This thesis is a two part exploration of the idea that the past is never gone. The core of the thesis is a work of fiction, supplemented by a shorter theoretical framework. Together, they consider the notion that rather than existing as a point in a chain of historical causality, past experience persists into the present as memory, as souvenirs, mementoes, tokens and other material and immaterial relics embodying traces of what has gone before. Each moment, and the lives that are lived within them, are made up of all the moments that have happened previously, so that the past is seen as having an ontology that endures into the present. In the exegesis I read three novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, exploring the ways in which her narrative techniques and startling formal innovations enact the idea of time and space as recursive. The narrative ‘past’ in her fiction keeps resurfacing in new iterations and contexts – structurally, thematically, historically and in terms of the chronicling of events – inflecting the ways in which the narrative ‘present’ can be understood. I am calling this process of narrative ‘re-remembering’ a poetics of anamnesis. The effect, I argue, is to open up the possibility of recovering the trauma of past experience and making it communicable as what Walter Benjamin terms Erfahrung. Where Benjamin seeks redemptive possibilities however, Erpenbeck is concerned with enabling an ethical aesthetic engagement within each new ‘now’ of the reading present. After framing my discussion within this reading of Erpenbeck, the second, major part of my thesis continues the exploration in the form of a novel titled A Loved Child Has Many Names. Intercut timelines follow separate but overlapping lives as they move through vastly different geographical locations, substantiating the recursive nature of time and memory in narrative form. The tale of a woman in early twentieth century Finland alternates with her later story as a grandmother in mid-century Australia, allowing both parts of her life to be experienced simultaneously in the reading present. Her recollections shift as they are retold and then filtered through the limited understanding of her young granddaughter; at other times her memories are reframed by being narrated ‘out of sequence’ in the ‘wrong’ time or recurring in new contexts. The past is continually re-remembered, finding new iterations in stories, motifs and objects reappearing in different times and places within the narrative. The narrative form structurally, thematically and historically enacts an anamnestic recovery that continues to reverberate and generate new meaning within the time-of-reading. The past is recovered, not with any nostalgic or redemptive potential, but with the possibility of allowing a reimagining of ‘now’ that is liberated from any sense of historical inevitability.
Date of Award | 2023 |
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Original language | English |
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Awarding Institution | - Western Sydney University
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Supervisor | Sara Knox (Supervisor) |
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- Erpenbeck, Jenny, 1967- -- Criticism and interpretation
A Loved Child Has Many Names : Jenny Erpenbeck’s poetics of anamnesis
Edgren, Y. (Author). 2023
Western Sydney University thesis: Doctoral thesis