Some have likened the richness and mutability of literature to a “magic cube” (Rubik’s cube); and, taken simply on the side of its functional structure, literature is indeed such a “magic cube”—its constitution complex, fluid, and ever-changing. The factors that determine the functional structure of literature are, of course, manifold. The present essay confines itself to one angle: the relation between defamiliarization and the functional structure of literature.
1. Shklovsky and the Theory of “Defamiliarization”
The concept of “defamiliarization” did not begin with Shklovsky. Already in the Romantic period writers and poets laid great stress on the strange, marvellous colouring of the literary work; Novalis, for instance, offered a corresponding formulation in his Fragments.[1] Yet the Romantic exaltation of “strangeness” was, at bottom, an exaltation of the subject’s creativity—that is, of the subject himself; “strangeness,” or “defamiliarization,” remained merely a means of expressing the creative power of the subject.
For the Russian Formalist theorist Shklovsky, however, “defamiliarization” possesses an ontological significance. Defamiliarization is no longer a means or a mark of the writer’s creative power; it is the fundamental ground on which literature attains its literariness—that is, it becomes literature itself. As Shklovsky sees it, because defamiliarization departs from people’s habits of experience, it increases the resistance and difficulty of perception, and so blocks the connection between literature and the reality it reflects, and even the connection between literature and its meaning; thereby it makes perception return once more to literature itself, to the defamiliarized form itself. This making of perception linger upon literature, upon the defamiliarized form, even upon the very character of the perceptual process, not only sets literature apart from science and philosophy but also estranges literature from social reality and from the writer, turning it into an intransitive, self-sufficient, self-purposive entity. At this point the study of literature is no longer the study of the society literature reflects or the meaning it discloses, nor the study of the writer, of creative intention, of the creative process; it is the study of literariness and textual constitution—that is, it becomes a study to which scientific structural analysis can be applied. Plainly, within the theoretical systems of Romanticism and Formalism defamiliarization underwent not only a change from means to ontological ground but also a conversion from a humanistic method to a modern scientistic method, becoming a forerunner of literary structuralism. Perhaps it is for this reason that Terry Eagleton, in discussing contemporary Western literary theory, regards Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” as the opening of the great changes in this century’s literary theory.[2]
In “Art as Technique” there is a passage that has been cited again and again: “In order to restore the sensation of life, in order to feel things, in order to make a stone stony, there exists what is called art. The aim of art is to give the sensation of things as perceived and not as recognized; the technique of art is to make things ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms obscure, to increase the difficulty and duration of perception, because in art the act of perception is an end in itself and ought to be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the making of a thing; what has been ‘made’ is of no importance to art.”[3]
A human being does not perceive an object with a blank mind, but enters a new perceptual activity bearing the perceptual experience accumulated beforehand. Experience is at once the premise of the acuteness and depth of perception and, conversely, the cause of perception’s blunting and automatization—that is to say, the subject, out of habit and contentment with his own experience, ceases to attend to the perceived object. Han Yu, in his “Letter in Reply to Liu Zhengfu,” says: “The myriad things one sees morning and evening, no one regards with attention.”[4] The modern aesthetician George Santayana has a similar remark: “The pleasure produced by a congenial but monotonous environment often fails to make that environment appear beautiful, for the simple reason that the environment receives no attention. In the same way, the ugly things we have grown used to—a blemish in a landscape, the shabby spots on our clothes or our walls—do not embarrass us, not because we fail to see their ugliness, but because we have grown so accustomed that we no longer notice it.”[5] Chomsky, too, points out that “when certain phenomena are too familiar, too ‘obvious,’ we feel no need to explain them.”[6] In artistic appreciation Gehler calls phenomena of this kind “form fatigue.” In his view, appreciating a work of art is an activity of distributing the perceived object into memory: “if the perceived object has long been familiar to people, so that the work of distribution becomes too simple, then the degree of appreciation of that object is lowered.”[7] Defamiliarization, on the contrary, breaks through the blunting and automatization of the subject’s perception. It departs from, or exceeds, the experience the subject already has, surging up before the subject as an unexpected novelty. This difference between the object and the subject’s experience and expectation compels the subject to face it squarely—and so seizes his attention, kindles his interest, and impels him to “perceive” it from a new angle, to grasp fully its vitality and richness, rather than simply to “recognize” it. As Kant says: “Novelty, even the novelty of the bizarre and the cryptic in content, makes the attention lively; for it is a gain, and the sensuous representation is thereby strengthened. The everyday and the ordinary, by contrast, attenuate such representation.”[8] Likewise, from the standpoint of information theory, a familiar object cannot supply the subject with information, whereas an unfamiliar object, because it supplies new information, fosters the exchange between subject and object and lets appreciation proceed.
