May 11, 2020
Defamiliarization in Literature: Examples and How to Use It
Defamiliarization, as the word implies, is a process where something familiar is no longer perceived as such. Specifically in writing, defamiliarization in literature refers to a technique (a literary device, in a sense) where the writer offers familiar, common things in an odd, unorthodox way.
The purpose of defamiliarization is to cause the readers to question their perception of reality and, as a result, ultimately redefine it.
In a way, defamiliarization in literature is a destabilizing process. All such literary devices – see, for instance, my post on juxtaposition – enhance the readers’ perception of reality. Therefore, perhaps ironically, although defamiliarization causes you to initially question reality (the known and familiar), through this process it actually facilitates a much deeper and more comprehensive understanding of reality.
In this post we’ll take a closer (yet accessible) look at defamiliarization in literature, with examples and tips on how to use it properly – that is, packing as much symbolic meaning as possible in your text. Remember that literature is more than a sum of its parts, which means that a quality text should inspire more meanings than what its words allow.
Defamiliarization in Literature: Examples
Before we take a look at a couple of examples, some disclaimers.
Firstly, keep in mind that defamiliarization (like all literary devices and indeed literature in general) is an entirely subjective process. I don’t claim my suggestions are the best, let alone the only ones.
Secondly, it’s important to realize that the chain of meaning here far exceeds the narrow confines of the excerpts below. In other words, if you imagine this chain of meaning as something like:
words → symbolism → affect → meaning
then it’s rather impossible to get the full impact of what defamiliarization does without knowing the wider context. I’ll supply information and comments but, ideally, one should have read the whole book to see the effect in its entirety.
Example 1
With these in mind, the first example of defamiliarization in literature is from my novel The Other Side of Dreams.
The scene below takes place after a particularly confusing day for the two main characters, ending in a very ambiguous way that contains sexual undertones, where it isn’t clear if the characters’ desires quite meet. With the ripples of this ambiguity still present, here is what occurs:
She walks toward the nearby kiosk, on the other side of the beach road. She looks left and right, making sure there aren’t any stupid tourists on ATVs speeding mindlessly, then she crosses the road. The cicadas’ song fools her into forgetting who she is; now she’s someone else (someone good). She approaches the kiosk, one step in front of the other, one breath before another. She can’t read Greek, so she has to rely on the pictures of the ice-cream cups. This one’s probably vanilla, she thinks; vanilla and cherry. Anna likes cherry, and she also likes the word “cherry” – there’s a musicality in it, not to mention all the associations it brings to her mind.
She pays for the ice-creams and begins to walk back to the beach. An old song is playing in her head, and she tries to figure out how it got there – probably it came from the same celestial realm of ideas where every notion, thought, feeling, fear, or desire resides. Anna crosses the road and her sandals now walk on the soft dark sand of Kamari. She sees their towels, spread one next to the other, but they’re both empty. Her pace is slowed down, as her eyes scan the surroundings, trying to see where Ahmed is. But he is nowhere to be seen; vanished like a frail lucid dream, come the first morning drops of dew.
Anna reaches her towel and sits on it, leaving her beach bag by her side. She is still holding the two ice-cream cups, together with two plastic spoons wrapped in silly pink paper. She looks at the sea, trying to spot Ahmed, but apart from a group of Chinese tourists and a happy young couple (isn’t that what she’s supposed to think?) there isn’t anyone else in the immediate vicinity. Calm and not alarmed at all, she places one cup on the ground – it’s hot, the ice-cream will soon melt – and pulls the paper lid of the other. She also unwraps the spoon and sinks it into the creamy white mass, interrupted by red rivers of cherry. Cherry; cheery; chore; chord; charred and burned beyond recognition.
Defamiliarization here focuses on cherry ice-cream. I love ice-cream but, come on, it’s a fairly ordinary thing. And so is the word “cherry”. It’s certainly less unusual than something like “gobbledygook ” or “pauciloquent”.
