Complicity and the Politics of Representation 1786611201, 9781786611208

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction: Complicity and the Politics of Representation
Chapter 2. The Chapters
Part I. NARRATIVE COMPLICITIES AND COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING
Chapter 3. Complicit Configurations: Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton
Chapter 4. Complicity on the Small Screen: Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust
Chapter 5. Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution
Chapter 6. Guilt and Autonomy in Harmann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works
Chapter 7. An Illusion of Absence: The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant
Part II. ENFOLDINGS AND UNFOLDINGS
Chapter 8. A Radical Unfolding: Utopianism against Complicity
Chapter 9. Complicity: Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation
Chapter 10. A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life
Chapter 11. “I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple”: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks
Part III. NARRATIVE COMPLICITY CRITIQUES
Chapter 12. The Black Counter-Gaze: Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
Chapter 13. Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism: Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art
Chapter 14. Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies: Spotlight and Doubt
Chapter 15. “. . . to understand everything that came her way”: Complicity and the Child Protagonist
Works Cited
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Complicity and the Politics of Representation

Complicity and the Politics of Representation Edited by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2019 by Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth. Copyright of individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:  HB 978-1-78661-119-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78661-119-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78661-120-8 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments vii 1  Introduction: Complicity and the Politics of Representation Cornelia Wächter

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2  The Chapters Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth

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PART I: Narrative Complicities and Collective Remembering 3  Complicit Configurations: Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton Christoph Singer 4  Complicity on the Small Screen: Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust Volker Benkert 5  Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution Lorraine Markotic 6  Guilt and Autonomy in Hermann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works Olaf Berwald v

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Contents

 7 An Illusion of Absence: The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant 89 Ivan Stacy PART II:  Enfoldings and Unfoldings  8  A Radical Unfolding: Utopianism against Complicity John Storey

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 9 Complicity: Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation 121 Paul Reynolds 10  A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life Brendan Moran

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11  “ I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple”: Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks Mihaela Irimia

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PART III:  Narrative Complicity Critiques 12  The Black Counter-Gaze: Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 177 Alexandra Hartmann 13  Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism: Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art Elisabeth Punzi and Katrin Röder

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14  Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies: Spotlight and Doubt 217 Eli Teram 15  “. . . to understand everything that came her way”: Complicity and the Child Protagonist Elizabeth Gilbert

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Works Cited

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Index 267 About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

We would first like to thank Afxentis Afxentiou, Bob Brecher, Robin Dunford, and Michael Neu at the University of Brighton for sparking the interest that led to the creation of this volume. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Ruhr University Bochum, and the University of Paderborn for funding the conference that provided the basis for this volume. In this regard, we would also like to offer our special thanks to our colleague Andrea Krause for her selfless generosity, and to Andreas Schwengel and Nina Simon for helping us make the conference a success. Thanks are also due to Christoph Ehland and Christoph Singer for their careful proofreading and their astute feedback. We of course also owe a sincere debt of gratitude to Vivian Sper for her tireless and meticulous copyediting. We are moreover grateful to all the authors who kindly agreed to contribute to this volume. And finally, thanks are due to Sarah Campbell and Rebecca Anastasi at Rowman & Littlefield International for all their invaluable help and support.

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Chapter 1

Introduction Complicity and the Politics of Representation Cornelia Wächter

Spying is complicity raised to an art, and the novelist is a socially tolerated spy in league with many of our cruder instincts. —Geoffrey Hartman, “The Aesthetics of Complicity,” 1974

In 2017, social media reverberated with references to Jared Kushner’s and Ivanka Trump’s complicity with the Trump administration. A sketch by the American TV show Saturday Night Live, for instance, had actress Scarlett Johansson pose as Ivanka Trump promoting her new perfume with the slogan: “Complicit, the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this—but won’t” (2017). In the aftermath of the mock advertisement’s airing, the First Daughter was asked in an interview with CBS This Morning what she thought of the accusations of her being complicit, to which she responded: “If being complicit is wanting to . . . is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit. . . . I don’t know what it means to be complicit, but I hope time will prove that I have done a good job” (Trump 2017). Ivanka Trump was subsequently ridiculed for her sketchy defense, which is not surprising, as the overarching figuration or traditional view of complicity is predominantly negative (see Laidman 2017, 65). In Ivanka Trump’s mind, she is contributing to and complying and cooperating with the administration, while her critics would consider her role as complicit in the wrongdoing of that administration. In the wake of the satirical sketch, the term was searched for so often online that it was voted “Word of the Year 2017” on dictionary.com. This goes to illustrate that, despite its ubiquity, complicity remains an elusive concept. Even in the realm of philosophy, the thorough scrutiny of the term is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Tellingly, Mark Sanders remarks in his preface to Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002), “Until recently, there has been no full-scale philosophical exposition of complic1

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ity on which to draw” (x).1 Since then, a number of works from different fields have explored complicity in detail (see, for example, Firat, de Mul, and van Wichelen 2009; Lepora and Goodin 2013; Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017). Nevertheless, Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford, and Michael Neu significantly open their volume Exploring Complicity: Concept, Cases and Critique (2017) with the admission that “the questions about complicity with which [they] started remain” (1). Rather than reading this as inherently problematic, however, they argue that “any attempt to establish, once and for all, the nature and scope of complicity would do little more than shut down important avenues for critical analysis; and in so doing, it would detract from our ability to imagine effective resistance against the causes of avoidable harms that can be elucidated through the lens of complicity” (1). The present volume takes its cue from Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu’s Exploring Complicity and extends their exploration of the vexed complexities of the concept into the realm of literary and cultural studies and the politics of representation. Refusing to provide a clear-cut definition of complicity is not to say that no delimitations or minimal thresholds should be established. True to its etymological roots, the term complicity is rather complex: in fact, it derives from that very Latin word complex, “partner, confederate,” from complicare, “to fold together,” and arrived in the English language via the French complicité. While definitions of complicity vary widely, there is nonetheless a common ground shared by most, namely that complicity entails a (causal) contribution to wrongdoing. The emphasis here is on contribution because, to follow Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin, complicity is not an act of wrongdoing perpetrated by a principal or by several co-principals but a secondary act of wrongdoing (2013, 33). Those who are complicit contribute to wrongdoing rather than fully participate in it (80). A complicit act supports, or fails to prevent, someone else’s wrongdoing. Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu draw attention to the fact that the dominant conception of complicity in the contemporary Western world is an atomistic one, which assumes that there is a (morally right) “law of the land” and that complicity means contributing to, or failing to prevent, a violation of this law. They argue that this understanding fails to acknowledge that, quite frequently, the “law of the land” is itself constitutive of moral wrongdoing (2017, 2). Accordingly, while peaceful social life requires the establishment of norms and rules and the compliance of the members of society, the question arises as to when and under what circumstances compliance turns into complicity (Docherty 2016, 9). Compliance, as Thomas Docherty emphasizes, “is not neutral; rather, it is an acknowledgement (if tacitly held) that we subscribe to the institution’s aims” (10). In more general terms, our various



