| Abstrakt: |
If theater is defined by enclosed spaces where prescribed representations unfold onstage, then theatricality entails leaving the theater and its narratives behind in search of freedoms to be found in signifying the world anew. Whereas Hubert Fichte’s third novel – Detlev’s Imitations (1971) – features theater prominently in its stories, theatricality’s transgressions assume greater importance with his fourth, Treatise on Puberty (1974). With The History of Sensitivity commenced that same year, theater and theatricality manifest themselves concretely in the closed spaces of love and fame, on the one hand, and anonymous gay sex, on the other. What love and fame cannot deliver are the sense of selfhood and sociability afforded by theatricality. This essay queries the fate of this tension in Fichte’s roman fleuve following the onset of the AIDS/HIV in the early 1980s and the ensuing hysteria from its media coverage. Of particular concern is the affirmative place Fichte’s poetics reserves for death in the queer theatricality of cruising as well as how global efforts to visualize the epidemic destroy what Leo Bersani calls “lived jouissance of dying.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
