Page 35 - 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. 35
Negotiating the Discursive Circulation of (Mis)Information in the Face of Global Uncertainties 35
translated onto the field of contemporary performance practices and the
‘performing arts system’.
But, first let us link it to the fictional system of W. G. Sebald. Se-
bald characteristically shapes the genre of his writing using a synthesis of
a breed of minor genres: biography, autobiography, memoir, travelogue.
To these minor literary genres he also adds non-literary forms: the note-
book or family album, which he connects, in order to interrupt the au-
tomatic reception in the reader. At the same time, with a special form of
travelling, which is bound to the combination of genres and their literary
and non-literary tactics, his literature with the help of recollections of ‘ar-
chetypical’ traumatic images of the First and Second World Wars, he in-
cludes the flow of significations and representations which builds social
reality.
In this way, he creates a singular synchronous genre, in which he is
able to dialogically join to the novel—as the modernist genre par excel-
lence—other genres and create an intertextual, intergenre and even inter-
media cohesive structure. Characteristic of that structure is the dynam-
ic of uptake and mutual pollination of genres on the level of the fabula as
well as the syuzhet. In doing so, Sebald creates a type of new, often me-
ta-genre, which breaks through the borders of the already known, as if he
were to construct a larger unfinished, perhaps even impossible to finish,
genre hybrid, yet in its base still always primarily narrative-fiction work,
with some kind of melancholy-infused process of Balzac’s contemporary
epic structure, La Comédie humaine, which appears as a quotational fibre
in the last part of Sebald’s ‘novel’ Austerlitz.
The Effect of Reality and Senseless Cruelty
It seems that Sebald’s procedure, which throughout is carefully plotted
and structured, is one of the possible answers to the status of contempo-
rary prose, which in her essay The Grieving of the Soul, dedicated to the
author’s prose, Susan Sontag detects as “an unproductive inadvertence of
literary ambitions and simultaneously the ascendancy of the tepid, the
glib and the senselessly cruel as creative fictional subjects” (Sontag 2001,
239). At this he succeeds in his ‘fictions’—and their accompanying visual
depiction—in driving the effect of reality and the harrowing extremity
(241). Precisely that violent effect of reality is the point in Sebald’s liter-
ary procedure that interests us. It’s a special procedure, with the help of
which achieves that fiction and ‘faction’ are not in opposition, but that
with the help of the dialogical relationship, which is stressed among sev-
eral different literary, textual and visual procedures, structures his ro-
translated onto the field of contemporary performance practices and the
‘performing arts system’.
But, first let us link it to the fictional system of W. G. Sebald. Se-
bald characteristically shapes the genre of his writing using a synthesis of
a breed of minor genres: biography, autobiography, memoir, travelogue.
To these minor literary genres he also adds non-literary forms: the note-
book or family album, which he connects, in order to interrupt the au-
tomatic reception in the reader. At the same time, with a special form of
travelling, which is bound to the combination of genres and their literary
and non-literary tactics, his literature with the help of recollections of ‘ar-
chetypical’ traumatic images of the First and Second World Wars, he in-
cludes the flow of significations and representations which builds social
reality.
In this way, he creates a singular synchronous genre, in which he is
able to dialogically join to the novel—as the modernist genre par excel-
lence—other genres and create an intertextual, intergenre and even inter-
media cohesive structure. Characteristic of that structure is the dynam-
ic of uptake and mutual pollination of genres on the level of the fabula as
well as the syuzhet. In doing so, Sebald creates a type of new, often me-
ta-genre, which breaks through the borders of the already known, as if he
were to construct a larger unfinished, perhaps even impossible to finish,
genre hybrid, yet in its base still always primarily narrative-fiction work,
with some kind of melancholy-infused process of Balzac’s contemporary
epic structure, La Comédie humaine, which appears as a quotational fibre
in the last part of Sebald’s ‘novel’ Austerlitz.
The Effect of Reality and Senseless Cruelty
It seems that Sebald’s procedure, which throughout is carefully plotted
and structured, is one of the possible answers to the status of contempo-
rary prose, which in her essay The Grieving of the Soul, dedicated to the
author’s prose, Susan Sontag detects as “an unproductive inadvertence of
literary ambitions and simultaneously the ascendancy of the tepid, the
glib and the senselessly cruel as creative fictional subjects” (Sontag 2001,
239). At this he succeeds in his ‘fictions’—and their accompanying visual
depiction—in driving the effect of reality and the harrowing extremity
(241). Precisely that violent effect of reality is the point in Sebald’s liter-
ary procedure that interests us. It’s a special procedure, with the help of
which achieves that fiction and ‘faction’ are not in opposition, but that
with the help of the dialogical relationship, which is stressed among sev-
eral different literary, textual and visual procedures, structures his ro-
