"Historien är förmodligen inte sann. Välj själv"

Arkiv, materialitet och minne i Eva-Marie Liffbers Imago

Abstract

This article discusses Eva-Marie Liffner’s novel Imago (2003) in relation to contemporary literary engagement with archives and archival practices. Informed by the archival turn – a theoretical shift that reconceptualized archives as sites of knowledge production and power rather than neutral repositories of the past, what has been labelled archival fiction interrogates the relationship between archives, history, and narrative. Drawing on perspectives from Jacques Derrida, Linda Hutcheon, Jerome de Groot, and literary criticism on archives, this article examines Imago as an instance of archival fiction, thematically and structurally problematizing the archive as a site of truth. Through its protagonist Esmé Olsen, who stumbles upon a box of documents from the Stasi archives, Imago engages with archival desire, materiality, memory, and the urge to reconstruct specific moments of the past. However, the novel ultimately resists the idea that archives can yield absolute truths and instead foregrounds gaps, silences, and the elusiveness of historical knowledge, questioning the possibility of retrieving what once happened.

Analysing Liffner’s novel in dialogue with recent critical discussions on archival fiction, the article argues that Imago complicates Chadwick’s & Vermeulen’s (2020) suggestion of different directions within such fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the article situates Liffner’s work within broader literary traditions and discusses how the combination of elements of historical novels, postmodern fiction, and gothic narrative informs Imago as an archival fiction. In conclusion, it is suggested that Liffner’s novels construct an intricate intertextual archive of recurring motifs, figures, and landscapes, ultimately illustrating how literary fiction engages with archives not only thematically but also at the level of form by enacting archival processes of accumulation, transformation, and reinterpretation.