Literature is the art of language, and the dual character of language likewise destines the importance of literary defamiliarization. On the one hand, language is the indispensable tool of humankind; without the “naming” that language provides, a person could not clearly perceive, distinguish, or recognize the objective object, still less carry on thinking and communication. As Cassirer says, “language is like the spiritual air in which our thought and feeling, perception and concept, come to live. Outside it we cannot breathe.”[9] On the other hand, language may also become a screen blocking a person’s perception and cognition of objects, and a limitation upon thinking and communication. For once language becomes the medium by which a person makes contact with the world of objects—a most effective medium, to be sure—it to some degree sets a distance between the person and the sensuous world, so that he no longer faces the living sensuous object nakedly but always distinguishes objects by the “differences” of language and recognizes them by the “naming” of language; and so the stone too becomes a hollow, withered concept serving as a mark of recognition, no longer a sensuous reality rich in content. Hence Bacon sighed: “Though we believe we govern our own words, in fact we are possessed and governed by these words. Words violently affect the understanding of even the wisest, and most readily disturb and distort his judgement.”[10] The important aim of literary defamiliarization is precisely to break through this limitation of language. Defamiliarization discards the habitual meanings of words, excavates their marginal, derived, or added meanings, and through this medium establishes an entirely new relation between the person and the sensuous object. Like a flash of lightning, it tears open the screen language casts over the sensuous object, renews human perception, and unfolds a “realm of lucid clarity.”
The defamiliarized object, by its novel appearance, draws the subject’s attention and kindles a new perceptual activity, thereby renewing the subject’s view of the world—this ought to be a proposition of extremely rich connotation. In Formalist theory, however, defamiliarization is often confined more narrowly to form, and even to the verbal level: the defamiliarized form increases the difficulty and duration of the perception of form, makes the subject concentrate on literary form, and so strengthens the sense of form and the aesthetic character, letting literature attain a distinctive value setting it apart from other objects—literariness. “The literary work is pure form; it is not a thing, not material, but a ratio of materials. Like any ratio, it is a ratio of degree zero.”[11] The defamiliarization of words, for its part, fully excavates the expressive functions and values at every level of poetic language, letting poetic language attain a poeticity that sets it apart from the language of prose. “Where is poeticity manifested? It is manifested in the fact that the word is felt as a word and not merely as the indicator of its referent or the trigger of an emotion; manifested in the fact that words, word-order, word-meaning, and their external and internal forms are not merely indistinguishable references to reality, but acquire a weight and a meaning of their own.”[12] Because defamiliarization lets literature attain literariness and lets poetry attain poeticity, it thereby comes to possess an ontological significance.
What especially interested the Formalists was the study of poetic language. In their view poetic language is the defamiliarization of everyday language. Through its distinctive combination and organization, poetic diction endows language with metre and rhythm and displays the musical beauty of language; at the same time, by distorting the word-order and the pragmatic conventions of prose, it gives vigour to the derived or added meanings of words; and, more importantly, by loosening and even severing the connection between signifier and signified, it lets every level of poetic language acquire “a weight and meaning of its own” and become an intransitive, self-purposive object. Here, because “defamiliarization” in Formalist theory was pushed to the Formalist extreme, it revealed its one-sidedness and its inner contradiction. Todorov saw this long ago. He observes: “Shklovsky seems never to have realized that this function of art—renewing the perception of the world—can no longer be reconciled with the other property of art (the self-contained purposiveness that has no external function); and yet in his later writings he continued to affirm both at once.”[13] To renew the perception of the world is an important external function and external purpose of artistic defamiliarization. When Shklovsky speaks of defamiliarization in general, or analyses concrete objects, he does not seem to discard or belittle the external purpose of art. In discussing Tolstoy, for instance, he points out: “This way of seeing things apart from their surrounding environment led Tolstoy, in his late works, to use the device of making-strange even when depicting religious doctrines and rituals, substituting everyday words for the customary words of religion; the result was strange, unthinkable things, which many people frankly took to be blasphemy, and which displeased them greatly... Tolstoy’s perception shook his religious faith and touched on things he had long avoided.”[14] “Blasphemy” and “shaking religious faith” plainly break out of the circle of literature’s self-contained purposiveness and possess the external purpose of renewing one’s view of religion and of the world. Yet when Shklovsky concentrates on questions of form and language, or formulates “defamiliarization” at a higher theoretical level, he again stresses literature’s self-purposiveness, its lack of external function. This contradiction, born of one-sidedness and of pushing matters to an extreme, is bound up with the polemical character of the times: “as against the unconditional emphasis on ‘content,’ there had at that time to be an antithesis emphasizing ‘form’ to set against it.”[15] More probably still, the mental set created by the theoretical atmosphere of Formalism caused Shklovsky to pass by the rich connotation his own theory of defamiliarization had touched upon.
