The Uncanny Space of “lesser” Europe: Trans-border Corpses and Transnational Ghosts in Post-1989 Eastern European Fiction

Abstract

With reference to two novels, the Polish Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1996) and the Ukrainian Juri Andrukhovych’s The Twelve Rings (1998), this article explores the ways in which the new novel of the postcommunist transition period reinvents the local as the necessary condition of new formulations of belonging and identity, contrasted with the imposed amnesia of state-controlled uniformity of the communist period. Reinventing the ravaged local, these novels unravel the uncanny aspect of place, realized as the intrusion of the ghost of the exterminated, forgotten or exiled other, within the transcultural space of the borderland. These novels offer a radical rethinking of the local that opens it up to its unfamiliar content: the uncanny ghostly or spectral presence of national and cultural otherness, and the traces of its extermination and obliteration in the context of a wider (European) history.

My reading involves a comparative mode in which postcolonial theory informs the reading of texts from Eastern Europe, with particular attention to the problematic of the local vis-à-vis larger, universalist discourses of the nation, the empire, and Europe as worldliness. I accentuate the discourse of “lesser” Europe developed in these texts as a way of challenging the safe familiarity of tropes of Europe with reference to its uncanny margins.