On the Theory of Prose

by Victor Shklovsky, Shushan Avagyan (Translation), Lyn Hejinian (Afterword)

As time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the twentieth century’s most significant works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Founded on the concept of “making strange,” it lays bare the inner workings of fiction―especially the works of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Sterne, Dickens, Bely and Rozanov―and imparts a new way of seeing, of reading, and of interacting with the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Theory, Writing, Criticism, Russia

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

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

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wish I'd paid attention to Shklovsky back in university. He might have saved me from the ravages of the French disease, which has left its scars on several useless generations of humanities students. Not that I think Shklovsky's approach to literature is entirely right (for what it's worth, my intuition tells me he got it fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways); nor do I think, for that matter, that a guy like Derrida is way off base, however silly he and his co-religionists tend to sound. It's just that Shklovsky's example is by far the saner one, to my mind, and ultimately the more fertile one.

Theory of Prose is as digressive and 'Shandean' a book as the Sterne novel it so ingeniously disassembles. At times it can read like a crazy tissue of quotations and gnomic pronouncements, held together (barely) by its author's offbeat theoretical showmanship. The middle sags a good deal under the weight of lengthy extracts from Russian folk tales, Don Quixote and Sherlock Holmes, all of which I can take or leave, frankly. And, if you're an academic, you're going to be seriously pissed by his total disregard for scholarly niceties such as - oh, I don't know - citations, a sustained argument - that sort of boring crap. I couldn't care less, personally; I'm just saying...

For me, the really N.B. stuff comes in the first two chapters, where he's at his most general, and towards the end, where he's tossing off aphorisms and having a grand old time taking apart Sterne, Bely and Rozanov.

I'd love to pull a Shklovsky and quote a good two or three pages, but I'll just leave you with a few one-liners picked out from my woefully dog-eared copy:

'And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.'

'A poet removes all signs from their places. An artist always incites insurrections among things.'

'These songs [from a folkloric collection] speak of a bad-tempered, querulous husband, of death, and of worms. This is tragic, yes, but only in the world of song. In art, blood is not bloody. No, it just rhymes with "flood"'.

[H]

ART AS DEVICE

In poetry, where imagery is a given, the artist does not so much "think" in images as "recollect" them. In any case, it is not imagistic thinking that unites the different arts or even the different forms of verbal art. And it is not the changes in imagery that constitute the essential dynamics of poetry. (2)

Thanks to this he [Potebyna, who didn't distinguish poetry from prose] failed to notice that there exist two types of imagery: imagery as a practical way of thinking, that is, as a means of uniting objects in groups, and, secondly, imagery as a way of intensifying the impressions of the senses. (3)

The poetic image is an instrument of the poetic language, while the prose image is a tool of abstraction: the watermelon instead of the round lampshade or the watermeleon instead of the head is nothing more than an act of abstracting from an object and is in no way to be distinguished from head = sphere or watermelon = sphere. This is indeed a way of thinking but has nothing to do with poetry. (3)

"If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been. (29 February [i.e. March] 1897)" (qtd. of Tolstoy on 5)

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowleddge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "estranging" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant. (6)

The devices by which Tolstoi estranges his material may be boiled down to the following: he does not call a thing by its name, that is, he describes it as if it were perceived for the first time, while an incident is described as if it were happening for the first time. (6)

All things considered, we've arrived at a definition of poetry as the language of impeded, distorted speech. Poetic speech is structured speech. Prose, on the other hand, is ordinary speech: economical, easy, correct speech (Dea Prosae, the queen of correct, easy childbirth, i.e., head first). (13)

And indeed, it is easier to walk with music than without it. Of course, it is just as easy to walk while talking up a storm, when the act of walking disappears from our consciousness. In this sense, the rhythm of prose is important as a factor leading to automatization. But such is not the rhythm of poetry. There is indeed such a thing as "order" in art, but not a single column of a Greek temple fulfills its order perfectly, and artistic rhythm may be said to exist in the rhythm of prose disrupted. (14)


PLOT CONSTRUCTION & STYLE

All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness. (20)

"This same phenomenon is familiar to us from music: the mathematical conception of the beat is felt as a background against which a living stream of sound flows, and this is attained by the combination of the most subtle nuances and distinctions. (S. V. Khristiansen, Philosophy of Art, 1911)" (qtd. on 22)

Of these alternatives the worst is that where someone has consciously planned to commit the crime but does not go through with it, for this failure to commit the crime is repugnant but not tragic to us. This is so because suffering is absent from the situation. (45)

