Reading with Images: Anita Brookner’s The Next Big Thing as Memento Mori

Abstract

The intermedial reading of Anita Brookner’s The Next Big Thing thanks to the aesthetic category of the memento mori is particularly fruitful as far as ruins are concerned. Memento mori si a very ‘particular’ kind of still life, it is also the enunciation/ annunciation of impending ruin. Herz’s heart, a leitmotiv in the novel (to wit onomastics), is also a focalizing point similar to the skull in its pictorial equivalent.Together with still life and vanitas, memento mori stands in a gradation towards the macabre, ruin and utter dissolution. The Dance of Death and The Triumph of Death, both specific pictorial representation in medieval times, also figure forebodings of death. The Next Big Thing, built on the ruins of the Second World War, the Shoah and their consequences, conjures up their persisting images from start to finish: thus it can also partly be read as a literary actualization of a kind of Triumph of Death. A necessary line has to be drawn: on the personal level the novel is akin to memento mori. On the Historical level it is close to a Triumph of Death. Both are meet in the notion of ruin, reminiscent of some of Nussbaum’s paintings, a persecuted Jewish painter who fell a victim Nazism. The Triumph of Death plays its ugly act on a mound of ruins.

Keywords

• A. Brookner
• F. Nussbaum
• intermediality
• Memento Mori
• persistence
• ruins