Parentheticals within Parentheticals: Obsessive Overinterpretation in Alexei Konakov’s Tabiya32

• In Event: Margins and Parentheses: On Translation, Gender, and Digression in Albanian, Russian, and Ukrainian Literature

Abstract

If repetitions are posited as a form of neurotic compulsion, and the desire to iteratively add one’s interpretation to a work of art an act of, in Susan Sontag’s words, contempt for form that reduces a work of art to contemporarily-derived notions of what a text “means” rather than what it “is” (“Against Interpretation,” 1964), then what are we to do with self-generated interpretations that are embedded within the text? This paper explores this conundrum through a close look at Alexei Konakov’s 2024 protopian novel, Tabiya32. Lurking in the digressive narratives generated by its narrator is a “story within a story,” presented in the form of his repetitive compulsions to add self-oriented interpretation of every event in the form of parentheticals. Konakov’s further parentheticals within parentheticals reveal a kind of double hedging, a strife between the narrator’s intent of giving the reader his more “authentic” voice (consistent with an artist) and a compulsion, with another set of parentheticals nested in the first, to still provide authoritative objective information for the uninformed reader (consistent with an interpreter). Following the logic of Sontag, Konakov’s parenthetheses-laden narrator voice aims to produce a text which “is” that synchronically attempts to show what it “means,” blurring the boundary between artist and interpreter.

Author

• Anna Tropnikova, Yale U