#enstrangement

Uncle Arch...We drove past the front door pretty much every time we visited Dad’s parents but we only went inside on one occasion. My sole memory is that one wall of the living room was unrendered and that the place had an air of profound sadness, though the latter may have been my own projection. He never came to Christmas lunch at our house with his brother and sister-in-law. I can only assume he wasn’t invited. In our entire lives Fiona and I saw him a handful of times at most, during that single visit and at a couple of family funerals and weddings. He seemed placid and slow and a little scruffy, but otherwise not greatly different from many other guests. He never married, never had children. I don’t think he worked. Later when I asked Mum about him she said, ‘He wasn’t all there,’ and refused to elaborate so that I have no idea whether he had some kind of learning difficulty or whether he was heavily medicated for a psychiatric illness, but he lived independently into his sixties so whatever difficulties he faced were not insuperable ones. I’ve since worked with many people like Uncle Arch, the kind of people we pass all too easily in the street, forgetting that they have stories and experiences and interior lives of as much value as our own but who get pushed to the edge of society, who are excluded from family events because they’re seen as shameful, because their personal hygiene isn’t perfect, because they might behave inappropriately, because we don’t know how to behave in their presence. I can’t think about Uncle Arch without thinking of how completely and how effectively he was written out of our lives, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I never once looked around the table at Christmas lunch and thought about him sitting eating his Christmas lunch alone four miles away.

and slowly blood starts to look like water

It is a nice day,

But I can not see through closed blinds and blasting music,

It is warm outside,

But I can not feel the sun's heat inside this room with a shut door, 

And slowly, sand through an hourglass, blood starts to look like water. 

I walk past a mirror,

And hold back a scream as a person,

I do not know, 

Stands in front of me,

And slowly, the chime of a clock, blood starts to look like water.

I walk up a flight of stairs,

Taking two at a time,

Without noticing,

The floor numbers never change,

And slowly, the loss of a love, blood starts to look like water.

I knock on the door, 

Of my mothers house,

And she tells me, 

“No solicitors,”

And slowly, a flower wilting, blood starts to look like water.

I wake up,

On my sixteenth birthday,

And I am surrounded by,

Strangers and an empty house,

Another moment in "One-Way Street" that struck me was this consideration of "the first glimpse:"

What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored (Benjamin, 83).

This notion of "the first glimpse," so "incomparable and irretrievable" by virtue of the fact that it precedes the establishment of habits of seeing - reflects to a certain degree Shklovsky's notion of "estrangement," and enstrangement as a literary method - and, as it can perhaps be pulled from this Benjamin quote - enstrangement as a method of reading, a way to really experience "objective truth." 

Here I am, finally returning to Shklovsky after it was returned to the library and made its way into my hands quite by coincidence!

I am still quite new to Shklovsky - I have only read the paper reference by Dennis Porter, titled in the Sher translation "Art as Device."

This particular moment in the essay struck me as a potentially useful interms of examining the formal underpinnings of the concepts of sight and recognition - and how they vary here from Benjamin's employments of the terms:

The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By 'enstranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a 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 (Shklovsky, 6).

This quote exemplifies a different employment of the concept of recognition from Benjamin's use, and also gestures to the concept of enstrangement, vital to Shklovsky's criticism.

What in this translation of Shklovsky's essay is reffered to as "sight" might more appropriately approximate the meaning of "recognition" employed in Benjamin's writing.

The concept of enstrangement seems to be potentially fruitful when considering particular ways in which images, moments are "enstranged" in Capote's place-portraits: for example, when he first describes New York as "floating in river water like a diamond iceberg," the urban, the city is made strange to the reader, and it is this strangeness which pulls out the fundamental "objective" truth of New York city that is expressed through the use of the image of an iceberg.