Givi Margvelashvili's “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” as a Metafictional Novel

Abstract

Each author happily writes about himself, about the difficulties encountered in writing, about literature, - we read in Roland Duhamel's book “The Poet in the Mirror: About Metaliterature” (Dichter im Spiegel: Über Metaliteratur) [Duhamel, 2001]. This is also the case with German-speaking Georgian migrant author Givi Margvelashvili. In a 2009 German-language novel, Givi Margvelashvili in his book “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” (“Der Kantakt, Aus den Lese-Lebenserfahrungen eines Stadtschreibers”), in parallel with his account of his life, experiences and work, shows the mystery of literary fiction and invites the reader into a metafictional game. Literary critic Patricia Waugh, who plays a special role in the study of metafiction, believes metafictional texts are those that deliberately refer to themselves as an artificial creation in order to raise questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. According to her concept, metafictional texts are created by an infinite linguistic game with the world, reality, fiction, narrative [Waugh, 1984]. In the present article we will try to review the novel “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” by Givi Margvelashvili, the main motives, elements or narrative techniques, characteristic of the metafictional literature, which show the metafictional nature of The Kantakt.It should be noted from the very beginning that Givi Margvelashvili's novel “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” is based on the artistic reality of the German writer Kurt Tucholsky’s - “Rheinsberg - A Picture Book for Lovers” (“Rheinsberg - Ein Bilderbuch für Verliebte”). The Kantakt is an intertextual game with a pretext. The latter appears in the work as a book in a book, which is one of the most common motifs in metafictional literature. Because Tucholsky’s work is often found in the Kantakt, the readers cannot forget it, therefore they constantly think about it, and even compare the pheno-text with the pretext. Naturally, there are many passages in the Kantakt in which we recognize intertextual metafiction.An important metafictional event in the novel is the transformation of the main character of the work - the first "City Writer" of the German city of Rheinsberg into a "reader" character. From the "real" world of the "City Writer" - from the second layer of the novel to the fictional world of the book - the first layer (the same as his own consciousness), the "transition" into the imaginary world blurs the line between "reality" and fiction. This is where one of the techniques of metafictional literature comes into play - metalepsis.The metafictionality of the novel is evidenced by the characters in the first layer, who are aware of their fictional existence. The aim of the "reader" is for the main characters of Kurt Tucholsky’s work to realize their fictional essence too. Because of this, he leaves a message to Claire and Wolf, which is written on a blank sheet of the same book the characters belong to: “This is your mirror-book. It accurately describes how you live through readers: everything you think, say and do here, you think, say and do in your reading-life” [Margvelashvili, 2009:461). In the work, the characters are presented as reading-creatures, whose lives depend on the reader and their imagination. The function of the characters also becomes a subject of discussion in the novel: "The characters in the book are committed to reflect the lives of real people, to serve people as a kind of reading-mirror" [Margvelashvili, 2009:200], - we read in Margvelashvili's novel.Based on the fragments of the life and memoirs of the "City Writer” scattered within the work, which coincide with the life and memoirs of Givi Margvelashvili, we can argue about the biographical auto-reflexivity in the work, which is also one of the forms of metafiction. It should also be noted that there are signs of autofiction in the Kantakt.In the Kantakt, as in most metafictional texts, the character, the reader, and the author are repeatedly thematized, as well as the act of writing, narrating, and reading. The language games in the novel also have a metafictional meaning. Auto-reflexive phrases and words reveal the fictional world of the book, through which often even a parallel is drawn between the fictional and the real world. Linguistic issues, including phonology, morphology, syntax, etc., are thematized and discussed in the Kantakt as a metafictional novel.Based on these and other examples discussed in the article, we can conclude that Givi Margvelashvili's “The Kantakt, from the Reading-Life Experiences of a City Writer” is a metafictional novel, revealing the fictitiousness of this work as well as other literary texts in general, primarily the pre-text of “Rheinsberg - A Picture Book for Lovers”.