in the following line, and that it really said "our fear of war."
Shklovsky had just been talking of fragmentary hearings, misunderstandings, and slips of the tongue, too. Misreadings, I'd say, can have an unintentional defamiliarizing effect all of their own, and the possibilities add cathedrals of space to what we read.
2 comments:
I superimpose misreadings upon readings all the time, seeing a similarly spelled, more stimulating or off-context word for what is written. Maybe this is how to dross up a dull text? Why not deliberately do the same with tissues, seeing the green madness of a mad house in the green, which to those in Japanese studies is after all sometimes blue. Insanity is definitely more than its opposite.
Well, that's evidently what I'm going to have to do for the moment, since I got caught in a thunderstorm while trying to walk to Target, and had to give up and come home on an overly well air-conditioned bus. I may be needing those tissues when I go down with bronchitis or pneumonia. Anyway, if I try hard I can pretend they are a diluted cornflower blue.
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