The Fetishized Subject: Modes of Resilience in Madeleine Thien's Certainty 1

Resumen

his chapter offers an investigation of the different modes of resilience in Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty, a complex text with a three-plot structure and two main temporal frames, moving between Vancouver and Amsterdam in the early 21st century, and North Borneo, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Australia during and after World War II. Probing the novel’s contribution to the current debate over resilience and vulnerability, the analysis looks into how the two main characters, Gail and Mathew, cope with life-threatening personal experiences, including extreme survival conditions, war trauma, forced migration, disease, death and mourning. In the process, Thien’s text is seen as articulating the difference between at least two different figures: the subject of subaltern resilience and the subject of creative resilience. The chapter concludes by examining the position of those two subjects in the novel, their exposure to fetishization as well the modalities of agency that they may produce or foreclose.