On the Theory of Prose

Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) was a prolific writer, in many genres and on many topics. One of his concerns was literary criticism and theory, and his early studies in this area were collected in O teorii prozy, published in 1925, with an enlarged edition in 1929. The book testifies to Shklovsky's position as the unofficial president of an unofficial critical school, called today Russian Formalism.Several of the chapters in the book appeared in English in different venues between 1965 and 1982, but when Dalkey Archive published Benjamin Sher's translation of The Theory of Prose in 1990, it was a milestone event, both for students of literature and readers of Shklovsky. (I refer to those who, like me, have no Russian.) It was evident that there were problems with the translation, which it would be ungenerous to attempt to recap here, even if space allowed. Thirty years later, students of literature should welcome Shushan Avagyan's new translation, which has been titled On the Theory of Prose to distinguish it, presumably, from Sher's version. (Henceforth I will call the new translation OTP when referring to it specifically; likewise, page citations will be OTP unless noted.) Though Avagyan's translation is perfectly adequate, and I would recommend the book to anyone interested in literary criticism, its academic presentation leaves much to be desired. OTP is published in what Dalkey Archive calls its Scholarly Series, but the publisher has provided no assistance for its scholarly use.To start with an obvious problem, the book has no index, not even a name index. In this respect, Sher's translation still has the advantage. Shklovsky is not a systematic thinker: he does not provide definitions, explanations, or methodical follow-up on hypotheses. Rather, Shklovsky is a creative writer trying his hand at academic writing, and each chapter in this book is an improvisation. To begin to make sense of Shklovsky's thoughts about narrative, genre, verbal art, and so forth, a good index would be essential. Creating one to post online would be a great project for a graduate seminar.Another shortcoming of this publication is that no information is provided on the history of the text. In the first place, and for whatever reason, the text of Shklovsky's book appears to have been problematic in places. Citations are allusive at best, the style of organization varies from chapter to chapter, and it is not always clear when (or whom) Shklovsky is quoting, or when quotations begin and end. This was one source of difficulties for Sher, and Avagyan's translation has evidently cleaned up many of them. This is to be welcomed, of course, but a record of the changes would have been helpful for scholarly purposes.In the second place, not all the chapters are new publications. Shklovsky reprinted at least five items: the celebrated first chapter, “Art as Device,” was first published in a collection of papers in 1917, and an enlarged version in another collection in 1919.1 The second chapter, “The Connection between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style,” first appeared in the same volume. Section 2 of the third chapter, “The Structure of the Story and the Novel,” was published in an arts magazine in 1919, and was reprinted by Shklovsky in a collection of his journalism, Knight's Move (1923). It can be read there under the title “Parallels in Tolstoy” (73–78 in the English translation). The seventh chapter of OTP, another famous one, on Tristram Shandy, appeared separately in 1921, as did the chapter on Vasily Rozanov, the same year (the eighth in the first edition of Theory of Prose, which became the ninth in the 1929 edition). OTP lacks any textual note of this information which, at minimum, raises the question of whether Shklovsky simply reprinted these items, or made any significant changes.The new translation also includes an afterword by Lyn Hejinian, which discusses the impact of Shklovsky's works on experimental writers in America. Primarily she is concerned with the influence of Shklovsky's novel Zoo (translated in 1971), the autobiographical Sentimental Journey (translated 1970), and the hybrid work Third Factory (translated 1977). Hejinian makes implicit reference to the pre-1990 English versions of several essays in Theory of Prose as having promoted an awareness, among the avant-garde, that there was such a thing as Russian Formalism. Otherwise, however, there is nothing in her essay about Shklovsky's literary theory or criticism as represented in OTP. Hejinian's is a good essay, but on a different topic from that of Theory of Prose.And finally, it is worth mentioning a subtle problem, raised by Emily Finer (2010) in her valuable study Turning into Sterne. Among its other kinds of importance, OTP is a precursor of the branch of literary study now called World Literature. To understand literary narrative, Shklovsky implies in this book, it is not enough to address one literature. Shklovsky is immersed in Bely, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, and Tolstoy, as well as Russian folklore from wonder tales to songs to riddles, and he makes abundant mention of them throughout. But his range of reference is broad, with substantial discussion of, among others, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Conan Doyle, Dickens, Hoffmann, Lesage, Maupassant, Poe, Radcliffe, Shakespeare, Sterne, and tale collections such as the Thousand and One Nights. (Incidentally, I consulted the index in Sher to make this list.) Yet, importantly, Shklovsky was a monoglot. He could only have read these works in