A Kernel on Defamiliarization
or how to banish cliché
As writers, we’ve all heard the exhortation to “banish cliché” so often that it has become, well, cliché. I’m not disagreeing with that advice, and certainly every time I see a worn-out phrase in a manuscript I strike it through with a red pencil. But recently I learned of a literary device that has done more than just banish cliché from my work, it has infused my writing with more intentional imagery and original sentiment. It’s called defamiliarization.
Defamiliarization is an artistic technique for presenting familiar, everyday things in an unfamiliar or strange way so that they can be perceived differently. I learned about it from a writing seminar I attended with the novelist Jenny Offill whose own work employs this technique brilliantly and to great professional success. She explained it as “describing a chair to someone who has never seen a chair before.”
The concept was originally outlined by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovksy, who argued that the purpose of “defamiliarization” is the very goal of art. “[A]rt exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony,” Shklovsky wrote in “Art as Device.” “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known…. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object.”
Some examples Shklovky uses are from Tolstoy’s novels and stories: how Tolstoy describes a night at the opera or the rituals performed during a religious service as if they are being observed by someone for whom these common occurrences are completely alien. When described in this way, the reader feels how remarkable these quotidian activities really are.
Why do this? For starters, making something unfamiliar slows the reader down, forcing them to really engage with the thing being described. Offill described it as “speed bumps for the reader.” Only when you slow down, can you really begin to see an object or an emotion. Have you ever seen a two-year-old walk down the sidewalk? They go incredibly slowly, stopping to pick up every rock, admire every flower, watch the play of dappled light through the canopy, spy the rabbit hiding beneath the lilacs. You couldn’t speed them up if you tried, while we adults will race down that same stretch of road as if late for an appointment, barely aware of what season we are in. They take in so much that we miss.
In short, defamiliarization is a way of injecting wonder back into the written word, of giving the reader goggles to see how extraordinary reality truly is. When you think about it, what is a cloud but magic swirling above us? What is a cocoon but the most implausible transfiguration? Or pulling from the man-made world, what is a smartphone but a wand we carry in our pockets that can summon food, transportation, all the knowledge of the world, and even, sometimes, loving companionship—through our very fingertips?
Since learning about this technique, I now see it everywhere, especially in the works of my favorite writers. Here are a few gleaned from my recent reading:
“[D]eath & tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces.” This is from a 1923 diary entry by Virginia Woolf, where she describes how her young niece had been struck down by a car. I love the way it evokes the image of Death as a lion or wolf, who toys with us, as if we are puny mice.
“Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinnertable directly the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms….” This passage from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse still makes me grin with recognition because of how it captures the sinewy sneakiness of children slipping away from a meal. I have noticed this habit many times in my own adolescent children—and in the deer who dine each morning on my perennials and bound away the second I open the door.
“All the while she stared into his eyes, rising up on the balls of her feet, and in the quiet house we heard the pants unsnap. The zipper opened all the way down our spines.” This evocative moment is from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, and it transported me back to the most heightened, sensual experience of my youth.
Finally, another longer and even stranger passage from The Virgin Suicides: “Her suicide … was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted. No one cared how Cecilia had caught the virus in the first place. Transmission became explanation. The other girls, safe in their own rooms, had smelled something strange, sniffed the air, but ignored it. Black tendrils of smoke had crept under their doors, rising up behind their studious backs to form the evil shapes smoke or shadow take on in cartoon: a black hatted assassin brandishing a dagger; an anvil about to drop. Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls’ throats.”
This passage is remarkable in how it uses a complex and very extended metaphor to attempt to answer the novel’s central question: why did five teenage sisters commit suicide? The reason is ultimately unknowable, and yet, these unfamiliar images—of a virus, a bacteria, a shadowy cartoon assassin—help me to “see” the strange, complex, and unfathomable causes.
If this all sounds esoteric and difficult to pull off, I assure you it isn’t. Offill insisted that it’s a skill that can be learned and gets easier with practice. So this summer I set myself the task of experimenting with it regularly. My results seem to mainly take two forms: either as figurative language or metaphor (such as the Woolf and Eugenides examples) or as the description of an action (such as the Tolstoy examples).
Here are a few of my recent exercises:
“The waves made their little Venn diagrams on the sand.” It’s a strange image, right? What could Venn diagrams and ocean waves possibly have in common, but that is, in fact, what the waves on the beach looked like to me one day this summer, and I realized for the very first time that a wave does not crash onto the shore in a straight line as I had imagined, but rather it comes ashore as two opposing and converging waves.
“The clouds kicked up their ruffled petticoats over the horizon.” I was thinking, of course, of how an incoming front of billowing cumulonimbus clouds resemble the frothy underskirt of a can-can dancer. Hopefully this image also conjures something of the joy of that sunny summer day at the beach.
Both of these are examples of defamiliarized figurative language, à la Woolf and Eugenides. An example of defamiliarized action in the vein of Tolstoy might be to describe the movements of someone taking a turn at bowling: how they wait for the ball to shoot out of the conveyor belt, then carry its hulking weight on just three delicate fingers, suddenly they let it fly across the floor as if loosed from a catapult, and finally it explodes a platoon of wobbly white pins at the end of the hall.
I challenge you to give it a try. One way to get started is to use any of the above examples as a template to write your own. Follow the cadence of sentences, use the same (or nearly the same) grammatical order, to make your own observations. Once you feel you’ve got the hang of it, try to come up with one phrase of your own each day. I feel certain that before you know it, you’ll be composing such fresh observations frequently and they will breathe new life into your writing (pardon the cliché).
My kernel of advice: Defamiliarize your descriptions to allow the reader to slow down, to see your images and sentiments with fresh eyes, and hopefully—wonder.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Sarah has been on a binge reading a new writer she “discovered” this summer. She just finished reading Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible (a novel), Love in Infant Monkeys (short stories), and We Loved it All (a memoir). Sarah is obsessed with Millet’s focus on climate change and the natural world as well as her dark, irreverent humor, her probing scientific mind, and her uncanny way of portraying teenagers.
Shelby started the querying process this week (!) and feels like she’s finally at a place where she can focus on her next novel. She’s figured out a solid opening scene, her protagonist’s deeper motive, and potentially a new twist of plot she hadn’t originally conceived but makes so much sense for the story!
Natalia is wrapping up The Other Name, the first book in the Septology series, and it is poetic perfection. The way Fosse is able to capture the spirituality and artistic nature of his protagonist is methodical and engaging despite it covering only a single day (so far). He uses the phrase “he thinks” often creating a realistic cadence to the protagonist’s thoughts and injecting each judgement or series of reflections with an uncertainty we must all feel even within our own minds as we perceive the world in real-time.
Neidy is making steady daily progress on her novel. She took some time this week to rewatch recordings of workshops from CeCe Lyra that she attended this year.