Entangled histories and divided audiences: overhearing Joseph Conrad, W. G. Sebald, and Dan Jacobson

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on specific effects that occur when transnational literary texts encounter diverse readerships that do not share the same historical imaginary. The author highlights a readerly dynamic of ‘overhearing,’ in which readers realize their outsider position within the discourse of a text but also recognize something sufficiently familiar in it to imagine a linkage to their own historical and social position. This dynamic is studied through texts by twentieth-century émigré authors Joseph Conrad and W. G. Sebald as well as by Dan Jacobson, whose memoir on the Lithuanian past of his Jewish family is referenced by Sebald.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative literature
• transcultural memory studies
• postcolonial studies
• post-Soviet studies
• central and eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the discussion on the scope and methods of comparative literature in the age of globalization, see, for example, Cheah 2016; Melas 2007; Saussy 2006; Spivak 2003.

2. I am referring here to my book Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald (Kaakinen 2017), which deals with the challenges that increasingly heterogeneous global reading contexts pose to the study of transnational historical narration in literary fiction. Through the analysis of ‘weak analogies’ prompted by the literary strategies of three twentieth-century writers Conrad, Weiss, and Sebald, I propose that historical pressures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also various unimplied reading positions that engage with twentieth-century history in displaced yet material ways.

I understand ‘heterogeneity’ here first and foremost in relation to the multiplicity and diversity of historical experiences, narratives, and orientations that readers bring to the event of reading and that often also come into contact in new ways in the reading contexts of the twenty-first century.

3. I was first prompted to study Conrad and Sebald side by side by Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn, 1997), in which Sebald writes about Conrad’s Polish background and calls him by the Polish name Konrad Korzeniowski. For an extensive discussion of Sebald’s literary gesture of linking Conrad to Poland and of connecting the partitioned Poland to the Congo through Conrad’s biography, see Kaakinen 2017.

4. For instance, western Europe and post-Socialist countries in eastern Europe did not adopt a transnational paradigm of cultural memory in the same historical moment. Eneken Laanes has written about the divergent historical trajectories in western Europe and in the post-Socialist context (in her case Estonia) in adopting the language of trauma as a universalizing moral language and global memory paradigm, developed in reference to the Holocaust but used in the transnational trauma paradigm to address human rights violations more generally. While this language was widespread in the West by the 1990s, it was at that time still largely absent in Estonia, which had developed distinct memorial forms in addressing the memories of the Gulag (see Laanes 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the University of Turku

Notes on contributors

Kaisa Kaakinen

Kaisa Kaakinen completed a PhD in comparative literature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and conducted dissertation research at the Humboldt University of Berlin as a DAAD graduate fellow. She is the author of the monograph, Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald (2017), and has taught comparative literature at Cornell University, the University of Turku, and the University of Helsinki.