« Excessive Storytelling »: Seetzen as a Protagonist in the Postmodern Adventure Novel Empty Quarter – Rub ’al-Khali (1996) by Michael Roes

Abstract

In his novel Empty Quarter – Rub ’al-Khali, published in 1996, Berlin writer Michael Roes tells of a fictional traveller to the Orient, Ferdinand Alois Schnittke, who is searching for Moses’s Tablets of the Law in the late eighteenth century. The reflections of the nameless, first-person narrator living in Yemen serve as a contrafaction to Schnittke’s narrative. The postmodern anthropologist has discovered Schnittke’s travel records and also starts a journey in search of the Western ‘self’, anthropological dimensions of games and gaming, and the roots of Orientalism in modern times. Echoing the style of Umberto Eco, Roes has written a brilliantly told postmodern adventure novel, which was also submitted as a Habilitation thesis in the subject of Ethnology at the Free University of Berlin. Moreover, in the appendix, Roes not only listed the various games that he observed and described in Yemen, but also he meticulously breaks down the sources used in the historical narrative section, including Ulrich Jasper Seetzen’s Travels through Syria (posth. 1854–1859). My essay addresses the question of how (1.) Roes’s protagonist can be identified with Seetzen and (2.) how orientalism, anthropology, and postmodern self-reflection are related in the novel.