Ars Non Scribendi as Artwork of the Absent: The Art of Not Writing in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Loss Library

Abstract

In The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories (2011), Ivan Vladislavić takes his characteristic genre experimentation to a new extreme. Presenting story ideas, bits of research and anecdotes, he interrogates several literary genres, but the volume as a whole has few obvious generic antecedents. Here I briefly consider the established literary genres that the author explores, and argue that the text is closer to a type of fine arts and artefacts that has always fascinated Vladislavić: those that commemorate loss. To refer to what he does in The Loss Library, I coin the term ars non scribendi – the art of not writing – as the inverse of ars poetica, the closest genre to (almost) accommodate the text. Encouraged by Vladislavić calling Micha Ullman an artist of the absent, I call the genre of The Loss Library and these other works ‘art of the absent’. Aligning Vladislavić’s ars non scribendi with artworks that he has written about in non-fiction or invented in his fiction, I show that the book represents and mourns loss, and conclude that The Loss Library’s genre-transcendence gives form to loss and absence.

Keywords:

• Ivan Vladislavić
• The Loss Library
• genre
• ars poetica
• loss
• absence

Notes

1 Brian McHale (1987) uses the concept of ‘dominant’ to define Postmodernism and to distinguish it from Modernism, showing that it is still useful in delineating genres.

2 For an exposition of how Vladislavić uses language in the way that certain conceptual artists use other media, refer to Swanepoel (212–213).

3 Vladislavić’s monograph on Boshoff explains how the artist carved a sort of diary onto wooden blocks every day for 370 days. Boshoff developed a visual language, setting himself the task of finding a new type of wood each day during the construction process (34).