"In everything, in almost everything that I have ever written, I have been guided by the need to collect my thoughts, to connect them in such a way that I may express myself. Hoewver, every thought that is expressed in words loses its meaning and degenerates horribly whenever it is taken by itself, that is, whenever it is ripped out of the integral structure of which it is a part. The structure of words consists not of ideas as such (I believe), but of something else, and it is impossible to express the basis of this structure directly through words. This basis can be expressed only through the mediation of words, that is through images, actions, situations. . . ." (qtd. of Tolstoy on 46)


STRUCTURE OF FICTION

Countless stories are, at bottom, really extended puns. As an example, we may cite stories dealing with the origin of names. (53)

In order to transform an object into a fact of art, it is necessary first to withdraw it from the domain of life. To do this, we must first and foremost "shake up the object," as Ivan the Terrible sorted out his henchmen. We must extricate a thing from the cluster of associations in which it is bound. It is necessary to turn over the object as one would turn a log over the fire. (61)

The modern novel was preceded by the short story collection. I am stating this as a chronological fact, without necessarily implying a causal relationship between these genres. (65)


SHERLOCK HOLMES & THE MYSTERY STORY

Although parallel narrative lines do eist in the story line (Odysseus and Telemachus), yet the events unfold alternately in each line. Transportation in time, as we see, may serve as a basis for a "mystery." However, we ought not to think that the mystery is in the transposition itself. For example, Chichikov's childhood, related after he had already been introduced by the author, would have ordinarily been found in the opening part of a classic adventure novel, and yet even in its transposed form it cannot make our hero mysterious. (101-2)

In a mystery novel, however, the gun that hangs on the wall [a la Chekhov] does not fire. Another gun shoots instead. (110)


DICKENS & THE MYSTERY NOVEL

A riddle is not merely a parallelism, one part of which has been omitted. Rather, it plays with the possibility of establishing a number of parallel structures. (117)

In the mystery story and mystery novel, on the other hand, we're dealing not with a comparison of objects but with the displacement of one object by another. (120)

The riddle makes it possible for the writer to manipulate the exposition, to estrange it, to capture the reader's attention. The main thing is not to allo the reader to find out what is in fact going on, because, once recognized, such a situation loses its horror. (140)

In essence, what Dickens needs here is not a secret but something mysterious to slow down the action. (143)

The mystery novel allows us to interpolate into the work large chunks of everyday life, which, while serving the purpose of impeding the action, feel the pressure of the plot and are therefore perceived as a part of the artistic whole. (145)


NOVEL AS PARODY

In addition, Sterne lays bare the device by which he stitches the novel out of individual stories. He does so, in general, by manipulating the structure of his novel, and it is the consciousness of form through its violation that constitutes the content of the novel. (149)

I cannot restrain myself from saying a few ords about Sterne's postures in general. Sterne was the first writer to introduce a description of poses into the novel. They're always depicted by him in a strange manner, or rather they are estranged. (152 [and Tolstoy then uses gesture psychologically])

Shakespeare uses inset scenes in precisely this way. Thrust into the basic action of the plot, they deflect us from the flow of time. (154)

In art, blood is not bloody. No, it just rhymes with "flood." It is material either for a structure of sounds or for a structure of images. For this reason, art is pitiless or rather without pity, apart from those cases where the feeling of sympathy forms the material for the artistic structure. But even in that case, we must consider it from the point of view of the composition. Similarly, we if want to understand how a certain machine works, we examine its drive belt first. That is, we consider this detail from the standpoint of a machinist and not, for instance, from the standpoint of a vegetarian. (159)

This device [of misunderstanding based on puns], canonical for folk drama, completely supplants, at times, novelistic plot structures. (162)

The concept of plot (syuzhet) is too often confused with a description of the events in the novel, with what I'd tentatively call the story line (fabula).
As a matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing more than material for plot formation. (170)

The forms of art are explained by the artistic laws that govern them and not by comparisons with actual life. (170)


BELY & ORNAMENTAL PROSE

A writer's philosophical worldview is his working hypothesis. However if we address the issue more precisely, we might wish to add that a writer's consciousness is nonetheless determined by literary form. The crises of a writer coincide with the crises of literary genres. A writer moves within the orbit of his art. (171)
The attempt to create a literary work which would correspond to some extrinsic worldview can succeed only ith much difficulty, if at all. This is so because a work of art distorts such a correspondence in accordance with its own laws. (171)
It is hard, indeed, to write any piece of literature that corresponds to anything as such, whatever it be. This is so because art is not the shadow of the thing but the thing itself. A work of art makes for a poor accompanist. (172)

An artist must maintain an emotional distance. He must not allow himsel to be arm-twisted. He must adopt an ironic attitude toward his material and not let it get to him. Same as in boxing or fencing. (174)

There is no point in becoming enamored of the biography of an artist. He writes first and looks for motivations later. And least of all should one be enamored of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis studies the psychological traumas of one person, while in truth, an author never writes alone. A school of writers writes through him. A whole age. (175-6)