Introduction 3

and intersecting affiliations entail a tacit approval of the norms and values of the respective group or institution. If these norms and values operate to the detriment of others, our compliance transforms into complicity. When and under what circumstances compliance becomes complicity is thus also a matter of perspective—it lies in the eye of the beholder, that is, the law, the media, the victim, the perpetrator. Accordingly, while Ivanka Trump regards her contribution to and tacit approval of her father’s administration to be (positively connoted) compliance and cooperation, the same actions (and failure to act) constitute complicity in the eyes of her critics. This volume is predominantly concerned with probing these boundaries between complicity and compliance and with considering the ways in which representations contribute to negotiations of the “law of the land.” In line with the fact that the “laws of the land” are subject to change, and perspectives on those laws are equally mutable, complicity critiques, which over the past decades have become a research paradigm in literary and cultural studies, are also “historically specific, changing in response to changing conditions” (Pfister 2006, 123). Because attributions of complicity often serve precisely the questioning of the “law of the land,” especially as far as ideology is concerned, Paul Reynolds has argued for the conceptualization of complicity as a means of political rhetoric. He asserts that “the power of complicity lies in the construction of a political narrative able to highlight the blurred lines of culpability, liability and responsibility in dealing with oftencomplex events and social practices” (2017a, 35). It is as such that the study of complicity assumes its most powerful manifestation in the realm of literary and cultural studies, where the primary concerns are less a matter of the law than of moral culpabilities and correspondent political struggles. Reading complicity as a rhetorical tool serves to emphasize that it is necessary to consider complicity rhetoric in the context of its formation, as embedded in regimes of truth (Foucault). This is not to say that the contributors to this volume read the attribution of complicity as a matter of moral relativism. On the contrary, questioning the “law of the land” is a decidedly political and moral endeavor that attributes blame, also in the form of complicity; assuming such a stance also involves the ascription of blame to individual agents. This volume is, however, mainly interested in questions of complicity that concern the complex interplay between structure and agency, and the negotiations of the benefits and limitations of complicity attributions. For all the discrepancies in its definitions, what can be safely observed is that “complicity clearly comes in different degrees and in different kinds” (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 10), or, in Lepora’s and Goodin’s words, “complicity comes on a sliding scale” (2013, 8). I argue that complicity actually

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comes on several intersecting sliding scales that entail degrees of involvement, degrees of knowledge, degrees of intention, and degrees of agency. As far as degrees of involvement are concerned, I follow Lepora and Goodin in delimiting the definition of complicity by excluding cases in which there is no causal contribution to someone else’s wrongdoing at all and, at the other end of the spectrum, by ruling out cases in which principal agents act together in cooperation rather than one contributing to another’s wrongdoing as a secondary agent (2013, 33–34). Most of the chapters collected in this volume are concerned with the complexities surrounding different degrees of knowledge and agency. Degrees of knowledge, for instance, raise the issue of culpable ignorance, that is, when a person commits a moral wrong without being aware of the harmful nature of this act, but this lack of knowledge does not exculpate him or her because he or she “should have realized what [he or she was] doing” (Smith 1983, 544). As Ivan Stacy’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, questions of culpable ignorance can emerge in ostensibly innocent endeavors such as the appreciation of sublime landscape, if the underlying operation is the canceling out or occlusion of social injustice and suffering, and aestheticism thus serves as an ideological tool. Culpable ignorance is particularly pertinent to the realm of literary and cultural studies as far as the study of dominant ideologies is concerned. Ideology is characterized by the fact that its norms and values are naturalized. Accordingly, people often do precisely not know; they are not aware, and even if they are, turning against what is naturalized via ideology comes at the price of social sanctions. For that reason, literary and cultural studies have a long tradition of complicity critiques that serve to unmask such processes of naturalization and the ways in which they operate within and by means of texts. Complicity is paramount to the study of ideologies in a second respect, namely the fact that, as numerous theories guiding contemporary literary and cultural studies have demonstrated, oppression relies on complicity—on the part of those benefiting from the respective structures as well as those who are oppressed. To name but a few, we might think of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, of Pierre Bourdieu’s masculine domination, or of Judith Butler’s performativity. In all these cases, those who are oppressed contribute to the perpetuation of the power structures that keep them in check. It is a central concern of literary and cultural studies to render visible the often unconscious and embodied complicities that serve to uphold social injustice—be that by agents or by the representations they produce, be that by the oppressor or the oppressed. In fact, most of what Joel Pfister terms complicity critique describes the unmasking of author, producer, text, and character complicity in structures of social injustice.



Introduction 5

Ironically, this type of criticism, of course, runs the risk of becoming complicit itself. For instance, probing into and speaking on behalf of those marginalized by society may be the veiled way critics have of catering to their own “cruder instincts” by prying into the lives of social “others.” Speaking on behalf of one group may inadvertently or unwittingly contribute to the marginalization of another, or the critique may be a case of academic opportunism. To quote Pfister, “at their hermetic worst, complicity critiques can be historically decorated forms of a self-liberatory therapeutic confessionalism that partly purges the professional-managerial-class complicity critic as the critic announces his or her guilt and complicity” (2006, 138). Correspondingly, what Linda Hutcheon observed with regard to the critical potential of postmodernism should also be heeded when it comes to complicity critique. She cautions that while “postmodernism works to ‘de-doxify’ our cultural representations and their undeniable political import, [t]his is a strange kind of critique, one bound up, too, with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyse and maybe even undermine” ([1989] 2002, 4). The acknowledgment of one’s own structural implication and complicity may, however, also provide a basis for resistance. True to its etymological roots, Sanders reads complicity as “folded-together-ness (com-plic-ity)—in human-being (or the being of being human)” (2002, 5; emphasis in the original). Within the recognition of shared human-being, Sanders argues, lies the potential to recognize one’s foldedness with an “other” and one’s potential and/or structural complicity in social injustice perpetrated against that “other.” Sanders speaks of the necessity of acknowledging the “little perpetrator” in oneself and asserts that “it is only by recognising the potential for evil in each one of us that we can take full responsibility for ensuring that such evil will never be repeated” (2002, 3). The recognition and acknowledgment of complicity thus ideally provokes a sense of responsibility. To quote Debarati Sanyal, it “can serve as a catalyst for ethical and political action” (2015, 13). Docherty points out, however, that in the late capitalist present of so-called advanced economies, responsibility has become replaced by accountability in the managerial or neoliberal regime of truth. Whereas responsibility acknowledges our foldedness in human-being and calls us to action, accountability “is a much more insipid and neutral affair. It atomises the social world into discrete individuals, each acting in their own privatised sphere of existence, and it thereby fundamentally threatens the existence of friendship, collegiality, and common assembly—or, in three words, friendship, love, and politics” (Docherty 2016, 28, 20). The notion that it suffices to give account of one’s

