Linguistic Defamiliarization and a New Dimension of Being

Language is the sky of humankind. Man lives under a grey canopy where everything seems so habitual, so frozen, without life — to the point that one no longer feels the colors the dim sky lays on every thing, no longer feels a living, ever-changing world. Then, one day, you wake from sleep and the eastern glow of dawn is overhead; the whole world is lit by the morning light and burns into a brilliant sea of fire. What sort of impression does the world then give you? Is what now appears before your eye a strange and unfamiliar realm? Or do you doubt that you are still in a dream, in some illusory, otherworldly place? In the world of the poetic, the defamiliarization of language is like a sky woven from morning glow; it leads us into another world, different from habitual life, and endows us with a wholly new existence.

1. Linguistic Defamiliarization in the Horizon of Russian Formalism

What Russian Formalism thought about and explored was precisely how to paint the sky of language with strange and uncanny color, and the theory of defamiliarization that they advanced is one of the cornerstones of formalist literary theory.

The Italian thinker Vico held that primal language is poetic language. Language at its birth was full of the poetic and the sensuous. As the Russian Formalists saw it, this trait that Vico named has, in the long use and development of language, gradually slipped away — like a coin worn smooth by the years, the word too has lost its original numinous luster and become a sign without poetic feeling, a dried-out conceptual husk. Language has “traveled the road from poetry to prose. The death of the thing.” [1] How can the word be made to speak anew, to take on life again? One important way is “defamiliarization.”

Shklovsky, an important member of Russian Formalism, raised the question of defamiliarization from the angle of overcoming the automatization of human perception. He held that once an action becomes habit it takes on a mechanical character; once a thing has been perceived many times, people begin to take it in by “recognition” rather than “perception” — the thing is right there in front of the eye, we know it, yet we do not see it. This is the automatization, the unconsciousness, of perception. To break automatization and the unconscious, defamiliarizing devices must be used to set up obstacles, increase the resistance of perception, awaken the vitality of perception, and prolong the time of perception. The thing then seems to occur for the first time again, surfacing again to the level of consciousness, manifesting itself anew to the human being, and its rich sensuous features begin to appear within a perception that has had its force aroused and its time prolonged. So:

The aim of the image is not to bring the meaning it carries closer to our understanding, but to create a special perception of the thing, to create its seeing rather than its recognition. [2]

By the same token, the language of poetry

is consciously created in order that perception may be lifted out of automatism. Its seeing expresses the aim of the creator and is artificially structured so that perception lingers in the seeing, so that the force and time of perception reach the maximum. The thing is not perceived as part of space, one could say, but is perceived in its prolongation. The language of poetry meets these conditions exactly. [3]

Since the time of perceiving the language of poetry must be prolonged, that language must be

difficult, obscure language, language full of obstacles. [3]

Shklovsky once drew on an example from Chekhov’s Notebook to illustrate the defamiliarization of language. A man walked down the same alley for decades, every day saw the same signboard, yet never seriously read what it said. Then somehow the board was taken down and leaned against the other side of the wall. Only then did he set out to make out its meaning, only then did he really read what it said. From this Shklovsky writes:

The poet pulls off from his post every signboard; the artist is forever the instigator of the rebellion of things. The thing throws off its old name and, with a new name, shows a new face — and so rises in rebellion within the poet.

“Defamiliarization” is the work of taking off the signboard. The signboard does indeed call out to passers-by, but it uses an empty sign to set the human being and the object apart, so that one cannot directly face the object and directly perceive it. Hence the artist’s work is not only to take off the old signboard, but to take off every signboard, to let one face the object directly. Not only that: the object must also show itself before the human eye with a wholly new face, awakening the dulled senses, so that one may embrace it with new ardor and sharpened perception. Defamiliarization is the process of taking down the signboard, of rousing the rebellion of moribund things, of overturning the human being’s set perception of things — a process in which the eye and ear are made new.

