Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot

by Victor Shklovsky

Conflating a biography and a criticism of Tolstoy, Shklovsky uses this great author to make a case for a revolutionary way of reading and appreciating literature.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Criticism

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (Russian: Виктор Борисович Шкловский) was a Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer.

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

At a street fair last summer, I saw this awesome routine where a female acrobat leaped onto her partner’s shoulders and then, one by one, carefully planted her feet on top of his shaved head. Balancing herself there, she proceeded to juggle machetes and flaming torches while keeping up a steady flow of stage patter. For his part, the man remained stoically immobile. The only signs of strain he showed were a slight tremor in his corded neck and a slow drip of sweat from his chin.

Lame as it is, that’s the best Shklovskian analogy I can think of for what’s going on in Energy of Delusion. The man in my little tableau would represent Tolstoy, the nominal subject of the book, while the juggler on his head would be the literary theorist, Viktor Shklovsky. Although Tolstoy underpins the whole enterprise and is present on nearly every page, it’s Shklovsky who hotdogs it and steals the show. The wily old bugger has so many machetes in the air, so many themes in play, you’d swear he was writing three or four books at the same time. And that may be a conservative estimate.

So what are they about, these books within a book? Among other things: art, old age, infidelity, storytelling, death, property, marriage, Russia. One of Shklovsky’s more endearing/infuriating qualities is his refusal to stay within the traditional boundaries of literary criticism – or of any other genre, for that matter. He rambles, he digresses, he shimmies, sashays and twirls. Going out on another analogical limb here, I’d say a book by Viktor Shklovsky is, mutatis very much mutandis, the Liza Minnelli experience of literary theory (I’m relying on hearsay at this point, I hasten to add). He’ll be cruising along, talking about ‘traveling plots’ in Boccaccio or whatever, when suddenly he’ll toss off a little autobiographical aside like this one:

The most incredible thing for me, though, is that I’m not a young man anymore, I’m eighty-eight, and no one offers me a seat in the tram, but that custom has passed, and so has my own habit of walking in the city that I love so much.

Or else he’ll go all sage and aphoristic on you:

Life is strange and loathsome… Both men and women become distorted. They are repulsive if we take off their clothes. They all lie. Only the drunk carried in the cab doesn’t lie, and that’s only because he has no consciousness.

Or deliver a breathtaking non-sequitur:

Literature emulates different things differently. But it doesn’t merely emulate, it torments itself, inviting us to watch these tortures. I will reflect more than once on Tolstoy’s house in Khamovniki.

If there’s coherence here, it’s holistic rather than sequential. It’s the coherence of the montage – to use Shklovsky’s term - rather than the long take.

Shklovsky is a writer who has come to mean a lot to me over the last couple of years, and I don’t expect to be finished with him any time soon (as long as Dalkey Archive, bless its collective heart, keeps bringing out his books). If I were honest with myself, though, I’d have to admit that Energy of Delusion doesn’t really succeed as literary criticism. I respect his right to cultivate idiosyncrasy – a ballsy thing to do in the old USSR – I appreciate his oddities of style and vision, but I feel that his discursive approach is better adapted to his autobiographical writings (some of which are simply amazing) than to his more theoretical work, where the content does not always warrant such determined obliquity. To put it another way: sometimes you just want Cecil Taylor to quit fartin’ around and play the damn tune already.

One more caveat: I was none too impressed with the translation. It has the punch and casualness I associate with Shklovsky, but the translator gets into some god-awful messes with English syntax. To take an especially gruesome example, try to count the number of mistakes and infelicities in this short sentence: ‘The Church took on the responsibility of the cleansing sins like a teacher washes away the wrongly solved problem from the blackboard.’ Speaking of wrong, that’s just a big bowl of it.

Still, Energy of Delusion is ‘an incredible book’, as Shklovsky exclaims a propos of Hadji Murad. He then added something that I still don’t completely understand, but I like it well enough to quote anyway, as it seems –- in its obscure way -- to sum up how I feel about a lot of books: ‘I don’t know how to write about it and I won’t even attempt to use the purely incidental fact that I’m still living.’

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good God, the top of my head's coming off. Shklovsky was one of the world's great literary critics, a Futurist theorist and writes like an angel--not typical academic criticism, this uses the tools of poetry, of memoir and essay and fiction--I'm missing some of the background, but ideas are POPPING!