But the text here, insisting on “cherry” as well as the importance of ice-cream, emphasizes the symbolism contained in both. Although, as I said, you’d need a wider context to fully appreciate it (particularly in knowing about the characters’ personalities and backstories), try to ponder on what kind of affective response this text inspires in you, taking into consideration the contextual information I offered you earlier. Here’s a hintConsidering that the two characters, Anna and Ahmed, have just shared a not-quite "perfect day" (found the reference?) that ended in an ambiguous way - in terms of sexual attraction and satisfaction - what kind of metaphors do you see in "cherry"? Anna’s thoughts make it almost explicit.
Moreover, what you do make of the ease with which Anna transforms "cherry" into other words (and, particularly, with the way they evolve into something entirely different)? And what does it mean that Ahmed’s ice-cream "will soon melt"?, if you need it.
Example 2
The second example comes from my novel Illiterary Fiction. This scene involves Paul, the protagonist, and a point in the narrative when the struggle between his values and his desires reaches a breaking point.
His eyes are obsessed with the sight in the mirror. He’s looking at it intently, the way one examines a Grecian urn in a museum. And the image, too, is broken; put together, glued into place, but complete nevermore.
To live is to die, to dream is to defy.
A numbness spreads down his neck, as if a potent drug found its way through his arteries. He lifts his hand and clasps his collar, squeezing enough to feel the pain. The image in the mirror now becomes more interesting. The diffused warm light of the lamp, turned down low, casts soft shadows around his nose and over his lips. His fingers eventually release their grip, and he’s again ordinary. The man in the mirror looks at him contemptuously, feeling sorry for him, laughing at his cowardice. Paul cannot stand the sight any longer, and he turns his back.
Here the defamiliarization technique is focused on the mirror. In all honesty, this is a fairly common application – which is the reason why I chose it.
A mirror is a very mundane object. We look in mirrors all the time. But, unless in rare moments of deep introspection, we don’t quite think about it. The text here takes advantage of this, turning the mirror into something that is more than just a reflection. It underlines the conflict Paul feels, in terms of struggling with his own volition.
As I said, it’s a very common application, but nonetheless a powerful one.
Tips on Using Defamiliarization in Literature
Again, there is no “best way”. And certainly no “only way”. But the ideas below have helped me, and they might help you.
First of all, before using defamiliarization, you must really understand its purpose. This might sound self-evident, but better be clear about it.
With this in mind, defamiliarization in literature is about telling something that isn’t there. If that sounds familiar, you’ve seen something similar in my post on literature being more than a sum of its parts:
Symbolic power is exclusively (think about that for a moment) found not in what you see but in what you don’t.
Like all such devices, defamiliarization draws the reader’s attention to something you consider important in terms of affect. In other words, you use defamiliarization to shove the reader into a piece of text meaning and tell them “Here, look at this. It reveals a lot”.
Practical Aspects
In more practical terms, defamiliarization is much about descriptions. In principle, it’s not unthinkable that you might see defamiliarization in dialogue, but it would require some special circumstances.
The reason?
An excessively unorthodox or “defamiliarized” way of talking conflicts with realistic characters. Unless it’s about a very particular character who habitually talks like that – think of someone not unlike a Shakespearean fool or a chorus-type character – then it would undermine the realism of the character, which would be problematic.
And so, most defamiliarization instances occur in narrative descriptions, the way I showed you in the examples above. Of course internal dialogue is an entirely different case.
Another thing to consider is my favorite less-is-more approach. In order for the effect to be truly powerful, you need to use it sparingly. Have you ever seen texts that put exclamation marks all the time (sometimes even more than one)? Same thing applies here.
“Well, How Do You Do It?”
As I said more than once, it’s subjective. I can’t really show you step-by-step. It depends on your novel, your style, and what you’re trying to achieve.
Having said that, here’s a quick checklist:
- Identify what kind of affect you’re trying to inspire. Do you want your audience to feel despair? Elation? Confusion?
- Zero in on the item/concept you will apply defamiliarization to so that you achieve your goal. A good candidate is an object that is familiar, yet containing symbolic power. In our example above, the mirror is a typical such object. But really, use your imagination; the surrounding world is full of such objects.
- Decide your strategy. Should it be with unusual descriptions? Excessive focusing on language? Something else? Whatever the strategy, it should be about destabilizing the reader’s perception of that object/concept.
