Performative event of the “nomination of the world” in the novel "Ocean sea" by Alessandro Baricco

The novel by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco is regarded as the example of a specific type of modern literary works in which the event of storytelling is considered more significant than the very event of the story. Such novels as Light Boxes by Shane Jones, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, Sky-Locked Atlas by Goran Petrović, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and others are classified by the author as the novels with complicated “problematics of speech making”. The aim of such novels is to transform the readers’ point of view on the feasibility of communication and causative-consecutive links generated by it as well as to find the right key to “wording the world”. The article shows that “nomination of the world” in the novel Ocean Sea takes place not within the aspect of nomination but within the aspect of communication. Illustrating the necessity for such “nomination”, the novel basically turns into a narrative about performative - an effort at the world transfiguration. It involves the reader in solving the problem of clarifying limits and possibilities of speech practices and the ontological essence of existence-communication.