Shklovsky's dog and Mulvey's Pleasure: The secret life of defamiliarization

The bear saw this and said to the magpie and the spider, "Holy priests! The peasant wants to piebald someone again."

The magpie said, "No, he wants to break someone's legs."

The spider said, "No, he wants to shove a stick up someone's rump." 12

Shklovsky immediately comments: "The identity of the device here with the device of [Tolstoy's story,] 'Kholstomer,' is, I think, obvious to all" "Odinnakovost' priema dannoi veshchi s priemom 'Kholstomera,' ia dumaiu, vidna kazhdomu" (literally: "the identity of the device of the given thing [i.e. of the cited text] with the device of 'Kholstomer' is, I think, obvious to everyone") (20). There are some problems here. According to Shklovsky, the effect of defamiliarization is to make the perceiver of art see an object anew bv transferring emphasis from recognition to seeing. And yet in erotic stories and riddles of this sort, the whole pathos is precisely in the final element of recognition, a recognition generically anticipated from the start. The erotic descriptions of body parts such as "Two white miracles appeared from beneath her blouse" seem to belong as much to the realm of cliche as to any category of novel expression. Shklovsky's decision to include his extended description of erotic poetics initially appears puzzling and might be chalked up to a Futurist fellow traveler's penchant for epatage. Yet, as we shall see, the inclusion of the erotic material is consistent with a misogynistic thread that also runs through Shklovsky's earlier discussion of Tolstoy.

Following the extended quotation of the erotic tale, Shklovsky immediately refers to the "priem dannoi veshchi," "the device of the given thing" (i.e. of the cited text), and it is worth noting that priem, the word for "device" in Russian also refers to an act of receiving or taking under one's control.'3 Shklovsky's phrase, priem dannoi veshchi, may be read as something of a double entendre, since within the context of the tale the literal priem dannoi veshchi, (device/ receipt of the given thing) may refer to the burning/tearing/ piercing of the female body to which the act of sex is compared. (That priem, when used to mean an act of receipt, signifies a relatively passive sort of acquiring possession makes its appearance here especially interesting: the peasant receives his wife's genitals, as it were, on a plate, and he exerts little effort to secure their proximity. The use of this double entendre thus masks the violent context of this particular receipt.) Indeed, Shklovsky ends the next paragraph by telling us that "defamiliarization is frequently employed in descriptions of the sex organs" "chasto ostranenie primeniaetsia pri izobrazhenii polovykh organov" (20), and in several of these examples priem functions as both an artistic device and a capture or receipt of the female genitals. Here Shklovsky seems close to Nietzsche, who in The Gay Science credits old women with realizing that all truth, virtue and profundity is "merely a veil over the pudendum" (125); wanting to keep this pudendum coveredand in front of us as an object of degradation-at all costs, Nietzsche defines artists as those who value riddles, veils and naming.14