It’s not about what You Say; It’s about what You Don’t
As with other literary devices and especially symbolism, defamiliarization is about saying something that isn’t quite there. Well, ultimately it is, but it’s so well hidden that we fail to notice it. Your job as an author is to help your audience figure it out.
Defamiliarization in literature is a concept with some resemblance to the uncanny. Although you have a feeling you should know and recognize something, you still don’t quite do. You feel as if reality isn’t quite what you assumed. And that is always a good thing to inspire in your audience, because art must be disruptive and inspire you to question.
The term “defamiliarization” was first coined in 1917 by Victor Shklovsky. You can find more about it in his Theory of Prose. Alternatively, you could try to find his essay “Art as Device”.
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Just today I was talking to someone and said: in art what glues to you, what sticks after all the years, is the sensible, not the sensical (trying to make the pun again doesn’t work, as both the words for ‘sense’, as in ‘five senses’, and ‘meaning’ are the same single “sentido” in Portuguese, so yeah, not what makes sense, but what touches, what reaches to the senses).
Ah, yes, it’s much better in Portuguese. Though the facts aren’t lost in translation, the affect is – see what I did there? 😉
Parenthetically, I’ve been reading the stories by Machado de Assis you sent me, they’re uncannily modern. My hands-down favorite was “The Alienist”, it must be among the funniest things I’ve ever read!
Oh! That’s amazing and funny! Especially considering I had to read The Alienist during high school (Brazilian education system doesn’t translate well to Advanced Levels, but still, around 15–7 years old) and I remember it being an extremely serious and dark novella/long short story. It is heavily celebrated by academic criticism (I mean, who cares for newspapers’ complimenting or complaining about books? I honestly never took that seriously). And if I must defend my own, Brazilian and Latin-American writers are absurdly beyond their time, extremely relevant today and, I must confess, much more to my liking. Anglophone literature has been quite a hassle (long books, exhausting long sentences, almost no meta-fiction, or extremely cliched out when it happens, etc.).
Interesting – and true – observation regarding Latin American vs Anglophone writers. I wonder what could be the reason.
To some extent, off the top of my head, I’d think of the role of puritanism, classicism, and imperialism (in chronological order, from the 16th century reaching into the early 20th and, perhaps, by consequence, beyond).
Obviously, a variety of other reasons should be examined, having to do with geography and culture.
I’d be interested in your opinion (anyone else reading this, feel free to chime in).
I think there is the weather/climate, no joke, I think that influences a lot.
I remember, when I had my scholarship for studying the writer Victor Giudice, under a professor (possibly the most unprofessional experience I’ve had in my life so far), that when an interviewer asked Giudice why there was no high fantasy (like the one in European fiction) in Latin-American fiction, he replied that our reality was so surreal in itself that there was no need for more fantasy than our daily basis. And that is true in the most Kafkaesque, horrifying, sense.
“Oh, but magical realism, García Marquez”, no shizzle my dude. It is far less magical to us than it is to anglophone readers.
I think french theorists caught the spirit a bit better, think 60s-70s french theory (viz. psychoanalysis, (post)structuralism, deconstruction, etc.) reading Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction, that’s 40s argentinian short prose! Two, three decades ahead of its time. And again I insist how Machado de Assis is even beyond that (I’ve read my fair share of Borges and, to apply a common Brazilian joke saying: as a writer he was a good philosopher).
We are so racially mixed it even shows in our language. Brazilian Portuguese retains the 17th century syntactic structure of colonial Portuguese whilst bringing back Persian and Arabic terms from medieval occupation of Iberian Peninsula; mix that with African religious terminology (and a telluric spirit derived from their native religions as adapted to Brazilian context, especially mixed with popular culture via music and dance); mixed with native indigenous languages and practice (think tobacco and even the toponym of my neighborhood is indigenous, many areas actually and even cities).
Latin-America is also the homeland of true baroque art: the art of resistance to colonization, the counter-colonization art. That is extremely contradictory, I would dare say even dialectics isn’t able to explain, there are so many intervening forces, it is such a strong spiritual fight with blows coming from all sides, looks more like a war and a feast all at once, a true bloodbath, in the ritual sense. Think ritual without gravity, though, ritual without seriousness.
