Metonymy, Presence, and the Ethics of Imagination in Postmemorial Writing: Andra Manfelde’s Zemnīcas bērni and Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages with two third-generation narratives of totalitarian trauma—Latvian writer Andra Manfelde’s prose work Zemnīcas bērni (The children of the bunker, 2010) and German writer Katja Petrowskaja’s autobiographical novel Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014)—to demonstrate the substantial role of metonymy in postmemorial writing where it serves the function of reactivating the troubling past. The author’s theoretical departure point is the observation that metonymy has been overlooked within the emphasis on the archive as the empirical basis of postmemorial prose. Metonymical connections between the past and the present are implied in Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) concept “points of memory.” However, her concept seems suited more for explaining the affective power of family photographs, while postmemorial texts are full of all kinds of metonymies: not just images, but also names, dates, and objects, able to enforce the presence of the past. In order to account for these metonymical signs encountered by autobiographical narrators in their storyworlds and made present on the level of narrative discourse, the article suggests turning to Eelco Runia’s (2014) philosophical conception of metonymy as a transfer of presence. The final aspect discussed here is the way metonymy enables ethical imagination.