Like a new garment, the new word fits the object well. The signboard has come down. This is one of the ways of turning the object into something that can become the material of an artwork. [4]

Within Russian Formalist literary theory, Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization has had wide influence. Many theorists took up the view and deepened the inquiry into linguistic defamiliarization. Roman Jakobson held:

Where does the poetic show itself? In the fact that the word is felt as the word, and not merely as the marker of the object referred to or the venting of a feeling — in the fact that the word and the word-order, the word-meaning, and its outer and inner form are no longer indistinguishable references to reality but each acquire its own weight and significance. [5]

Eikhenbaum, similarly, held:

We must be able to break loose from the formed automatism of the practical use of language in order to “understand” the language of art. [6]

To overcome linguistic automatism — to let the word become the word itself rather than the marker of the referent — the chief way is through linguistic defamiliarization. That is:

Any word in the language of poetry — compared with practical language — whether in its phonic side or its semantic side, has been transformed. [7]

Does the defamiliarization of language, then, mean that ever-new words must constantly be created? Yury Tynyanov holds that the way to give a word a new face is to renew its lexical and functional structures — that is, to renew the linguistic context of the word.

The word has no fixed meaning; it is a chameleon. In fact, the abstract entity of the “word” is like a cup: it is filled afresh each time, according to the lexical structure it has been placed within and to the function that the spontaneous force of each utterance carries. [8]

In everyday linguistic use, though every utterance is accompanied by “different connotations,” “different shades,” and other complex “secondary features,” the word gradually forms what we name as “basic meaning,” and so forms a unified category. The defamiliarization of language in literary works is, by altering the everyday use of language and altering the concrete context, to make the “basic feature” of the word blur and to make its “secondary features” stand out — to bring forth the savor and color that everyday use suppresses.

The brighter the lexical color of the word, the greater the possibility that, with its basic meaning blurred, its lexical color (rather than its basic feature) can be brought to the fore. [9]

Tynyanov’s demotion of the “basic feature” and elevation of the “secondary features” is of a piece with Shklovsky’s demotion of “recognition” and emphasis on “perception.” Both try, through defamiliarizing devices, to change the habits of everyday utilitarian use that take meaning, recognition, and the referent as primary, and so allow the human being to perceive again the sensuous features of the word itself. To break this habit, the resistance of understanding must be increased; language must become language full of obstacles; and one must even be forced to give up understanding meaning so that attention may be gathered upon language itself, and the form-feel of language may stand forth. The form-feel of language thus becomes both the focus and the aim of perception.

Yet, influenced by Saussure’s theory of “signifier / signified,” what the Russian Formalists really emphasized was not the “seeing” of language but the “signifier” of language — language’s most prominent material form: phonation. Increasing resistance and giving up understanding led, in their hands, not to bringing forward the visual image but to the strengthening of the phonic and the auditory. Sound became the chief formal factor that received attention, or — more extremely — the sole object of perception. The Formalists believed that within sound is sedimented the primal link between man and nature, and that only by attending to sound could poetry disclose the primal deep relations and primal experience laid down within it. From this view of Formalist theory, a fondness for the “transrational word” (zaum, the “meaningless word”) naturally followed.

One may flatly assert that, in the composition of poetic language, phonation (and the action of the speech organs) and phonic expression are of first importance. [10]

Strictly speaking, the language of poetry takes as its aim the word as sound — more precisely, because of the existence of its corresponding aim, the language of poetry takes the harmonic word, the meaningless word, as its aim. [11]

2. The Two Senses of Linguistic Defamiliarization

On the whole, Formalism leaned toward exploring literary questions from a linguistic angle or by linguistic method. Yet Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” theory is plainly influenced by the literary-psychological approach then still current in Russia; it thinks more from the angle of perceptual psychology.

Human perception is a complex receiving system; it is the fruit of long historical evolution and of selection by the environment of survival. Man is always closely tied to the things of the world, and at every moment is submerged in an ocean made up of all manner of information. To adapt to this environment, he must form a set of automatic information-filtering and -screening systems, letting the ordinary information slip through easily, lest he be worn to exhaustion by the density of information, and singling out, for attention, only the special and the strange. For the special and the strange always foretell some change, lurk with chance or with danger, and bear on the very state of life’s being. Man cannot but face them; cannot but pay them strong attention. It is just this long sedimentation of experience and this disciplining of perception that have made the human sense organs sharply selective “historical” sense organs.