Russian translations. As Finer shows, it is remarkable how much of World Literature was available in Russian around 1900; but she also raises a fair question about the nature of these translations. How adequate were they, especially for highly stylized works such as Sterne's? When Shklovsky quotes Tristram Shandy, or any other work, Avagyan follows the standard practice of translators by locating the passage in Sterne that Shklovsky is quoting in translation and substituting the original text. But this may be misleading in some cases. It is quite possible that the Russian version of Sterne that Shklovsky quotes subtracts, changes, or even adds things to the text, to which some of Shklovsky's comments may pertain. It is not clear how a translation should handle this problem—but it requires mentioning.Theory of Prose is not entirely chaotic. Overall, there seems to be a plan or design, though others may disagree with my description of it. The opening chapter introduces some general notions about art (more on this below). Shklovsky does not explain what he means by “prose,” though he does announce a separate book on verse (or verse “rhythm,” 25), which he never wrote. The remaining chapters cover fictional narrative in prose. Rather than arranging his chapters chronologically by subject matter, it seems Shklovsky progresses from simpler to more complicated forms of fiction, moving from what might be called spontaneous or naive types of fictional composition to sophisticated or self-conscious types. He begins his survey in the second chapter, by focusing on traditional tales, moving on in the third and fourth chapters to framed narratives, from those with static frames (as in the Decameron) to those with dynamic frames, that is, frames that are themselves tales (as in part 1 of Don Quixote). In the fifth and sixth chapters he turns to mystery narratives, in which the story is told out of sequence, whether in the form of stories (of the Sherlock Holmes type) or that of novels, such as those of Dickens. The seventh chapter deals with Tristram Shandy, which is a paradigm case of a fiction in which fictional technique itself becomes a theme. In the final chapters, Shklovsky considers examples of what he calls “plotless prose,” or fiction without narrative (I will also return to this). Shklovsky proceeds stepwise: each type of fiction that he considers represents a complication of a type previously discussed.Theory of Prose is an important work and has made a major contribution to literary studies. To start, concerning literary works generally, Shklovsky makes vivid the importance of devices and their function in literary composition, and the priority, for the critic, of the question of How X is made, where X is a literary work. Shklovsky has often been criticized for his (characteristically) brash dictum that a work is the sum of its devices (OTP 281), on the grounds that this is reductive. After all, the response goes, there is much more to the significance of a work than how it is made. But Shklovsky does not deny this. He simply adopts a mechanic's view of mechanisms; that is his project in Theory of Prose. The correct reply on his behalf, I think, is to restate the slogan in slightly softened form and say that a literary work is also the sum of its devices. The first step in understanding a composition is to grasp it as a set of interacting elements; beyond that, critics may take as many further steps, interpretive, evaluative, or contextualizing, as they like.Theory of Prose is a foundational text of narratology. Elsewhere I have tried to outline Shklovsky's ideas about narrative (Gorman 2019). Here I will just add that readers who assume that the main contribution in Russian Formalism to narrative study is the distinction between plot (syuzhet) and story (fabula) will be surprised to find that it is addressed just once in the book, in the oft-quoted conclusion to the essay on Tristram Shandy (250–51), which is actually no more than a side comment—like Roland Barthes, Shklovsky is lavish with these. Of the two concepts, fabula and syuzhet, Shklovsky is almost exclusively concerned with plot, by which he means narrative form. One kind of plot that interests him is the nonlinear kind; that is why he gives mystery stories so much attention. But that is one option among others in narrative composition. If anything, the major narratological topic in Theory of Prose is motivation. Shklovsky's assumption is that the aim in what I previously called spontaneous fictional narrative is to conceal its artificiality by adding material that distracts readers from the narrative's use of devices and their functioning; conversely, a technique of sophisticated narrative art is to reverse the process of motivation, to “lay bare the device.” With a few exceptions, motivation in its various aspects has yet to be systematically studied by narratologists.In his discussion of literary and especially narrative technique, Shklovsky begins to work out a new approach to literary history. The first comprehensive statement appears in the chapter on Rozanov. One of the clichés of contemporary literary study is that there is some contrast or incompatibility between historical approaches to literature and “formalist” ones of the kind exemplified by Shklovsky. As a general assumption, this is absurd. Shklovsky came to realize that, in bringing out the role of technique—devices and functions—in literature, he had identified a new field of historical study. Since the Formalist theory of literary evolution was developed much further by others (especially Iury Tynianov) and is described in all the major