Stressing literature’s self-purposiveness, prizing its literariness, and estranging literature from the writer and from reality so as to study it in isolation did, to be sure, allow great strides in the exploration of literature’s “internal laws”; but a price was paid for this as well. And the contradictions and blanks Shklovsky left within the theory of defamiliarization offered later thinkers the possibility of developing and reshaping that theory.
2. Brecht and the “Alienation Effect”
The “alienation effect” is also rendered “defamiliarization effect.” If, for Shklovsky, defamiliarization let literature attain literariness, and—because defamiliarization brought into prominence the artistic character (the aesthetic character) of literature, making the reader concentrate on that artistic character itself—turned literature into an intransitive, self-purposive object; then for Brecht defamiliarization served mainly a purpose outside art itself, namely the cognition and critique of social reality. Brecht held that the alienation effect, “in a word, is a means of giving the things to be represented between people the character of something striking, something that calls for explanation, something not to be taken for granted and not simply natural. The aim of this effect is to enable the audience to make a correct critique from a social standpoint.”[16] Defamiliarization arouses surprise and overcomes the automatization of the subject’s perception; on this point Brecht agrees with Shklovsky. But for Shklovsky perception itself is the end, the terminus: it refers back to itself and does not lead to any other end beyond itself. For Brecht, defamiliarization does not stop at perception: it awakens the subject’s reason, freeing the subject from the unconscious state produced by habits of experience and social prejudice, and making him regard the object with a critical, sceptical eye—thereby realizing the cognitive function of literary art as well as its functions of social critique and education, and not merely the Formalists’ “autonomy of the aesthetic function.” Plainly, Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization is closer to Kant, whereas Brecht has a more direct lineage to Hegel rather than to Kant.
Hegel advances his view from the standpoint of epistemology: “Generally speaking, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not really known. One of the most common forms of self-deception in cognition is to presuppose that something is already known and so to let it be, leaving it unexamined.”[17] In accord with Hegel’s view, Brecht advocates “stripping away from an event or a character whatever is self-evident, familiar, and obvious at a glance, so as to produce surprise and curiosity toward it.”[18] And surprise and curiosity are precisely the starting point from which a person penetrates into the cognition of an object and discovers its laws. It “clears away the residue of cult worship that adhered to it in earlier phases, and completes the phase in which it helped to interpret the world, entering the phase in which it helps to change the world.”[19]
Although Brecht’s theory of defamiliarization has a rich connotation, comprising both a cognitive method and principles of dramatic performance, the epistemological significance constitutes the core of his theory and runs through his theory of defamiliarization as a dramatic principle. Whether in the writing of the script, the director’s direction, the actor’s grasp of the role, or in set, lighting, and music, the use of defamiliarizing devices serves to create in the audience a psychical distance from the drama, so that, with a critical attitude, they may attain cognition of the drama and, beyond it, of reality. On this view Brecht takes a critical attitude toward traditional Aristotelian drama. He holds that such drama exploits empathy to place the audience in an intoxicated illusion. Empathy does infect the audience, but because the ardour it kindles remains in an unconscious state, lacking the basis of a rational cognition of the object, this ardour is short-lived: it vanishes with the vanishing of the illusion and so cannot fundamentally educate the audience. To overcome this weakness, an epic element—the narrator—should be introduced into the drama, transforming the drama’s “present tense” directly into an epic narration of past history. This constitutes the epic theatre (or narrative theatre) that Brecht advocated. As the core device of such theatre, the defamiliarizing device (the alienation effect) creates a fissure between the world of the stage and the world of reality, weakening the drama’s power of empathy. Because the audience’s standpoint is no longer in the position of the dramatic character but outside the drama, the audience no longer closely follows and clings to the character but freely, equally, and independently raises its own questions and then independently answers them; thus it not only attains cognition through the drama but may even attain a cognition surpassing what the drama itself can supply. Beyond doubt, the pronounced rational colouring of Brecht’s theory of defamiliarization sets it markedly apart from the many modern theories of literature and art that champion the irrational.
