The Somatic and the Epistemological in Ismail Kadare’s ”Stone Chronicles. A Time for Folly

The frailty of any discourse on – retrievable – history is alluded to by the very title of the book: ‘stone chronicles’, a syntagm that by no means yields the stability of, say, the Rosetta Stone or of the runes, but – paradoxically – the evanescence of any possible rendering of ‘real’ history, the fleeting nature of the canon more generally speaking, i.e. of canonically-imposed text. Real, unmediated access to historical event is but an illusion. The despotic presence of canonical representation is thus usurped on the epistemological battlefield. Indeed Lyotard at his best.