It is my firm belief that a literary work, especially a long one, is not brought into being by fulfilling its task.
Yes, a task exists all right, but this task is completely altered by the technical means at the author's disposal.
The unity of a work of literature is more likely than not a myth. (179-80)


LITERATURE W/O A PLOT: ROZANOV

A literary work is pure form. It is neither thing nor material, but a relationship of materials. And, like every relationship, this one has too little to do with length or width or any other dimension. It's the arithmetic significance of its numerator and denominator (i.e., their relationship) that is important. (189)

Humorous works, tragic works, world-encompassing or intimate works, confrontations of worlds or of cats and stones--are all equal in the eyes of literature.
It is from this that comes the inoffensive character of art, its sense of being shut up within itself, its freedom from external coercion. The history of literature progresses along a broken path. If we were to arrange all of the literary saints canonized since the seventeenth century along one line, we would still fail to produce a single line of descent that mihgt allow us to trace the history of literary form. (189)


ESSAY & ANECDOTE

A plot is a picklock, not a key. Plot schemata conform closely to the social reality that they put into shape. THe plot distorts the material by the very fact that it selects it, and on the basis of rather arbitrary criteria. (206)

The essayist of today, unfortunately, has a habit of simply coloring his material in the manner of fiction (i.e., he includes a description of the color of the sky). Yet, this is done in a useless fashion, all the more so when we consider that this color is applied from memory without any real scientific understanding of what clouds are and what they designate. But the good essayist has his standard of comparison. So Goncharov describes the exotic against the touching though feebly expressed background of Nature and the everday life of ordinary Russians. This discovery of a fundamental point of vie that drives the material forward, enabling the reader to reassemble it once again, is a far more organic device for the essayist to use than comparisons that rarely hit the mark. (209)

[Justine]

“And so in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to feel things-- to make the stone stony-- we have something called art. The purpose of art is to convey the sensation of an object as something visible, not as something recognizable.”

Viktor Shklovsky’s On the Theory of Prose is a ramble through literary criticism. Shklovsky will seem to get distracted along the way with various digressions (“But I shouldn't write about Dostoevsky in a chapter on Conan Doyle.”); long passages from Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dickins, Sterne and Bely; even a poetic description of the mountains and trees around Dresden at one point. It does not read like a scholarly work much of the time, in fact, it seems to disregard scholarly tradition with an enthusiastic playfulness and passion for literature, but I would expect nothing less from Shklovsky.

“In order to turn an object into a fact of art, one must extract it from the facts of life.”

“And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.”

“Tolstoy estranges a thing not by naming it, but by describing it as if he were seeing it for the first time, or describing an event as if it were happening for the first time.”

“The purpose of the image is not to bring its meaning closer to our understanding, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, to make the object 'visible' rather than 'recognizable'.”

“I am not criticizing Conan Doyle, but I must point out the repetitiousness of not only his plot schemes but also the elements of their execution.”

“Plot is a lock pick, not a key. Plot schemes correspond rather loosely to the material of everyday life that they formulate. Plot distorts the material through the very fact of selection, which may be carried out on the basis of quite arbitrary criteria.”

“But I am beginning to feel the influence of Don Quixote-- I am inserting episode after episode, while forgetting about the main flow of the chapter.”

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as literary theory goes, this is highly enjoyable and fun to read. When Shklovsky is waxing poetic about the nature of the written word as art, differentiating between poetry and prose, he is at his best and most enjoyable. I don't agree with all of his points about the role of the artist and the creative process, but Shklovsky is the type of brilliant writer who makes a point from which you the reader can easily agree or disagree, and then let the discussion begin.

His dissections of Cervantes, Doyle, and Sterne were boring, and were filled with unbelievably long excerpts, but his discussion of Blok, Bely, and Rozanov was engrossing, probably because he knew them personally, probably because he is personally involved in their work and their context in the history of Russian literature. And now that I have read some Shklovsky, I understand where a lot of my Russian literature professors were coming all this time.

And since I've read David Shields's Reality Hunger recently, I must say the closing chapter, "Essay and Anecdote," parallels Shields's call for a reality-based literature with an argument for a "literature of fact" based on the "traditional anecdote" that feels a lot like what's going on with 21st-century literature (and the ever-expanding literature of memoir and Twitter-influenced sparse writing).

Very glad to have read this tremendous piece of literary history, and I recommend it for all fellow readers who are interested in the nuts and bolts of how and why literature works.

"And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.

