Narrating islands: fragmentation and totality as figures of thought in Raoul Schrott’s work

Abstract

This paper reflects on depictions of islands in two novels by the Austrian author Raoul Schrott (born 1964): his first novel, Finis Terrae: Manuscripts, from 1995, and the later Tristan da Cunha or Half of the Earth from 2003. I argue that Schrott's concepts and explorations of islands strongly influence the presentation and organisation of his texts. Finis Terrae and Tristan da Cunha exhibit distinctly different concepts of the insular. Whereas the earlier text accentuates a frail, fragmented, and almost mythical condition, the later novel Tristan evokes a plethora of Western topoi about islands and heavily relies on dualities. In both cases, island concepts are also reflected in narrative gestures: oppositions are central to interpreting and analysing Tristan da Cunha, and Finis Terrae revolves around fragmentation, vagueness, and loss. Islands are thus not only objects in the texts-they also determine the design and structure of the texts.

Islands as legible geographies: perceiving the islandness of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

“…The unambiguous water borders that characterise islands allow us to trace them in our minds. This is equally the case for an oceanic island such as Tristan da Cunha (Schällibaum, 2017), for a near-shore island such as Saaremaa (Cottrell, 2017), and for islands in the city with abundant fixed links such as Hong Kong (Leung et al, 2017) -though less so for island cities that have merged with the mainland through land reclamation, such as Macau (Sheng et al, 2017).…”