I will not even get into the economic backyard we are for North America and Europe in general, for that should go without saying (and if an explanation need be: Ruy Mauro Marini provides the best one ever in his The Dialectic of Dependence).
Anyways, I’m just collecting anachronic historic blasts because that’s how we live, that’s how we feel time: suspended, in retrograde flow… In waves.
What a great, informative comment, thanks for taking the time to write it! I confess my relative ignorance on the matter, so you gave me some food for thought and resources for further study.
Was brushing my teeth and suddenly had the idea to list some names that might interest you.
Contemporary critics/theorists/call-them-whatever: Raúl Antelo, Florencia Garramuño, Josefina Ludmer, Daniel Link, Silviano Santiago, João Adolfo Hansen, Victor da Rosa, Moysés Pinto Neto, Karl Erik Schøllhammer, Tamara Kamenszain, Alexandre Nodari, Leonardo D’Ávila de Oliveira, Guilherme Gontijo Flores and there are plenty more, but these are what sprung to mind.
Contemporary writers (I will NOT separate litfic from genrefic because that distance only makes sense in the anglophone world, I mean, speaking from a Latin-American perspective, but most of them, if not all, would fall closer to litfic than genrefic for what is worth): César Aira, Bernardo Carvalho, Alejandro Zambra, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, Guimarães Rosa, Cristovão Tezza, Julian Fuks, Ana Maria Machado, Verônica Stigger, Victor Giudice, Manuel Puig, Roberto Arlt, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ricardo Piglia, Rodolfo Walsh, Antonio di Benedetto, Haroldo Conti, Severo Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Néstor Perlongher, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Caio Fernando Abreu, Marçal Aquino, Cyro dos Anjos, Lúcio Cardoso, Michel Laub, Lya Luft, José Lins do Rego, José J. Veiga, Moacyr Scliar, Luiz Ruffato, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, João Gilberto Nöll, Raduan Nassar, Nélida Piñón and others.
You are an inexhaustible source of information! Thanks 🙂
I just wanted to share something with you, hope you understand.
I just saw some people discussing why Ursula K. Le Guin is not queer enough because she is or was, whatever, authors don’t have a life anyways, a cis-heterosexual woman and at least Virginia Woolf was actually queer because, look, Orlando is a love letter to another woman.
Man, I’ve gotta tell you something: fuck that whole shit. Fuck it all from top to bottom and back up. I wanna read good text. Is that a difficult criterion? Is that hard to understand? People discuss the hell out of x and y and z, I get the political implications. I mean, I have the scholarship, I’ve graduated already. I got it. But, damn, I’ve got into this because of the fun, because I read fucking great books and amazing stuff. It’s 3:33 in the morning, I just want to see people cheer because this author wrote this amazing sentence that I wanna quote for the rest of the night. You catch my drift? What happened to the pleasure of reading? What happened to the fun behind it all? I mean, Woolf is BO-RING. And I’ve never cared that much for Le Guin ‘cuz, you know, politics before good fiction, couldn’t care less. I don’t know if it is the hot latino spirit burning within me, or what else could it be, but I can’t take such ridiculous discussions anymore and that’s why I’ve quit academia, no post-grad in sight, and I’m just teaching basic education and creative writing via private, one-on-one, lessons. And considering ordaining as a Buddhist monk.
Man, I’m with you 100%. I totally get you. You might remember an earlier post of mine about separating the art from the artist, as well as that on experimental fiction and House of Leaves mercilessly mocking the academia.
The truth is, the academia has become a hotbed for elitist, self-righteous morons that can deconstruct a text a thousand ways but can’t tell you why that’s important. They have no personal thought in them left anymore, it’s just an endless regurgitation of fossilized ideas.
And that’s why I’ve given up on the academia as well.
Take care, man!
You explained it so keenly & clearly even like a year old child can get it. Thankyou so much 🙂
Thanks for your comment!
Great post, thank you. I’m a new subscriber and just found you after a search on “writing irony.”
Thanks for your comment, and welcome! 🙂