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

Thus life, unnoticed, fades away. Automatization eats up things, clothing, furniture, the wife and the fear of war.

"If the entire complex life of many people passes unconsciously, it is as if that life had never happened."

Tak propadaet, v nichto vmeniaias', zhizn'.

Avtomatizatsiia s"edaet veshchi, plat'e, mebel', zhenu i strakh voiny. "Esli tselaia slozhnaia zhizn' mnogikh prokhodit bessoznatel'no, to eta zhizn' kak by ne byla." (13)

In other words, the wife, here sandwiched between repetitions of the quote from Tolstoy, may be not only general and indefinite (the wife, our wives) but also a quite specific wife, the subjugation of whose will was an ongoing struggle for the most frequently cited source of Shklovsky's quotations in "Art as Device." In this context, it is worth recalling what Shklovsky represses in his most famous quotations from Tolstoy, those drawn from the scene of Natasha's visit to the opera in War and Peace. Shklovsky reproduces for his reader Natasha's uncomprehending, defamiliarized vision of the opera, but he cuts the scene to eliminate all traces of Natasha's presence. Her name is totally repressed, as are the intervening scenes in which she sees and learns to desire Kuragin. Whereas Tolstoy condemns female desire by showing its subsequent consequences, Shklovsky, working under greater constraints of time and space, wipes the desire away entirely.'e

The quotation from Shklovsky's article printed in the notes to the translation of Brik's article in volume fifteen of Screen begins just after this comment about the loss of a wife: "What is called art exists in order to restore man's sensation of life, to make him perceive things, to make a stone stony." The phallic import here seems not to have been noticed by Mulvey, and the omission of the paragraph with the wife may have precluded her from realizing that in its move from "wife" to "fear of war" to "stone" Shklovsky's article comes about as close as possible to a three word summary of one of Mulvey's most prominently cited Freudian texts-"Medusa's Head.""7 But the dynamic that we have been exploring here suggests another-does art in Shklovsky's view exist to make a wife wifey? And does this wifey-ness consist in a woman's loss of conscious choice and in the appropriation-necessary to patriarchy-- of independent female desire? In her reading of Eisenstein's Strike, Judith Mayne remarks that defamiliarization may be profoundly conservative "in the sense that the disruption of a straightforward narrative [may] prevent the political structure of the film from being understood as mere cliche and stereotype" (68-69). Mayne's point about the avant-garde cinema is that montage can serve as a subterfuge for the perpetuation of traditional values. Our reading of Shklovsky has suggested that this use of a defamiliarizing technique as a patriarchal device was not Eisenstein's innovation but may have been inherent in Shklovsky's and Formalism's early and most famous salvo.

In a memoir included in his 1983 anthology, "On the Theory of Prose," Shklovsky admits that he made at least one mistake in "Art as Device." Reminiscing about the Formalists' early days, Shklovsky recalls: "It was then that I invented the term 'defamiliarization' [ ostranenie]. And-today I have reached the point where I can admit that I have made grammatical mistakes-I wrote one n. I should have written strannyi [strange, with two n's]. And so off it went with one N, and like a dog with a severed ear, runs about the world" (73).18 Two pages later he returns to this free-range canine: "One of my articles which was published then, `Art as Device,' has been republished without any changes up to the present day. Not because it was impeccable and correct, but because,just as we write with a pencil, so time writes with us" (75). In that very same collection, however, "Art as a Device" is reprinted with changes. Reprinted for the first time since 1929, this new version, according to the collection's editor, K.N. Polonskaia, offers the reader "an exact copy" "tochnaia kopiia" of the 1929 text (8). All that has been changed, she adds, is "the system of citation, to bring it into line with contemporary rules" and to include republications of Shklovsky's sources that are more accessible than the original editions (8). Silently wiped away from the text are many of the symptomatic "mistakes" discussed above. In effect, Polonskaia gives Shklovsky's dog a new, prosthetic ear.'