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actions, that is, to provide a reasonable explanation, has come to replace awareness of the material consequences of one’s actions for other people’s lives and a corresponding sense of responsibility. According to Docherty, contemporary university systems, most notably in the United Kingdom, have come to facilitate this attitudinal shift in the wake of a neoliberal turn to managerialism—a shift that renders academics’ lives (sometimes literally) precarious and thus drives them into states of accountability and hence complicity. Brendan Moran, in this volume, is even more pessimistic about intellectual work and its potential to effect change for those suffering from social injustice. He argues, following François Laruelle, that intellectual work and the ensuing claims to an authorial identity not only cater to institutionally facilitated narcissism of academics but actually constitute a form of victimization in and of themselves. For all their criticism and pessimism, Docherty and Moran share with Sanders a belief in the potential of literature to impact positively on social injustice (Moran grants this potential as long as the authorial function is relinquished). Societies are suffused with various conflicting and intersecting ideologies, always struggling to achieve and maintain a hegemonic equilibrium. Authors, producers, and texts always—whether wittingly or unwittingly, and often both in different respects—take a side in this struggle. In the words of John Storey, “all texts are ultimately political. That is, they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be” (2012, 3). Texts may serve to perpetuate and legitimize social injustice— and thus invite complicity critique—but they may also themselves serve to question precisely those structures and perform what we would call representational or narrative complicity critique. Pfister complains that many critics “politicize literature-as-ideological-symptoms, but often can be less attuned to thinking through how literature and the arts might teach us how to repoliticize politics.” He therefore proposes to consider not only “the complicity of literature—and its authors, institutions, teachers, readers—but also the affirmative capacity of culture to help produce incentives, energies, feelings, and ideas that promote progressive social change” (Pfister 2006, 123). Reading complicity in terms of its etymology can serve to conceptualize the two in interrelation. Both Sanders and Docherty advocate the use of literature or “the literary” in instigating a sense of responsibility and in envisioning alternatives to a deleterious “law of the land.” Sanders argues that literature “calls upon a reader to assume responsibility for an other in the name of a generalized foldedness in human-being (and perhaps beyond human-being)” (2002, 17). Following Sir Philip Sidney’s argument in his “Apology for Poetry” (1595), Docherty similarly maintains that “poetry teaches us how the world can be, and it does



Introduction 7

so . . . by offering a world that might be, that can be inferred or that we can make” (Docherty 2016, 107). Martha Nussbaum moreover avers that “there is a complicity between the consciousness of the reader (and the writer) of stories and the consciousness, the morality, of perception. For stories cultivate our capability to see and care for particulars, not as representatives of a law, but as what they themselves are” (1990, 184). In his chapter in this volume, John Storey demonstrates how utopia, more specifically utopian desire, can operate as precisely such a radical opening or, playing upon the etymology of complicity, a radical unfolding. NOTE 1.  Among the few texts Sanders was able to draw upon were Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit (1987), the report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and Christopher Kutz’s Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age ([2000] 2007).

Chapter 2

The Chapters Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth

Both structurally and conceptually, this volume is divided into three parts: the first discusses and analyzes narrative complicities and collective remembering; the second explores the concept of complicity in light of its etymology, considering various unfoldings and enfoldings; and the third examines examples of texts that perform narrative complicity critiques. The contributions in the first part all view the politics and practices of collective remembering (and forgetting) of atrocities through the prism of complicity. They cover all levels of representational communication, ranging from authorial and textual complicities to narrative explorations of subjects’ complicity in war crimes (on the level of the told) to readerly complicities, as well as the interrelation between these levels. Frequently, as this part illustrates, the depiction of complicity on the level of the told (that is, characters’ complicities) serves to open up a discussion of complicity on the level of production (that is, producers’ and authors’ complicities) and thus facilitates the recognition of foldedness-in-human-being (see Sanders 2002, 5) and the acknowledgment of responsibility (see Docherty 2016). PART I: Narrative Complicities and Collective Remembering In “Complicit Configurations: Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton,” Christoph Singer examines fictionalized negotiations of the question in how far the British lawyer and Law Lord Cyril Radcliffe was co-responsible for the violence and mass-scale suffering following the Partition of India. Singer analyzes three distinct types of texts that all approach the question of Radcliffe’s complicity from a different perspective, 9

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namely W. H. Auden’s poem “Partition” (1966), Ram Madhvani’s short film “This Bloody Line” (2017), which was inspired by Auden’s poem, and Howard Brenton’s history play Drawing the Line (2013). Instead of attempting the thankless and essentially futile task of ascertaining whether the historical figure of Radcliffe may have either been complicit, that is, contributing to the wrongdoing of others, or whether he could or should, in fact, be deemed a co-principal, that is, even worse than complicit (see Lepora and Goodin 2013, 6), Singer looks at the historiography of Radcliffe’s role in the events that led to the displacement and demise of millions of human beings. In line with the key tenets of narrative ethics and their emphasis on particularity and embeddedness, Singer argues that narratives, rather than depicting a linear and monocausal progression of events that lead to complicity, allow for a mapping of the “logic of incrementalism” and “the representation of how social networks evolve and of how complicity [creeps] in and helps to ‘escalate’ (Laidman 2017, 68) the situation at hand” (32). These narratives, however, inevitably take a side. Stressing the need to distinguish between complicity on the intra- and extra-textual level, Singer examines how culpability and complicity are remembered in the case of Partition, posing the important question as to whether textual reifications of memories can be considered as acts of complicit historiography or as narrative complicities in their own right. As Homi K. Bhaba reminds us: “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye” (1990, 1). Thus, it is not only producers and their narratives but also uncritical consumers of those narratives that may render themselves complicit in narrative exculpations or occlusions of atrocities. In “Complicity on the Small Screen: Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust,” Volker Benkert is similarly concerned with what Singer calls narrative complicity in the construction of collective memories—in this case regarding the representation of “ordinary” Germans’ complicity with Nazi crimes. In the 1966 novel The Magus, John Fowles succinctly put the issue as follows: “But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good” ([1966] 2004, 132). While the guilt of that “one man” (and that of his henchmen) has been largely accepted, the verdict still appears to be out on the (degree of) complicity of ordinary Germans. Benkert in his contribution analyzes the negotiation of complicity of said “ordinary Germans” within two recent miniseries set in wartime and postwar Germany, namely Unsere Mütter Unsere Väter (2013) and Tannbach (2015). He thereby attempts to disentangle the complex relationship that Germans continue to have with their troubled past.



The Chapters 11

Produced for the German public broadcaster ZDF, the two series display a wide array of characters who could variously be categorized, to use Lepora and Goodin’s terminology, either as principal agents, that is, committing the wrongs themselves; as co-principals, that is, committing the wrongs together with others; or as secondary agents who are complicit with, that is, contributing to, the wrongs of others (2013, 33, 80). Interestingly, Benkert’s close reading shows that this rather clear-cut classification is only partially applicable with regard to the two series, as the characters and protagonists constantly undergo development throughout the course of the series. In UMUV, the intended audience is invited to follow the trajectory from the protagonists’ innocent youth, via becoming either principals, co-principals, or secondary agents in war crimes committed on the eastern front, to the redeeming conclusions in which either the characters’ direct or indirect participation is supposed to be accepted as a downgrading to mere contribution, (somewhat) relativized by brutalization, circumstance, and naivety. In Tannbach, on the other hand, this trajectory of character development starts off with a case of principal guilt, which is only hinted at after the fact but never explicitly expressed, the rendering of which eventually arrives at a similar concluding redemption of and apologia for the characters’ crimes and misdeeds. Rather than making the individuals directly responsible for their contribution, UMUV frames the complicity of its protagonists in apologetic terms: by evoking empathy for their suffering, and by positing the brutalizing effects and hardships of war, the allure of Nazi propaganda, or the imperative to follow orders as the main reason for their (heinous) actions. Tannbach achieves a similar effect by means of omission: the crimes committed or contributed to are not shown, only hinted at, which makes the redemption of the culprits more readily available. As Umberto Eco has pointed out (with regard to the contract between producer and audience), “You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience” (2005). This is achieved in both series by inviting the audience to empathize with the suffering that the war generation had to endure, to read ordinary Germans as (merely) complicit, albeit still leaving enough scope for victimhood. It thus tells us more about present-day attitudes toward historical complicity—and about contemporary narrative complicities—than about the past itself. Like Singer, Benkert compellingly demonstrates that complicity does not stop at the producers or the text, or the complicity negotiated within the text itself, but also shows that there is a case to be made for the complicity of the audiences who, if they uncritically accept the implied reading of the narratives that is suggested to them, can also become complicit. Staying within the theme of complicity with Nazi crimes introduced by Benkert, Lorraine Markotic, in her chapter titled “Literary Complicity and the Differend: Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representa-

