Abstract
When a history is too painful to relate to, when there is no possible account for the lives that have been lost, when there is no one who will listen to the witnesses, when the testimonies are repressed by the dominant forms of historical representation – then literature might configure
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a space in which unvoiced, silent or silenced difference might emerge. This is made possible through the gaps, the fissures, the silences, the mysteries of a text, the effects it describes, the language it uses, the concepts of time and space it employs, and its self-reflexive turn towards its own limitations. Taking up Gilles Deleuze's vague and sketchy configuration of the powers of the false, Wiese argues that literature is able to deal constructively with the inability to represent events from the past. Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2003), and Richard Powers's The Time of our Singing (2003) are three novels that deal creatively with histories that cannot be passed on. Wiese gives a close reading of these novels, showing how each of them allows its readers to relate to historical events that are commonly considered to pose problems to historical transmission. Foer's (2002) novel situates its main characters, the Jewish-American Jonathan and the Ukrainian Alex, against the background of the Shoah. Both are confronted with their family's entanglement in the Nazi's annihilation of the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod. They are asked to accept the legacy of the past, while confronted with the task to make responsible choices for the future. The novel thereby performs the need for a postmemorial ethical standpoint that is characterized as being indebted to the memories of the Shoah without being able to claim them. Flanagan's (2003) literary work invents the narrative voice of a character called Gould who is modelled on a historical persona, the convict-painter William Buelow Gould, who was imprisoned in the 1820s on Sarah Island, Tasmania, when the island was still a penal colony. By taking up the perspective of Gould, the novel forges an account of the Tasmanian convict-system that was left out of historical recordings compiled exclusively by the ruling powers during those early years of Tasmania's colonization. Powers's (2003) piece of literature tells the fictional story of the mixed-race family Daley-Strom. The novel brings Du Bois' “the problem of the color line” to the fore by dramatizing how its characters are exposed to racial thinking with devastating effects. It exhibits how modernity's notion of “race” is intricately linked to a concept of time which is seen as progressing in a linear fashion: constant and unchanging. Powers presents an alternative view on time and temporality that is informed by the insights of relativity theory and an ontological understanding of Bergson's dur饮 This vision assists in a fruitful deconstruction of essentialistic notions of “race.” To read, write, and think about these three novels , Wiese takes Deleuze's philosopheme of the powers of the false as a point of departure.
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