Bound up with defamiliarization is historicization. Historicization means not only treating historical events as history but also treating the reality presently unfolding as history. Reality is no longer an eternal, unchanging, self-evident fact, but is regarded as a transient, developing, changing, contradiction-laden object. This strips a person of his blind faith in reality, rouses his doubt and questioning of it, and impels him to explore the contradictory movement of the object—its past and its future. Since reality is changing, a person’s habits of experience and his conceptual cognition ought constantly to be renewed. To be habituated to ready-made conclusions and to treat ever-changing reality with an attitude of taking it for granted is to make true cognition of reality impossible.
In Brecht’s theoretical system, historicization is at once the ground of defamiliarization and its result. Because reality is ever-changing, a person cannot but regard it with unfamiliar eyes; and conversely, only through defamiliarization can a person see clearly the changes in reality. More important still, historicization is itself defamiliarization, for ever-changing reality in fact always places a person in an unfamiliar relation, so that historicization is defamiliarization. History is fluid, and the existence of reality is dubitable and ought to be doubted. If Hegel’s proposition “the actual is rational” supplied a theoretical ground of existence for what is newborn, weak, and small, then Brecht’s proposition “the actual is historical” issues, from another side, a challenge to the existing social forces that occupy the ruling position. It impels people to move from doubt of existing reality and of habits of thought to a critical sublation and even a thorough negation. Hence this thought of historical dialectics necessarily endows Brecht’s theory of defamiliarization with a revolutionary character.
The English critic John Willett holds that the concept of “defamiliarization” in Brecht’s theory derives from Russian Formalism: in 1935, after Brecht visited Moscow, the concept appeared in his work.[20] What is more probable is this: in Moscow Brecht came into contact both with Russian Formalist theory and with the Chinese Peking opera then being performed in Moscow, and this aroused in him—from the angles of theory and of practice respectively—a keen interest in defamiliarization; he grasped the affinity between this theory and the “epic theatre” he advocated, and went on to reshape the theory of defamiliarization, developing and applying it from a wholly different direction.
3. Defamiliarization and the Functional Structure of Literature
For Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the guarantee by which literature attains literariness and the autonomy of its aesthetic function; for Brecht, it is emphasized as the path to realizing the cognitive, social-critical, and educational functions. How is this theoretical contradiction and opposition to be explained? On this, Booth’s view is instructive. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth proposes that several kinds of distance-relation may exist between the reader and the object of appreciation: distances of value, of morals, of cognition, of aesthetics, and of the physical.[21] The unfamiliar is precisely a distance between the object of appreciation and the subject’s experience; but this distance may be a distance of value, of morals, of cognition, or of aesthetics. When defamiliarization creates an aesthetic distance between the object of appreciation and the subject—as when a new metre, a new mode of structure, or some other new artistic device stands at a distance from the subject’s aesthetic experience—it brings these formal features into prominence and places them in the foreground, making the subject first fix his gaze on the novel formal features; and in the process of savouring these “significant forms” and striving to close the distance between subject and object, he tastes the rich import the new form contains, and so the aesthetic function is realized. If the defamiliarizing device is applied to social phenomena bearing a moral-ethical significance—especially to behaviour and speech that display people’s moral norms—it exaggerates and emphasizes the moral distance between the appreciating subject and the object. Faced with a conspicuous gap, the subject cannot but be compelled to judge and choose, either appraising the object by his own moral standards or, while appraising the object, reflecting on his own moral conceptions and sublating them—thereby realizing the work’s moral-educational function. Likewise, the defamiliarization of historical events or of certain complex social phenomena, or the defamiliarization of value-conceptions, will—through the cognitive distance and value distance thus created—push the object of cognition and the value-phenomenon respectively into the foreground, realizing the cognitive function and the value-orientation function. Thus Tao Yuanming’s “The Peach Blossom Spring” (Account and Poem) fabricates an utterly nonexistent Peach Blossom Spring and, through the eyes of a man of the Jin, looks upon the life of “the people of Qin” who “did not know there had been a Han, let alone the Wei and the Jin.” This ideal realm—where “at sundown all retire to rest” and “the autumn harvest is free of the sovereign’s tax”—possesses in itself a certain cognitive value, and in turn, by setting this ideal life against the actual life of society, it attains a cognition of the unreasonableness of actual life, thereby realizing the work’s cognitive and social-critical functions. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway depicts the old man, the sea, and the sharks in strong, vivid strokes, prompting the reader to reflect deeply on the philosophical import the work contains—the relation of man and nature, of human striving and human destiny. And in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, the author gives a defamiliarizing treatment to old Grandet’s attitude toward money, wife, and daughter, thereby pushing old Grandet’s deformed value-conceptions and moral conceptions into the foreground and realizing a critique of such conceptions. John Fowles, for his part, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman embeds certain real persons and events of the Victorian era within a fictional story-frame, reconstructing in a distinctive defamiliarizing manner a historical text, so as to realize a new interpretation of the history of Victorian England.
