When I Was Young & In My Prime

by flashmemoria

Posted by Isaac:

Five or six years ago, friend of mine – initially, more mentor than friend – used to have this email domain name that, for the life of me, left me curious as to its origins every time we made an exchange in reconnaissance: from: [name]@Ostranenie. I could have just Googled the damn term, but there was something strangely compelling in it’s unfamiliarity. As I read Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young & In My Prime for class, the term suddenly showed up on page 71, complete with descriptor:

“The Russian formalist literary theorists have this word I love. Ostranenie. It translates more or less as defamiliarization. To tilt things at such an angle that we can see them new, beyond the patina bestowed by habit. Often the goal is to reveal a horror or hypocrisy we’ve become used to. Or to reveal a beauty we take for granted. Sometimes the goal is even more elusive – to steal a glimpse of the essential hard-to-get-at strangeness of being here at all.”

Sure enough, in spite of how the novel announces this process with all the sobering complicity of a categorical definition – an announcement that ought to make me all the more on guard of such a procedural gambit – it continued to humble me from page to page, reminding me of all the horror, hypocrisy, beauty, and strangeness that I think most of us think we’ve discovered and tucked away for the sake of some alien command to perpetually (out)enjoy ourselves. And yet I never felt like I was overly frustrated with Munce’s pacing or form, there wasn’t a disruption on the textual surface, even with the shifts between voice, prose, tense, time, etc. It was almost a kind of unheimlich-ness more sentimental than conceptual, if that makes any sense.

I think there’s a certain arrogance in that “critical distance” Arnold asks of the theorist/academic/philosopher/worker bee. We have all these esoteric, linguistic, conceptual contortions as a means of apprehending the world and how it functions, and we’re constantly qualifying the limitations of our quasi-mystical schemata (phenomenology, empiricism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, dorsality, etc.) as if that might reveal some poetic residue of the [r]eal catastrophe of our cleavage, animus/materia. And, fuck, I’ve been a theory kid for as long as I’ve been (pretending to be) a remotely competent student. But this novel, for all its representationism and pithy parsing, somehow “gets it” so much better than anything I’ve read in a long time.

There’s a point at which Helena articulates (or at least alludes to) that kind of residual Ostranenie:

“Whenever I have to work a shift at the bar after a visit with Grandma, I always feel like a foreigner in my life. Invariably I drift through the whole evening at a slight remove – how odd, these people’s customs — though the distance is never quite as intense as it was the shift I worked after the day we moved her” (169).

When I first stumbled on the passage, I thought it was that italicized part that I identified with. We’ve all had that “don’t think about your own death” auto-pilot interrupted by some tragedy or relative, unfair, material shortcoming or tragedy via a friend, loved one, etc. But the velocity at which we forget those discoveries and those points in space so bodily mediated (you know, aside from La Petite Mort, and all that jazz) for the sake of.. well, because that’s the relief of forgetting.

It was a little frustrating to read the grandfather’s physical degradation receiving more presence in contradistinction to the grandmother, but that’s the bragging rights of a good yarn, it has to leave you frustrated, barred off from everything left out of the frame.