But this feature of human perception cannot be applied to literary analysis in a simple way. Because Shklovsky borrowed the features of psychological perception to discuss literary defamiliarization, he placed his defamiliarization theory in an indeterminate position. Zhirmunsky has already pointed this out: from the angle of perception, defamiliarization is relative. For different readers, whether or not something is defamiliarizing is hard to fix. Goethe’s Götz, for instance, is complex, hard to understand, and odd for the reader brought up on French tragedy and on Gottsched or Lessing, but it is not so for those Storm-and-Stress devotees of Shakespeare. As long as a reader is trained, what was strange becomes familiar to him. So whether or not something is defamiliarizing cannot itself be fixed. In Zhirmunsky’s view,

the principle of escape from existing stiff formulas, the “procedure of estrangement” and the “procedure of complication of form,” are by no means the organizing and motive factors of artistic development. [12]

If defamiliarization is relative, do works that have already become familiar in form and language no longer have aesthetic specificity or artistic appeal for readers who already know them? In fact, no. Defamiliarization has two senses, on two levels.

The first sense is relative to everyday life and everyday discourse. The literary work has been worked over by art — that is, it has been formalized. This formalization sets literary discourse apart from everyday discourse, which is itself a defamiliarization of everyday discourse. Through formalization — that is, defamiliarization — literary discourse is created in distinction from everyday discourse, and at the same time the life and events depicted within the literary work are set apart from everyday life and events. So the reader is led to give up the everyday attitude and adopt instead a non-real, free attitude — a virtual aesthetic attitude — toward what he reads, reading poetry as poetry, the novel as novel, and not as newspaper report or government document or commodity manual. Defamiliarization here is relative to everyday-ness. It is a “marker” that hints at and leads the reader from the everyday state into the aesthetic state, from the real world into the world of art. “Poetry is language in its aesthetic function.” As a “marker,” the organizing form of this language also shows itself as a “convention.” Within one literary genre, the overall features of its language hold together a common quality that sets it apart from everyday discourse and from the discourse of other literary genres; they share the same or similar rules of organization — that is, conventions. Jonathan Culler writes:

The intention to communicate presupposes that the hearer knows the language. Likewise, a poem presupposes the conventions of reading. The poet can refer to these conventions in his writing, can try to alter them, but these conventions are still the condition under which his discourse can exist at all. [13]

Because of the constraint of “convention,” within a particular literary genre only a certain degree of linguistic defamiliarization, or local defamiliarization, is allowed. These defamiliarizations cannot go so far as to dismantle the existing “convention” wholesale, lest the literary reading lose its guide and become impossible. It is precisely “convention” that secures the historical continuity of the form of literary language, that secures the continuity of literature as a language-art.

Defamiliarization in the second sense is relative to literary language itself. Although literary language is constrained by literary conventions, it is, after all, ceaselessly renewing itself. Within literature, through the repeated use of vocabulary and modes of linguistic expression, language gradually loses its luster and lapses into cliché. The language of cliché is a withered language — a language that has lost its poetic.

When a manner of speech is exhausted, it turns to its opposite. [14]

An over-used metaphor, a worn-out word or sentence-pattern, is always cast aside by the poet and the writer, who must labor in solitude to seek new modes of linguistic expression and to forge their own distinctive style. As T. S. Eliot remarks in his criticism, in poetry

language is forever in slight motion; words are forever set side by side in new and abrupt combinations. [15]

If the overall feel of literary language as distinct from everyday discourse — what we have called “convention” — leads man to view the work with an aesthetic attitude, to break habitual response, and to liberate his sense organs, then defamiliarization at the level of discourse and of word offers him unexpected delight at every turn, drawing him into the inner chambers and pushing him to keep exploring the depths of the aesthetic. This further strengthens the human aesthetic attitude and draws him still more deeply into the aesthetic world. In the creation of literary language, defamiliarization on both these levels is extraordinarily important; and the overall feel of a work’s language is itself made up of concrete features at the level of discourse and word.

3. Mode of Perception or Mode of Being?

On the theory of defamiliarization Terence Hawkes offers this summary:

The aim of poetry is to invert the process of habituation, to “defamiliarize” what is so familiar to us, to “creatively damage” the routine and the standard, in order to instill in us a new, childlike, vital prospect. The poet, then, intends to break up the “stock response” and create a heightened consciousness — to restructure our ordinary feeling of “reality” so that we may at last see the world and not merely give a confused assent to it; or at least so that we may at last devise a “new” reality to replace the inherited and habituated (and not unfictional) reality. [16]

Literature comes from reality and is the negation of reality. This negation is not simple critique; it is the creation of a world of art, an aesthetic world, distinct from the habitual world. Within this world, what is negated and overturned is not only some particular event or thing, some particular perceptual habit; the human sense organs are liberated as a whole, and on the whole a variety of real norms that bind the heart and repress feeling and the unconscious are broken — by which a total negation of real existence is performed.

