I frånvaro av allmängiltighet. Verklighetsframställningen i en allegorisk tolkning av Thomas Bernhards Undergångaren.

Abstract

The paper’s purpose is to explore a literary text’s relations and allusions to a social reality in the postmodern society through the study of Jonathan Culler’s levels of vraisemblance. It further explores the text’s ideological and historical dimensions through an allegorical interpretation. The use of allegory to study a literary text is historically significant, and according to Fredric Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutics, the only way to discover the political unconscious in a text. The object for the study is Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (Der Untergeher) from 1983, which is, in this study, classified as a postmodernist novel. The reading of Bernhard’s The Loser showed that the novel is trying to deal with a linguistic relativism and a subjective realism. The reading also showed that the representation of reality in the novel is managing a human existence that is unrepresentable due to today’s inhuman language, a representation that is impossible especially after the trauma of the Holocaust. The interpretation revealed that there are two literary codes that exist in the text – the romantic and the realistic. The romantic code is shown in the novel’s concerns about ideal and perfection, and the realistic code is shown in the references to a traditional realistic literary genre, which in their different views of language and the world constitutes an antagonism in the text. The allegorical interpretation revealed that the imaginary solution to this antagonism of literary codes is the desymbolization of words by ways of negation, for the utopian purpose of forming universality in language and representation.