Brave New Words: Statement of Faith and Learning
Chad Engbers, Professor of English
Minds in the Making

This paper was submitted for the author's reappointment to the Calvin College English department in the fall of 2005.

I have been asked to describe the integration of faith and learning in my work, and I find the topic breathtakingly broad. It is simply not the case that faith and learning are separate territories, sharing fertile patches of common ground in a few places where their boundaries overlap. They are for me one realm, a single kingdom, with God as its sovereign. It is not as if I can disengage my religious commitments when going about my professional tasks. How can I think except as a person of faith? For that matter, how can I read the Bible without—at some level—studying its language? They are one realm. For this reason, I am mildly uncomfortable with the phrase “integration of faith and learning.” To my mind, the expression implies that faith and learning are distinct entities. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “integrate” means “to put or bring together (parts or elements) so as to form one whole.” In my work, faith and learning are not two things I put together. They simply are together, already whole; I have little or nothing to do with it. A complete statement of my integration of faith and learning would thus need to cover all of my faith or all of my learning, or both.

Rather than survey the entire kingdom, therefore, I have chosen to offer a guided tour of two topoi within it. The first is Viktor Shklovsky's notion of “defamiliarization,” which I researched in preparation for my Russian Literature course. The second is J.R.R. Tolkien's notion of “recovery,” which I studied both for an Interim course and for a book review that I wrote earlier this year. The two ideas have stirred my thinking for the past year, and I have seized the present opportunity to explore them in writing. Taken together, defamiliarization and recovery will thus serve as a two-lane entry into my thinking as a Christian scholar. These ideas will not, of course, provide an exhaustive view of my faith and learning. They should, however, allow me to discuss my work in a manner that is both academic and Reformed, thereby illustrating how I tend to move about within the Single Kingdom.

For Viktor Shklovsky, art is valuable because it defamiliarizes its subject matter, forcing readers to see old things as if they were new. In “Art as Technique” (1917), Shklovsky points to several highly descriptive passages in Tolstoy as examples of defamiliarization. Tolstoy, for instance, does not merely say that a battle occurred. He offers highly precise descriptions of the uniforms, the cannons, the horses. The battles described in War and Peace would have been intimately familiar to all Russian readers through countless written and oral reconstructions, so Tolstoy had no real need to provide such extended descriptions. Shklovsky's claim, however, is that familiarity breeds ignorance. When we have heard the Battle of 1812 retold a thousand times, the stories become dry historical facts rather than wrenching human triumphs and tragedies. When we know (or think we know) something well, we tend not to pay attention to it. We tend to forget the little details of things, places, and people that we encounter every day. We turn left off Burton Street without really reading the sign that says “ Calvin College.” Those things that are habitual for us slowly disappear from our perception:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.'¹ And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Shklovsky 12)

It is the task of art to slow us down, to wake us up, to make us look again at the signs past which we speed. A similar note is struck by J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1939). Tolkien is describing several functions of fantasy literature, one of which he calls “Recovery”:

Recovery (which includes return and a renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are' and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness…. [T]he things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them. (146)

Fairy-stories are not merely escapist alternatives to the real world; they help us to perceive the real world around us as sharply as we saw it when it seemed new and strange. We meet Pegasus (to take one of Tolkien's own examples) and not only marvel at his wings but more fully grasp the graceful power of ordinary horses. We meet an Ent in The Lord of the Rings and perhaps notice once again the earthy solemnity of the trees in our own back yards.

The similarities between “defamiliarization” and “recovery” are immediately apparent—the two writers even tend to use one another's language. Shklovsky says that art helps us to “recover the sensation of life”; Tolkien says that art can help to free us from the “drab blur of… familiarity.”² In short, both writers tend to treat literature as a way of viewing the world in a fresh way. Before considering how this idea might be useful to a Reformed literature professor, however, it is important to observe the major differences between the two notions. Defamiliarization is, after all, a form of estrangement, while recovery is ultimately a form of reunion.³

Despite his heroic language of art rescuing one's works, furniture, and wife from the devouring jaws of habitualization, Shklovsky ultimately cares very little for how literature might help a reader in the real world. Along with his fellow Russian Formalists, Shklovsky was more concerned with defining the “literariness” of a poem than in exploring its connections to life. (This attitude made the Formalists profoundly unpopular with the fledgling Soviet state, which would soon redefine “literature” to mean little more than “propaganda.”)