It may be said that, for a literary work—a composite system constituted by several functions—the relations among its functions, or rather which function occupies the prominent position under given conditions, are closely bound up with the various distances between the appreciator and the literary object. The most prominent distance tends to push its related object into the foremost foreground, thereby providing favourable conditions for the realization of the corresponding function. And the various distance-relations depend, in turn, on which part and which level of the text is involved, and on how the defamiliarizing device is employed. At this point the contradiction between Shklovsky’s and Brecht’s theories of defamiliarization can be explained. Shklovsky inclines toward the defamiliarization of artistic form, especially of poetic metre and language; this necessarily brings the formal features of the literary sign into prominence, pushes them into the foremost foreground, and makes them the centre of attention. Defamiliarization creates a distance between the world of literary signs and the world of reality, and stresses the value of the sign-world itself. Brecht is different: he holds that “the aim of the alienation effect is to defamiliarize all the social actions within events.”[22] And so, by this defamiliarization, the moral significance, the social-critical significance, and the cognitive significance contained in “social actions” are necessarily brought into prominence. Brecht’s defamiliarization, too, creates a distance between the sign-world and the world of reality; but this mode of defamiliarization does not, like the Formalists’, strive for the mutual isolation of the literary sign-world and the world of reality, or for the independence of the literary sign-world. Rather it mainly provides the appreciator with a better standpoint and angle for observing and evaluating reality. Defamiliarization sets the literary sign-world apart from the world of reality while at the same time directly referring to the world of reality and leading toward it.
Here it is necessary to compare and discuss the distance spoken of in this essay with Edward Bullough’s “doctrine of distance.” In “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” Bullough proposes: “Every art requires a limit of distance; aesthetic perception is possible only beyond one limit and within many limits. This is the psychological expression of a general analysis of art—more precisely, of the anti-realist nature of art.”[23] What Bullough means by the “anti-realist nature” is art’s reshaping and remaking of reality. Reshaping makes art distinct from, different from, reality, and so is precisely the defamiliarization of reality. This very feature of art guarantees the psychical distance between the appreciator and the art-object, so that the appreciator regards the art-object with an attitude differing from his attitude toward everyday life. The necessary distance is the premise of aesthetic perception. Therefore the “psychical distance” of which Bullough speaks is bound up with a single non-real psychical attitude. Beyond the sense Bullough intends, the present essay also uses the concept of “distance” in a more concrete sense: it refers to the gap between the aesthetic norms a work embodies and the aesthetic norms with which the appreciator is familiar—the aesthetic distance; the gap between the cognitive content a work contains and the appreciator’s existing background of knowledge and experience—the cognitive distance; the gap between the moral conceptions and norms a work embodies and those the appreciator holds—the moral distance; and so on. The same term “distance” is used, but with somewhat different meanings: this is the first point.
Psychical distance endows the appreciator with an attitude differing from that of everyday life—a non-real attitude—making the subject regard the object as fictional and not as a fact of real life. But the non-real attitude is not equivalent to a purely aesthetic attitude; it does not wholly exclude cognitive relations, moral relations, and the like between subject and object. In fact, when a person is lost in metaphysical contemplation, or in pure theoretical inquiry, or immersed in a religious atmosphere, he too is in a kind of non-real attitude. Literary appreciation is the same. In reading Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, for instance, the reader cannot but sympathize with the kindly bell-ringer Quasimodo and, in moral feeling, detest and condemn the hypocritical, sinister Archdeacon Claude Frollo. Yet he still does not treat the novel as the transcription of real events but as fiction—that is, he still maintains the distance of which Bullough speaks; only the moral reverberation aroused by reading and appreciation differs from the direct reaction one has when facing real events and real persons. Likewise, even if from Dickens’s works we obtain “more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together,”[24] we would not equate the social picture his works depict, point by point, with existing society itself.
