Life as Intertext: Distance, Deception, and Intentionality in Marek Hłasko’s<i>Killing the Second Dog</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes a number of strategies of representing the scriptive “I” voice in Marek Hlasko’s Killing the Second Dog, an exilic novel set in Israel but written in Western Europe, and based to a certain extent on the author’s own experiences as a down-and-out expatriate. Following a short theoretical discussion on the nature of autobiographic novels and the problems with transparency of any speaking subject within a text, I suggest a middle way of reading fictional(ized) autobiographies, one balanced between, on the one hand, the study of autonomous textuality in which the centrality of the historical author is displaced and, on the other, more traditional “persona criticism” in which the biographical and the textual are intimately related. After tracing Hlasko’s own well-publicized maneuvers in self-creation and mythopoeia in both the literary and the public sphere—maneuvers which greatly problematized the links between what we know of this author as an individual in space and time and his textual persona which reflects (in certain individualized ways) this space and this time—I focus specifically on the relationship between the two protagonists in the novel. Jacob and Robert, I suggest, emerge as a reflection of the broader authorial dilemma between revealing the self in a text and concealing it. The two protagonists, I argue, function as a synecdoche of the problematics of textual self-expression and storytelling in general: one of them, Jacob, becomes a sort of emptied signified and a vessel to be filled with a narration; the other, Robert, directs and authorizes Jacob’s identity, invests his role with signification and legitimates it as a discourse, as a text. By highlighting the dynamic established between the two characters in their struggle to create a persuasive narrative of their own (specifically, a confidence game which involves the seduction o f a tourist) the real author, Hlasko, in a sense allows himself to “disappear” into an anonymous space made available by the narrative’s centering of these two textual “creators.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".