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Karl Horsky
Fiction as Apophantic Structure of Poetry over the Root in the Real World
Looking for Truth behind the poetic Veil of Fascination
- "The apophantic structure of fiction, so much of theory, is it usefull for anything? Serve for literary education at schools, in introduction to theory of literature at university? " -
- " Below a page from the new book version in English as demonstration. " -
The term "alienation" (остранение) was coined by the Russian Formalists. Viktor SHKLOVSKI (Шкловский) explains it in his essay "Искуство как прием". He posits, that we tend towards an economization of perception and therefore do not truly look at the things, we encounter, but only grasp a superficial characteristic and perform formulaic actions with them, without the thing or the action having entered in our consciousness:
" Thus, life is lost and transformed into nothing. Automation devours things, clothes, furniture, women, and the horrors of war."
[So kommt das Leben abhanden und verwandelt sich in nichts. Die Automatisierung vertilgt die Dinge, die Kleidung, die Möbel, die Frau und den Schrecken des Krieges.]
And he quotes from Tolstoy's diary [Дневник Толстого]:
"If the whole complicated life of many unfolds unconsciously, then were this life, as if it had never existed."
["Wenn das ganze komplizierte Leben bei vielen unbewusst verläuft, dann hat es dieses Leben gleichsam nicht gegeben".]
Basel has not been the subject of as many banal poems as Paris. Yet the very fact, that a city serves as the subject of a poem, awakens certain expectations in the reader, evoking conventions and clichés, shaped by popular songs and sentimental poetry. The author's approach in this text is based on subverting these expectations. The poem begins with banal, but syntactically and semantically correct, colloquial sentences, exhibiting a high degree of redundancy. Around the middle of the text, three purely onomatopoeic verses appear, disrupting the reader's anticipation of redundancy. Subsequently, a compromise is struck between comprehensibility and onomatopoeia, and the poet, in a free-associative manner, lists some of Basel's tourist attractions. The poem concludes with the punchline "Man, watch out!", likely an association with a women's choir, a veiled ironic allusion to the city's atmosphere. The poem thrives primarily on the interplay between proposition and presupposition. The city of Basel, as the subject of the text (proposition), does activate in the reader a certain horizon of expectations, regarding conventions and agreements (presupposition), with which he approach the reading . The "disruption of the ceremony," that is, the deliberately mishandling of the layer of presuppositions, complicates the reception process, exposes the commonplaces, and redirects attention back to the deconventionalized proposition (Basel). Shklovsky's recipe works with success - one reacts to the "defamiliarization strategy" with a certain curiosity: what is Basel really like?, one wonders.
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