studies on Formalism, I need not summarize. However, I will note that, even before developing the idea that histories of literary techniques—for example, devices, themes, and genres—were feasible, Shklovsky rejected historical approaches to literature that proposed, in effect, to explain works in nonliterary terms. Thus, his scorn for “ethnographic” treatments of folktales is evident throughout the book, and notably in the second chapter. The incompatibility between formal and historical approaches is only in regard to the particular question of what considerations take precedence in the explanation of literary phenomena.It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Theory of Prose to a book about narrative. Especially interesting are the last three chapters (two of which, again, were added to the 1929 edition), concerning what Shklovsky calls “prose without plot,” which I have characterized as nonnarrative fiction. Although there is no official consensus on this among contemporary narratologists, it is not productive to classify works without narrative as examples of fiction—but they do exist, and need to be studied somehow, as well as appropriately classified. Works like Rozanov's Fallen Leaves or Andrei Bely's Symphonies do not present characters or a storyline; nevertheless, they are works of literary art, using compositional techniques that can be identified and described. In the last chapters of the enlarged edition of Theory of Prose, Shklovsky has provided examples of how to explore the still largely mysterious fourth quadrant of literature, that is, all those works that do not belong to the familiar textbook categories of poetry, drama, or fiction.Finally, defamiliarization [ostranenie], or (as translated in OTP) estrangement, must be addressed. Many have heard that estrangement is the distinctive or central concept of Russian Formalism, and that the Theory of Prose is the charter document for this doctrine. Neither claim is true. Estrangement is certainly introduced in the much-cited first chapter. But that chapter is entitled “Art as Device [priem],” not “Art as Estrangement.” I venture to say that art is not estrangement, and that neither Shklovsky nor anyone else claimed otherwise. That would be an implausible generality. What Shklovsky intends in this chapter, I suggest, is to introduce the idea that, considered as a composition, a work of art consists of devices, and that ostranenie is one example of a device, which Shklovsky may be credited with identifying. Yet it should be added that Shklovsky fails to make this sufficiently clear. Even with an improved translation, Theory of Prose is not an easy book to understand. Readers are invited to look through the other chapters of the book to see how often the term recurs. I have prepared a specimen entry for the index that is missing in OTP: “Estrangement (ostranenie): 12–25, 73, 87, 124, 222, 239–40, 270, 302.”To be fair, if we added passages where Shklovsky alludes to this device without mentioning it by name, the number of entries might double; but that would not come close to making estrangement the main topic of the book. And to be scrupulously fair, it would be instructive to look through both the Theory of Prose and other works by Shklovsky to see the use he makes of various concepts associated with estrangement, such as perception, impediment, euphemism, and deformation and transformation of various kinds: it may be possible to show that his experience in discovering this device guided him in thinking about other aesthetic phenomena. But this would not render acceptable the reduction of Shklovsky to a one-idea theorist.I have suggested that the “prose” in Theory of Prose should be understood to mean fictional narrative (including some nonnarrative). Additionally, by “theory,” we should take Shklovsky to mean poetics. His book is a poetics of fiction. Yet this point marks a potential obstacle for academic readers, given the narrow horizon of contemporary literary studies, in which the central activity is typically viewed to be “close reading,” with its assumption that the only valuable critical activity is to study one work at a time. Generalization across works is not encouraged. But practitioners of poetics like Shklovsky are concerned not with individual narratives but rather with narrative techniques and their functions overall—with narrative potentials, as one might say. Devotees of close reading will simply not find much of interest in the Theory of Prose. To return once more to the case of Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky is interested in the techniques that Sterne uses rather than articulating some kind of significance of his novel. This could be put even more strongly: one could say that Shklovsky's primary concern is not with Tristram Shandy at all—not, that is, in its ineffable particularity or irreducible uniqueness. Like all the many works that he discusses in Theory of Prose, for Shklovsky, Sterne's novel constitutes a specimen: some other work might do just as well to demonstrate the particular narrative possibilities that he has in mind—in this case, those pertaining to narrative self-consciousness.The difficulty that I am describing relates to Russian Formalism as a whole, and in this respect, Shklovsky's book remains a paradigm. As I have tried to explain elsewhere (Gorman 2018), the Formalists were simply not doing close reading, but poetics. This is the interest that their work has today, if it has any interest, and it is the reason critics should still read books like On the Theory of Prose

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