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tions of National Socialist Persecution,” discusses the aporia of representing the unrepresentable. In his essay Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Theodor W. Adorno famously asserts that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” ([1951] 1983, 34); or, as he puts it in his Negative Dialectics ([1966] 2004), “All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage. . . . Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be” (367). Adorno’s crushing verdict of the futility of any form of artistic representation following the Holocaust sparked various heated debates about whether it was at all possible to represent—or, if that was the case, how to represent—the incommensurable horrors that fascism had produced. In addition to Paul Celan, who managed to convince Adorno to somewhat renege on his strong claim, it is Jean-François Lyotard who can probably be counted among Adorno’s fiercest critics (see, for example, Lyotard 1974). Instead of accepting Adorno’s blanket ban on representation (Bilderverbot), Lyotard stresses the importance of at least attempting to represent the unrepresentable. In the foreword to Heidegger and “the Jews” (1997), David Carroll sums up Lyotard’s stance as follows: “Lyotard makes the unrepresentable what all representation must strive to represent and what it must also be aware of not being able to represent; he makes the forgotten what all memory must strive to remember but what it cannot remember . . . especially ‘after Auschwitz’” (Carroll 1997, xiii). It is this concept of the differend that Lorraine Markotic persuasively applies to three novels that revolve around complicity with Nazi crimes—novels that (indirectly) attempt to take up Lyotard’s baton of creating new idioms in order to express the unexpressable, to depict the undepictable, but essentially, according to Markotic, fall short or fail: Albert Camus’s The Plague (1948), Alois Hotschnig’s Ludwig’s Zimmer (2000), and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997). Engaging with Docherty’s Complicity (2016) and Debarati Sanyal’s Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), Markotic argues that while the three novels under discussion all address questions of complicity with National Socialist persecution, they are simultaneously complicit themselves in misrepresentation by means of their respective representational forms. Like Markotic, Olaf Berwald explores the complex interrelations between ethics and poetics, or complicities of form, in the representation of atrocities. In his chapter, titled “Guilt and Autonomy in Hermann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works,” Berwald is specifically concerned with various forms of self-incrimination within writing. After briefly touching upon reflections on complicity and the interplay of ethics, rhetoric, and literature made by Max Picard, Elaine Scarry, Thomas Docherty, and Paul Reynolds,



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Berwald turns to questions of guilt, autonomy, and complicity in works by the British poet and essayist Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) and the Austrian novelist and philosopher Hermann Broch (1886–1951). Hill’s lyrical personae in his poems “Ovid in the Third Reich” (1968), “September Song” (1968), segments from his volume Speech! Speech! (2000), and “The Argument of the Mask” (2005) mourn victims of the Shoah while at the same time incriminating themselves of having been ambivalent bystanders. This ambiguity, Berwald argues, proffers but open-ended questions, and thus makes for productively uneasy reading by invoking a sense of moral outrage while simultaneously calling upon the reader “to realize that succumbing to the readily available impulse of moral superiority would mean becoming complicit in self-congratulatory complacency” (78). In the final part of his chapter, Berwald analyzes how protagonists in Broch’s novels Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers, 1928–1932), Die Schuldlosen (The Guiltless, 1950), and Der Tod des Vergil (1945, The Death of Virgil) regain autonomy (in one case by committing suicide) after having declared their guilt-by-indifference to warprofiteering. Berwald asserts that Broch’s “explorations of complicity and guilt-by-indifference [equally] resist the lure and convenience of supplying ‘certitudes’” (86), and as such “perform preliminary experiments, rather than providing any dogmatic formula” (84). Berwald’s close reading of these works explores “the gray zones of complicity” (77) and takes Hill and Broch seriously as nuanced discussion partners in asking how lyrical evocations and literary representations of complicity with violent regimes might be able to “address their own complicity with the very process they creatively offer up for further exploration” (75). Equally concerned with the representation and occlusion of atrocities and its function in the construction of collective memories, Ivan Stacy demonstrates how complicity may be lurking in apparently innocent and mundane pursuits—in this case the aesthetic appreciation of nature. In his chapter titled “An Illusion of Absence: The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant,” Stacy hones in on the picturesque to discuss in what way and to what end culpable ignorance as a form of complicity (see Lepora and Goodin 2013, 95) is negotiated in two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels: Remains of the Day (1998) and The Buried Giant (2015). By exploring the relationship between landscape and complicity in Ishiguro’s writing, as well as in its reception, Stacy invites us to revisit and reconsider the well-trodden “winding lane[s] and tranquil meadow[s]”—so famously oscillating betwixt and between “the sublime and the beautiful” (90). He does so in order to sensitize us to the various blind spots that complicit ways of looking can foster. Idealization of landscape, he contends, “produces a disposition whereby an individual is

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unwilling, or simply unaccustomed to, looking for the evidence of wrongdoing” (89), and thus constitutes an uncritical stance that, when it forms a repetitive pattern, can be read as a “form of moral complicity” because this “tacit assent becomes an enabling condition for atrocity” (90). These complicit ways of looking are negotiated on both the level of the told and on the level of reception. Stacy uses The Remains of the Day in order to illustrate, via Ishiguro’s depiction of Stevens the butler, how “small, local actions may contribute to wrongdoing on a world-shaping scale—in this case, the rise of the Nazi regime” (90). Like Markotic, he provides an interesting complement to Volker Benkert’s contribution in showing that even beyond Germany, “ordinary people” facilitated the rise of Nazism. In his discussion of The Buried Giant, Stacy shifts his gaze to the reader, exploring how “we might be framing the landscape, and how that framing might be a form of culpable ignorance” (90). Stacy thus asks us to become aware of our interpretative choices and to confront our own culpable ignorance in the reception of idyllic landscape representations. Accordingly, far from merely echoing previous studies on mythmaking in Ishiguro’s work, Stacy’s reading of what might be called “complicity by repetition” offers an innovative approach to conceptualizing depictions of landscape (and their complicity with ideology) along new lines. As far as complicity as a concept is concerned, he both echoes and applies Paul Reynolds’s contention that “culpable ignorance as complicity is an excellent example of an accusation of complicity that would be difficult to account for within a fixed, analytic definition, but can be potently woven into a political narrative” (2017a, 40). PART I: Enfoldings and Unfoldings Mark Sanders, in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002), was among the first to explore complicity from the perspective of its etymology. Pointing to the term’s Latin roots in complicare, “foldedness,” he is interested in the politics of intellectual “enfolding” and “unfolding” in the context of Apartheid South Africa, ultimately reading complicity, perhaps counterintuitively, as a positive form of “foldedness-in-human-being” that allows for the recognition of deleterious social structures and ultimately a basis for overcoming them. The contributors to this part equally take their cue from the fact that complicity etymologically denotes “foldedness.” Sometimes in line with Sanders, sometimes shedding a very different light on the matter, they consider the implications of complicity-as-foldedness with regard to the politics of representation.



