Victor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose is a landmark work in critical literary theory that covers a lot of literary ground: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, War and Peace, and Sherlock Holmes all make starring appearances. The subject matter covers plot and style, features a wealth of quoted lines from the works of other writers and takes the reader on a dizzying journey from Shakespearean stage drama to the movies. Along the way, the reader is asked to confront some terms that are likely unfamiliar yet are essential to the text: literaturnost and ostranenie.
The first is basically a Russian word to describe the quality of something being “literary.” That is, something being worthy of literary analysis. Ostranenie is really the defining bedrock of Shklovsky’s theory of prose, however, and fortunately it is fairly easy to define as well, even though any definition must account for nuance that cannot be conveyed except through example. Here is basically what you need to know to discuss this book and the author’s essential qualities of theoretical analysis: don’t be boring and find ways to present the familiar in unfamiliar ways.
Easier said than done, indeed, but that is really the entire book boiled down to its absolute distilled essence. One of the iconic examples that Shklovsky forwards as an example of ostranenie comes from the massive Russian novel War and Peace. Although Tolstoy’s novel is about, of course, war and peace, the singular description which Shklovsky extricates is actually a description of an opera, which the author portrays metaphorically as “painted cardboard and oddly dressed men and women who moved, spoke and sang strangely in a patch of blazing light.” Opera is the essence of highbrow art and high culture and as such to read it described using such lowbrow terms is most assuredly an example of presenting the familiar in an unfamiliar way.
This is the path that Shklovsky pursues throughout his book. Whether investigating the detective adventures of Sherlock Holmes or “ornamental prose” of the symbolist writer Andrey Bely, what Shklovsky persistently presents as the ultimate sins of composing literature are repetition, habit, and boredom. To characterize something in a boring way automatically transfers that lack of interest to thing itself. On the other hand, one can write about something that is boring in a way that makes the subject lively and illuminating by seeking success in the art of lending it that sense of ostranenie.
As one of the premiere examples of Shklovksy’s conceptualization of avoiding habit, investing the familiar with a sense of strangeness and working diligent to avoid falling into the trap of repeating what has already proven success, he provides a comprehensive analysis of Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy. As he notes in the chapter’s commence, he has no intention of analyzing the novel in the sense of its narrative, but rather in the structural composition which presents that narrative in a way that still has the power even today to knock modern readers for a loop. He points to how “action constantly breaks off” and “is constantly interrupted by dozens of pages filled with whimsical deliberations on the influence of a person’s nose or name on his character.” Tristram Shandy becomes the ultimate exercise in presenting both literaturnost and ostranenie.