Our literature has always prized the tradition of “praise and censure” (meici); and even some of the finest of the political satirical poems of Ma Fantuo, which appeared in the late 1940s of this century, laid greater stress on the functions of intervening in life and criticizing society, yet did not on that account degenerate into mere preaching. It must be said that Bullough is right to stress the necessity of “distance” in the artwork; but when, setting out from the necessary distance, he excludes the other functions beyond the aesthetic and, on that basis, opposes art’s intervention in actual life, he again falls into one-sidedness. This is a further divergence between the present essay and Bullough. On this point Formalist defamiliarization theory is in agreement with Bullough, or may even have a lineage to him.[25]
Of course, since literary defamiliarization is the defamiliarization of concrete images—of persons, events, and phenomena—and is inseparable from its own distinctive artistic form, it must create an aesthetic distance; therefore the moral, cognitive, social-critical, and social-interventionist functions of a literary work have their own particularity: they neither act directly upon reality, and must necessarily fuse with the aesthetic function. The appreciator receives from the work an emotional kindling, an enjoyment of beauty, a cultivation of moral sentiment, an enlightenment of reason and an orientation of value, which then in turn influence his social practice and way of life. Likewise, literature’s intervention in society can only be indirect, not direct. More precisely, the reverberation in reading and appreciation, being under what Norman N. Holland calls the “aesthetic inhibition of motor action,” loses direct actuality. Defamiliarization creates the “psychical distance” of which Bullough speaks, making the appreciator regard the literary object with a non-real attitude; at the same time, through the different uses of defamiliarizing devices, it creates the aesthetic, cognitive, moral, and value distances spoken of in this essay, and produces an inequality in the standing of these distances in the course of appreciation, strengthening and bringing into prominence the role of certain distances—thereby leading to changes in the functional structure of literature.
To point out the influence of defamiliarization on the distance-relations between appreciator and literary object is not to say that a particular defamiliarizing device can create only one kind of distance and help realize only one function; it is to say that the defamiliarizing device produces changes in the relative relations among the aesthetic, cognitive, moral, and other distances, brings one of these distances into prominence, places it in the foremost foreground, and provides the conditions for the priority realization of the function corresponding to that distance. Because the other distances do not occupy the prominent position—and because of the selectivity of attention and the psychical phenomenon of attentional dominance—the realization of the other corresponding functions is often delayed or temporarily neglected. The several functions of literature are not mutually incompatible but coexist symbiotically. Under certain conditions of appreciation and reception, a particular defamiliarizing device does not necessarily weaken the other functions by bringing one function into prominence and strengthening it; in most cases they rather augment one another. A wholly new-formed artwork, for instance, because of its artistic charm, also strengthens the work’s educational or cognitive function at the same time—only it first makes one notice its artistic features. In the well-known example of old Grandet, although the moral and value distances are conspicuously displayed, a cognitive distance is created at the same time, making the reader recognize the cold, greedy nature of the bourgeoisie once the veil of tender feeling has been torn away; this realizes the cognitive function, which in turn strengthens the work’s educational and social-critical functions.
As to the mechanism by which defamiliarization influences literary function, it lies mainly in this: literary defamiliarization brings about a conflict between two sets of paradigms—it arouses the reader’s expectation and the paradigm he already holds, and then with the work’s new paradigm breaks that expectation and paradigm; surprise is the result of the tension and mutual collision between the two sets of paradigms. Terence Hawkes points out: “The process of ‘defamiliarization’ requires beforehand the existence of a body of ‘commonly familiar’ material, which seems to have content. If all literary works at all times engaged in the process of defamiliarization, then—for lack of a commonly familiar standard or ‘contrast object’—any feature of this process would be stripped away.”[26]
In practical activity, especially in the reading and appreciation of literature, the reader gradually internalizes aesthetic experience, knowledge experience, moral conceptions, and value conceptions, forming his own particular aesthetic paradigm, cognitive paradigm, moral paradigm, and so on. The reader always enters new reading and appreciation bearing his own paradigm. When a particular defamiliarizing device thrusts some new paradigm—an aesthetic paradigm, say—before the reader, it arouses the subject’s existing aesthetic paradigm and then breaks it with the new paradigm. The tension and collision constituted by the two sets of paradigms greatly draw the subject’s attention, kindle his interest, and—in his effort to dispel the distance between his own aesthetic paradigm and the literary object, or to make an aesthetic judgement on the object—cause him either to change himself or to enrich himself. It is the same with the cognitive and other paradigms. The process of constructing a paradigm may be described by Piaget’s formula of “assimilation–accommodation.”
