Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
2006; University of Chicago Press; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
ResumoPatrik Oufednik, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2005. 122 pp. $12.50 Among the commonplaces of literary criticism is the idea that any literary work, in particular any stylistically unconventional work, must teach its readers how to read it. This does not mean that the work should point readers toward a single interpretation, but that it should allow readers a means of interpretation, a sense of how its various parts are working together or some clues about what it is attempting to do. Such clues provide a way the work, a space through which readers may access the authors project, leading, ultimately, to a recognition of shared (or not shared) ethical and artistic concerns. A book that fails to allow such points of entry is not successful in the sense that its purposes remain obscure; a thing can only be successful if there is something to be successful at. As measures of literary success go, this one strikes me as better than most, since it at least focuses on the reader's relationship to the text. But like any rule, or at least any literary rule, it is particularly interesting in its exceptions. One such exception is Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Czech writer Patrik Ourednik, which provides readers with an encyclopedia's worth of information but flatly refuses to tell us how to read its catalog of odd facts and observations concerning twentieth-century wars, genocides, scientific innovations, technological developments, and cultural marginalia. Instead we get: The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 cm. on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in World War I who measured 176 cm., and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. The narrating voice is funny, scientific, infantile, sarcastic, and eerie; yet while it is filled with what we usually call personality, it remains morally ambiguous regarding the statistics it relates. For 122 pages, it moves quickly, often in large jumps, from philosophy to psychology, the moon landing to Barbie dolls, the death of humanism to the ethics of Amish people to a rise in popularity of pets: And people in cities got themselves dogs and cats and tortoises and guinea pigs their homes, because dumb animals were faithful friends even in an alienated world. And dogs and cats had their own hairdressers and beauty salons and fitness centers and convalescent homes and morgues and cemeteries, etc. And American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War joined together to build a memorial to the 4,100 American dogs who fell in Vietnam freedom and democracy. We read cynical undertones in for freedom and democracy, and, as a result, think we can read the whole book as a comprehensive cultural critique, commenting on the moral decrepitude of situation X, philosophy Y, and social entity Z. The problem is that while the reader may follow such a reading, the book refuses to confirm it, remaining content to catalog and juxtapose. We can also read the books non-narrative structure as subverting the means by which we usually construct history, except insofar as Europeana does not resist the impulse to focus on the important events-war, major technological and social developments-that typically define historical experience. It just doesn't comment on or evaluate these events. If we see the book as concerned primarily with information rather than with cultural criticism or historical narrative, we can read a passage near the end of the novel as a kind of thesis: and mathematicians invented the theory of information . …
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