POETICS AND POETOLOGY: ‘THOMAS BERNHARD AND THE MODERNIST METANOVEL’

Abstract

The review of the monograph by V. V. Kotelevskaya Thomas Bernhard and the Modernist Metanovel (2018) raises theoretical problems of the relationship between poetics and poetology, metaization and metanovel, the discrepancy between genre terminology used by writers and that generally accepted in literary studies. The book by Kotelevskaya fits into the context of the Russian studies of metafiction (O. S. Miroshnichenko), metanovel (V. B. Zusev-Ozkan), and novel about a novel (I. Suslov), as well as T. Bernhard’s prose studies by Russian Germanists (D. V. Zatonsky, N. S. Pavlova, A. V. Belobratov, S. P. Tashkenov, S. Yu. Novikova). The experimental structure of the scientific (poetological) treatise is compared with the experimental character of the object under study, i. e. Bernhard’s metanovels, in which poetics is “replaced” by poetology. In particular, it is noted that the Kotelevskaya’s monograph has also undergone “metaization”, which in Bernhard’s works is expressed in the reduction of mimesis in favor of creative self-reflection, and in the book by Kotelevskaya – in reduction of descriptive poetics in favor of theoretical reasoning and generalizations, literary-philosophical context, and intertext. The generalizing and particularizing parts of the work are interchanged, the boundaries between them are problematized. The logic of the object (Bernhard’s work) description is externally broken, but in the internal logic of the monograph one can feel the movement from music (Beton, 1982) to architecture (Correction, 1975), from the content to the form, from the ‘thought-theme’ to its expression and back again. The focus of the researcher is on the early work Amras (1964), to which the author himself attached particular importance. In the monograph, analysis of this work takes up to fifty pages and connects the novel Frost (1963) with the last work Extinction (1986). The emphasis on the romantic tradition justifies the genre specificity of the ‘novel’ and ‘fragment’, as well as the use of the term ‘novel’ as applied to most works, although neither Bernhard himself nor his characters call their works this way.