THE SOMATIC CODE AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR VERBAL DISCOURSE IN STEFAN ZWEIG’S NOVELLAS (FEAR AND LEPORELLA)

Abstract

This article explores the poetics of silence in the short prose of the Austrian modernist writer Stefan Zweig, focusing on his novellas Fear (Angst, 1920) and Leporella (1929). Drawing on current methodologies in narratology, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, the study investigates how characters navigate the systemic blockage of verbal communication channels. The author demonstrates that unexpressed affect undergoes aesthetic substitution and sublimation, shifting onto the level of the somatic (bodily) code. Gestures, facial expressions, vegetative reactions, and gaze trajectories are analyzed not as mere decorative or illustrative components, but as an alternative, highly semiotized language of the unconscious that operates within the writer's artistic system when spoken language fails