[This the fourth in a series of posts in which I offer an argument in the terms of Russian Formalism for J. K. Rowling’s being awarded a Nobel Prize on the merits of her work. The first three posts in this set can be found here, here, and here.]

If there are two concepts in academic study of literature which are anywhere and everywhere recognized as ‘Russian Formalist,’ as such, they are literaturnost or ‘literariness’ and ostrananie or ‘defamiliarization.’ The ideas are conjoined, as we’ll discuss at some length in tomorrow’s installment, but I have separated them temporarily and artificially to highlight how each is reflected in Rowling’s work before seeming them in conjunction. Defamiliarization is the point of literature, in a nutshell; literariness is how writers create this effect and what those who study literature are studying. Literaturnost is a principal means to any author’s syuzhet or poeima.

Roman Jakobson, the most well known Russian Formalist besides Shklovosky, wrote in Modern Russian Poetry (1921) that “the object of literary science is not literature, but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work.” Chris Baldick explains:

The Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts – especially poems – foreground their own language, in meter, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition. Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts. (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, p 123)

The obviously poetic or extra-mundane quality of literary language “foregrounds” it.  M. H. Abrams defines ‘foregrounding’ as “bring[ing] something into prominence, to make it dominant in perception.”

The literariness of a work, as Jan Mukarovsky, a member of the Prague Circle, described it in the 1920s, consists “in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance,” that is the foregrounding of the act of expression, the act of speech itself.”… The primary aim of literature in thus foregrounding its linguistic medium, as Viktor Shklovsky put it in an influential formulation is to estrange or defamiliarize; that is, by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature “makes strange” the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity for fresh sensation. [A Glossary of Literary Terms, pp 107-108 (highlighting in original)]

This “focus on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values” (Abrams, 107), as we have discussed, is why the Formalists were labelled as such by their critical opponents. To risk repeating myself to clarify this point, the aim of fine writing is a reawakening of any reader’s thinking and understanding by a defamiliarizing experience; the means to this goal and the object of literary study is any work’s literariness or foregrounded linguistic, structural, and referential markers that make it undeniable that we are reading something extraordinarily other than commonplace experience and language. References to other work or intertextuality is a hallmark of such foregrounding or markers that we have entered the world-apart of intentional writing.

If there is only one hurdle for Rowling to clear to become Nobel worthy in the eyes of the cognoscenti and academic gatekeepers of literary canon, it is literariness. For at least a century, literariness to these stewards has meant writing plotless novels of self-reflection about the absurdity and meaninglessness of human existence in elevated, relatively inaccessible language for an increasingly limited audience of existential-atheists. The only thing Rowling has published to date, perhaps published to please just this audience, that is not wonderfully accessible, popular, and plot-driven has been the Hardy-esque Casual Vacancy, the only novel or screenplay she has written that disappointed her global audience.

But literariness understood as the Formalists did rather than as the certified literary establishment now does is an undeniable quality of Rowling’s work, Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts to Cormoran Strike. Here are three points about Rowling’s novels and screenplays in which she foregrounds by language, artifice, and referencing the literariness of her writing that continually remind her readers they’re not in Kansas anymore.

[Read more…]

In yesterday’s introduction to this series of posts about the reasons Rowling deserves a Nobel Prize, I explained why I thought the ideas of Russian Formalism and the formalist movement in general were most apt in examining the value of her work. In a nutshell, Formalism is the most stringently literary of the various schools, eschewing Freudian and Marxist concerns about autobiography and political correctness, two of Rowling’s most important influences were academic formalists as well as novelists, and formalism holds that writing, inevitably, is about the experience of writing and reading.

Today I want to introduce the formalist central tenet from which the other six reasons I’ll discuss naturally extend, namely, the difference between syuzhet and fabula. Here is an example of this distinction in a recent piece about Nabokov’s Lolita in the Inside Higher Ed that defines the terms and shows what a commonplace it is in academic reading of literature. From Anne Dwyer’s ‘Why I Teach Lolita:’

I’ve taught an undergraduate seminar on Vladimir Nabokov since 2008. In each iteration I’ve addressed the challenges of reading Lolita — a novel whose plot (the fabula, to speak in Russian formalist terms) is about the abduction and ongoing sexual abuse of a child, but whose structures and devices (the siuzhet) point everywhere else. In 2016, students debated whether I should have included a “trigger warning” on the syllabus. This year I added a few words asking students to inform themselves about the plot of Lolita and to consider what it means that Nabokov treats “a range of human experience in a highly artful, and even artificial, way.”