DAMN I had to take it back to the library. More TK

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book’s title is a phrase used by Tolstoy to describe his impetus to write fiction as though it were “true” – you have to believe in the “fiction”. In this scheme of things, a writer gropes toward discovering the “true” character of a novel’s characters in much the same way as a sculptor seeks the hidden form awaiting release from the stone.
I have some difficulty with this book because it is written for readers who have read and are very familiar with all the major works of Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov. I have read most of these books, but often many years ago. Still, I have come away with a greater appreciation of Tolstoy, of his persistent desire to get his characters, his stories and plots “right”. Any false note and he would abandon the manuscript and start again. Tolstoy’s heroes change. As Shklovsky says, “In new circumstances, the hero, in his essence, becomes a new person.”
As for plot: A few pages before the end of his book, Shklovsky admits that he has never had a clear idea of what plot really is, and that he wrote this work to discover what it is – much as Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote to discover and understand their fictional characters. Shklovsky does say that plot is “a device for description” and “should not be confused with intrigue”. “Plot,” he says [p 420], “is a knot of circumstances that lead to other circumstances, circumstances of a different structure, different style.”
Great literature does not recognize happy endings – the story merely goes on, whether or not it is written. “Literature plays the role of a poker; it stirs the coals in the fireplace.” Shklovsky observes that in Chekhov’s endings “the person doesn’t improve his social condition. But he understands it.”
Scattered throughout are many interesting observations and anecdotes concerning the major Russian writers. Sometimes Shklovsky rides off on a long digression and disappears behind a ridge, but then he suddenly reappears and clarifies a lot with a simple statement. At other times he is simply too oblique, too clever for his own good – or, perhaps I should have read him more carefully.

[Dionysius the Areopagite]

Cannot get the ball rolling. Oddly, I like everything about this book and sought it out with great expectations. Glad to know of Shklovsky and may even pick this back up over the summer or something. After the fifth or six setting aside I have also noticed a strange pattern:

Each time I plop myself down into my easy chair to get back to Energy, there is much commotion in this quiet abode. As quiet as New York gets, to be honest. There are several doors within this compound, one natrually connecting to the basement, where a strange bird lives. I know little of this character, as I see him about twice a month, and that around Christmas I found out that I'd had his name wrong since October. To boot, back in autumn I was once tying my shoe when this person approached me with a poem, having heard something, I assume, of yrstruly, in one aesthetic sense or another, and proceeded to read me a long poem about Ma Rainey, the content of which I cataloged neither then nor now, save that MA Rainey now reminds me of two things:

Tombstone Blues

&

Tying shoelaces

What I've come to gather about Basement Poet is that he is hard of hearing, incapable of not shouting or slamming doors or stomping, as opposed to speaking, clicking closed a door, or walking, and in his last words to me, once upon a time, "I fucking love video games."

Of course there was nowhere to go but quiet severance from here. As I picked up Energy this evening I consciously noted, 'If tonight is one of those slamming door nights, all bets are off, and I'll make up for lost time this week."

One who reads through the door - closings of the near - deaf by proxy defames Author. I have too much stock in Schklovsky. We'll meet again when this season in Hell is over.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t fully remember the literary theory behind the book. What I do recall is that Shklovsky’s can always be appreciated on both the thesis level and the sentence level. His prose is relentlessly clever and even fun. He makes you think after each smart sentence. He knows the entire Western (and much of the non-Western) literary canon. He’s a master stylist, an experimental novelist trapped in a literary critic’s body.

[Bad Horse · Rating 1 out of 5]

I might have liked this book if I'd been expecting a novel. But I wanted a book about plot. Instead, I got wandering reminiscences about Viktor Shklovsky, by Viktor Shklovsky. It could be a fun read if I had the time for that, and if Shklovsky hadn't gone senile. "Energy of Delusion" is an appropriate title. The text is full of energy, fun to read; but if you try to grasp what it's saying, the meaning dissolves in your hands. I just now opened the book to a random page--110--and read, "What we define as plot is the analysis of a certain theme and its narration in a style that has been found the most effective." This is simply not a definition of plot. It might be a definition of a story--a very odd and incomplete one--but it isn't what anyone in America means by "plot". The whole book seems to be one long string of such wise-sounding nonsense.

[Bamcquern · Rating 3 out of 5]

Autobiographical, novelistic, sometimes epigrammatic criticism. Great style. Very different from Theory of Prose, the only early work of criticism I have of his.