Iser discusses the negating power of defamiliarization from another angle. He holds that, living in the habitual world, one is subject at every moment to norms of every kind, and that these social norms have been internalized into human habits of behavior, have become a “second nature,” so that one no longer notices their presence.

So long as these norms function within their social context, we are ordinarily unaware that they are norms.

When they are transposed within a literary text and de-realized, they themselves become a theme of reading; correspondingly, the reader undergoes a change too — he is no longer within a habituated everyday reality, no longer unconsciously included within the system of the real, but is shifted out of the real and transposed into the de-realized text. This is a defamiliarized virtual world, a world in which the constraints of the real no longer hold. At this point, the reader has the chance to perceive the system consciously. And if the new context set up by the text negates these norms, the perception is intensified all the more. [17] Iser also discusses here the double negating function of defamiliarization: first, the text negates the real context and gives the reader a “strange” context that has been de-realized; second, this newly built “strange” context negates the validity of the real norms. This double negation powerfully mobilizes human perception and consciousness, and so leads to the discovery of the unreasonable in the real.

Plainly, Iser focuses more on the operation of literary reading at the level of consciousness, more on the social-critical function of “negation,” and relatively neglects the deeper and broader role it plays in liberating the whole human soul and endowing the human being with a free and sharp aesthetic sense. Defamiliarization does not only change the everyday mode of perception and attitude; it changes the everyday mode of being. Literature, by its distinctive use of language, creates another sign-world distinct from the real. As Adorno notes, in this world

everything in the artwork — concerning form and material, spirit and matter — has been shifted out of the real and into the artwork, and in this shifting its reality has been stripped away. [18]

What Adorno calls “the stripping of reality” is precisely a liberation of the human soul, an enrichment of the human soul and of the sensuous world. What is stripped away here is not only reality but also habits and prejudices that have gradually formed in long historical practice, and the rules, taboos, and constraints that have gradually been internalized. Once the reality on which they parasite has been stripped away, they too lose their ground, lose their existence-basis, and are dissolved away. The world of art is a non-real world, a world that truly belongs to man. In this world that stands apart from the real, all manner of real rules and taboos lose their force; habits and prejudices are negated; man returns to his free nature, opens his senses, renews and enriches his sensuous world, and becomes a truly free aesthetic being. Man dwells poetically. The defamiliarization of literary language is the “marker” that leads man into such an aesthetic relation with the work; it is precisely through it that man sets aside the long-habituated everyday-real attitude and faces the work with a wholly new, open attitude — with a free aesthetic attitude. In man’s opened-up sensuous world, defamiliarization gains a still more dazzling shine and color, and from it produces an ever stronger awakening force upon the human heart. Man and language, man and work, draw one another and rouse one another, and together build up a poetic realm — a wide-open “republic” of free heart. The defamiliarized language, with its distinctive splendor, allures man, leaving him to linger and forget to return within the world that language constructs. From this angle, the function of literary linguistic defamiliarization is not only to renew perception, nor only to change the mode of perception, still less to prolong the time of perception by increasing the difficulty of perception. Defamiliarization, by “negating” a habitual real world, leads man into an aesthetic world that stands apart from the real, and takes part in the very construction of this new world, and so endows language and man with a wholly new mode of being. For just this reason, the defamiliarization of literary language has an ontological value of its own. That is: man enters the aesthetic world not only by way of the “marker” of linguistic defamiliarization; this very aesthetic world is itself built jointly by defamiliarized language and man. The mode of being of language is the mode of being of man. When man tries, through defamiliarization, to break loose from the stiffness and dullness of everyday discourse, he in fact at the same time breaks free from the bonds and pressures of the real world and steps into a new state of being.

Marcuse holds that literature and art possess a truly vast liberating potential, but not by asking literature and art to give direct allegiance to revolution. On the contrary: only by drawing a distance from social reality and from revolution does literature open a new dimension of being that stands apart from the real — the “aesthetic dimension” — and so let man fully break free from the grip and repression of the real, cultivate a “new sensibility,” and gain a new mode of being. The same goes for language:

to break with the chains that control man, one must at the same time break with the vocabulary that controls man.

This calls for the lifting of the “stone-weight upon the masses” that is everyday language, and for the creation of a wholly new mode of discourse.