One key aspect of literariness, according to the Russian Formalists, is opacity. Literary texts are opaque because they force a reader to pay attention to their actual language and structure. In a non-literary text—say, an office memo—content is more important than form. The purpose of such a text is to clarify some idea or situation in the real world. The text succeeds if it is transparent—if its reader can pass through it quickly, arriving at its meaning without being distracted by curious diction or syntax. Literary writing, on the other hand, tends to emphasize its own form. It is not what is said that is important, but how it is said. A literary text is meant to be looked at, not through. In fact, Shklovsky—who is sometimes prone to overstatement—goes so far as to say that the actual content of a poem is irrelevant, as long as the form of the poem demands prolonged contemplation. He concludes the passage quoted above with this statement (which he, too, italicizes): “ Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” For Shklovsky, in other words, art separates a reader from reality. The work of art stands like a wall in the reader's path: immoveable, impassable, opaque.

For Tolkien, on the other hand, literature can function as a window. It is not opaque but transparent. However long we spend marveling at the work itself, one powerful benefit of art is that it points us back to our own experience. Middle-earth, Narnia, Earthsea—these fictional places are intriguing in their own right, but they eventually become lenses through which we see our own world. (It might be argued that this sort of awareness does not always happen when we read, but the important thing is that it can happen and frequently does.) Tolkien's point is not, however, that fantasy literature gives us perceptions that are new, but rather that this literature revives our old perceptions of our world. Those old perceptions might at first seem new to us, because since we initially experienced them our windows on the world have become smudged with “the drab blur of triteness and familiarity.” Literature wipes our windows clean and reminds us of perspectives we have forgotten. It is not just that literature shows us the world; it shows us the world through our former windows, our former eyes. When we read Tolstoy's account of an old war, we should relive some of the thrill we felt the first time we ever heard the story.

A Shklovskian reader should feel slightly disoriented, as if someone has rearranged the living room furniture; a Tolkienian reader feels a tantalizing tinge of déjà vu. To summarize the basic difference between Shklovsky and Tolkien, imagine the two of them, each alone in his own study, reading the same battle sequence in War and Peace. Having finished the paragraph, each man responds in his own way. Tolkien pauses, putting his finger in the page, gazing out the window and thinking about the horror and beauty of war. He recalls his own experiences on the Somme ; he thinks of his son Christopher, off fighting in the Second World War. Shklovsky, meanwhile, still has his nose in the book. He is busy rereading the paragraph because he wants to experience the vividness of the scene all over again, and because he also wants to answer the nagging question: “How did Tolstoy do that?”

Upon closer examination, however, defamiliarization and recovery share one basic effect: they separate the text from the reader. An opaque text forces us to respect something that is unfamiliar—the text itself—on its own terms. It aggressively distinguishes itself from its reader. (No one reads Ezra Pound's Cantos and says, “Yes, that's just what I was thinking.”) An opaque text thwarts our attempts to impose our own assumptions on it. Perhaps we have come to assume that Napoleon's invasion of Moscow was a clever victory for the Russians (who simply evacuated the city beforehand and let the French march right in to take it). Tolstoy's description of that event complicates our assumption by confronting us with tragic details. Our assumption is shaken, or at least shown to be incomplete. For a reader to be completely free from all assumptions, of course, would be neither possible nor terribly desirable, and a reader will always approach a given text from a unique point of view. An opaque text does not obliterate its reader's identity, and it cannot prevent the reader from subjecting it to certain assumptions. It does resist such subjection, however, and that resistance is generally enough to humble a reader.

Surprisingly, this humility is also key to recovery. “Fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery,” Tolkien writes. “Humility is enough” (146). It would initially seem that recovery involves a sort of recapturing and re-embracing, but on the contrary, Tolkien formulates recovery as a release. It is an act not of gathering in but of letting go. We misperceive things when we force our own assumptions and habits upon them. Recovery involves humbly seeing these things independently of our constricting assumptions and habits, perceiving them as “things apart from ourselves.” The trees in our back yards are assumed to be our trees until we meet an Ent. Then we are not so sure.

True recovery, in other words, depends on initial moment of estrangement. Before we can regain a clear view of things, we must first set those things free from the ways we have always seen them. We must defamiliarize them. Readers who attempt to pass over the defamiliarization and proceed directly to recovery generally misread a text, because what they are really reading is not the text at all but themselves. In The Gospel According to Tolkien, a book which I reviewed for Calvin Theological Journal, Ralph Wood attempts to prove that The Lord of the Rings is a distinctly Christian book. This is an ambitious claim, given Tolkien's deliberate efforts to exclude all references to religion of any kind from the novel. Wood's volume is essentially an exposition of Augustinian Christianity, with incidental—and often strained—illustrations lifted from Tolkien's writings. Wood is so eager to recover his own worldview in The Lord of the Rings that he does not see the text as a thing apart from himself. The book merely confirms his own views. Had he humbly accepted Middle-earth for the strange and unfamiliar place that it is, Wood might have found more refreshing ideas about friendship, service, sacrifice, and so forth.

