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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.
She said people didn’t talk about the War when she was growing up. There was this very tidy surface and you didn’t know there was anything but the surface. They didn’t talk about the camps. So then when she was 16 Max told her about them and she understood the Baader-Meinhof, she wanted to blow up a building. Her father made her do the Geselle which was three years of hell. She knew if she stayed she would kill herself. So she hitchhiked for about 6 years around Asia.
When you are that age you don’t think about the cut-off age for the Turner Prize. You don’t realise that the people who are going to get their work to a certain level before the cut-off are not hitchhiking around Asia. If you would realise it you would not be able to do anything about it, because if you would not hitchhike around Asia you would not be an artist. So you can’t say if I would have gone to art college then.
Peter said, Please.
He tried to think of the sort of thing Americans say.
He said, It would mean a lot to me to work with someone who admired Bertrand Russell.
He said, It would really mean a lot to me.
The statement seemed, if not meaningless, then uselessly imprecise.
(The first book had made all this money. Why could he not use the money to buy what he wanted? Was that not the general point of having money in the first place?)
He said, I’d be happy to switch the percentages round if that would help. You’d be very welcome to take an 85% commission.
This was undoubtedly precise but was perhaps not the sort of thing Americans say. Jim said he was happy with the normal 15% commission.
Peter pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes.
Gil checked the listings in Time Out. He had saved up a list of films that he wanted to see for the first time in New York (Jules et Jim; Breathless; Battleship Potemkin; La Dolce Vita; Bicycle Thieves; The Leopard; all of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, because if there is a season you want to be able to immerse yourself in the oeuvre), holding out, somehow, in the face of often almost irresistible temptation, till the age of 22. And now, by an amazing piece of luck, Jules et Jim was showing at the Tribeca!!!!!
footnote: There was a second list of films which he had had to downgrade to “Okay to watch in Iowa,” because he did not want to come to New York and look completely uneducated, but he had never felt good about it. He had mental conversations with an interlocutor who said “Wild Strawberries? Are you telling me Wild Strawberries doesn’t deserve first-time-viewing-in-New-York? Are you serious?” to which Gil would mentally reply that it was not a question of the artistic merit of the film, on which, as someone who hadn’t even seen it, he was unable to comment, but a question of what felt right for the viewing experience. That was the mental reply, but he felt bad about relegating Bob le Flambeur, The Crow, La Ronde, Wings of Desire, La Strada, 8½, Solaris, plus much of Hitchcock, much of Mamet, all of Tarantino and others too numerous to mention to the Iowa League. He wished he had grown up in New York, so these invidious choices would not have been forced on him, but what was he to do?
The third list of films, obviously, was the list of films set in New York. But we digress.
ugh
It’s true. You definitely got the feeling, holding these objects, that they had been in a room with a crazy guy, or rather a guy with the potential to be crazy who was trying to keep madness at bay. The writing was small and precise and clear, this slightly pedantic European handwriting that you would normally never see. Reading a typescript, you would miss this: it was like hearing excellent English spoken with a foreign accent. You saw the effort that had gone into the excellence. Precision, a bulwark. (The word “bulwark” was in fact on one of the cards.) You could see that maybe the visibility of the effort had to stay there for the completion, or even the continuation, of the work.
Gil had met Rachel in the gift shop of the Van Gogh Museum in the heat of the hype. She had picked up a paperback, Vincent Van Gogh, een leven in brieven.
He had seen her across a room but kept his distance. If you have never been to Amsterdam before and maybe never will be again you don’t want to smear the paintings with a lot of boy-meets-girl stuff. There were paintings on the walls that had been in a room with a crazy guy, a guy who never sold any paintings; you want to be alone with the craziness. He walked from room to room, seeing her across each room, keeping his distance.
X and I are smiling. We are both charmed by the flowered velvet. X’s hand moves up my thigh. I have noticed this tendency to reductionism in X before. The text is infinitely variegated, the subtext always the same. I tried once to resist this by accusing X of believing in final causes — that for the sake of which the rest is there — but it didn’t work. X said I took everything personally. X takes nothing personally: X discussed the deconstruction of teleology and put a hand on my knee.
What is a subtext? You may think of it as a movement in the circumambient language, whose presence you divine by distortions and ripples in the text; what lies between the lines is as invisible, as plain to the eye as the breeze which stirs the leaves of the copper beech in the quadrangle, the high wind that toppled trees in Hyde Park. And we know that the disruption is not in one direction only: the text is a kind of windbreak.
There is a text which I could insert at this point which begins ‘I’m not in the mood,’ but the reader who has had occasion to consult it will know that, though open to many variations, there is one form which is, as Voltaire would say, potius optandum quam probandum, and that is the one which runs ‘I’m not in the mood,’ ‘Oh, OK.’ My own experience has shown this to be a text particularly susceptible to discursive and recursive operations, one which circles back on itself through several iterations and recapitulations, one which ends pretty invariably in ‘Oh, OK,’ but only about half the time as the contribution of my co-scripteur. I think for a moment about giving the thing a whirl, but finally settle on the curtailed version which leaves out ‘I’m not in the mood’ and goes directly to ‘Oh, OK.’ X and I go upstairs.