Defamiliarizing the Familiar

“Literature is not a window for looking at sociological themes or philosophic ideas or biographical information; it is a mural or wall painting, something with a palpability of its own which arrests the eye and merits study”  -Rivkin and Ryan

Invigorating the ordinary means defamiliarizing ourselves with a colorless world and guzzling up the beauty that surrounds us.  Viktor Shklovsky believes that literature rattles us, forcing us to rediscover ordinary life. 

Leo Tolstoy presents a meditation on property from the point of view of a horse, who recounts the story of a flogging in a vivid and brutal manner.  Tolstoy awakens our senses and captivates us as he tells an unbearable story from a new point of view, as if we discover the act of flogging for the first time.  Literature presents objects or experiences from such an unusual perspective or in such unconventional language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed.  How often do we get to feel the thrill of experiencing something for the first time?  Literature invites us to do this whenever we please.  “Habitualization devours life and deadens everything,” writes Shklovsky.  So much value resides in tradition and routine, but when life becomes a series of mechanical, automatic actions, we may be in danger of not actually living. Like Lester Burnham in “American Beauty” before he experiences his revelation, we become merely automatons, trudging through the motions of life.  When we read Literature, however, we recover the sensation of life – we get to feel again.    

“It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities.”  -Stanley Fish

Literature also enables us to develop interpretive strategies that can empower us to be happy.   Allow me to explain:  Stanley Fish theorizes that authors never actually write a text, nor does the text exist as a reality itself – he suggests instead that the reader is responsible for writing the text at the moment when he interprets it.  

To exemplify this claim, Fish asks his class (studying Christian symbols) to interpret the “poem” they see on the blackboard.  In actuality the “poem” they see is merely the previous class’s homework assignment jotted down on the board:

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?)

The Christian symbol hunters feverishly assign each word a biblical metaphor, resulting in the final analytical triumph of discovering that the most prominent letters in the “poem,” were S, O, N, – an obvious reference to Jesus Christ.  

The point Fish makes is that interpreters do not decode poems or literature; they make them.  This idea can be transferred into our lives beyond paper as well – we might even say that all objects and events are made by the perceiver and are not found; they are instead created by the interpretive strategies that we set in motion.  You with me? In other words, any time we experience something, we create it based on specific interpretation strategies we’ve developed.  

Thus, I’ve discovered the secret to optimism: we can always choose whether or not to embrace what we experience by altering our interpretive strategies.  Literature teaches us to develop new strategies.  If we use the same interpretive strategy to write everything, it’ll all be the same. 

The message Fish gives us is not that Literature and poetry may not possess qualities that attract a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic or literary qualities.  In other words – we “write” into our lives whatever we pay attention to, and not the other way around.  I recognize the audacity of this claim, and it can of course be argued that we are not, in fact, the authors of our lives at all but instead vessels in which either a) a cultural matrix simply channels through us (meaning that we can’t ever “write” anything without societal/cultural influence on our perceptions or b) God or a Holy Spirit channels through us and controls what we “write” for ourselves.  

Regardless, Fish’s argument defamiliarizes us and gives us a recipe for optimism: let’s develop an interpretive strategy that will allow us to focus predominantly on recognizing beauty and joy.  Literature not only liberates us from monotony, but it also forces us to develop our own interpretive strategies to find meaning and happiness in the world. 

However, in the name of Fish’s theory, I am fully aware that you will agree with me on this only if you already agreed with me.