Submitted Abstract
Explosions in Lonely Furrows. Narration, Description and Their Aesthetic-political Implications in Two Narratives by Arno Schmidt and Peter WeissToday, ‘Scenes from the Life of a Faun’ and ‘The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body’ are considered as major works of the 20th century German literature ; originally however, at the beginning of the 1950s, they were rather isolated in the German-language literary landscape – to such an extent that Peter Weiss’ text was not even published until 1960. The present work analyses the two auto-diegetic narratives by choosing the following axes of comparison : the tension between the narrator’s voice and the voice of the authorial, non anthropomorphic instance ; the networks of metaphors with poetological implications and, above all, the interaction between the abounding descriptive micro-sequences and the narrative macro-sequences, somewhat hidden behind the descriptions but nonetheless and undeniably present. By following these tracks, the analysis shows the aesthetic-political implications of the two texts ; echoing with either romantic and myth-like (as far as ‘Scenes from the Life of a Faun’ is concerned) or surrealist and Freudian (‘The Shadow of the Coachman’s Body’) intertexts, each of the texts raises a specific ‘explosive’ question, neglected or avoided by the dominant literary production. Thus, Arno Schmidt’s convulsive idyll asks : What is the price to pay for a fictional narrative about the Nazi-years if it is not willing to give up the pleasures of the metaphor ? And Peter Weiss’ matter-of-fact psycho-drama : What is it that post-war German literature keeps out by focusing entirely on the outlines of the exterior world and by relying on a supposedly non-metaphorical language with stable meanings ?