Alternative Geographies for Alternative Stories. The Diagonal Space in Michael Chabron’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Autori

  • Alice Balestrino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2018.i12.682

Parole chiave:

letteratura, letteratura Americana, Michael Chabon

Abstract

The present paper discusses the construction of fictional spaces with particular focus on their relationship to history by demonstrating how in Michael Chabon’s alternate history The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a re-configuration of geography corresponds to a re-interpretation of history. My argument is grounded in the postmodernist construction of literature as having an ontological dominant and I hold that the abovementioned cause-effect relationship between history and geography engenders in the novel a fictional “space-time,” diagonal to the actual world. The latter represents a third alternative to factuality and fictionality; therefore, it is a diagonal originating from the intersection between the two, a universe where history and geography, as well as factuality and counter-factuality mingle and collide. By resorting to the ubiquitous metaphor of the chess game, I present a reading of the novel as generative literary endeavor and of the narrative as selfsustained space-time, grounded in two main vectors of diagonality: language and history.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1998. 325.

Boyarin, Jonathan. Remapping Memory, The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.

Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

---. Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

Cohen, Patricia. “The Frozen Chosen.” The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. 6-17.

Doležel, Lubomír. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History. Baltimora: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 1987.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes.” Poetics Today 6.4 (1985): 717-755.

---. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Pubblicato

2018-12-01

Fascicolo

Sezione

Articoli (sezione generale) - lingua, letteratura e cultura Americana