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.