This author, like Rowling as we’ll see, uses ‘plot’ to mean basic story or fabula while most critics use that word for syuzhet but the distinction beyond the word used for translation is not a difficult one. Syuzhet is the story-as-told and fabula the story-in-sequence that the reader creates from the story as told or as the characters in their universe experience them chronologically. The syuzhet is the story-teller’s art and the fabula either the order of events re-created by the author or the interpretation a reader makes to understand the story events in a natural timeline. Syuzhet is the object of critical study, the deliberate story telling and use of literary devices that make a story more than a police report. It is the author’s intentional craft.

The best online explanation of this distinction I have found was ‘Syuzhet and Fabula’ by Neil Moore. Read the whole thing but here is his conclusion:

As mentioned earlier, the relation between syuzhet and fabula is a metonymic one. The syuzhet is, at least in the model considered here, given form by selecting certain parts of the fabula while omitting others: this selection usually serves to emphasize the “important” events or aspects of events, by omitting irrelevant ones. However, the elided events are often of the utmost importance: the author introduces tension, drama, and ambiguity by omitting them.

Lodge quotes Hemingway, who says that “the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”. Thus, in “The Killers”, we do not know why the killers have been sent to kill Ole Anderson; we also do not know whether they ever find him. Likewise, in Kafka’s The Trial, we are always presented the world from Josef K.’s perspective; like K., we do not know what is happening in the courts, if anything. Thus the reader gets a taste of the overwhelming confusion, helplessness, and frustration of K.’s situation.

Though the choice of words in Russian may not be entirely clear, the distinction between fabula and syuzhet should be. What must be noted is the relationship between fabula and syuzhet in terms of content and in terms of construction. The syuzhet appears to be constructed from the fabula, and, in analysis, is usually treated as though it were; however, the fabula that readers find is one constructed by themselves from the material of the syuzhet. The ambiguity—fabula as underlying objective sequence of events versus fabula as reader-constructed theory—is important to understanding narrative fiction.

A writer deserving of the Nobel Prize, if it is more than just an award for championing politically ‘progressive’ positions (which, alas, it usually is), has to be someone who is a literary craftsman of great accomplishment. This series of posts is to establish that Rowling is more than a Kid Lit story teller, a whiz-bang fabulist, but someone who writes consumately planned novels in which the actual story events are brilliantly represented, obscured, and revealed by various structures, symbol sets, and sequencing for the most engaging and transformative reader experience.

While that is what this series as a whole concerns, on this one point and as introduction to the next six I want to emphasize the evident planning that goes into Rowling’s work. Rowling’s syuzhet differs from her fabula because of how carefully she plans her exposition of the basic story; here are three points to make that base-point for establishing her serious artistry indisputable: [Read more…]

The Nobel Prize for Literature has a storied history as the most important recognition an author can receive but it has taken quite a few hits of late with respect to its respectability. First there was the controversy when Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 prize; many felt the vagabond songster, however obscure in his lyrics, was insufficiently literary or serious for this honor. Then the committee that chooses the recipient each year was hit in April 2018 with its own #MeToo moment. There won’t be a 2018 prize, consequently, if the Academy does hope to offer two prizes in 2019 to make up for lost time.

What to do, though, this year? How about offering an alternative Nobel Prize for literature without the progressive agenda and old school tie prejudices of the Academy? That’s the thinking behind the New Academy Prize in Literature, both to fill the breach and to offer an implicit criticism of the elitism of all things Nobel. Though ultimately selected by a panel, the process includes a plebiscite of sorts online – we get a vote! — and the panel would include the relative humble presence of librarians instead of literati.

I bring all this up because J.K. Rowling was nominated for the New Academy Prize along with forty other authors; news coverage of the New Academy Prize inevitably mentioned her first among nominees, perhaps because of how recognizable the name is, perhaps to highlight that the New Academy Prize is not your grandfather’s Nobel in Literature. Which is to say, “J. K. Rowling, super-popular but no serious writer, would never have made the finalists list for the real Nobel Prize in Literature.”

Now, Rowling didn’t make the finalists list for the alternative prize, either (though “genre” fantasy writer Neil Gaiman did). But why the whiff of patronizing dismissal in the fact that she was even nominated?

The simple fact is, though no living author’s work has ever been the subject of as much critical attention as has Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, this tsunami of academic literature has done very little to raise her reputation as a writer. Besides the rush of new work in the field — I think of Shira Wolosky’s Riddles of Harry Potter, Beatrice Groves’ Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, and Patrick McCauley’s Into the Pensieve — little of the quality anthologized essays or book length treatments that take Harry and his creator seriously as literature has penetrated the public or media mind.

The neat solution to the problem of Rowling not being taken seriously as an intentional writer is to take the most rigorous school of literary criticism and apply its tools to a very close reading of Rowling’s work. The school I’m thinking of is usually called ‘Russian Formalism’ and there are at least three reasons for thinking this relatively obscure branch of critical history is apt and important for establishing Rowling’s bona fides as a Nobel worthy author. [Read more…]