Argiilma poeetika ja pidulik elu (original) (raw)

The poetics of the everyday and festive life This article investigates ways of writing about the everyday in contemporary life. It starts by posing the question of why literature thrives especially on violence and extraordinary events. If literature strives to speak to us through our experience of being in the world, and aims to help us understand our common human experience, then shouldn’t it rather avoid the extraordinary? Without doubt, a topic needs to captivate its writer no less than its reader—otherwise the writing and the reading would not take place at all. Facing death in literature proposes that a given text is something to be taken seriously; it signifies that here one is dealing with existential matters, not just with the myriad small nothingnesses of the everyday. Nonetheless, the present article analyzes a different way to intensify the quotidian: to turn the everyday into an experience of beauty. A writer can find moments of special importance from inside the everyday, thus relieving the reader from the boredom of „nothing happens“ otherwise than through an encounter with death and the extraordinary. Through a close reading of several Estonian novels (Indigo by Peeter Sauter and Tõde ja õigus by A.H. Tammsaare), the article suggests that, instead of underlining the burdensome boredom of the everyday, literature has the potential, through the power of its imagery, to aestheticize the everyday, even against the conscious will of the writer. If the routine of the everyday involves the automatization of life and a loss of the intense feeling of being in the world, Heidegger reminds us that the work of art opens up being in the world as a whole—and does so precisely by relying on the everyday, not on moments of extraordinary significance. Thus, art would imply the disappearance of the everyday as a locus of boredom, unfullfilment, obligation and repetition, and the replacement of the everyday with pidulik elu, a life at once festive and solemn. For Heidegger, the everyday is a based on a structure of Care. Care is the existential meaning of the everyday and the basis of human existence. Insofar as literature might aim towards revealing the structure of care, this effort would involve the creation of festive life precisely out of the ordinariness of the everyday. Thus, in addition to the way literature may depart from the everyday with the violent and the extraordinary, literature may also recover the solemn festivity of the everyday as a way to make a piece of fiction readable, create loci of desire and interest in the text.