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Approaching complicity from the perspective of utopian studies, John Storey’s contribution “A Radical Unfolding: Utopianism against Complicity” resonates strongly with both Docherty’s and Sanders’s work on complicity but places a stronger emphasis on ways and means of resistance. In contrast to Sanders’s reading of “foldedness” as (perhaps counterintuitive) grounds for responsibility and commitment (2002, x, 11), Storey regards it, more negatively, as complicity in restrictive and often deleterious social constructions of reality that demand a radical unfolding. In line with Docherty’s argument, Storey considers the greatest inhibiting factor of effective resistance to lie in the oppressive constitution of a reality that allows for neither alternative thought nor speech (see Docherty 2016, 19). Where Docherty focuses on the demand for the invention of “new languages” (2016, 24), Storey explores what he calls utopian desire as a driving force in attempts to see beyond the confines of socially constructed realities and thus as a means of resistance. Storey distinguishes between blueprint utopianism, that is, “models of the future,” and utopianism as utopian desire, that is, “the depiction or enactment of something that currently does not exist, or does not yet exist in a fully developed form, in order to incite the desire for it in the here and now” (107). Unlike the former, the latter radically transcends the social reality that is enforced upon us and that attempts to preclude resistant thought. His epistemological tour de force takes us from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (1954), from Jacques Lacan’s concept of lack to Freudian and Markusean desire, and urges us to imagine the impossible along new lines. Storey here echoes Slavoj Žižek’s call to arms expressed in the lecture The Reality of the Virtual: “We should dare to enact the impossible; we should rediscover how to, . . . not imagine, but to enact utopias. The point is not of planning utopias; the point is about practicing them. And I think this is not a question of should we do it or should we persist in the existing order? It’s a much more radical question, a matter of survival: the future will be utopian or there will be none” (Wright 2004, 1:13:17–1:14:03; transcription ours). Instead of “dismissing utopianism as hopelessly impossible,” Storey urges, we should “‘refus[e] to be realistic’” and thus avoid being complicit (119). Docherty believes in the power of poetry to transcend the confines of socially constructed reality (2016, 24). Storey similarly holds that utopianism as utopian desire can be evoked by means of representation, in that “the depiction of an imagined situation [can] produce the longing for such a situation in actuality” (108). Accordingly, he reads representations as not only a possible form of complicity critique but as a crucial means of overcoming complicity. In his contribution to Exploring Complicity (2017a), Paul Reynolds addresses the various problems revolving around terminological exactitude within ascriptions of complicity, and he thus maintains that complicity should

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be primarily regarded as a rhetorical device and not solely as an analytical concept. He makes the convincing case that “the power of complicity emerges from its successful deployment within language games, and not from its precise, analytical use” (Reynolds 2017a, 47–48). In “Complicity: Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation,” Reynolds’s contribution to the present volume, he revisits his earlier argument and explores “the concept of complicity as a cultural politics of representation that provides a conceptual ‘glue’”—a form of foldedness—“for the construction of . . . veiled, hidden, and hegemonized associations and relationships” (121), which as such allows for the development of framings that build counter-hegemonic narratives or radical unfoldings in Storey’s terms. In order to expand on and test his argument, Reynolds critically engages with various points raised by Thomas Docherty in his Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment (2016). Reynolds contends that in Docherty’s analyses it is not complicity itself but rather the correlating concepts of “responsibility, collaboration, conformity, and other concepts in the language game of relationship and association [that] do the effective work” (131). According to Reynolds, Docherty himself ultimately draws upon these related concepts in order to construct a persuasive argument regarding the cases of complicity under discussion. Reynolds goes on to maintain that the force of Docherty’s argument thus does not lie in his deployment of complicity as analytical but as a rhetorical tool. Docherty’s work, to Reynolds, is paradigmatic of the fact that articulation is of prime significance. He maintains that, in the characterization of complicity, the main driving force is the ability of the rhetorician and the way he or she constructs his or her narrative and composes his or her representation. Rhetorical power lies in the capacity to evoke cohesive and persuasive narratives as narratives rather than narratives that find purchase in accuracy in depicting particular associations, responsibilities, and connections. Accordingly, complicity is not dependent upon the relationship between characterization and analyzed subject, but selfreferentially within complicity narratives themselves. Reynolds thus combines a positively connoted view of complicity-as-enfolding with Storey’s vision of a radical unfolding. Like Sanders (2002) and Docherty (2016), Brendan Moran, in his contribution titled “A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life” is concerned with intellectual complicities and the quest for ways of overcoming them. Both Sanders and Docherty emphasize the responsibility of intellectuals toward those who are subject to social harm, and they explore gateways to the recognition of precisely that responsibility. Moran, by contrast, interrogates the motives for and the implications of academics assuming responsibility for and speaking on behalf of others. In line with



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Joel Pfister (2006), Moran explores the complicity dilemma inherent within complicity critique and asks how any form of critique of complicity can be applied without becoming or being complicit itself. Following deliberations by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and in particular François Laruelle, he highlights witting or unwitting complicities with the “author function” and correspondingly with narcissism and obsequiousness. Sanders, for instance, reads advocacy as “a version of the essential human foldedness whereby one can assume the place of another” (2002, 17). Moran, by contrast, holds that “victims become an occasion for the philosopher’s self-aggrandizement” (152), and “intellectuals who presume to speak on behalf of victims are also exerting their own strength over victims” (150). Sanders and Docherty maintain that change is possible if full and personal responsibility is assumed, and literature is considered to be a significant force in this respect. For Moran, laying the basis for change demands the sacrifice of the “author function” and attendant complicities. Again, literature is regarded as a key facilitator—but it is a literature whose non- or even anti-complicity (see Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 11) is founded in collectivity. Only by giving up claims to authorship and thus recognition can complicity be avoided. In “I spy with my little eye something complicity simple: EighteenthCentury Caricature Tricks,” Mihaela Irimia delves even more deeply into the complex etymology of the term complicity to discuss complicity displayed in eighteenth-century caricatures that satirize the opulent and excessive hairstyles of high society. Irimia points out that complicare, “to fold together,” is relevant to the politics of representation in two ways: for one thing, in the sense of a foldendess that “induces in our minds the tricky-wicked indirectness of language. Canny and deceitful, duplicitous and guileful, words can be at once revelatory and obscure, folding up and unfolding their message according to the craft of the user” (160). Second, we can read complicity as “foldedness” in the sense of “holding together text, author, and reader in a given cultural context” (159). The complicities involved can either be occluded—rendering the text more complicit—or divulged, in which case the text draws attention to precisely those complicities. Irimia takes as her example eighteenth-century complicities with a perpetual craving for novelty, hedonism, and opulence, metonymically represented by increasingly ostentatious hairdos. As Lisa Jones put it succinctly, “hair issues are among us. . . . We must tease them out, hold them up to the light, and coax them into art” (1994, 303). The same held true in the eighteenth century. Taking Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1717) as her starting point, Irimia shows that complicity involves more than may readily meet the eye. Drawing on William Hogarth’s Characters and Caricaturas