The language of this poetic-imaginative realm is not, and cannot be, an instrumentalist language — that is, it is not the tool of revolution. [19]

In real life, man’s treatment of language as a tool to be hammered and molded is inseparable, as cause and effect, from language’s already-finished forms exercising control over man. When language has lost its own sacredness and fallen to be the slave of man, the tool of man, it has steadily been forged by man into a logical chain made of linked concepts. This chain in turn binds human thought and the human heart, so that man himself falls to be slave and tool. Poetic language must, by its own creation, transcend the instrumentality of everyday language, must, in a mode that stands apart from the real, break loose from logic and concept and reference, win its own independence — and at the same time give up the language’s grip and enslavement over man — and, as a subject, step with man into the aesthetic realm.

Heidegger develops his thinking directly from the relation of language and being. In his view, man, as “positer” and “maker,” stands before a “disguised openness.” On the face of it, with the development of technology, man has opened to himself a broader road to the world and to the future, but in fact technology only posits the world as “object,” dismembering, calculating, and trading it; the originally limitless, intimate relation between man and world has been ruined past repair.

When man constructs the world as object through technology, man has — in his very will and entirely — blocked the road, already closed, that leads to the open. [20]

How is the road that has been blocked to be opened again, the former state of openness restored, the original undifferentiated communion and blending recovered? In Heidegger’s view, only language has the capacity, for

the poet attains an authentic experience with the word, and it is only the word that gives a thing a relation. To put it more clearly: the poet experiences this — that it is only the word that lets a thing appear as the thing it is, and so lets it presence. [21]

Yet everyday language is not equal to bearing this weight. Everyday chatter is a forgotten, over-used poetry, from which scarcely any call any longer issues. Only by naming the things of the world in poetic language — naming that is no longer the affixing of labels by habit, but a wholly new naming — can the call thus issued bring the one called near to man.

The locus of the arrival of the called within the calling (der Ort der Ankunft) is a presencing concealed within absence. The naming call lets things enter into this arrival. This letting (Heissen) is an inviting (Einladen). It invites things, so that things as things may concern man. [22]

This wholly new mode of naming is a fervent, powerful call; it opens up the world, calls forth the things of the world, lets them concern and draw near to man; it gathers heaven, earth, man, and gods together into an “originary unified co-presence.” Plainly, for Heidegger, linguistic naming (re-naming) means to side-step the worn-out word and worn-out mode of expression, and, through a new creation of language, to call up being — to return to the originary, authentic state.

4. Defamiliarization: “Cyclical Return,” or “Nirvanic Rebirth”?

The development of language is always toward the future. It ceaselessly names the unknown world and ceaselessly names new-born creations; it keeps altering its own material form, mercilessly leaving heaps of linguistic remains behind and pressing forward without looking back. Poetic language is somewhat different: its sharp drive for the new often runs far ahead of everyday language, even to the point of becoming an unacceptable linguistic adventure; yet it always seems to hold the past in mind, striving to return to the source of language, to return to the primal state. Defamiliarizing devices such as metaphor, hyperbole, and distortion are all renaming of the world; through renaming they build new relations between man and world, and at the same time endow the world with a new face and man with a new mode of being. Yet this new relation is precisely the relation that takes shape when man first faces the world — a relation limitlessly rich, vividly alive, and forever just-coming-to-be. Language seems again to take on the sacred magic of the primeval. Poetic language, by its “strangeness,” resists everyday relations; resists relations already cinched by the cords of history; casts off rules, conventions, and prejudices; and lets man, in a heart full of sacredness and shock, throw himself again into the embrace of the world. At the same time it lets man and world together enter a free and abundant state. Defamiliarization seems to be just “cyclical return”: it leads man and world back to original being, back to the relation of primal undifferentiated blending.

Dufrenne holds that the function of language carries an “ambiguity”: the word is at once signifying and expressive. By “signifying” is meant that it carries an objective meaning, which is in some measure exterior to it and requires the exercise of understanding. By “expressive” is meant that it itself carries an interior meaning that exceeds the objective meaning grasped by understanding. The word is a sign and is yet not only a sign: it states, and it also shows. In everyday use, the stating function of language is always primary; language always tends to become a rational tool of signification, exchanging ambiguity for accuracy and even forcing itself into the system of arithmetic notation. But when language becomes aesthetic language, it undergoes another total transformation: meaning and expressiveness blend into one. Language seems to want to tear off again the “rational corset” wrapping its body and to lay the object it expresses living before our eyes.

