Page 36 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 36
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
manesque ‘grievings’. As we will see in the continuation of this article,
Frljić also uses similar procedures, except that it does so within a differ-
ent medium, that of theatre.
In Sebald’s writing, which to its advantage mixes the made up and
documentation, we are (just as in, for example, his novel The Rings of Sat-
urn), witness to the exchanges and transverses between the past and the
present. This creates a heterochronic temporality, which enables the writ-
er to examine and connect two central themes to one another: time and
memory. For him, memory is as personal as historical. We remember only
the introductory chapter of The Rings of Saturn, which in a fundamen-
tal and nearly unnoticeable arc moves from Suffolk in August 1992 to
the hospital in 1993 and to Kafka, the memory of the narrative friends
36 and history of art in the 17th century. Those shifts among others enable
a multimodality of the novel, which alongside its textual material also
also iconographic-documentary material of photography thus inter-
twining the heterogeneous verbal and non-verbal signs in new combina-
tions. Bourriaud interprets that as an altermodernistic “valorising of con-
nections, which establish between the text and images as special paths,
which artists establish in multicultural landscapes, transitions, which
they impose in order to connect the ways of expressing and communica-
tion” (Bourriaud 2009b, 44).2 Thus with his literary and poetological pro-
cedures Sebald generally “shows the memory of past people and events in
our lives as something that makes us afraid, that shapes the space around
us” (129).
The question which arises and which we will examine along the line
of Mark Richard McCulloh’s book Understanding W. G. Sebald is as fol-
lows: can we truly interpret Sebald as “a writer who draws on his knowl-
edge of several literatures and literary periods to create a new kind of doc-
umentary fiction that owes much” to Borges, Kafka, Bernhard, Nabokov
and even Stendhal, as well as, of course, Eco and Calvino, yet he essen-
tially differs from the postmodernist prose in that he isn’t ‘fictionalizing
facts’ but “making facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms
of his narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actu-
al world” (McCulloh 2003, 25)?
2 On the basis of Bourriaud’s theory, Alison Gibbons in the book Routledge Companion
to Experimental Literature dedicates a special chapter to the altermodernistic prose,
which according to her opinion characterises a particular attitude towards form, time
and identity. The subject of its treatment is alongside the authors of the 21st century
(Liam Gillick, Brian Castro, Charles Avery) exactly Sebald’s specific prose.
manesque ‘grievings’. As we will see in the continuation of this article,
Frljić also uses similar procedures, except that it does so within a differ-
ent medium, that of theatre.
In Sebald’s writing, which to its advantage mixes the made up and
documentation, we are (just as in, for example, his novel The Rings of Sat-
urn), witness to the exchanges and transverses between the past and the
present. This creates a heterochronic temporality, which enables the writ-
er to examine and connect two central themes to one another: time and
memory. For him, memory is as personal as historical. We remember only
the introductory chapter of The Rings of Saturn, which in a fundamen-
tal and nearly unnoticeable arc moves from Suffolk in August 1992 to
the hospital in 1993 and to Kafka, the memory of the narrative friends
36 and history of art in the 17th century. Those shifts among others enable
a multimodality of the novel, which alongside its textual material also
also iconographic-documentary material of photography thus inter-
twining the heterogeneous verbal and non-verbal signs in new combina-
tions. Bourriaud interprets that as an altermodernistic “valorising of con-
nections, which establish between the text and images as special paths,
which artists establish in multicultural landscapes, transitions, which
they impose in order to connect the ways of expressing and communica-
tion” (Bourriaud 2009b, 44).2 Thus with his literary and poetological pro-
cedures Sebald generally “shows the memory of past people and events in
our lives as something that makes us afraid, that shapes the space around
us” (129).
The question which arises and which we will examine along the line
of Mark Richard McCulloh’s book Understanding W. G. Sebald is as fol-
lows: can we truly interpret Sebald as “a writer who draws on his knowl-
edge of several literatures and literary periods to create a new kind of doc-
umentary fiction that owes much” to Borges, Kafka, Bernhard, Nabokov
and even Stendhal, as well as, of course, Eco and Calvino, yet he essen-
tially differs from the postmodernist prose in that he isn’t ‘fictionalizing
facts’ but “making facts fictive by binding them so deeply into the forms
of his narratives that these facts seem never to have belonged to the actu-
al world” (McCulloh 2003, 25)?
2 On the basis of Bourriaud’s theory, Alison Gibbons in the book Routledge Companion
to Experimental Literature dedicates a special chapter to the altermodernistic prose,
which according to her opinion characterises a particular attitude towards form, time
and identity. The subject of its treatment is alongside the authors of the 21st century
(Liam Gillick, Brian Castro, Charles Avery) exactly Sebald’s specific prose.
