Abstract
Images performed by words in Howard Jacobson’s novel “Kalooki Nights”. Remarks about intersemiotic relations among words and picturesThe article titled Images performed by words in Howard Jacobson’n novel Kalooki Nights. Remarks about intersemiotic relations among words and pictures concerns the intersemiotic tensions among words and pictures. The theoretical model is supported by the interpretation of Howard Jacobson’s novel titled Kalooki Nights. This novel redefines the limits of representation and reception of the Holocaust in the context of identity and contemporary world. Exploring the forms of “reading” (“looking at”) of the linguistic codes as the visual codes, such terms like “transframing” and “performing” refer to the patterns of creation the fictional worlds (constructed by the words which are treated as the images). The being of words still means looking through them, through their semantic flaws. This intersemiotic translations are rooted in the will of creation (Eros) and the will of destruction (Thanatos). The history of interpretations of these two sources of semiosphere touches the limits of questions: what can be shown in written wor(l).
Highlights
The wor(l)d is not a picture, not an image, not even the meanings
The image is the body of selfdestruction by showing the erotic creative will of representation. This plot is an interesting form which shows that the representation which gives something is taking back more, even life. Painting in this story is shown as the anthropological form of confrontation with illusion of reality which is doubled by the dialectics: of Eros and Thanatos, Jew (Mendel) and the German (Ilse Koch), act of creation and the act of destrucion, the body and the “erasing of it”, the penis and the whip, the representation of reality and unpresented reality, the prisoner and the “bitch” and an art as the slave of power
It is no doubt that the notion of sexuality evoked in this plot provides both origin and destiny for the traditional history of erotic writing[24], whether for the author behind the work (Mendel behind his picture) and the reader in front of it (Ilse Koch who checks the “results” of painting) wanting to create by the destruction his and her single story of repression
Summary
The wor(l)d is not a picture, not an image, not even the meanings. This statement is provocative from semiotic and communicational perspective. Howard Jacobson’s[2] novel Kalooki’s Nights shows that words can function as the pictures, images, like representations before meanings.
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