True art is a primordial language: it both awakens feeling and brings forth presencing, without producing any conceptual meaning. [23]

Language too seems to return to its primal age.

Richards discusses the question of poetry and its language from another angle. He holds that humankind’s initial worldview is the “mystical worldview,” and that tied to this mystical worldview are

the countless “pseudo-statements” about God, about the universe, about human nature, about the relation of mind and mind, about the soul and its ranks and fates.

This mystical worldview and the “pseudo-statements” rooted in it

are the pivot of the organization of the heart, and are of extraordinary importance to the peace of the heart.

With the development of modern science and technology, the mystical worldview has been replaced by the scientific worldview, and the various “pseudo-statements” are no longer believed. This is one of the great crises civilization has suffered. Only poetry endures. Poetry was born from within the mystical worldview; it has “no connection at all” with logic, has set itself apart from belief in “intellect,” and uses the verbal form of the “pseudo-statement” to liberate and organize our impulses and attitudes. So, in Richards’s mind,

for an illustrious poet to try with all his strength to return to the mood of primeval times and to seek consolation there

is altogether natural. [24]

Literature and its poetic language do, indeed, carry a tendency to return to the primal. If human intellect always looks to the future and seeks the future, feeling is forever attached to the past. Feeling is the experience of relation. Relations of the future have not yet been built; so the experience of past relations of every kind occupies the whole space of the feeling-world. Feeling is also a chief feature of literature and of poetic language. For just this reason, literature is often inseparable from memories of a lost childhood, from longing for a withered love, from yearning for a parted hometown, from sighs over a vanished civilization . . . In short, it is attachment to the past, and what lies deepest in this attachment is the original relation between man and the maternal womb of nature. One may say: the longing for childhood, for love, for home, for the lost civilization is built on the original relation between man and nature; these longings are deformations and variations of the original relation. Poetic language, through defamiliarizing creation, seeks out that original relation and hopes to rebuild the lost home.

Seen from the generation and evolution of language, the rich sensuous features of poetic language — especially in linking and blending man and nature — share a lineage with primal language. Yet in the course of development, the “usefulness” of language has revealed itself ever more fully and has been ever more strengthened by humankind. The result is the abstraction, the logicization, and the sign-ification of language. The poetic features carried within language have been lost in everyday use; the original relation between man and nature, by entering the abstract, logical, sign-ified language, has been severed. The poetic features of language have been preserved within ritual and song-ballad, and have been transmitted through poetic language. So, relative to primal language, everyday language is the alienation of language, while poetic language is its continuation — the “normally grown” language. Yet when the utilitarian use of language becomes the most universal, most practically effective, and so the most important and most everyday-familiar mode, this “alienated” language becomes instead the “normal” conventional language. By contrast, poetic language, originally the “normally grown” language, becomes the “unusual,” “unconventional” language. It must, by a “defamiliarizing” mode different from the everyday, break loose from the wall that everyday language has built between man and nature, name the things of nature anew, and so seek to return to the original relation.

Language, by first naming what is, first brings what is into the word and into appearance. This naming first names what is from out of its being and into its being. This saying is the casting of clearing. [25]

Is linguistic defamiliarization, then, a return to the primal state of language? The answer is plainly not so simple. In the deep mind of man there does lurk an impulse to return to nature and to the primal, and poetic language embodies precisely the intention of this impulse. But this is only an intention; it is the work of historical sedimentation, and does not mean a literal return to the primal. Time flows like a river, and the human and the worldly changes that have flowed away with it cannot reappear in the original form. “Re-enactment” and “return” are no more than figurative exaggerations. Moreover, although the relation between primal man and nature was closely bound, it was also harsh; primal man never “dwelt poetically” but struggled in hardship. Yet the close bond between primal man and the maternal womb of nature has, as historical sedimentation, been preserved and laid down in the depths of the human mind. Cleansed and distilled by time, this relation has been idealized and gets embodied through literature and poetic language. At the same time, with the gods’ receding, the shadow of the gods within primal language has gradually grown blurred; the sacredness of language is thus transformed into the aura and allure of poetic language. So the defamiliarizing creation of poetic language is the searching for a lost dream-realm, a utopia full of ideal coloring. It looks back to the past and at the same time foretells an ideal future. Through renaming the world, defamiliarization restores the rich tie between man and world; but this is not a literal return to the primal relation. It is the nirvanic rebirth of the primal relation.

