Język wydrążony, język wygrzebany. Nekrotopografie Elfriede Jelinek i Paula Celana
Hollow Language, Unearthed Language: Necrotopographies of Elfriede Jelinek and Paul Celan

Summary/Abstract: Gromala conducts a parallel reading of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel The Children of the Deadand drama Rechnitz along with Paul Celan’s poem “Es war Erde in ihnen” (It Was Earthin Them). Focusing on the discursive alliance of Jelinek’s and Celan’s words, Gromalashows how language altered and distorted by the Holocaust influences the formationof textual necrotopographies (spaces filled with dead bodies), whose presence in theanalyzed works is directly linked to the “empty memory” of the Austrian experience of theShoah. The article draws attention to ways in which the voice of the Other is overtakenby subjects who are in various ways dead and to Jelinek and Celan’s strategy of creatingan (anti)economy, meaning an excess of death that – by deconstructing language – pileslife-less voices or those that remain suspended between life and death.

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