Through the Eyes of a Child. Private Narratives and Political History in Jenny Erpenbeck

PEREYRA, SOLEDAD

Denver, Colorado

Conferencia; 37th Annual Conference- German Studies Association; 2013

German Studies Association

In Wörterbuch (2005), Jenny Erpenbeck?after Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999)? focused her fiction again on a child, who in this work reconstructs an obscure private and family story set in a South American country near 1980. The narration of the private space takes place going back to each of the images and, particularly, the words that have been marked by a continuity that the main character aims to depict as broken. The narrator and main character of Wörterbuch underlines the breaking-off of the straight identity line between the words that make up her memories and their intended sense?a way of signaling the emptiness-abyss that exists between experience as language and its forms of signifying. Words such as ?Vater,? ?Mutter,? ?Milch,? and ?Messer? are broken down in the narrative, and are presented through their irreparable disassociation, since they do not correspond to ?father,? ?mother,? ?milk ,? and ?knife.? These words are no longer iconographic signifiers of the everyday family world and show themselves as discontinuations and possible fragments, both of the private narrative and the political history. This paper explores, on the one hand, how certain discourse forms and the organization of the fictional material insist on the impossibility of a representative narrative or a narrative mark ed by an attempt of achieving mimetic verisimilitude when it comes to narrate the traumatic personal experience under a totalitarian regime in Wörterbuch. On the other hand, Erpenbeck ?s narrative project is discussed as an aesthetic of subtraction and suspension in the terms outlined by Rancière (2008).