If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been." (5)

"And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By 'estranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and 'laborious.' The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant." (6)

"The concept of plot (syuzhet) is too often confused with a description of the events in the novel, with what I'd tentatively call the story line (fabula).
As a matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing more than material for plot formation . . .(170)

"It is hard, indeed, to write any piece of literature that corresponds to anything as such, whatever it may be. This is so because art is not the shadow of a thing but the thing itself. A work of art makes for a poor accompanist." (172)

"There is no point in becoming enamored of the biography of an artist. He writes first and looks for motivations later. And least of all one should be enamored of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis studies the psychological traumas of one person, while in truth, an author never writes alone. A school of writers writes through him. A whole age." (176)

[Bruce Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unless you have a Ph.D in Russian, British, German and French literature, focusing on novels, a deep knowledge of literary theory, and a monstrous taste for the absurd- you probably won't get much of this book. Unfortunately, I only qualify in the absurd division.

Perhaps the following two quotations will help illustrate what I mean: ...Chekhov introduces the alarm clock into Russian literature. Viktor Shklovskiĭ, Theory of Prose, (Elmwood Park, Il.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 190

War and Peace and Tristram Shandy, in spite of their nearly total lack of a framing story, may be called novels for the very reason that they violate the laws of a novel. Viktor Shklovskiĭ, Theory of Prose, (Elmwood Park, Il.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 192

[Sjonni]

Although many different prose devices are analysed throughout this book, one of them, that of "enstrangement" constitutes the red thread. This neologism means in short that in order to fully experience a concept in literature, that concept has to be forcibly removed from its usual semantic field. For the reader to actually notice a chair in prose, the chair has to be contrasted provockingly. To experience that thing (chair, action) trully, as an adult, the way only a child can experience it.

The theory holds true as an artistic tool but unfortunately has catastrophic philosophical consequences (left unexplored in this book).

I



Th

[A L]

I think Shklovsky believed in content despite himself.

[Peter]

Selections

[Sam Cenzhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you care at all about how fiction works, read this

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as we get the coliseum-dwellers reading Shklovsky we'll be well on our way...

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[Evelyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books organically develops a way of analyzing plot and characterization based on the idea that art is something that creates a feeling of estrangement on which the writer builds a story. A story is conceived as a system of devices whose goal is to deal with this estrangement, to create, reinforce, maintain, or resolve it. While unclear on the exact definition of what is a device, Shklovsky goes on to define generic devices that are very often used in literature but by no means are the only ones possible. One is step-by-step construction, in which an author repeats previous elements while introducing new elements that add some estrangement, and another deceleration which slows down the action to delay the resolution of the estrangement. He uses those ideas to analyze how the novels of Dickens and Doyle create mystery, as well as to make sense of the apparently chaotic novels Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Each essay stays very close to the text, but they can be hard to understand on a first reading because Shklovsky prefers to lay out the details first and leave the thesis for the last paragraph; often a re-reading is required to grasp everything. Nonetheless, it provides very interesting tools to build stories, and it made me interested in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy which I would have otherwise thought of as influential but boring dusty classics.

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its blurbs are all unusually apt: rambling, digressive, irregular, quintessential. There's an astonishing amount of insight into how literary prose actually works, an abundance of bons mots for rumination ("A plot is a picklock, not a key" being among my favorites, and whatever it means), an ostensible penchant for the "laying bare of the device" - "so elegantly naked", one could say, after a line from Anna Akhmatova that Shklovsky quotes apropos of almost nothing (or of form).

[Michaela Macháčková · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written theoretical book. It makes you think more and it makes you want to read almost all the mentioned books.

[Taylor Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudite, discursive, fun.

[Mhd Rb]

THE BEST BOOK IVE READ

[Hans Sandberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it and learned quite a few things from this rambling potpourri of ideas and examples from Russian and European literature. But it's not for everybody, that's for sure.

[Marta]

un libro divertido. los personajes son muy carismáticos te atrapa desde el minuto 1

[Will O’Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

vibes vibes yeah it is honestly mostly vibes

[Pietro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A parte quello che ciascuno di noi possa pensare dei critici d'arte, ci sono degli intelletuali, che hanno aiutato l'arte, riflettendo sull'opera degli artisti. Ho la sensazione che questi siano aumentati in numero ma diminuiti in qualità. Anche se lo strutturalismo e il formalismo sembrano sorpassati, ci sono autori che stanno andando nel dimenticatoio delle università occidentali: Uspenskij, Lotman, Bachtin.. Ci si ricorda, in sordina, dell'ultimo. E' un peccato....

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read almost everything Shklovsky wrote that’s easily available in translation. He’s that good. His nonfiction is as entertaining as his fiction. And his fiction is as erudite as his nonfiction.

[Carlos Carneiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dedicated to Ceinwyin xDD

[Carlo Mayer]

Non iniziato

[Garnel Gulya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I swear that sometimes this is intentionally boring.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

i dig this book