פרסומים

The paper argues for a post-metaphysical reading of Jorge Luis Borges, a reading that would situate the writer’s work in a dimension of substance, presence and space, instead of understanding it exclusively in terms of discursive, metaphysically-anchored meaning. Borges’s poetry is viewed as anticipating the current turn in the humanities, from hermeneutics to the study and cultivation of a sense of the presence of the world and of art -- visual, verbal, or other.

“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

The celebrated ubiquity of “narrative” in culture is both a fecund premise and the bane of narrative studies today. While not outright against narrative, nor narrative studies, the present paper aims to remain skeptical towards broad, overly enthusiastic uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a narratological conference. What is more, and no less ominously, the paper might just as well be subtitled “A Boring Story” – though this is in fact the title of the Chekhov text (“Skuchnaia istoriia” 1889) using as an illustration.

The articles surveys some exemplars of the broad usage – albeit briefly: this has been done before – with special regard for repercussions on the domain of literary narratology. This is where the skepticism comes in: either (1) the notion of narrative is stretched disproportionately (“it is simply there, like life itself,” Barthes), becoming synonymous, say, with fiction (e.g. Palmer 2004: “in a sense we are all novelists,” an empty phrase); or (2), conversely, the expansion of narratological approaches to domains such as cultural studies or social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or quotidian, linear, causal, realistic type of narrative (a bias discerned by Rimmon-Kenan 2002 in her work on illness narratives).

This may be all right for cultural studies. But for literary narratology the way to go seems to be in the opposite direction. Is not it the role of literary narratives to subvert, transgress, make problematic in a thousand and one ways the generalizations thought up by theorists? Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” an illness narrative in its own right, displaying precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative features that are ignored by more sweeping definitions. Aside from being a poignant tale of a burnt-out professor, Chekhov’s story also emerges as a meditation on narrative and, if you will, narratology itself. Such subversive narrative tactics add up to what has been termed “weak” narrativity (by McHale 2001, 2004, with regard to a very different set of texts), narrativity sous rature. Possibly, this tendency is always already there, underlying not only post-modernist texts, but seemingly realistic, linear fiction.

The philosopher Berel Lang offers powerful arguments for the conclusion that there can be no useful fictional treatment of the Holocaust. However, he notes that three writers (Celan, Appelfeld, and Borowski) escape the force of these arguments. Lang is prepared to grant that, in such cases, “literary and moral genius” may enable a writer to “transcend” the “supposedly intrinsic” limitations suggested by abstract philosophical argument; but leaves open the question what such “genius” consists in. This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to that question for the specific case of Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld’s fictions introduce their readers into the fabric of Jewish life in Central Europe immediately prior to the catastrophe, to the extent of allowing them to feel in propria persona, and thus to attain knowledge-of, rather than merely knowledge-about, the tensions constituting the situational framework within which those lives were lived. Appelfeld’s fictions offer a way of recovering the individuality, as persons rather than numbers, of those whom the Shoah destroyed, because individuality displays itself, inter alia, in the varying of individual response to a common situation. Such recovery is relevant to our moral understanding of the Shoah, it is argued, because what is morally important about the representations of the Shoah is not merely the destruction, but also the nature of what was destroyed. The essay concludes with brief discussions of the relative merits, in this connection, of fiction and memoir, and of the criticisms levelled against Appelfeld’s work by M. A. Bernstein and others.