The Point of Death, the Point of Memory. Identity Politics in Juozas Šikšnelis’s “Horizon of Events” and Paweł Huelle’s “Castorp”

Abstract

The article proposes a comparative reading of two Central European novels: Paweł Huelle’s Castorp (2004) and Juozas Šikšnelis’s Horizon of Events (Lithuanian orig. Įvykių horizontas, 2006; Polish trans. 2015), examining how each text constructs and deconstructs identity through the interrelated categories of memory and death. Against the backdrop of existing Polish scholarship – including Jerzy Jarzębski’s palimpsest metaphor, Dariusz Skórczewski’s postcolonial reading, and Anita Zabłocka-Trojnar’s intertextual approach – the author argues that none of these frameworks, taken in isolation, can account for the structural mechanism by which “the point of death” and “the point of memory” function as instruments of imperial politics in Central and Eastern European literature. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory and Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, the article identifies a shared regional crisis of identity in which neither the fragile imprint nor the corrupted document can sustain a coherent narrative of selfhood.