Derybos su genealogija : intertekstualios baltumo žymės Antano Škėmos romane

ENConsidering a shift in literature as a withdrawal from what is being created around, from powerful tradition, history, past, influences, i.e., as a negotiation with genealogy, the article starts with an inspiring analogy between White Paintings by American artist Robert Rauschenberg and Škėmas novel The White Shroud. The insights into the relation between tradition and novelty made by Joanne Morra, who conceptualizes the beginning as marking and marked by a moment of difference, were crucial for this article in aiming to illuminate the relation of a shift in literature, a white new beginning and genealogy. The analysis of intertextual marks of whiteness in Škėma's novel shows the importance of Bernardas Brazdžionis's texts in the texture of the White Shroud and helps to trace a rough trajectory of the movement of Škėma's writing through the canon of ithuanian literature: 1) from monumental single powerful image toward many images following each other; 2) from direct sentimentality and seriousness toward "inside-out" ironic emotionality; 3) from pathos and romantic, symbolic exaltation of human being, writer and unquestioned status of text toward irony, writing, textual self-consciousness, i.e. toward a text, which reflects its nature as a text (as a woven shroud); and finally 4) from literary representation toward the uncovering of the illusion of representation or toward non-representation.The analysis shows that The White Shroud presents the conception of literature as an intertextual, self-reflective construct, a perspective that all texts are possible because of other texts. Without the texts written by Brazdžionis and Radauskas there would be no such novel by Škėma, as it is written. In the novel Brazdžionis's and Radauskas's white imagery is transformed, "decrowned" and "recrowned". Škėma's novel is a white beginning in Lithuanian literature, a beginning, which pushes and turns a reader back to literature, to text itself. A strong link between whiteness, which is related with a white page of paper (with what is not written yet), and literary self-consciousness, self-reflective writing can be seen not only in Škėma's texts. [text from author]