Art as Technique by Victor Shklovsky, and Conversation Galante by T.S. Eliot

To learn a thing, I need a structure which I can loop through. Lacking any better structure to adopt, I've sketched one for myself:

1. Read an essay describing some perspective of Literary Theory. 
2. Read something to which Literary Theory might be applied. 
3. Blog about the meaning I took from my reading in step 2, using the perspective I gained in step 1. 

For this post I read Art as Technique, by Victor Shklovsky, who points out that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. We stop seeing things which we see every day, we simply expect them to be there.  Shklovsky points out that this occurs in everything humans experience: in the way we truncate language, in our feelings about our environment, the objects we interact with, the people we know, in the way we perceive time, and the impact artistic expression can have on us. 

I found this passage, quoted from Tolstoy, particularly effective at communicating the point:

"I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember — so that if I had dusted it and forgot — that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."

For the artist, then, the essential technique for creating compelling art is Defamiliarization. Finding some way to take a familiar thing, and present it to the reader in a way that makes them feel they are seeing it for the first time. 

Once grasped the idea seems trivial. Of course some novel approach is required to make art compelling. To call a work of art "derivative" is the first sloppy criticism a teenager usually learns. Likewise, once one goes looking for defamiliarization, it's easy to see everywhere. Overwhelmingly so. I suppose that's what makes it compelling as a way to describe why good art is good.  

— 

For step 2, I read Conversation Galante by T.S. Eliot. Eliot's Prufrock poems are some of the first I've really been able to enjoy, so I'm looking forward to having a reason to spend more time with Eliot via this project. This poem is quite short, so I'll just reproduce it in whole here: 

I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon! 
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess) 
It may be Prester John’s balloon 
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft 
To light poor travellers to their distress." 
   She then: "How you digress!" 

And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys 
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain 
The night and moonshine; music which we seize 
To body forth our own vacuity." 
   She then: "Does this refer to me?" 
   "Oh no, it is I who am inane." 

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist, 
The eternal enemy of the absolute, 
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist! 
With your aid indifferent and imperious 
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" 
   And—"Are we then so serious?"

This is an interesting example to look for defamiliarization in, because so much of its slight bulk is a poem-within-a-poem. A young man talking at a girl, trying to sound deep. There's tons of defamiliarization in what he says: to conceive of the moon as a friend, or the balloon of a mythical and distant figure, or as an old battered lantern hung aloft certainly demand that we think about the moon in a different way than normal. So too the phrase "frames upon the keys" as a defamiliarized way to say "plays on a piano." Eliot's poetry is fun, even when he's putting words in the mouth of a character who is being cringe. 

 Yet presumably there's defamiliarization happening not just on the level of what the characters are saying, but also on the level of what the poem is saying. 

Perhaps it is best to say that the whole poem is communicating a single idea: the feeling of being in a bumbling and awkward conversation. That is a familiar, if hopefully rare, experience for everyone. By putting us in a position first to appreciate Eliot's poetry, then to have that appreciation undercut by his interlocutor's disinterest and annoyance, Eliot allows us to share that experience anew. It is, thus, defamiliarized. 

 —

It is too tidy to say that the whole poem is communicating a single idea. I can see there's more to it, but more is a little beyond my grasp now, and beyond the scope of what I'm endeavoring to do. 

From reading the analysis on PoetryVerse, I gather that Eliot might be much more critical of the young woman in the poem than I thought. My reading of this, and most of the Prufrock poems, is that it's mostly about a young man (Eliot?) being cringe around women, but maybe the women are a little lost themselves. Spaghetti falling out of everyone's pockets.