Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett

TL;DR: In the work on narrative difficulty over the last hundred years, much of the en ergy has gone into two contrasting conditions of reader resistance, the defamiliarized and the veiled.

Abstract: In the work on narrative difficulty over the last hundred years, much of the en ergy has gone into two contrasting conditions of reader resistance, the defamiliarized and the veiled. The first is most famously associated with Viktor Shklovsky, who gave us the ur-concept of plot (syuzhet) as the means by which the telling can be used to defamiliarize the story (fabula). In this kind of reader resistance the focus is on the conscious management of narrative as a craft, not as an end in itself but as an instrument with insightful rewards for the hard-working reader. Thus, Shklovsky's coinage, "ostranyenie" (pcTpaneHue), often translated as "making strange," is also "showing the strangeness of,"1 and in this regard keyed to the larger purpose of breaking habitual templates and seeing with fresh eyes. This general idea of yielding insight by resisting the easy transport of conventional texts, of slowing the reader down and increasing reflexive awareness, can be found in a broad range of diverse assessments of reader/viewer resistance from Brecht's Verfremdung to Michael M. Boardman's "urgent innovation" to Vicki Mahaffey's "challenging fictions" to James Phelan's concept of "the difficult." In the same spirit, modernist texts imported the more demanding and textually self-conscious modes of poetry (Lodge), even as T. S. Eliot argued that poetry itself must be difficult to be successful. More broadly still, these modernists were simply elaborating what Coleridge contended when he wrote that "Genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty" in rescuing truths that "lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul" (60).