A life without a shoreline: Tropes of refugee literature in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

ABSTRACT

Through close engagement with Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone (first published in German as Gehen, ging, gegangen in 2015), this article makes a case for refugee literature as a body of texts by and about refugees which represent migration as part of a shared world. Ostensibly a novel about hospitality, Go, Went, Gone establishes walls, paper(s) and water as tropes of refugee literature, turning them into meditations on habits of thought built into our understanding of language, on the precariousness of foundational narratives, and on what ultimately constitutes a human life. Refraining from offering a solution to the refugee crisis in spite of dramatizing the lessons of ethical hospitality, the novel compels its readers to dwell on the discomfort of a global crisis that requires a political solution which transcends the fatalism of the west’s cultural self-doubt.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee literature
• Jenny Erpenbeck
• hospitality
• cultural pessimism
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have in mind the manifesto of the sans-papiers in Libération on February 25, 1997. Their demand for papers is a request both for legal status and for the symbolic ownership of their life stories (see also Cissé 1997; Nail 2015).

2. For example, see contributors to The Displaced (Nguyen 2018).

3. Refugee accounts, write Herd and Pincus (2017), are discredited “in all manner of forms, from the kind of questions asked in official circumstances, to a refusal to accept basic facts of linguistic exchange; that, for instance, a person who has just faced persecution will not necessarily have a clear sense of how to communicate their experience” (121). Like Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges, Refugee Tales suggests that refugees need not only linguistic mediation, but also the support of established western cultural forms (such as, in these cases, The Canterbury Tales or Aeschylus’ The Supplicants) in order to gain legitimacy and be heard.

4. See, for example, accounts by journalists who have accompanied refugees on their journeys (Kingsley 2016; Bauer 2016), and collective writing projects involving refugees (Godin et al. 2017).

5. “Furniture and shop windows, in particular, remind him of Eastern times; thinking of the large quantities of out-of-favor wooden chairs in dumpsters, he imagines his mother – a person who lived during the scarcity of wartime – pointing out that their use value had not been exhausted: They’re still perfectly good, she would have said” (76; original emphasis).

6. I am borrowing the question from Luiselli (2017).

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Notes on contributors

Corina Stan

Corina Stan is assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Department of English at Duke University. She is the author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (2018), and of articles published in Comparative Literature Studies, MLN, Arcadia, English Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Critical Inquiry, The European Journal of English Studies, Empedocles and others. She is currently working on a book project about the “end of culture” in the west.