Guides to Berlin

Abstract

A LITERARY TEXT IS, on the most objective level, only a collection of other people's words, culled from the dictionary and arranged in an order. Even much of that order-grammar, idiom, heartfelt or parodic use of clich?tends to be predetermined by common usage. Yet in these anonymous words and phrasings, each of which taken by itself belongs to the reader as much as to the author, one discerns something produced by and unique to that text. It has become something of a commonplace that writing in general-modernist and postmodern poetics in particular-depends heavily upon techniques of fragmentation and juxtaposition. Literary theory teems with terms like collage, assemblage, and bricolage, and often the emphasis is on a text's dismemberment of a received reality. It seems to me, however, that the situation changes radically when that reality is not a received but an alien one. To fragment and rearrange your own language, to change the order of your own everyday surroundings, is a relatively straightforward affair, since you are manipulating codes and experiences you already claim as yours and with which you have a long-standing familiarity. The right to interact with and even manipulate that reality is implicit in your ownership of it. When, however, the reality in question is not your own but someone else's-as could be the case for a European in the suddenly exploded world of the Renaissance, for a first-wave Russian emigre relocated to Berlin, for a Croatian forced from Zagreb into Germany-the techniques of collection and rearrangement acquire a new dimension: the narrative's right to break up and reorder its material is no longer a given, but must be established. Indeed the narrative must justify its practice of collage and build that justification into its form. Whether we consider Renaissance collections of exotic objects, Dubravka Ugre'id's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (a postmodern scrapbook by a political exile in Germany), or Nabokov's Putevoditel' po Berlinu ('A Guide to Berlin-a brief collection of snapshots from everyday life compiled by a Russian who has emigrated to the German capital), we see this need for justification taken into account and embedded into the text. To ignore these texts' respective methods of making their material their own is to overlook an integral part of their form, the uniqueness that emerges from a set of anonymous words.