Magical Realism Tactics
Defamiliarization Writing Techniques Applied
Poetic technique shocks readers into awareness of Other realities. Several literary tactics explored in this article.
Poets are charged with a duty to disrupt habits, overcome barriers of cultural perceptions and see the world fresh or new. The poet’s task doesn’t stray far from defamiliarization’s charge to make the familiar strange. And when a poet accepts this task, powerful communications result- witness Pan's Labyrinth, written and directed by Del Toro, a film in teh magic realism genre.
The term “defamiliarization” was first used by Russian Formalists following the Tolstoy and Doestoevsky period. Writers at that time were expected to be political figures and philosophers as well as craftsmen. It was taboo to write for aesthetic or illogical effect.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1905, writers like Victor Shklovsky searched for a way to “Recover the sensation of life: to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” He believed the purpose of art was to impart the sensation of things as they were perceived and not as they were known. He and others created the Formalist movement to “make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, and to increase the difficulty and length of perception.
Writers accomplish this through novel linguistic features in a story or poem that strike a reader as interesting. Features that are playful and slow the story, allowing emotions released by these devices to emerge; devices like alliteration, inversion, metaphor, and the unfamiliar agglutination.
Agglutination is a process of forming new words by combining other words or word elements like splitting the word “defamiliarization” with playful precision:
De bunking the Familiar I Zensation
Forces me to STOP.
To absorb a tree in its forestflesh.
A tree NOTME.
In making the common uncommon, defamiliarization techniques pull the reader into a reading experience. Barbara Harrison, founding Director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College says, “Experience has the capacity to diminish, but it also has the capacity to ennoble. It can be disillusioning and even tragic, but not necessarily either one—although because of it we are not the same person we were a moment before. Something has happened—a change, an awakening, an understanding.”
Defamiliarization techniques turn readers upside down, which is exactly what Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina intended. He created “magico-mythical worlds in which everything was related.” Borges had what Coleridge would call Poetic Imagination; “the ability to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar.”
This poetic imagination has an additional task- to take readers beyond their own experience towards understanding and empathy with The Other.
