To whom am I shouting? Who listens?”: Voice and Ethics in Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinkyboys

Few authors have engaged so intensively with the human voice as Svetlana Alexievich. In her interview books, the monologues of testimony run over hundreds of pages, completely dominating the narration. In Zinkyboys (1998) the technique of the interview-book attains perhaps its fullest realization: the interviewees’ speech seems to operate freely in quotations, without authorial comments, confirmations, or denials. But how shall we understand this ”pure” documentary voice? This article proposes a few basic theoretical starting points for the analysis of the production of voice and address in documentary literature, and aims to demonstrate how these aspects interact with textual ethics in Alexievich’s text. My perspective on documentary literature emphasizes performative and dialogical aspects, rather than questions of representation and fact-fiction dichotomies (formerly dominant focal-points of research on documentary literature). Utilizing a method that combines speech act theory and narratology, with philosophical thoughts on language and ethics presented by Emmanuel Levinas, the genealogy of the documentary voice may be discerned. Most important is how the documentary text proves to work on double grounds in the production of speech acts – utterances in the real situation/event (which precede the text) negotiate with an overall form of address that the literary work connotes. Zinkyboys and its quotations manifest the performative of ”the saying” in a way that corresponds to an ethical responsibility in the text. As an illustrative example, this article analyses Alexievich’s frequent use of the ellipsis (three dots), a strategy that, in this documentary context, constitutes what might be termed a ”principle of amplification”.

This doctoral thesis explores the literarity of reportage, with a focus on the 20th century and modern reportage. The aim is to describe the literary strategies used in modern text-based reportage and how these strategies relate to journalistic standards of credibility and ethics. A primary focus is the question of what the reportage is looking for in the literary, what happens to this literarity when it is used for journalistic purposes, and, in turn, how the literary establishes ethics in the text.

By suggesting that a piece of reportage is a journalistic text that simultaneously tells the story about the reporter’s encounter with the event, this dissertation sheds light on possible approaches to the concept of literarity: Subjectivity, narrativity, meta-narrative aspects, the poetic function of language and the performative movements in the text. The ethics of reportage is also to be derived from the encounter, and this thesis implements a concept of ethics in conversations with Emmanuel Levinas and dialogical philosophy. It provides an opportunity to separate ethics from moral, ideological and political dimensions of responsibility in the encounter. This aspect of ethics, where literarity and counter-movement operate beyond the direct intention, is what is needed to understand the reportage genre.

The dissertation also includes six longer reportage analyses embodying its results: Djuna Barnes’s, Vagaries Malicieux, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hanna Krall’s A Tale for Hollywood, Sven Lindqvist’s Kina nu: Vad skulle Mao ha sagt? and Joan Didion’s, Slouching towards Bethlehem.