We might summarize the relationship between defamiliarization and recovery by saying that defamiliarization is the necessary first step to a full recovery. Or, to put it another way, recovery provides a larger context and purpose for defamiliarization. A work of art stops us in our tracks and compels us to marvel at its craftsmanship. So what? So, Tolkien might say, once we are finished marveling, we might catch a flash of déjà vu. We might end up looking not at the art, but at the world—and looking at it with just a touch of childlike wonder. We know that the tree in our back yard is not watching us, but perhaps we glance at it for one suspicious second, just to check.

These two ideas have informed my teaching of both literature and composition. In the Bhagavad-Gita the Hindu god Vishnu offers some rather pointed advice about duty to an unwilling warrior named Arjuna. I have found this passage highly effective in defamiliarizing issues of vocation. Through lectures and online notes, I help students to explore what are to them the strange, unfamiliar aspects of the text: the Hindu concept of dharma, the larger dialogue between Buddhism and Hinduism in which this text is one utterance, and so forth. Then, however, I ask them to consider their own views of vocation from a Hindu point of view. Arjuna is told by a god that he must fight because it is his duty, or dharma, as a member of the warrior caste. To what extent, I ask, would that sense of duty apply to Christians who were attempting to act in accordance with the will of God? How well does the term dharma reflect the concept of vocation? This line of inquiry is uncomfortable for some students, but not as uncomfortable as most students imagine. In fact, many find it refreshing. By the time they are sophomores at Calvin College, students have been so heavily bombarded with the terms “calling” and “vocation” that they are tired of hearing them. Habitual repetition of the same words has dulled their perception of the issues, or at least their will to consider the issues. My hope is that, by defamiliarizing for students the idea of vocation, I might help them to recover some of the excitement and challenge involved with Christian responsibility—or at the very least give them a fresh vocabulary with which to formulate those concerns.

Recovery, however, is neither my first nor my most important goal in the classroom. Experience has taught me that defamiliarization is the greater need among Calvin College students. Calvin students are actually quite good at looking through literature—at least on a basic level. Once prompted, most of them have no trouble applying a text to their own lives, perhaps because they have done so with scriptural texts since they were children. They know how to find something familiar in a poem or story. Most of them have never been Hindu warriors, but they can relate to Arjuna. They are less comfortable, however, in the state of defamiliarization. They tend to be unpracticed in the arts of looking at a text. At least initially, they are sometimes so anxious to find out what the text means that they do not fully consider how it means. In their zeal for denotation, they overlook connotation. And when a poem baffles them, many students tend to assume that it is because of some shortcoming in themselves, rather than a normal part of the poetic experience. (I suspect that this is especially difficult for English majors, who feel that they really should be “good at poetry.”) It is not that students are lazy or hasty or incapable. On the contrary, the average Calvin College student is hard-working, patient, and very able. Most of them have simply never been trained to ask the kinds of questions demanded by opaque texts. Especially in a core literature class, which might well be a student's only opportunity for that type of training, I teach my students to look at texts before they look through them.

It is not merely a matter of developing skills for textual analysis, however. I believe that the experience of defamiliarization can help all readers to prepare for other times in life when we are confronted with the unfamiliar: a neighbor who is a Muslim, a service project in the Third World, a new family-in-law with its own strange traditions and manners. How can defamiliarization prepare us for such situations? It helps to keep us humble. As described above, defamiliarization forces us to respect, on its own terms, that which differs from us. It teaches us to study what we do not know without becoming possessive of it. It forces us to acknowledge strange things and ideas as things apart from ourselves, things that are not our own. This should be easy work for people whose only comfort in life and in death is that they themselves are not their own. The truth, however, is that we need constant practice to sustain such humble mental postures, and opaque texts are one solid form of practice.

