Aléa Torik

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aléa Torik is the literary fictional character of the German writer Claus Heck (* 1966 in Essen). Heck publishes his literary texts under the pseudonym Aléa Torik (born May 1, 1983 in Sibiu / Hermannstadt ), a fictional Romanian-German writer.

The fictional character Aléa Torik

Torik grew up in a village of the Mărginimea Sibiului , went to the Samuel von Brukenthal high school in Sibiu , where German is the official language of instruction. She studied literature and philosophy in Bucharest , among others with Mircea Cărtărescu . In 2006 she moved to Berlin, where she finished her studies. She is working on her doctorate with Joseph Vogl at the Humboldt University in Berlin on the subject of "Identity, Authenticity and Illusion - On The Theory of Fictionality".

Torik alternates between a pseudonym and a heteronym . Heck calls Torik a "semi-hetero synonym". The name has several levels of meaning. Under aleatoric one risk, chance or arbitrariness, a non-directional or intentional behavior understands. The term is usually used to describe a musical principle. Alea is a Hebrew given name and means 'eyes'. This is also what the notches of a cube are called. Alea is also the abbreviation of Eulalia , which is made up of the prefix eu - 'good' and lalein - 'talking': the eloquent or eloquent. Torik recalls the Torah , the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch . The transition from first name to surname indicates a transition between two cultural levels, from orality to written form. Antonymically , the narrator who tells in time and who thus stands for transience stands opposite the goddess of eternal and immutable truth: Aletheia .

According to Heck, initially as an escape from unsuccessfulness - hundreds of unsuccessful applications to publishers and literary sponsors - Heck, who showed no interest in his completed novel about a blind man, The Sound of Becoming , set up a weblog that was published by the German Literature Archive Marbach is archived. It quickly became clear that writing required a personal identity , an experiencing and descriptive 'I'. He divided the term Aleatorik, which gave the blog its name, into first and last names and posted literary, literary theoretical and personal contributions as Aléa Torik. Torik also participated in various blog activities, most notably discussing David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Fun . The interest in Torik's contributions was apparently difficult to separate from that in her person, which she willingly underpinned with all sorts of seemingly biographical, but actually fictitious details. This is how the idea for the second novel, Aléas Ich, came about .

plant

The sound of becoming tells the story of a blind man who comes to Berlin from the Romanian village of Mărginime, meets Leonie in his increasing despair over the loss of his sight and confronts himself with his blindness through a camera. The story of Marijan's life runs like a red thread through the novel, reported from his own perspective, on the occasion of an exhibition of his photographs in a Berlin gallery. The much larger scope of the text is reported from the point of view of other people who are more or less clearly related to the protagonist . Over the course of several generations, a picture emerges that is not unlike that which his blind man makes himself, marked by considerable gaps and yet by an overflowing imagination. Like a blind man, the reader feels his way from figure to figure and has to identify the time and place of the action in each chapter. This system puts the reader himself in the position of a blind person.

Aléas Ich tells the story of a Romanian who comes to Berlin for her doctorate, runs a blog on the Internet and, after her first novel, which has now actually been published, is working on her second. In this text, of which Torik himself is the protagonist, gradually all the circumstances and people that one had to accept as authentic up to then, also through the entries in her blog, turn out to be fictitious, as narrative threads of this very novel that the author works. At no point in the reading process can the reader distinguish between the level of reality and the level of history. He actually only watches the text, which he thinks he is holding in his hands, as it is being drawn up. Torik, who splits into author and protagonist right at the beginning of the novel, is here both an inventive subject and an invented object.

The blurb of the novel indicates that Aléa Torik is not only doing her doctorate on fictionality and has written a novel about it with Aléas Ich, but that she is also fictional herself.

Claus Heck

Claus Heck, born in 1966, studied philosophy and literature in Berlin from 1987. During a writing crisis he started a blog under the pseudonym Aléa Torik, under which he subsequently published all of his texts.

Scholarships

Publications as Aléa Torik

  • "The noise of becoming", Osburg Verlag Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-940731-75-3
  • "Endless fun". In: Lettre International . 2012. H. 97. pp. 130f.
  • "Aléas Ich", Osburg Verlag Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-95510-004-9
  • “Aléa Torik in conversation with Katharina Bendixen. We cannot distinguish between real and fictional ”. In: Poet. 2013. H. 15. pp. 169-177.
  • “In the uterus of the skull. Mircea Cărtărescu's Orbitor Trilogy ”. Article on literaturkritik.de , No. 5, May 2015. A modified version of the essay was published under the title "The Infinite Carpet of Illusion: Mircea Cărtărescu's Orbitor Trilogy" in The Repetition. Journal of Literary Criticism , Issue 2, May 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Nicole Henneberg: Who am I, and if so, of which gender? In: tagesspiegel.de . June 4, 2013, accessed August 19, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Interview with Katharina Bendixen on poetenladen.de
personal data
SURNAME Torik, Aléa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heck, Claus (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH eat