Part of Viktor Shklovskij's brilliance was that he not only described the creeping disjunctive unsettle-and-laugh anti-sublime (not that it lacks qualities of it, but it functions in reverse, the sneaking up behind you dethroning of the understanding) of defamiliarization (
ostranenie). It's also how he can pull it off in his own prose, like a stand-up comedian whose punchline (at least in
A Sentimental Journey, his memoirs from 1917 to 1922) is often the brutality of banal moments in the midst of slaughter.
A favorite from
A Sentimental Journey (although less corpse-oriented than much of this memoir):
My wife asked every day, "Aren't you going to blow yourself up one of these days?"
I was still wearing that green suit made out of somebody's drapes.
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