"What is Literature?" - A Peek

     Let’s start with this quote from Tony Bennett: ‘the uniqueness of ‘literature’ consists in its tendency to ‘defamiliarise’ experience.’

     Thus, the simple answer to the proposed question is this: literature is any work which causes us to think and feel anew – that is, experience something as though for the first time. Well, admittedly, this doesn’t sound smart, nor does it sound complicated – but I think it is really important. Let’s explore why.

     Almost 100 years ago, a smart guy from Russia called Viktor Shklovsky identified a problem in his society. He quotes Leo Tolstoy who says ‘if the whole life of many people is lived unconsciously, it is as if this life had never been.’ Shklovsky chillingly elaborates, saying that ‘this is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war.’

     Two words are worth exploring: ‘unconsciously’ and ‘automatization.’ What Shklovsky has in mind is that once an experience is repeated - and in our age, so many things are on repeat – it becomes a habit, and routine actions become automatic. For example, I was lost during the first few days of my arrival in Durham and everything looked fresh and new. Now, after having lived here for almost a year and a half, I’ve lost the initial feelings I had when I first experienced the city. Now, I ‘recognise’ things instead of ‘see’ things. In other words, we are being routinely desensitised to life; ours is a numbed existence where we embark on a wild goose hunt for success and dreams, only to find waiting at the end of the rainbow – the sniggering face of Death.

     Literature then, is that which ‘restores the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony.’ This re-sensitising us to ‘the sensation of life’ is achieved primarily through ‘defamiliarisation.’ This simply means that we describe things differently. I’d like to take a look at this short story a friend (Clarissa, who blogs here) wrote, called ‘AlternateFrequencies:’

"There are many differences between him and her: skin colour, bank balance, number of years they have carried on their shoulders. They travel in alternate frequencies, destined not to meet.

Everyday at 3.15pm, however, he would wait outside her school door, the hot sun pressing down upon him. The beads of sweat slide agonizingly on his forehead like the condensation of his sugar cane drink.

There she is. Her designer schoolbag on her back, her latest iPhone, the heavy textbooks she carries with one hand – all reminders of the dissonance between him and her. Her eyes cut across the after-school din to meet his.

She approaches him, and gets inside the backseat of the car (not his). He revs up his engine and drives.

And finally silence settles.

All the other drivers told him he was lucky, he was paid so well. All her classmates told her it was good she was driven around. But no one saw the tragedy of the silence. 

They travel in alternate frequencies. They cannot, do not, make conversation."

     In her recounting the scene of a driver escorting his employer’s daughter home from school, Clarissa draws attentions to the disparity between the two characters – whose lives, though vastly different, intersect in a seemingly mundane moment. This ability to capture the imagination, I believe, lies in the disinterested narrator’s careful attention to details. For, although we see a lot of things: the waiting driver, the schoolbag, the iPhone and etc.; and we hear equally much: the after-school din, the revving engine, the voices of other drivers and classmates – there is finally and ultimately, an alienating silence.

     I believe many of us have witnessed scenes similar to this, but have never felt moved like we would have when reading the short story. There is nothing inherently significant about the story. Its effectiveness in communicating emotions is achieved simply by defamiliarising our habitualised perception. Thus, returning to our quotation at the start: ‘the uniqueness of ‘literature’ consists in its tendency to ‘defamiliarise’ experience,’ we begin to see how unpretentious, yet powerful this tool of defamiliarisation can be.

     This, is what I would consider the ‘literariness’ of a text: its ability to make one see and experience life.

PS: I hope I have not misread Clarissa’s short story. XD