Of course, it is not the case that the greater the distance, the more favourable it is for strengthening or bringing into prominence the related function. Once the distance is too great, exceeding the subject’s receptive capacity, it on the contrary plunges the subject into bewilderment—and, because it cannot be drawn into the subject’s relations of meaning, it forms no collision of two paradigms between subject and object, and so cannot at all kindle the subject’s interest or draw his attention. Hence what appears in the foremost foreground of the reader’s field of vision in a literary work is not the object of greatest distance, but the object of a distance within a determinate limit. Only a distance within a certain limit can most greatly arouse the subject’s concern and interest and let certain related functions be realized first. As Goethe once said: “People do not really care how great a poet is. Rather it is the poet who stands out just a little above the general audience who best wins that audience’s favour.”[27]
The defamiliarizing devices in literature are of many kinds. Exaggerating and distorting a work’s characters is a device commonly used in comic defamiliarization. Comic defamiliarization emphasizes the distance between the characters’ behavioural norms and the appreciator, enabling the appreciator to pass a clear judgement on the object and to laugh at it. Certain critical-realist works do not adopt exaggeration but merely withdraw certain backgrounds, alienating a given social phenomenon. The stripping away of the background gives the appreciator freedom to choose his standpoint; the phenomena that the subject formerly, against that background, found natural, reasonable, and beyond doubt now—because the change of standpoint has created a distance and altered the mode of observation and understanding—reveal their flaws. Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer” views the world through a horse’s eyes, displaying at once the conceptions and norms of a society of private property and the “horse’s norms” that know nothing of private ownership; the conflict of the two sets of norms thus constituted compels those who live under private property and are habituated to attaching the label “mine” to every object to rethink and judge the matter anew—thereby realizing the social-critical function. As Adorno points out: “There is a distance between art and reality, and this distance gives the artwork a favourable position from which art can criticize reality.”[28]
The doctrine of “turning iron into gold” held by the ancient Chinese poet Huang Tingjian is, in its connotation, also a theory of defamiliarization, and it is akin to the Russian Formalist theory of poetic language. Once words and allusions with a pedigree are placed in a new context, their habitual usages and meanings undergo mutation under the pressure of the new context; between the old usage and meaning and the new usage and meaning a tension is constituted, and so the “iron” is turned into “gold.” “Parody” in Western literature, for its part, imitates some fashionable artistic form and then destroys that form—that is, it displays two aesthetic norms and their conflict so as to lay bare and criticize that form (that artistic device). Indeed, Chekhov’s advocacy of using language as cold as possible to portray objects of sympathy and pity may also be called a mode of defamiliarization: because it departs from the emotional expression of sympathy and pity that ought properly to be there, it creates an emotional distance between reader and work, and so the expression becomes, on the contrary, more conspicuous and more forceful. The opposition between the two modes of emotional expression lets the work’s function of emotional expression be the better realized.
If we sum up the role of literary defamiliarization in reading and appreciation, it may broadly be divided into three levels. First, it creates the distance of which Bullough speaks, inducing the appreciator to regard the literary object with an attitude differing from that of everyday life. Second, defamiliarization produces an adjustment in the standing of the several functions within the functional structure of literature, placing certain functions in the prominent position and providing the conditions for their priority realization, while the standing of other functions becomes relatively secondary—that is, it produces changes in the relations of primary and secondary, of prominent and recessive, among the functions. Third, because defamiliarization changes certain substantive distances between the work and the appreciator—supplying, say, new aesthetic norms, or new moral standards, or new cognitive content—it produces changes in the values of certain functions and so leads to an alteration of the whole functional structure.
In A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht once mentioned the “old alienation effect.” He held that, unlike the new alienation effect, “the old alienation effect makes the audience wholly unable to intervene in the things represented, turning them into something that cannot be changed.”[29] Brecht did not elaborate further on this. One may conjecture that the “old defamiliarization” he speaks of refers to the mystification of the object—that is, defamiliarizing (alienating) the human into a god and defamiliarizing the human condition into fate. Strictly speaking, the “old defamiliarization” is not the defamiliarization spoken of in this essay; one might even say it is not defamiliarization at all. For it is built precisely upon a deep-rooted habitual conception in people—namely, that god and fate are not to be doubted, not to be questioned, not to be pried into and appraised—rather than upon the breaking of habit. From another angle, one may say that the gulf created by the old alienation effect between the world beyond and the world of human experience is so vast that it cannot be bridged, with the result that it endows the work with a cult function.
