That is why I am free to dream of Prague’: A Critique on Authorial Nationality Discourse and Historical Grand Narrative in Laurent Binet’s HHhH

Abstract

In Laurent Binet’s alternative historical novel entitles HHhH, published in French in 2010 and translated into English in 2013, the writer takes his readers beyond the historical facts of a particular event in the past, Operation Authropoid, to his own life as a French writer faced with the burden of his personal history and the perpetual struggle with the unattainability of historical truth. In this article, I propose that Binet’s conscious “otherness” to Central Europe , particularly the Czech and Slovak languages, cultures, and histories, set him “free to dream” of a different place/time and to imagine as well as introduce specters of the obscure and unknown “subaltern” in history, thereby adding critical dimensions to the critical rethinking and re(-)membering of the Czech and Slovak histories of violence and dissidence.