I especially try to build such practice into my composition courses. The final paper of my English 101 course is always an intensely researched persuasive essay, and I assign several smaller papers that eventually become components of the final masterpiece. Students write a simple Position Paper, for instance, using some basic argumentative strategies. After they have written the Position Paper, I assign what I call the Antidraft. The Antidraft is simply another position paper, but written from an opponent's point of view. The stated purpose of the paper is to construct the best possible argument against the author's original position. On the day when I assign this paper, we cover the “straw man” fallacy, and I tell students that unconvincing Antidrafts will receive no credit. The unstated purpose of the paper is, of course, to test the students' commitments to their original agendas. This is best accomplished by defamiliarizing those agendas, by forcing students to view them from other windows—and not just to view another set of opinions, but to actually articulate those opinions. They put their own theses on hold and momentarily view their issues as things apart from themselves. They may not ultimately agree with the opposing positions, but in the process of writing Antidrafts, most students at least learn to respect them. In the week after Antidrafts are due, I typically receive visits from three or four students who enter my office, shamefaced, and confess that they no longer believe their theses—at least not as strongly as they once did. I congratulate each one on being a fair and circumspect writer, and I help each one to craft a more moderate and nuanced agenda for the final paper.

In short, I emphasize defamiliarization not only because close reading is a useful academic skill, but because defamiliarization trains students to encounter unfamiliar ideas and situations with humility and respect. And those students who become comfortable with defamiliarization are ultimately much better at recovery. It is best to approach Arjuna and Vishnu not as distorted allegories for us and God, but as beings apart from us. It is best to respect our differences from them, to look at Hinduism for its own sake and not bother much about comparisons to Christianity. The better we are able to do that, the better the Bhagavad-Gita will raise aspects of vocation that we might not have considered on our own. We will also be in a better position to understand the deep differences between Hindu and Christian notions of responsibility. The word dharma (literally, “that which holds”) implies an objective, impersonal ordering of society. It is simply the way things are. In contrast to it, the terms “vocation” and “calling” are warmer insofar as they imply a personal voice.

If I teach recovery at all, it usually occupies only a small fraction of class time. On the day I teach the Bhagavad-Gita , for instance, I plan to lecture for ten minutes or so on historical and religious contexts (usually summarizing information I gave students before they were assigned to read the text). We then spend thirty minutes reading through the text and discussing specific passages. Only in the last ten minutes or so will I attempt to recover the idea of vocation. That is not enough time to discuss the issue thoroughly, but that is why I assign a short paper on the topic. A strong dose of defamiliarization, an occasional dash of recovery—that is my usual recipe.

Aside from being useful methods in my teaching, defamiliarization and recovery are useful concepts in and of themselves because they offer new ways to talk about an old concern at Calvin College : renewal. I have avoided that particular word throughout this essay: it appears only once before this paragraph, and then it was Tolkien's word, not mine. I have, in effect, been attempting to defamiliarize the notion of renewal. I am not claiming, of course, that Shklovsky and Tolkien's ideas are equivalent to the Reformed idea of renewal. Defamiliarization and recovery are, after all, contemplative processes whereas renewal is—or should be—active. But the three concepts are certainly related: just as defamiliarization finds a larger context and purpose in recovery, so recovery finds a larger context and purpose in renewal. Renewal extends contemplative recovery into caring action.

Every semester, for example, I am surprised by a student in a conference. The student is one of the quiet ones, probably a clean cut, athletic male with blond hair and a last name that begins with a “V.” When I memorized names at the beginning of the semester, I struggled to distinguish him from two other students fitting the exact same description. He has said nothing in class for five weeks, preferring instead to look at me or the board with a somewhat vacant stare. A clean piece of notebook paper usually sits next to his open but unmarked textbook. This student shocks me in a conference by revealing to me that he is, in fact, a human being. He has liked some of what we've read, but not all of it. He's worried about his grade because he's here on scholarship, and English has never been a strong subject for him. He hopes to be a dentist.

For the past five weeks, this young man has been unknowingly locked in my habitual perception of him. He has been the blond blank in the last row, and little more. As he talks to me in my office, however, he estranges himself from my habitual perception of him. It turns out that I did not see right through him: he has his own needs, wants, and likes. He is—in the best sense of the word—opaque. Humbled, I am forced to look at him rather than through him, to see what makes him unique. He suddenly appears before me almost as a stranger. I recover my sense of him as a living, breathing, teachable person, and then I am much better qualified to help him with his latest paper or figure out a better way to study for the next test. My perception of this student has been defamiliarized and recovered, and that has helped both of us to renew our respective efforts in his education. Without defamiliarization and recovery, it is unlikely that this renewal would have happened.

