LITERATURE AS PERFORMATIVE WRITING

Iulia Militaru, poet, artist, and publisher of FrACTalia Press, wrote compellingly about The Republic of Exit 43 in two issues of Revista—ARTA, a Bucharest journal, in Romanian and in English: Manifest(ation) between Literature as Censorship and the Censorship of Literature

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Literature As Performative Writing

Here is an excerpt: "The Republic of Exit 43 shows how the world colonized by Alice has been “cultivated”, how the extra-human has been appropriated and introduced into the economic circuit, how its growth can be obtained through added chemical substances, fertilizers that accelerate its production, the consequences of visibility, knowledge etc. Wonderland/Underland is in no way a utopia, nor a dystopia, it does not create a possible world, for it is a realm of the non-creative, of repetition, refraction and imitation, a place for discursive remains but also home to extra-linguistic realities (the problem of pollution and waste from big companies and institutions)....It refracts not only the field elements, but also its structure, resulting in a figure that hides and through which the excess of seen reality is granted to invisibility, [so] it becomes invested with power (“Not to render the invisible visible, but to bruise and multiply the channels of its invisibility” – Scappettone, p. 44). Jennifer Scappettone might provide the best answer for all these questions on performative literature, especially for those questions that demonstrate how literature can become a performative act. Although an art of memory, of memoirism or, quite the opposite, of possible worlds, utopias, it can sometimes position itself on the line that separates them, thus becoming a frontier art through which the archived past that was passed on in the form of ascertaining descriptive discourse  becomes action, present action played out for the receiver not through the technique of representation but via direct participation – the authorial voice will have been canceled because, in the midst of total nonsense, we allow ourselves to be talked, we do not talk.... Performative literature therefore remains a laboratory where history is replayed, reassembled in order to make use of its waste, materials that have been used and abandoned – not the significance of the material itself, but what it can do, its manner of action."