5. The Strange and the New vs. the Natural and the Plain

Defamiliarization plays an important role in language’s acquiring of the poetic; it is the signpost that hints at and leads man into the virtual aesthetic realm. But this does not mean that defamiliarization necessarily produces the poetic feature of language. In fact, in all manner of applied texts, defamiliarization is just as common. The deepest reason for the poetic transformation of language lies in the virtual aesthetic intentional relation that is built between the human being and the work, between the human being and language. Defamiliarization, by its very freshness, can indeed draw the reader’s notice and bring itself into the foreground, and it can hint to the reader that he is to enter the virtual aesthetic realm. Yet only when the reader has built a virtual intentional relation with the work and its language — when reality has been suspended at the root, when language has been kept at a distance from its real referent, when habit has been shed — only then can language be fully liberated and acquire the poetic character. Moreover, defamiliarization cannot fully explain the high esteem given, within the Chinese literary tradition, to the natural-and-plain style.

In fact, when the reader reads in accordance with the “convention” of a work and with the “literary” attitude — that is, when he builds with the language of the work a virtual aesthetic intentional relation — then within this relation, whether the language is strange or plain, an aesthetic transformation takes place, and the language becomes poetic language. It is precisely within this virtual aesthetic intentional relation that defamiliarized language itself appears all the more striking; its features of the new and the unusual receive their fullest display. Conversely, defamiliarized language then draws the reader still more strongly into the realm of language, into the virtual aesthetic realm. There is here an aesthetic circle: linguistic defamiliarization, by its distinguishing features from everyday language, becomes the important marker that leads man and work into the virtual intentional relation; once the relation has been built, the inner content of the defamiliarized language is more fully displayed; the display of this inner content in turn draws man more deeply into the world built by language, into the virtual aesthetic realm. It is precisely within this circle that the potential of language is continually unfolded; the “encyclopedic” content laid up within language, the feeling-savor, cultural savor, and collective unconscious sedimented within it, are gradually drawn out. So man is intoxicated by the mingled resonance of language and sinks deep into the linguistic pool that blends consciousness and unconscious, sinks deep into the boundless undifferentiated bottom-stratum of life.

Defamiliarized language realizes itself most fully only within the virtual intentional relation. Linguistic defamiliarization tends toward two directions and uses many devices. One direction is the pursuit of the rare, the steep, the difficult — as in Huang Tingjian’s use of rare rhymes and his search for difficult realms. By transgressing the established meter or realm of poetry, or the habitual use of the word, he opens a new face for poetic creation. “Stealing the embryo, changing the bone” (duotai huangu) is itself a defamiliarizing device: it uses the defamiliarization of context to bring back to life words and allusions that have lost their luster from over-use, “turning iron into gold.” The other direction is the pursuit of the vulgar, the plain, and the natural. In the Chinese literary tradition, the plain-and-natural style of language is the most praised; the plain, the unembellished, the natural are often viewed as the highest realm.

Defamiliarization is at once a transgression of everyday linguistic habits and a continual renewing of literary language itself. For the latter, defamiliarization may be sought either by the pursuit of the rare and new, or by a return to the vulgar, the plain, the natural. Because the demand for novelty in literature and art forces literary language to keep pursuing the new, and because literary language gradually forms its own features in long development, vulgar, plain, and natural words, introduced into a literary work, often look fresh by contrast. Xu Shuofang offers a fine reading of Xie Lingyun’s line “In the pond grass of spring grows / on the garden willow the songbird changes its tune,” and holds that, at the time, the poetry world was full of finely-wrought poems, and so this naturally plain work looked very special and won much notice and praise. Xu Shuofang’s view is acute and chimes, unwittingly, with the Russian Formalist view of literary evolution. But the question is: not only at that time, but even after the styles of poetry have shifted again and again, people have always specially esteemed natural-and-plain work, holding it superior to the strange-and-new. This is hard to explain by defamiliarization theory alone.

