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

In another respect, though, Shklovsky's article endorses Tolstoy's views and desires. Tolstoy's specific interest in the quoted passage is the importance of consciousness to life and to existence. In essence, he denies the reality of unconscious actions. It is, he says, "as if [unconscious] life had never happened" "eta zhizn' kak by ne byla." Yet a peculiar pathos becomes apparent in this statement when we examine what Tolstoy's diaries and letters show was going on in his life at this time. The entry was made at the height of Tolstoy's jealousy over his wife's friendship with the pianist Sergei Taneev, whose playing and views are specifically targeted and denigrated in What is Art, although Taneev is not there identified by name but only as the easily recognizable "splendid musician who came to visit us" "zaekhavshii k nam prekrasnyi muzykant" (235) and who aroused the entire Tolstoy household with his playing of Beethoven. On February 16th, a fortnight before the dusting entry, Tolstoy's wife, Sof'ia Andreevna, left him at Nikolskoe to travel to Moscow, and in her absence Tolstoy alternated between depression and jealousy. Earlier in the month, Tolstoy had written an angry letter to his wife accusing her of acting "involuntarily" and "unconsciously" ("nevol'no" and "bessoznatel'no") in regard to Taneev (1928-1958:84:275). Because he did not want to cease loving her, he said, there was only one possible remedy: "There remains one chance, that you will wake from the somnambulism in which you are walking and return to normal life" "Ostaetsia odna vozmozhnost', ta, chto ty prosnesh'sia ot etogo somnambulizma, v kotorom ty khodish', i vernesh'sia k normal'noi zhizni." (276-77). In this context, Tolstoy's comments about dusting begin to look somewhat different. If Sof ia Andreevna acted unconsciously, her actions would be (according to the logic of the diary entry) to a fundamental extent less threatening and perhaps even fictitious; "if I had cleaned and forgotten it, that is, acted unconsciously, it would be all the same, as if it had never happened. [. . .] if the entire complex life of many people passes unconsciously, it is as if that life had never happened."

Thus, the opening piece of evidence supporting Shklovsky's exposition of defamiliarization is essentially part of a spousal squabble that contributes to a denial of the reality of female consciousness and of female desire. Because Shklovsky probably had not read the letter from Tolstoy cited above-it was omitted when Sof'ia Andreevna published her correspondence with her husband in 1915-we speak here of a relationship that emerges only from an exploration of subtextual material repressed in the process of a chain of publication and citation. The effect, though, is still worth considering: on one hand, Shklovsky-albeit "unintentionally" and "unconsciously"-discards or wipes away the quotidian dust off Tolstoy's life and silences Tolstoy's yearning for the refamiliarization of Sof'ia Andreevna and for a return to his "normal" i.e. "habitual" life (of course, to speak of Tolstoy's life as normal is itself problematic); on the other hand, Shklovsky preserves Tolstoy's hostility to female subjectivity. And Shklovsky's oft-cited aphorism immediately following his quotation of the dusting scene-and his requotation of it, as if for emphasis-now also begins to look different, or less familiar, as well: