Abstract
In this chapter, Ursa explores multiple forms of displacement in Herta Müller’s prose. Identified as crucial ways of remediating the author’s autobiography and postmemory, linguistic estrangement, autobiographical mediation, and non-human displacement are central to the analysis. Based on two best-known novels by Müller, The Land of Green Plums and The Hunger Angel, the chapter shows how meaning is transferred throughout the narrative between speech, material objects, humanness, and animality. Focusing on the individual-collective interplay and on the human–non-human ambivalence, and dwelling on theoretical input from memory and postmemory studies, Ursa contends that the writer uses identity displacement to mediate and remediate different places of memory, where the non-human takes part in being human.
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Notes
- 1.
More about this resistance to feminism among Romanian female writers, and about their exceptionalist self-perceptions in Ursa (2008).
- 2.
See in this sense an interview in ‘Observator cultural’ literary magazine 391 (2007), with Ștefan Sienerth’, ‘Interviu: Dacă Herta Müller ia premiul Nobel mâine, literatura română o va accepta imediat’ [If Herta Müller gets the Nobel Prize tomorrow, Romanian literature will suddenly accept her], Observator cultural 391 (2007): 6–7.
- 3.
With the exception of an avant-garde collage-poem entitled Este sau nu este Ion [To Be or Not to Be Ion] (Iassy: Editura Polirom, 2005).
- 4.
See, among others, Predoiu (2001, pp. 183–185) for examples of Müller using Romanian sayings in German.
- 5.
Similar accusations are formulated, in a different context, by Romanian politicians, against the cinema productions of the directors from the so-called Romanian New Wave. They show that, to ‘the national eye’, unflattering representations of national content is still associated, in an obsolete manner, with state denigration. See more about that in Pop (2015).
- 6.
A brilliant analysis of spatial relationships created by perception in Müller’s writing can be read in Brandt and Glajar (2013), Anja Johannsen’s chapter ‘Osmoses. Müller’s Things, Bodies and Spaces’ (207–229), drawing on the Vladimir Shklovsky’s concept of automated perception.
- 7.
A good cultural analysis that exposes the fallacy of this ideological label is to be found in Bican (2012), pp. 25–26.
- 8.
Richard Wagner quoted by Diaconu (2018).
- 9.
A very rich bibliography on the issue of alternative concepts to postmemory is to be found in Huyssen (2003, p. 171).
- 10.
The most meaningful analysis of Nazis’ phobia about mice was conducted by Huyssen (2003, esp. Chaps. 5 and 8) on Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus.
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Ursa, M. (2018). Non-human Displacements: Narrative Remediations of Autobiography and Postmemory in Herta Müller’s Writing. In: Mitroiu, S. (eds) Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96833-9_7
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