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(1743) and on its hypotext Caricature Heads (c. 1590) by Annibale Caracci, she analyzes the various ways in which caricatures can expose society’s fads and fashions by means of exaggeration, ridiculing, and lambasting. Artifice gained prominence as a complicity “in the service of the public show” (165). This illustrates a third kind of foldedness in the sense of a lady and her servants’ “complicit session[s] of private-into-public metamorphosis” (170), in which “the simple (Latin sine ‘without’ plica ‘fold’) [is] disguised or/ and concealed as complex (Latin com ‘with’ plica)” (170). Paradoxically, as Irimia illustrates, the texts in question demonstrate that women’s complicity was perceived as emancipatory rather than as symptomatic of oppression in “a new dialectics of sameness and otherness” (161). Irimia’s interest in complicity as a “holding together” moreover leads her to explore what she calls intertextual complicity, manifesting, for instance, in a shared vocabulary of signs denoting precisely the kind of opulence that was celebrated to the extreme. She thus illustrates how caricatures can serve as complicity critique or even a form of anti-complicity—an issue that is explored more extensively in the third part of this volume. PART III: Narrative Complicity Critiques The contributions in this part are concerned with precisely the kinds of texts that, for instance, Sanders, Docherty, or Storey envision when speaking of literature as a form of commitment or unfolding because the texts themselves perform narrative complicity critiques. Applying concepts from critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and embodiment theory, Alexandra Hartmann, like Sanders (2002), explores the recognition of complicity as a productive force in its own contestation. Unlike Sanders, however, she does not focus on intellectuals but on “ordinary” people and the operation of white privilege in everyday life. In “The Black Counter-Gaze: Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” Hartmann discusses Rankine’s book-length poem Citizen: An American Lyric (2010) to demonstrate how the depiction of everyday complicities can be rendered productive by means of a narrative black counter-gaze, in George Yancy’s terms (2012). Citizen not only depicts and discusses instances of racially motivated violence but particularly draws attention to the operation of microaggressions in everyday life. These microaggressions, while all too visible to people of color, are often barely visible or simply denied by whites. Rankine’s book combats this form of (culpable) ignorance and draws attention to the fact that if attention is focused on racially motivated violence only—and thus only on “bad white people”—the multifarious ways in which “ordinary” whites



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contribute to and perpetuate social injustice remain occluded. This structural injustice, in turn, provides fertile ground for racially motivated violence. Citizen, as Hartmann points out, generates intimacy—or foldedness-inhuman-being, to speak with Sanders—in order to bridge the color line, and, by way of empathy and identification, calls upon the reader to act. In this sense, to draw upon John Storey’s chapter, narrative representations of complicity in Citizen serve as a radical unfolding. Hartman’s chapter thus highlights the fact that, while it may be virtually impossible not to be complicit in white privilege, Citizen, and the entreaty it makes to its readership, invites deliberate anti-complicit acts that, in accumulation, may eventually effect substantive social change. Hartmann therefore argues that “conceptualizing complicity allows for or even requires a critical analysis of cultural practices that remains carefully aware of the powerful grasp of the structures we inhabit and live but also of the human agency to struggle against and break with these structures again and again. It can thus point the way to more sustained activism and more self-conscious cultural practices” (192). Accordingly, Hartmann’s reading of Rankine’s poetic bricolage achieves two things: it first elucidates in what way the “seemingly inconsequential, everyday forms of complicity,” to use Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu’s words (2017, blurb), often go unnoticed, and second illustrates how critique of such forms of complicity, when and if applied properly, can foster increased “racial literacy,” prevent one-sided allocation of blame, and challenge “invisibility of privilege” in general without reverting to acrimonious finger pointing. By way of Amanda Green’s autobiographies and Anna Odell’s performance art, Elisabeth Punzi and Katrin Röder analyze representations that put our preconceptions of mental health and illness to the test. In their chapter titled “Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism: Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art,” the contributors productively link the concept of anti-complicity (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017) with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, that is, the telling of truth in the face of power, and apply them to narrative challenges to mentalism—modes of thinking that position mental illness as the binary opposite of mental health. More generally, by drawing upon insights and tools from critical psychiatry and discourse theory, the two contributors demonstrate that and in what ways the genres of life writing and performance art are particularly useful tools for exposing complicity with mentalism. Punzi and Röder’s analysis of Green’s and Odell’s work compellingly shows that by buying into such mentalist ways of thinking, doctors, clinicians, and entire healthcare systems have adopted diagnostic practices and treatments that—instead of being beneficial to the well-being of patients—can, in fact, be counterproductive and even harmful, as the diagnoses and treatments that

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mental health professionals apply may lead to stigmatization, pathologization, or othering (of women in particular) and, once the damning diagnosis has ossified a patient’s untrustworthiness, may result in the silencing of patients’ voices. Reading this in terms of what Docherty calls “institutional complicities” (Docherty 2016, 10), the authors demonstrate how, especially within the discursive formation of mentalism, compliance with institutional rules and norms can easily (albeit often unwittingly) turn into complicity with social injustice. Mentalism, particularly in the form of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), constitutes precisely the kind of linguistic reduction, which delimits what can be thought and said about a given subject, that Docherty so productively links to complicity (2016, 19). Punzi and Röder show that daring to “speak a different language,” that is, a language beyond the DSM, daring to speak truth in the face of oppression in the sense of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, frequently entails either being silenced or simply remaining unheard. Accordingly, as far as the experience of mental distress is concerned, the examples discussed are attempts at, to use Docherty’s words, “changing the language, opening the language to possibility” (2016, 19). The artists not only perform anti-complicity in their projects but, perhaps more importantly, allow readers and audiences to become aware of the structural injustice underlying mentalist thought, including their own probable (although often unwitting) complicity with this way of thinking. They thus perform a narrative form of complicity critique. The kind of institutional complicity Punzi and Röder are concerned with ultimately aims to achieve a positive outcome (the patients’ well-being) but linguistically suppresses its often disastrous consequences. Eli Teram addresses a different form of institutional complicity that serves to suppress or curtail knowledge—in this case, to speak in Erving Goffman’s terms, in order to safeguard institutional “impression management” in the face of potential scandals surrounding child sexual abuse. Teram’s contribution, titled “Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies: Spotlight and Doubt,” examines two films that both revolve around cases of complicity with the sexual abuse of children—a form of abuse that is ever-present yet constantly denied or covered up. While the two films start off from a similar premise, namely the quandary that both individual and collective complicity can produce when it comes to sexual child abuse or the cover-up thereof, they differ considerably in their respective negotiation of the moral and ethical implications such complicity may entail. Like the real-life investigative journalists that it is based on, the film Spotlight (2015) on the one hand manages to expose the staggering extent to which religious, political, and governmental institutions in the city of Boston can be considered co-responsible for the abuse of children. In this regard, Teram distinguishes between the various degrees of complicity of either institutions



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or individuals, their complicity taking the form of either turning a blind eye, keeping schtum, helping the perpetrators go scot-free for so long, obstructing the course of justice, or of contributing to the wrongdoing of others by feigning (culpable) ignorance. The emphasis here lies on the co-responsibility of the many in covering up and obfuscating the misdeeds or horrid actions of the (“elect”) few, thus posing the question as to whether it is warranted to speak of only a few bad apples when, in fact, it seems to be the whole tree that is rotten to the core. As the title already suggests, in Doubt (2008), the answers as to why (and how) an individual may become complicit in the physical and mental abuse of children are not as readily forthcoming. Teram here astutely analyzes the complicity dilemma posed in one particular scene in which the question arises whether to take a gay boy who is abused by one of the teachers/priests out of school or whether that boy is best served by leaving him in school and letting him graduate. The heated discussion that Teram analyzes is between the boy’s mother and Sister Aloysius, one of the boy’s teachers. Both have the well-being and best interest of the child in mind. However, neither option available, whether to take him out of school or to leave him in, would avoid becoming complicit. Following Docherty, we may argue that the strength of the film lies precisely in its undecidability, in the fact that it is not “closed.” It invites us to hesitate; it operates by “hold[ing] us in reserve” (Docherty 2016, 118), and thereby constitutes the basis for effective (and anti-complicit) criticism. To remind ourselves, complicity, as Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu have pointed out, may not only lie in contributing to violations of the “law of the land” but often in adherence to that law. Docherty draws attention to the fact that the social bonds we form require compliance and that this compliance may turn into complicity if the aim of the institution in question becomes morally dubious or wrong (2016, 10). Teram’s examples illustrate such transformations from compliance into complicity and furthermore highlight the fact that complicity dilemmas may arise from the different social bonds we form in different contexts. The chapter demonstrates moreover how examining complicity dilemmas in representations can serve as a valuable didactic tool—in this case for those working in social services and battling child abuse. In the twenty-first century, examining childhood as a cultural construct has gained significant critical impact in the field of literary and cultural studies. The child’s liminal position of being both representative of and morally exempt from society, while embodying that society’s future, has traditionally led authors to find the child to be a perfect surface onto which nostalgic and utopian desire can be projected. Contemporary authors, by contrast, are increasingly deconstructing the myth of innocent childhood; instead they