In fact, although the vulgar, the plain, and the natural come directly from everyday discourse, once they enter the virtual aesthetic intentional relation, they too undergo aesthetic transformation. Indeed, just because they are plain and natural, they come closer to man, more easily soak the heart without obstacle, and more easily move feeling. For humankind, plain-and-natural language, like man himself, is rooted in the headwaters of human history; the realm of the plain and the natural is the true spiritual home of man. The point is this: in everyday discourse, plain-and-natural words, through “utilitarian” use, have fallen into being tools, and have lost the power to link and gather man and world. Once they enter the poetic-language system and the virtual aesthetic intentional relation, having shed the twisted relation with man brought on by everyday utilitarian use, their poetic nature shows itself afresh. So although the plain-and-natural words in literature come from everyday discourse, the rich link they build with man and with the world is sharply different from what everyday language can offer. The natural realm they open up is both familiar and strange when set against the habitual world: familiar, in that it seems to have lived all along within human life and to have lain dormant in the depths of the heart, the “native place” of the human spirit; strange, in that it is also a wholly new discovery and a wholly new feeling. For just this reason, plain-and-natural language is more sought after in literary creation.

If we look deeper, we may find the ground in man’s contradictory attitude toward nature. Worringer once pointed to two opposing tendencies of man toward nature: empathy and abstraction.

The empathy-impulse is conditioned on the round, pantheistic intimate link between man and the outer world, while the abstraction-impulse is the product of the great inner unrest that the outer world arouses in man. [26]

The natural world changes from one instant to the next; danger lurks at every step; man carries great psychological fear toward natural space. Man builds barracks and houses for himself, setting himself apart from nature; builds cities and forts, distancing himself from nature; puts on garments and robes, separating himself from nature; uses make-up and ornament to mark himself off from the natural self. Culture is the “artifact” that sets man apart from nature. Culture lays itself down layer upon layer, wrapping man tightly and cutting him off from nature, in an attempt to set up a man-made “snug nest” for him without outer threat. On the other side, man can never cut the umbilical cord that ties him to nature; he forever longs for nature, forever longs for the maternal womb of nature that gave birth to humankind, and dreams of returning to that womb. So man, at every turn, must leave the city to receive the natural sight, and ceaselessly sings of pastoral life; in the house he opens doors and windows, leaving himself paths into nature; on his clothes he leaves the collar open so as to peep and listen to nature, and bathes in sunlight and tide naked on the beach; even ornament and the whole of culture adjust their styles from time to time, and in the end lean toward imitation of nature. The Huainanzi, “Tai-zu” (Grand Clan), says:

What men live by is clothing and food. Now lock a man in a dark chamber: even if you feed him with the meat of the herd-animals and clothe him in fine brocade, he cannot rejoice — because the eye sees nothing and the ear hears nothing. Bore a chink, and seeing the rain fall, he sighs with delight; how much more if you open the door and the window, and let him see from within the dimness into the light? When from within the dimness he sees the brightness, he cannot help being moved to joy — how much more when he steps out of the room and sits in the hall, seeing the light of sun and moon? Seeing the light of sun and moon, he rejoices in the wide; how much more when he ascends Mount Tai, treads the stone-sealed altar, gazes out at the eight wildernesses, sees the heavenly capital as if it were a canopy, the rivers as if they were a ribbon, and the ten thousand things laid between them? Is his joy not great? [27]

Man can never break loose from nature, never forget nature. The return to nature is the eternal impulse in the depths of the human heart. Language embodies the contradictory human attitude toward nature most fully of all. Language, by the abstraction of its concept, leads man steadily away from nature, has him hover above nature, and lays down a permanent linguistic “intermediary” between man and nature. Language at the same time gathers man and nature: the act of naming is the process by which nature is humanized; in calling out the name of a natural object, man brands and blends himself into that object. Language is itself the meeting and gathering of man and nature. Especially poetic language: it opens up nature and lets man truly return to nature, return upon the poetic earth, beneath the sacred sky, among the things of nature. Just because humanity and language always carry these two opposing tendencies, even as language develops toward one pole — toward artificial-intelligence language, computer language, and mathematical language — poetic language is the indispensable spiritual complement for man, preserving for him a broad road back to nature in the very moment when he is far from nature; the further man is from nature, the more precious it becomes. And within poetic language, the realm of nature that is created and opened up by the plain-and-natural style is precisely the maternal womb of nature that humankind will forever long for and cling to.

Human history is a process of moving forward and turning back. Even as he carries on his real-life activities, man at the same time preserves for himself another, other world, and within this virtual aesthetic intention he drives the poetic generation of language. He thereby preserves an effective road back to nature for himself. By the same token, poetic language, even as it ceaselessly innovates, always lingers over the past, so much so that it often goes through the strange-and-new to seek out the plain-and-natural, or through the plain-and-natural to seek out the strange-and-new. Language thus forms its own multi-layered, multi-directional, and many-faceted being.