When Reformed people use the term “renewal,” of course, they mean very particular things, and defamiliarization and recovery can help us to distinguish this highly specific sense of renewal from other forms of renovation. Reformed people are obviously not the only people who are driven to make all things new: shopping malls and subdivisions continually creep outward from any living city. Those new environments, however, usually express some form of possessiveness or ownership. Malls help us to conveniently acquire more goods, and they also attempt to make the shopping process itself glamorous and exciting. A new home, similarly, is both an acquired good and a pleasing experience. It serves both as a financial investment and as a style of living. Such enterprises, although they undoubtedly put old land to new uses, are at odds with a Reformed idea of renewal insofar as they subordinate a piece of the world to our own desires. They do not help us to see a piece of wilderness as a thing apart from ourselves; they encourage us to buy it, zone it, plow it under, pave it over.

Renewal, on the other hand, asks to defamiliarize the land, to see it as something apart from ourselves and to find fresh, creative uses for it that foster shalom. Perhaps, ultimately, that might even mean building another shopping mall—but if so, the guiding motivation for the mall would differ sharply from the hungry impulses of consumerism. And when the motivation is different, the results will likely differ, too. Even new malls tend to house the same old stores: Gap, Old Navy, Barnes & Noble, Starbucks. Even our new developments are clenched tightly in the teeth of habitualization, sullied by “the drab blur of triteness and familiarity.” What might a truly renewed shopping mall look like? It is a good question to ask students, and one that I have asked them in my D.C.M. course.

Defamiliarization and recovery do not radically change the way in which we think about renewal. We can seldom expect such grand results from our daily work. They can, however, help us to deepen our traditional understanding of that cultural mandate. We use the word “renewal” habitually at Calvin College, and the ideas of defamiliarization and recovery can help us to rethink what we might mean by it.

I should emphasize that I do not conduct research primarily to find new expressions of Reformed thought. I study defamiliarization to better understand Russian Formalism; I study recovery to better understand Tolkien's own theoretical sense of fantasy literature. Many of the things I study have no direct relevance to Reformed thinking. Socialist Realism, for instance—the Soviet aesthetic doctrine which soon overran Shklovskian formalism—might very well have distinctly Reformed applications, but I have not yet discovered them. Nor have I worked terribly hard to bend Socialist Realism to my purposes. I have tried to respect it as something apart—utterly apart—from myself. I do not set out hunting for intellectual game that will feed my Reformed appetite. I simply try to stay aware of the real questions that I am asking about the world, about God, and about myself: How can we recognize the image of God in the things and people he has made? What can literary creation tell us about our creator and his creatures? What is my own small place in God's slowly unfolding plan for this earth? When I find that my research material is in some way asking similar questions—or even, in rare cases, answering some of them—my eyes and ears perk up.

Defamiliarization and recovery caught my mind's eye because they help me to articulate one of my basic responsibilities as a professor at Calvin College: making old ideas new for students. I have no choice but to ask Reformed questions of the texts I teach; that is simply who I am. I do, however, choose the words with which I ask those questions, and I try to avoid those that have become cliché. Students frequently complain about the habitual use of the words “renewal,” “discernment,” and (especially) “creation-fall-redemption.” They learn these words early in their careers at Calvin College, and many of them feel that they have mastered the concepts already in their freshman year. I am afraid that administrators and professors sometimes feed this feeling. By attaching comfortable handles to Reformed doctrine, we make it much easier for students to set Reformed doctrine aside.

Shklovsky's observation that habitualization devours all that is dear ought to be a grim word of caution to those who administer Prelude and DCM to our freshmen. It should also light a fire beneath professors who, in the context of their courses, can present Reformed ideas to students in unfamiliar ways. I attempt to do for my students what I am also constantly trying to do for myself: to admit that the mighty truths of creation, fall, redemption, and renewal can never be fully mastered, and to gently release those concepts from the habitual language we have affixed to them. Only then can we recover the wonder with which we were meant to receive these ideas in the first place.

Surely one of our tasks as agents of renewal should be to find fresh alternatives to the term “agents of renewal.” When our language of rejuvenation and change grows old and familiar, our salt has lost its savor. We are in constant need of new ways to understand our responsibility to renovate God's world. We must always seek brave new words with which to express our charges as his servants. He who rules the Single Kingdom deserves no less.

References

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln : U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-57.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Christopher Tolkien, ed. The Monsters and The Critics and Other Essays. London : HaperCollins, 1997. 108-161.

Wood, Ralph C. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville : Westminster John Knox P, 2003.

Footnotes

1 Shklovsky quotes from Tolstoy's diary.

2 It is extremely doubtful that either author actually read the other. At the time Tolkien wrote “On Fairy-Stories,” Shklovsky's essay had not yet been translated into English, and Russian was one of the few European languages with which Tolkien had no success.

3 “Estrangement” is actually a more literal translation of Shklovsky's own term for defamiliarization (ostranenie).

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