Weltabgewandter Sprachspieler oder »radikaler Realist«? Fremd- und Selbstzuschreibung gehen in Bezug auf den Autor Ror Wolf weit auseinander. Dies gründet auf einer nur scheinbaren Paradoxie: In Wolfs vielgestaltigem Werk vollzieht sich der Zugriff auf Wirklichkeit gerade im Modus der Sabotage, Unterbrechung, Irritation oder Verzerrung – kurz: im Modus der Störung. Ausgehend von der langen Prosa fragt Barbara Bausch nach möglichen Formen literarischer Referenzialität. Dabei konturiert sie Wolfs experimentelle und zugleich engagierte Poetik des ästhetisch produktiven Störens als Kreuzungspunkt verschiedenster Suchbewegungen des Prosaschreibens in den 1950er bis 1980er Jahren.
In reviews, the prose of Ror Wolf has often been described as a play on words because of its experimental procedures, while the author calls himself, albeit tongue-in-cheek, a ‚radical realist‘. Between these poles, the present study tries to sound out Wolf’s poetics. The analyses focus a prose writing that leaves traditional narrative procedures far behind and pursues a wide range of disruptive strategies. With this poetics, that I contour as a ‚poetics of disruption‘, the specific ‚realism‘ of Wolf’s prose comes into view. According to the guiding thesis, his long prose works model their access to reality precisely through practices of disruption, which include e.g. the disruption of the fluid progress of the prose, the referential function of language or the idea of the text as a ‚whole‘. Far from a realistic technique, Wolf’s approach to reality ranges from forms of disclosing the reality of the literary text itself, to reflecting on the possibilities of (realistic) representation and the relation of the modern subject to reality, to critical references to social reality. On the one hand, Wolf’s poetics articulate a desire for the disclosure of a linguistically non-representable real; at the same time, this desire is marked as a utopian aspiration that―if at all―can only find realization in the process of reading. By means of comparative references to prose works and poetological reflections of contemporary authors, it becomes clear that Ror Wolf, who throughout his life occupied a marginal position in the literary field, finds himself at the intersection of the most diverse literary movements of his time. Wolf’s poetics of disruption, which is experimental and politically engaged at the same time, is to be read in particular in the context of the 1960s, the period in which it emerged: It feeds on literary tendencies of the 1950s and early 1960s, breathes the provocative spirit of ‚1968‘, and anticipates developments that will only come to full bloom in the further course of literary history.
