286
PARTISAN REVIEW
look at each other, but we do not see each other any more.
Our
perception of the world has withered away, what has remained is
mere recognition."
It is this inexorable pull of routine, of habit, that the artist
is
called upon to counteract. By tearing the object out of its habitual
context, by bringing together disparate notions, the poet gives the
coup de grace
to the verbal cliche and to the stock responses attend–
ant upon it, forcing us into the heightened awareness of things and
of their sensory texture. The act of creative deformation restores
sharpness to our perception, giving "density" to the world around
us. "Density," said Shklovski, "is the principal characteristic of this
peculiar world of deliberately constructed objects, the totality of
which we call art."
In discussing Shklovski's dichotomy of "automatization" vs. "per–
ceptibility," Medvedev, one of Shklovski's Marxist opponents, ac–
cused the Formalist spokesman of straying from the path of objective
analysis and bogging down in "the psycho-physiological conditions
of aesthetic perception." Even outside of the completely misapplied
adjective "physiological," Medvedev's charge seems unwarranted.
Works of literature are objects of knowledge, accessible only through
individual experience. Consequently, the mechanism of the aesthetic
response is a legitimate concern of an "objectivist" art theoretician,
provided that the emphasis is placed not on the individual reader's
idiosyncratic associations, but on the qualities inherent in the work
of art and capable of eliciting certain "intersubjective" responses.
But if the charge of psychologistic "deviation" was scarcely
justified, it may be plausibly argued that, in spite of his descriptive
point of departure, Shklovski came to define poetry not in terms of
what it is but in terms of what it is for. The Formalist credo turned
out to be a new "defense of poesie," rather than a definition of "liter–
ariness." Furthermore, it may be noted without detracting from the
validity of Shklovski's formulations, that his notion of art as a redis–
covery of the world had more in common with some "traditional"
views than the Formalist critic would have cared to admit. As Wenek
and Warren have pointed out, the criterion of novelty and "strange–
ness" was anything but novel. Aristotle knew that a perfect poetic
"diction" cannot dispense with "unusual words." More recently,
Romantic aesthetics proclaimed with S. T. Coleridge "the sense of
