A Narrative of Migration: Gabrielle Alioth's Die Erfindung von Liebe und Tod
2007; International Fiction Association; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0315-4149
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic research and analysis
ResumoWith her fifth novel, Die Erfindung von Liebe und Tod (The Invention of Love and Death), (1) Swiss writer Gabrielle Alioth intensifies her technique of concealment and disguise (2) beyond that reached in Die stumme Reiterin (The Silent Rider), (3) and continues to address questions about polysemy of truth and constitution of identity in a world of migrants. (4) Instead of intertextuality with texts such as pre-courtly multiculturalist Legend of Duke Ernst, (5) The Invention refers to Ovid's Metamorphoses. And rather than setting plot in late-medieval Europe, Alioth has Invention take place in present-day North America; yet, she reaches back into colonial past as well. The text challenges readers to explore Invention, that is, performance and fruit of fantasy, in conjunction with themes of loss and displacement. I will investigate topics of migration and creation in tandem with novel's narrative structure, drawing on a concept developed by Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse. (6) I will show how Alioth employs a variety of tactics to disturb and unsettle reader, and in particular a specific narrative strategy, metalepsis, as a metaphor for displacement. For those dispossessed of a sense of physical or spiritual home, there is no shelter except in fictional production (outside time and space). With respect to Alioth's first novel, Der Narr (The Fool), Anne Fuchs cautioned that text creates an anxiety in reader because plot dissolves into a composition of ... reflections, memories, foreshadowings, speculations, rumors and suppositions. (7) Even more unsettling, in Invention Alioth develops a number of plots concurrently, and although they inhabit various narrative levels, they overlap, intersect, and affect one another, generating discomfort and a sense of loss of orientation for readers. The entire text is transmitted via immediate speech by a narrator whose use of first-person pronoun designates her as a character in at least one of stories she relates. This narrator, a European author on a reading tour, travels to eighteen different cities. She meets with a number of people, delivers excerpts from The Silent Rider to various audiences, and engages in discussions; she also visits exhibitions. Her personal history (childhood, youth, and married life) is told via flashbacks amid events occurring during her tour. After stops in Madison, Toronto (14), Montreal (24), Ottawa (27), Quebec City (28), Wolfville (33), Halifax (38), St. John's (45), Regina (56), and Vancouver (71), she rests in an unnamed Californian location near San Francisco (77). She then travels to Berkeley (79), Los Angeles (84), Three Rivers (92), Monrovia (96), Santa Monica (99), Tucson (104), and Houston (110). From Texas, she returns to Toronto, transfers to St. John's, and drives to Ferryland, Newfoundland, where she remains in order to engage in a romantic relationship with a fictional character (Duncan) she creates. She abandons her husband in Ireland to be the lover of man [she] invented in Newfoundland (109). Predictably, very down-to-earth Philipp is aghast when his wife explains her motivation for leaving him (82). This first plot line exposes major themes: displacement or migration and fictional creation. This tallies well with Alioth's corpus, which in The Silent Rider contains a medieval scribe and in all her novels travel and quest. An author's reading tour and development of plot(s) evoke Gunter Grass's second venture into postmodernity, Headbirths, Or The Germans Are Dying Out (1980), and Walter Kempowski's Letzte Grusse (2003). (8) In Kempowski's novel, main character, Alexander Sowtschick, dies in New York at end of his American reading tour. (9) Sowtschick, already notorious from Kempowski's Dog Days, (10) is, like Alioth's narrator, a writer whom readers cannot trust, a man who falsifies his diary for future generations of researchers. …
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