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deploy the child as a particularly interesting figure for the exploration of the intricacies of moral culpability beyond the legal realm, especially as far as questions of structure vs. agency and knowledge vs. (culpable) ignorance are concerned. Complicity, as Elizabeth Gilbert demonstrates in her contribution, “‘to understand everything that came her way’: Complicity and the Child Protagonist,” assumes central significance in this respect. Gilbert asks the pertinent question as to whether children, while generally not legally liable, can be held morally accountable for their complicit actions or refusals to act. In order to arrive at answers, she analyzes the ways in which contemporary novels by Kate Atkinson, Michael Frayn, and Ian McEwan negotiate the respective complicity of their child protagonists, shedding light on their varying states of culpable ignorance, their involvement with crime and death, their reliability, and their agency in contribution to wrongdoing. Gilbert holds that children are particularly interesting canvases on which to narratively play out complicity dilemmas. At the same time, provoking empathy and readerly emotional investment in the child’s innocence is likely to lead readers into what Gilbert calls a complicity trap (236) and thus constitutes a case of narratological complicity (230). In this sense, the narratological complicity Gilbert draws attention to shows the opposite side of the narrative complicity critique that is performed, for instance, in the primary texts discussed in the chapters by Teram, Hartmann, and Punzi and Röder. It is not, however, a narcissistic endeavor of pointing a critical finger at texts and authors. Instead, Gilbert highlights how the narratological complicity trap can in turn invite a (re)examination of ideological gullibility. If we want to believe in the child’s innocence against our better judgment and catch ourselves doing so, this provokes a distancing effect that asks us to be wary of the seductive powers of literature—it invites us to be noncomplicit. As the examples in this volume show, representations in various media can not only be complicit, they can perform complicity critiques and offer alternatives. They can render visible not only deleterious social structures but also the often subtle but no less harmful complicit ways and means of their perpetuation. Representations can illustrate boundaries, conundrums, cases of complicity, and complicity dilemmas. Moreover, such representations go to show that complicity does not happen in a void. Among the main reasons why a significant number of philosophers turned to the study of narratives in the 1980s was that narratives take account of the fact that we are all embodied beings within a specific sociocultural environment with our own histories. For one thing, this means that the “autonomous moral agent” of moral philosophy is precisely not the unencumbered white, middle-class male that he had tacitly been assumed to be. It is instead necessary to emphasize that people are nonideal agents in nonideal circumstances, and that it is in these that we need



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to act as moral agents. Narratives can thus help us explore what complicity is in the messiness of actual, embodied, particular life. The contributions to this volume both enfold and unfold—they use the analysis of representations in order to highlight ways in which these representations construct and emphasize foldedness-in-human-being so as to counter binary thinking and social injustice; they also implicitly and explicitly deploy these representations to advocate change. The contributions both perform complicity critiques of representations and read representations as complicity critique—and the one, quite often, is enfolded in the other.

Part I

NARRATIVE COMPLICITIES AND COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING

Chapter 3

Complicit Configurations Narrating the Partition of India in Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton Christoph Singer

The terrible thing is, the terrible thing . . . I really do believe he is trying to be fair. —Howard Brenton, Drawing the Line, 2013

In a 2015 online article in The Hindu, Ramakrishnan M. discusses the political genesis and bloody outcome of the Partition of India. He is especially interested in the so-called Radcliffe Line, the border separating India and Pakistan. The border is named after its creator, the English barrister Cyril Radcliffe, who in 1947 was tasked with drawing the infamous line. Radcliffe’s degree of complicity with the violence and political conflicts following Partition is, according to Ramakrishnan M., still open to debate: “Close to about seven decades after the accelerated chapter of independence, debates still rage on how much Radcliffe was complicit in triggering diplomatic tensions that simmer and boil to this day” (2015). In the following chapter I will discuss the question of Cyril Radcliffe’s complicity as represented in W. H. Auden’s poem “Partition” (1966), Ram Madhvani’s short film “This Bloody Line” (2017), which depicts Radcliffe’s response to the caustic poem, and Howard Brenton’s history play Drawing the Line (2013). These texts are deeply concerned with Radcliffe’s legacy and co-responsibility for the violence subsequent to Partition. After a short historical introduction to Cyril Radcliffe and the Radcliffe Line, I will discuss the highly contested historiography concerning Partition’s aftermath as depicted in the three texts.

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POSTMEMORIES OF PARTITION The texts discussed in this chapter can be subsumed under the term Long Partition, coined by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar (2007). Long Partition stresses the enduring influence of the separation of British India into Hindustan and Pakistan on August 14 and 15, 1947, an influence that can still be felt more than seventy years later. The Partition of India was one of the bloodiest and most violent historical events of the twentieth century. The birth of Pakistan and India saw a subcontinent ripped apart, the aftermath of which continues to affect not only the two nuclear powers but the whole region. Partition left approximately one million women, men, and children dead and turned an estimated fifteen million into refugees. Perpetrators and victims are to be found among all classes, castes, and creeds. In the words of the (heterodiegetic) narrator of Kushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, “Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped” (1956, 1). Over seventy years later, questions concerning complicity and culpability remain as unanswered as they were in 1947. To this day, the influence of Partition is shaping the political and sociocultural landscape of South Asia and beyond. Here one finds not only a dispute over geographical territory, as seen in the Kashmir region, but also a contest over economic and military dominance of the whole region. Equally contested are the narratives surrounding Partition and its aftermath. The Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal argues, for instance, that as a defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future. There can be no real understanding of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh without the full grasp of the lasting impact of partition on their self imaginings, political contestations, and national projections. (2013, 4)

Yet trying to make sense of traumatic events with the help of narratives is highly complicated. As Amrijit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola maintain, “the Partition is a tragedy of multiple narratives, and any single historical account might cover just one geographical facet, or the perspective or bias of one particular region or community” (2016, xvi). Hence, to remember Partition often means to confirm or reject the respective national narratives. As a consequence, the very act of commemorating can result in becoming complicit with nationalistic or militaristic agendas. William Dalrymple, for



