Defamiliarisation, invisible characters, and laboured connections

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that the post-war experimental British novel helps theorise a response towards the aesthetics of representation and ethics of connection with ‘invisible,' migrant characters through the aesthetic of defamiliarisation. Turning to Christine Brooke-Rose's 1964 avant-garde novel Out, I contend that the novel provides a defamiliarising, non-sentimental response to what Lyndsey Stonebridge calls the ‘placeless condition' of the mid-twentieth century. Through a close reading of Out's estranging practices, I demonstrate that the novel's narrative choices become both a modality of non-sympathetic representation and a politically potent critique of the placeless condition through the narratological foregrounding of typically unnoticeable non-human entities. That these narrative choices, in fact, enable an engagement with the character's perspective, suggests that the process of ‘staying with the estranging' also constitutes an ethical practice of acknowledgement and connection with an ‘invisible' character, away from emotional identification. By centring my analysis on defamiliarisation, I also trace a trajectory between Viktor Shklovsky's Formalist thinking and Brooke-Rose’s literary work, investigating more specifically the heretofore unexamined, yet crucial, imbrication of labour and affective estrangement as readerly practices that defamiliarisation encourages.