ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 offers an analysis of Astronaut van Oranje (2013) by the Flemish authors Andy Fierens and Michaël Brijs. This novel expresses a vision of mnemonic engagement in which the past is approached as something that is available to an open-ended appropriation. It engages the legacy of World War II collaborationism in Belgium. However, rather than tackling this topic through morally inspired negotiations of guilt and accountability (as in first- and second-generation novels) or intergenerational dealings with questions of identity, it deals with this history as something that can be randomly implemented for literary purposes. This is manifest from the authors’ use of collaborationists’ names for its fictional characters. Although the collaborationist history is to a certain extent evoked by this, the historical personas become entirely tied up in a new, fictional universe. As Lensen argues in his reading, history is here first of all appropriated for fictional purposes, which expresses a view of cultural memory not just as a collection of (hi)stories, but also as a discursive reservoir from which one can select and implement freely and without reverence to historical accuracy, political sensitivities, or mnemonic rules.