4. The Relativity of Defamiliarization and Distance, and the Mutability of the Functional Structure
Since what defamiliarization creates is a distance between subject and object, it necessarily depends at once on the features of the literary object and on the features of the appreciating subject. The same defamiliarizing device, for appreciating subjects with differing cultural-psychological structures, necessarily creates differing distances. That is to say, defamiliarization and distance are relative. For some appreciating subjects an object may be unfamiliar, at a distance; for others it is not. For some subjects the cognitive distance may occupy a relatively primary position; for others it may be the aesthetic or moral distance. And so the mutability of the literary functional structure arises. Yet within a particular socio-historical environment—owing to the constraint of a shared historical tradition and the existence of a relatively stable, unified cultural atmosphere, and even the possible prevalence of a particular social fashion, especially a literary fashion—the distinctively individual cultural-psychological structures also possess a commonality and unity; and so defamiliarization, distance, and the literary functional structure also possess a relative stability. This is what makes it possible for us to explore the relation between defamiliarization and the functional structure of literature.
The differences among individual cultural-psychological structures are manifested not only in the fact that each separately possesses its particular aesthetic paradigm, cognitive paradigm, moral paradigm, and so forth, but also in the fact that these paradigms are always combined, in different ways in different individuals, into an overall cultural-psychological structure. In a sociologist, for instance, the social cognitive paradigm and the moral paradigm often occupy a dominant and prominent position in the overall structure, and so produce a perceptual and cognitive set. This feature of the cultural-psychological structure may lead the subject to disregard the features of a work shaped by a particular defamiliarizing device and, setting out wholly from individual interest, to make his choices according to his own needs and habits—so realizing those literary functions that suit himself. A typical example is the wholly different conclusions Shklovsky and Bakhtin drew about the defamiliarizing device in Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer.”[30] This too produces the relativity and mutability of the defamiliarization effect (not of defamiliarization itself) and of the mode in which literary function is realized.
A further cause of the relativity and mutability of defamiliarization, distance, and functional structure is regional difference and historical change. An artistic form long since grown stale in one country may, once introduced into another, be transformed at a stroke into something novel and unfamiliar. And so not a few people admire it endlessly and flock to it, while others are relatively bewildered and voice censure. Shen Congwen’s fiction has drawn many readers, especially foreign readers; one reason is that it provides an unfamiliar realm: the rustic human scene of western Hunan. The same literary work, in different countries, meets with different fortunes according to the differing relative degree and mode of its defamiliarization. Thus, while Goethe’s Faust was regarded as a masterpiece by English poets, who drew nourishment from it, “the Romantics of France still could not appreciate the dramatic structure of this masterpiece or its philosophical import.”[31] And Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, equally beloved by the English and the French, met with divergence in reception as well: “the one side moved toward the ethical, the other toward the purely artistic.”[32]
In “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Jauss advances the view of literature’s historical connectedness. He says: “Historical connectedness plainly lies in this: that the understanding of the first readers can be transmitted, and continually enriched, from generation to generation along the chain of reception; this thereby determines the historical significance of a work and displays its aesthetic standing. In this process of receptive history, past works are grasped anew, and at the same time a continual communication goes on between past art and present art, between the traditional evaluation of literature and its present-day testing.”[33] Because of historical connectedness, with the passage of history—with the accumulation of the reader’s aesthetic and knowledge experience and the evolution of moral and value conceptions—the subject’s reception paradigm changes, and this may make a literary phenomenon that seemed unfamiliar under particular historical conditions no longer unfamiliar. Or a literary work that, under certain historical conditions, was not accepted because of too great a distance may, with the passage of time, have that distance shrink and approach the moderate, so that it is rediscovered and its corresponding function realized. The rise and fall of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and of Feydeau’s Fanny, similar in subject matter, may serve as a footnote here. When the two works appeared in 1857, Fanny ran through thirteen editions in a single year, eclipsing Madame Bovary. One reason was that at the time the “non-subjective narration” of Madame Bovary could not be accepted, whereas Fanny created a sensation for a time through its fashionable form and style. As the years passed, the former was at last universally acknowledged, while the latter sank into oblivion. Historical connectedness is manifested also in this: the changing reception paradigms of appreciators in different ages cause the relations among the various distances to be readjusted, with the result that an object formerly placed in the foreground recedes to a secondary position while a secondary one leaps into the foreground—thereby producing mutations in the functional structure. For this very reason, a work that might once have been favoured for its aesthetic function may later be esteemed for its cognitive function.
In sum, the functional structure of literature is not the same as the textual structure of literature. An objective existence, it can be generated only within a concrete socio-historical environment, within intentional relations, within the process of literary appreciation; and it is at the same time conditioned by the textual structure of literature and by the various background factors of the appreciating subject and the activity of appreciation. The present essay has confined itself to seizing upon the single question of defamiliarization, so as to make a preliminary examination of the functional structure of literature.