Pynchon and Kracht

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Here's an apocalyptic vision of the Afro-Swiss protagonist from Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008), pp. 144-145, that might work as an example of Kracht's "subversive and ironic negotiation of (post)colonial questions". In the narration's end the colonized Africans leave the cities of the Swiss Soviet Union - it's an alternate history novel (Lenin stayed in Switzerland and thus that's the country where the Bolshevist Revolution took place) - and return to their rural home villages.

"Ich sah erst die Masken meiner Ahnen, dann sah ich, was sie sahen; ich sah ein gigantisches Feuermeer über England, es waren die Luftschiffe der Hindustanis. Ich sah Brazhinsky, der sich blind und schreiend mit den Fingerspitzen die Reliefarbeiten entlang durch leere Gänge tastete, die Geschichte der Schweiz rückwärts abschreitend; ich sah den Maler Roerich, nachdem ein deutscher Kanister mit halluzinogenem Gas seinen Balkon getroffen hatte, mitsamt Staffelei in die Tiefe stürzen, umringt von einem Schwarm fallender farbiger Zuckerstücke. Ich sah den alten Heiler mit zittrigen Händen Mchere an einen Mtengo streichen, Salzlake an einen Baum. Ich sah die Hand eines der deutschen Partisanen, die ich auf dem Feld erschossen hatte, sich im Schnee bewegen; es war jener Mann mit den Tätowierungen im Gesicht, seine Hand öffnete und schloss sich, als taste sie nach etwas, wie ein Tarmanguin, der nach dem Halt eines Astes sucht und, nichts findend, ins Leere greift."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhqsTkg6yyM

The following article respectively lecture, discussing V in context of early German colonial literature, could perhaps be relevant for Kracht research, too:

Sibylle Benninghoff-Lühl:

Die Masken des Schwarz-Weiß-Roten Todes. Verlebendigungen in der frühen deutschen Kolonialliteratur und in Thomas Pynchons „V“. In: Ortrud Gutjahr und Stefan Hermes (Hg.): Maskeraden des (Post-)Kolonialismus. Verschattete Repräsentationen >der Anderen< in der deutschsprachigen Literatur und im Film. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2011, S. 95-121

McGill University, Dept. of German Studies, 13. November 2008, “Die Masken des Schwarz-Weiß-Roten Todes. Verlebendigungen in der frühen deutschen Kolonialliteratur und in Thomas Pynchons `V`

https://www.literatur.hu-berlin.de/de/derzeitige-institutsmitarbeiterinnen/128372/publikationen


Am 11.03.2017 um 10:06 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:

> Abstract --- Simone Brühl (Walter Benjamin Kolleg, Universität Bern)

Postkoloniales Schreiben im Spiegel der historiographischen Metafiktion

Over the last years, it has become a common method to fictionalise and thereby ‘rewrite’ historical events and processes in literary texts. In particular, the German colonial history has been undergoing a remarkable Renaissance, not least due to the Swiss author Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium, which has been widely and controversially discussed in German media. In confronting so-called postcolonial1 topics such as questions of alterity and identity with narrative representations of historical occurrences, these novels point out that the knowledge of history is determined by language and discourse — the dominant narration functions as a means of taking possession over the ‘other’ in a discursive and political way: “[N]ations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them” (Edward Said). This raises the question in which way contemporary examples of the historical novel and especially literary negotiations with the colonial history are related to the reciprocal effects of poetology and formations of power and knowledge. Which notations do historiographic metafictions develop in respect of the postmodern assumption of linear and teleological narratives? And to what extent are they able to create a ‘different knowledge’ of the ‘other’?

To approach these questions I will analyse and compare Thomas Pynchon’s works V. and Gravity’s Rainbow as well as Christian Kracht’s novels Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten and Imperium in my thesis. Published between the 1960s and the beginning 21st century the texts constitute the inception and the (preliminary) end of a postcolonial writing, which finds its complete expression beyond the academic discourses of postcolonialism: Whereas Pynchon anticipates essential paradigms of postcolonial theory, Kracht unfolds his stories facing a nearly finished development — postcolonialism has been established, institutionalised, and conventionalised in the academic ‘postcolonial studies’ and in a postcolonial literature characterised by the ‘postcolonial view’ (Paul Michael Lützeler). However, Pynchon’s and Kracht’s novels symbolise a different writing about the ‘other’: a ‘committed’ postcolonial literature seems to be replaced by a subversive and ironic negotiation of (post-)colonial questions. By confronting colonial, metahistoriographic, and metafictional subjects these texts suggest the necessity of redefining postcolonial notations beyond the ‘postcolonial view’ and mark — as it is my proposition — a shifting of postcolonial formations of knowledge. <

http://blog.wbkolleg.unibe.ch/?page_id=4343


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