Page 37 - 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. 37
Negotiating the Discursive Circulation of (Mis)Information in the Face of Global Uncertainties 37
Prose as Inner Theatre
In an interview for Dutch television in 1998, Sebald emphasised his atti-
tude towards the past, the present and the future, which nicely reveals the
ways of his perception and framing the world:
In one sense the future does not interest me or that narrator figure at all
because, knowing what I do, I fear that it can only be blighted and that,
therefore, the past, horrendous though it is, with all its calamitous epi-
sodes, nevertheless seems to be some kind of refuge because at least the
pain that you had there is over. It is no longer acute, it has been subdued
and so the presence of the past has something very ambivalent about it.
On the one hand it is burdensome, heavy, it weighs you down, on the oth-
er hand it is something that liberates you from the present constraints (Se-
bald, 2006, 23–24).
In his works Sebald produces a consciousness which is like “a theater
that blends memory, hallucination, deceptive memory, dreams, soliloquy
and the stream of immediate perceptions” (McCulloh 2003, 25). In the
title of his book Blending Facts, Fiction, Allusion, and Recall McCulloh
produces the metaphor of Sebald’s prose as an inner theatre, whose own-
er “is at once actor, audience, and playwright” (25). This metaphor will
take us to Frljić, to his theatre, which likewise creates connections of fic-
tions and facts. Just like Sebald, Frljić also creates une salle des pas per-
dus, a space of lost steps. In this space resides the author producing signi-
fiers that do not point to an easily found signifieds, along with the reader,
whom the author entices on a journey between the signifiers and signi-
fied. The reader is enticed to a fundamental architecture of Sebald’s prose
(and Frljić’s theatre), in which he will meet with the narrator (or narra-
tors-actors), but the latter will not enable him either an unambiguous
identification or a clear distance. Nevertheless, the meetings in the text
and in the theatre are no less intense.
Sebald addresses readers who know how to read. Frljić also creates his
productions for such spectators. Both of them play with the readers or
the spectators, they play hide-and-seek with contemporary civilisation,
which recalls the themes of history in order to speak about the present
and (dependent upon the desires and projections of the reader/spectator)
perhaps also of the future. Both use the principle of repetition, which just
as with Italo Calvino, produces the reader’s or spectator’s co-responsibili-
ty for a creative reading of the text and the performance. Both destroy the
Prose as Inner Theatre
In an interview for Dutch television in 1998, Sebald emphasised his atti-
tude towards the past, the present and the future, which nicely reveals the
ways of his perception and framing the world:
In one sense the future does not interest me or that narrator figure at all
because, knowing what I do, I fear that it can only be blighted and that,
therefore, the past, horrendous though it is, with all its calamitous epi-
sodes, nevertheless seems to be some kind of refuge because at least the
pain that you had there is over. It is no longer acute, it has been subdued
and so the presence of the past has something very ambivalent about it.
On the one hand it is burdensome, heavy, it weighs you down, on the oth-
er hand it is something that liberates you from the present constraints (Se-
bald, 2006, 23–24).
In his works Sebald produces a consciousness which is like “a theater
that blends memory, hallucination, deceptive memory, dreams, soliloquy
and the stream of immediate perceptions” (McCulloh 2003, 25). In the
title of his book Blending Facts, Fiction, Allusion, and Recall McCulloh
produces the metaphor of Sebald’s prose as an inner theatre, whose own-
er “is at once actor, audience, and playwright” (25). This metaphor will
take us to Frljić, to his theatre, which likewise creates connections of fic-
tions and facts. Just like Sebald, Frljić also creates une salle des pas per-
dus, a space of lost steps. In this space resides the author producing signi-
fiers that do not point to an easily found signifieds, along with the reader,
whom the author entices on a journey between the signifiers and signi-
fied. The reader is enticed to a fundamental architecture of Sebald’s prose
(and Frljić’s theatre), in which he will meet with the narrator (or narra-
tors-actors), but the latter will not enable him either an unambiguous
identification or a clear distance. Nevertheless, the meetings in the text
and in the theatre are no less intense.
Sebald addresses readers who know how to read. Frljić also creates his
productions for such spectators. Both of them play with the readers or
the spectators, they play hide-and-seek with contemporary civilisation,
which recalls the themes of history in order to speak about the present
and (dependent upon the desires and projections of the reader/spectator)
perhaps also of the future. Both use the principle of repetition, which just
as with Italo Calvino, produces the reader’s or spectator’s co-responsibili-
ty for a creative reading of the text and the performance. Both destroy the
