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[...] DeWitt’s novel hopes for a world that might make it possible to write a better sort of literature and be ready to receive that literature. The Last Samurai is not an example of that hypothetical literature. DeWitt knows perfectly well—though she may not always admit it in interviews and essays—that such a vision of literature is, under current institutional arrangements, improbable. But the improbability of its own aspiration is part of what makes The Last Samurai compelling. As long as we live in a world of wasted potential, the book will continue to speak to those who might hope to build a better world, a more rational institutional life, and who hope art might play some role in the making of such a world.
This definition of the purpose of art sounds familiar, resembling in some ways the Russian formalist description of art as an engine of defamiliarization. “Defamiliarization,” or ostranenie—alternately translated as “estrangement”—is a concept most associated with the founding father of formalism, the critic and novelist Viktor Shklovsky. “The purpose of art,” Shklovsky writes in a classic 1917 essay, “is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.” Art takes familiar objects, which through long exposure become subject to “automized perception,” and makes us see those objects again. It systematically defeats the habituated oblivion most of us inhabit most of the time.
In highlighting habituation, the concept of ostranenie doesn’t only give an account of art’s relation to human perception. It also posits a theory of art’s relationship to itself, an explanation of the driving force of artistic change. When devices become canonized, too familiar, cliché, they lose their ability to revivify the world. Artists hoping to create living art must therefore develop new devices. And so, art moves on, is forced to change, and (in a narrowly defined sense) progresses. This account of art, consilient with modernist and avant-garde ideas of artistic innovation, encodes a set of assumptions about how an idealized— and homogeneous—modern readership comes to internalize specific expectations about art and then (repeatedly) should have those expectations shattered.
We can now see the gap between DeWitt and formalism. DeWitt is not much concerned with art’s effect on the habituated consciousness of a hypothetical general reader, nor does she develop new artistic devices through which to render lost objects again visible. She is, in one sense, indifferent to the consciousness of her audience, though not in the way some critics celebrate as a hallmark of modernism. Likewise, she’s not obsessed with the internal relations of literary form and the autonomy of art (quite the opposite in fact, since she often speaks of art in instrumental terms). Instead, DeWitt focuses on the normative social standards and aesthetic horizons within which artists work and within which readers read. DeWitt is interested in what artists take for granted, what they assume they are and aren’t allowed to do or say, and the institutions that hem in what they can say. She asks the American novel of the late twentieth century to be more ambitious, to discard its Anglocentrism, and to widen its geographic and linguistic horizons. She asks something similar of the reader. After all, the ambitious writer of the future—who loves the “monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese,” “lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases,” and “lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes”—will require a corresponding ambitious reader, one who might judge such a virtuosic textual performance. DeWitt’s vision of art is political to the degree that making the polyglot literary world she dreams of anything more than a quixotic fantasy would require a wholesale transformation of many existing norms and institutions.
Ludo’s failure would seem to support the conclusion that the critics Caroline Marie and Christelle Reggiani reach about The Last Samurai. In a typology of how mathematics has been incorporated into contemporary literature, they suggest that DeWitt’s novel ultimately disavows Sibylla’s mathematicized way of seeing the world. “Becoming a samurai,” they argue, “implies giving up the illusory quest of a perfectly mathematized reality in favour of the pragmatics of action, by nature unforeseeable and irreducible to axioms.” DeWitt would be suggesting that Ludo must learn what Sibylla fails to see: that strict adherence to standards of rationality and mathematized reconstructions of life can create its own forms of dysfunction.