More critical terms: defamiharisation

Defamiliarization The act of making something that could be familiar to the reader unfamiliar.

This can be employed in literary texts in a number of ways and for a number of different effects. It can make the reader look in a new way at the object or action that is defamiliarized; it can tell the reader more about the focalizer through whose eyes the object or action is viewed than about the object or action itself; it can postpone the reader's correct interpretation and understanding of the object or action represented.

In Charlotte Brontd's, Villette (1853), the reader learns more about Lucy Snowe, the central character of the novel, than he or she does

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about the picture that Lucy looks at.

One day, at a quiet early hour, I found myself nearly alone in a certain gallery, wherein one particular picture of portentous size, set up in the best light, having a cordon of protection stretched before it, and a cushioned bench duly set in front for the accommodation of worshipping connoisseurs, who, having gazed themselves off their feet, might be fain to complete the business sitting: this picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection.

It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude, suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat - to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids -must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay halfreclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material - seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery - she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans -perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets - were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore the name 'Cleopatra.'

Lucy's narrative is faux naive. It affects an ignorance of the conventions of art so that Lucy criticises the painting from a realistic point of view rather than an aesthetic. She relates the image to the standards and conventions of middle-class Victorian society, and to her own standards, to humorous effect. From her judgemental view of the woman in the painting we infer that Lucy is small and slim, hard-working and tidy, as well as censorious.

In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899/1902), the defamiliarization is not knowing and wilful but a genuine misinterpretation on the part of the focalizer. Not expecting to see the things that he does see, Marlow cannot initially understand them. There is a deferral of his and therefore the reader's ability to 'decode' the events. The reader is put into his position and is expected to have to reinterpret the events retrospectively.

I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling much annoyed to see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in. He kept hold on it though, and it trailed in the water. At the same time the fireman, whom I could also see below me, sat down abruptly before his furnace and ducked his head. I was amazed. Then I had to look at the river mighty quick, because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks, little sticks, were flying about - thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet - perfectly quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!

In William Golding's The Inheritors (1955), it is the reader, not the characters, who have to work to make sense of things. The defamiliarization comes from the otherness of the protagonists, who see and interpret things and events in very different ways from those of the reader. The narrative follows a group of characters who are clearly not 'like us', and whose attributes and outlook the reader must work out without authorial assistance.

Lok's ears spoke to Lok.

So concerned was he with the island that he paid no attention to his ears for a time. He clung swaying gently in the tree-top while the fall grumbled at him and the space on the island remained empty. Then he heard. There were people coming, not on the other side of the water but on this side, far off. They were coming down from the overhang, their steps careless on the stones. He could hear their speech and it made him laugh. The sounds made a picture in his head of interlacing shapes, thin and complex, voluble and silly, not like the long curve of a hawk's cry, but tangled like line weed on the beach after a storm, muddled as water. This laugh-sound advanced through the trees towards the river. The same sort of laugh-sound began to rise on the island, so that it flitted back and forth across the water. Lok half-fell, half-scrambled down the tree and was on the trail [....]

Lok was still fighting with the bushes when the screaming stopped. Now he could hear the laugh-noise again and the new one mewing. He burst the bushes and was out in the open by the dead tree. The clearing round the tree stank of other and Liku and fear. Across the water there was a great bowing and ducking and swishing of green sprays. He caught a glimpse of Liku’s red head and the new one on a dark hairy shoulder. He jumped up and down and shouted.

"Liku! Liku!"

The green drifts twitched together and the people on the island disappeared. Lok ran up and down along the river-bank under the dead tree with its nest of ivy. He was so close to the water that he thrust chunks of earth out that went splash into the current.

The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok could understand that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to its full length again.

The dead tree by Lok's ear acquired a voice.

"Clop!"

His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok's stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did not like it.

Events and things are seen through the eyes and filtered through the consciousness of Lok, and it becomes clear to the reader that he and his group represent an early form of proto- or sub-human. The group is established as sympathetic; intuitive, empathic, kindly, and attuned to their environment. The reader soon begins to identify with Lok, and is disturbed when a new and very different group arrive and begin to kill Lok's people. The absence of an omniscient narrative voice giving us privileged information makes possible the twist in the tale; when Lok's people are eradicated, the reader realises that the identification with them was false; we are the inheritors not of Lok's gentle and loving people but of their killers.

Еще раз о литературоведческих терминах: дефамилиаризация

Сэнди Берн

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