3 - Performance, Performativity, and the Contemporary German Kurzgeschichte

Summary

Words themselves … lay bare the way that, in order to understand an object, you first of all have to write something on it, I mean really describe it. Someone else then reads what's been written on this object, but obviously not the object itself. That is, of course, the great presumption of art—that it goes around describing everything like graffiti artists in a city. On the other hand, you simply can't talk about an object that hasn't been described.

—Roman Ehrlich

AS A MATERIAL-DISCURSIVE PRACTICE, the short story is performative: it does things with words, producing cognitive, affective, and social effects through the combined structural constraints of language, genre, and material, or digital text. More so than other narrative forms, the short story is ideally suited to stage the performance of self, due to its fragmentary form and its often pronounced dialogic qualities. By offering a systematic analysis of the most significant performative qualities at play in the contemporary German-language short story, in this chapter I offer an original approach to the form, itself a somewhat neglected object of study. The intersection of this theoretical paradigm—performativity—and the short-story genre developed here represents an innovative application, which will extend understandings of the short story and its impact within and beyond the German-language context today. Ultimately, I contend that the concept of literary performativity furthers the case for the transformative impact and social value of literature per se.

As Judith Butler argues, identities arise through the processes of performativity, which necessarily entail an audience. As with novels, plays, and narrative poetry, the short-story form allows for the representational performance of diegetically constrained identities—in short, characters— whose perspective the reader shares through the first-person voice or the guidance of a narrator. The identity of the “short story” itself accretes through the performance of language constructed in the form of a generically framed narrative, composed in a chain of deracinated signifiers that nonetheless exist in material-textual form and conjure up a slice of a world. For short-story writer and novelist Roman Ehrlich, this process evokes the creative and taxonomical work of the graffiti artist: words, like “tags” sprayed on the walls of a city, are arbitrary and unstable, but nevertheless necessary to identify and employ a mode of successful communication.