‘IMAGINARY’ AND ‘EXPERIENCED’ IN THE NOVELS BY ROMAIN GARY
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-4-264-285
Abstract
R. Gary was a founder of the total novel: a new genre epitomizing the strong desire to learn more about the world and humanity in the 20th century. It was Gary’s fondness for the works of Cervantes, Balzac, and Tolstoy that explains his drive to explore the world in its entirety. Rejecting life-like depictions, the writer turns instead to fantasy and imagination, existential reflection and the principle of the universality of existence. Gary’s novels were born of a complicated transformation of his personal life experiences and real events into mythical-poetic images of life and death, hope and despair, love and hatred. Gary’s artistic creed was expressed in his only essay In Defense of Sganarelle [Pour Sganarelle]. Sganarelle is emblematic for Gary’s poetics; he reconstructs a Scarronian burlesque in its playfulness and the art ‘to lie whilst speaking the truth’ in his novel The Dance of Genghis Cohn [Le Danse de Gengis Cohn]. He paints a farcical and grotesque picture of the Nazi crimes and Germany’s post-war history. In this bizarre story, Gary unleashes the protagonist of the Dybbuk into the real world, planting him in the mind of the former SS-officer Schatz, who serves as a police inspector now that the war is over. Schatz investigates the mass murders that occur in a small German town. By spoofing the detective plotline, Gary goes on to destroy its workings. As a result, a new semantic model is created: a parable-like narrative about the Holocaust and the world history of humanity.
Keywords
R. Gary,
mystification,
existentialism,
new wave,
poetic thinking,
humor,
irony,
carnival,
existence
About the Author
V. Shervashidze
Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Vera V. Shervashidze, Doctor of Philology
6 Miklukho-Maklay St., Moscow, 117198
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Review
For citations:
Shervashidze V. ‘IMAGINARY’ AND ‘EXPERIENCED’ IN THE NOVELS BY ROMAIN GARY. Voprosy literatury. 2018;(4):264-285. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-4-264-285
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