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example, adds in this regard that “today, both India and Pakistan remain crippled by the narratives built around memories of the crimes of Partition, as politicians (particularly in India) and the military (particularly in Pakistan) continue to stoke the hatreds of 1947 for their own ends” (2015). One may also be complicit with state actors that try to suppress any memories of Partition’s bloody consequences. Alongside a propagandistic misuse of historical events, one also has to consider an outright ignorance toward the past. Such “imperial amnesia,” as Shashi Tharoor claims, neglects a moral imperative to remember: “History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present” (2017, 235). Whereas Tharoor identifies such a contemporary amnesia largely on the side of the former colonizers, Menaka Guruswamy, for example, equally perceives the way Partition is treated in India as a form of amnesia. This amnesia, her argument implies, is sanctioned by the very institutions that were complicit with Partition’s violence: “On August 14 and 15, 1947, while many Indians and Pakistanis rejoiced, others stumbled into a darkness that was characterised by large-scale killing, looting and systematic degradation, sometimes with the complicity of authorities, rulers of princely states and religious leaders” (2016). One has to keep in mind these unreliable memories when discussing narrative and fictionalized representations of Partition. What complicates matters of historiography and commemoration is the fact that these distorted memories are often postmemories, a concept introduced by Marianne Hirsch. In relation to the Holocaust, Hirsch argues that “postmemory characterizes the experiences of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (1996, 659). By no means wanting to equate the Holocaust with Partition, I would nonetheless like to claim that the concept of postmemory also applies to the latter because both share the problem of how to relate traumatic events that “can be neither understood nor recreated.” When considering especially the relationship between trauma and silence—that is, trauma as the inability to express experiences—the writing of historical narratives is further complicated. This transgenerational question of memory and complicity becomes particularly interesting when we take a look at contemporary commercials. In 2013, Google India, for instance, released a four-minute advertisement that quickly went viral. The advert, titled “Reunion,” tells the fictional story of two childhood friends who were separated after Partition: Baldev, who was forced to move to New Delhi, and Yusuf, who remained in Lahore. Many years later the reunion of the two elders is organized by Baldev’s tech-savvy Indian granddaughter and Yusuf’s Pakistani grandson. Both, of course, use Google’s services.

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While the narrative takes its cues from a historical event, the depicted characters are actors, the diary and photos are fake, and their stories are fictional. While the fictionality is not a problem per se, one has to wonder what the ethical implications are of using a historical catastrophe for commercial gain. Not only does the commercial’s plot present an attempt at dissolving borders, Google, more importantly, dissolves the borders between commercial interest and political action. And in doing so, the commercial has to gloss over important aspects of Partition’s history that may not be quite as self-evident as viewers are made to believe. As mentioned earlier, this chapter does not intend to pass judgment on the actors involved in the preparation and the aftermath of the Partition of India. Rather I want to examine first how culpability and complicity are remembered, and second whether the textual forms these memories take—poetry, plays, and films—can be acts of complicit historiography in their own right. NARRATIVE COMPLICITY How can postmemory be translated into a narrative of any kind? How can one circumvent narrative complicity? When it comes to narratives, complicity needs be discussed on two levels. On an intra-textual level, complicity is a recurring theme on the story level. Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton turn the question of Radcliffe’s complicity into one of their main themes. On an extratextual level, one can and one should ask how these texts attempt steer clear of any kind of complicity. How do they attempt not to fall into the trap of furthering political propaganda, one-sided or wrong historization, or avoid— in the case of Auden and Brenton—Eurocentric perspectives? Following Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford, and Michael Neu, I consider complicity to be “a valuable and underestimated tool for the analysis and critique of social relations” (2017, 1). For my discussion, I would like to stress especially the importance of an analysis of complicity in light of these “social relations,” rather than restricting myself to a limited perspective on individual actors. These social relations are necessarily embedded in hierarchical as well as socioeconomic power structures. In the case of Radcliffe, the various texts repeatedly stress his conflicting and irreconcilable allegiances: on the one hand, he is dependent and (initially) loyal to his government; he likes to present himself as a dutiful servant of his declining empire. On the other hand, Radcliffe is in a position of unprecedented geopolitical power. Radcliffe’s loyalty as well as sense of morality is constantly tested and shifting. Based on his place among this network of social relations, in all three texts his perception of what actually would entail complicit actions constantly



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shifts and alters in all three texts. And ultimately, especially in Brenton’s play, Radcliffe is very much aware that, in one way or another, his actions are very likely to facilitate wrongdoing. “A complicit act,” as Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu point out, “contributes, in some way, to wrongdoing. It facilitates wrongdoing, covers it up, or makes it possible in the first place by creating the conditions which enable it to occur” (2017, 2). This notion of complicity recalls Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin’s basic premise that a complicit act can be read as a causal contribution to the wrongdoing of others. Such a contribution, they rather vaguely claim, needs to cross the “minimum ‘responsibility threshold’” (2013, 6). The vagueness of this definition, however, is quite helpful in the sense that this is the central conflict with regard to remembering the Radcliffe Line. Historiography in general, and partition history in particular, have a tendency of being either over- or underemphasized, especially as far as the role of individuals is concerned. The concept of complicity sharpens the focus on social relationships and thus bridges the gaps between “High Politics” (that is, history perceived as being mostly enacted by those in power) and “people’s histories” (that is, the often silenced experiences but also the responsibilities of affected citizens). One of the problems regarding definitions and attributions of complicity is where to draw the line. In the words of Pam Laidman, “If we consider everyone necessarily to be complicit, then it may seem that the concept of complicity becomes meaningless and unhelpful. If everyone is complicit all the time, then, one might conclude, no one ever is” (2017, 70). Such generalizations may undo what a focus on the nodes of complicity within social networks invites: a careful examination of the genealogy, the execution, and the effects of complicit acts. Combining a broader perspective on social networks with a more focused analysis of causal relationships within such social networks may prevent the devaluation of complicity merely as a theoretical tool and as cultural currency. Complicity, after all, is as much a process as it is an end result. Say a complicit actor may want to achieve a positive outcome, yet her or his actions could lead to, facilitate, and result in negative consequences. In this light I would like to concentrate on complicit acts that “could also refer to, e.g., an insidious, creeping series of acts, something which can, following complicity’s ‘logic of incrementalism’ . . . escalate into catastrophic wrongdoing” (Laidman 2017, 68). From this perspective, the prehistory of Partition could be read as such a “creeping series of acts.” This approach may also help to avoid reading a purely malicious intent into Partition politics. While these politics were divisive, rushed, and ill conceived, and the eventual violence was foreshadowed by the Calcutta Riots, the ultimate outcome was not intended.

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Narrative forms are then predestined to probe such a “creeping series of acts.” Narratives, after all, are forms of emplotment and of causally connecting certain acts and events. Historical narratives in conjunction with individual and fictional narratives allow for a closer introspection of the complicated correlations of cause and effect and their complicit temporalities. Narratives allow for a conception of complicity as a process and a representation of how social networks evolve and of how complicity is creeping in and helps to “escalate” (Laidman 2017, 68) the situation at hand. Tracing complicity by means of narratives then offers a focus on social relationships among actors in a given sociohistorical context. Plots, which are by definition perceived as a connection of events, causally connected by means of interpretation, invite an analysis of all the nodes in acts of decision making that lead to complicit actions. Naturally, narratives are constructions, and as such they are also some of the essential building blocks of social networks. Laidman argues that “the collective memory we share with others not only frames, but also enables and builds our identity. In a practical sense others tie us to places and spaces, evoking emotions, giving us a sense of rootedness, avoiding alienation and giving us a voice that can be heard” (2016, 70). As illustrated earlier, narratives of Partition are highly contested, politically charged, and, due to their traumatic nature, the underlying questions of guilt and responsibility are anything but clear cut. A vague concept like “historical truth” is hard to maintain and even harder to transform into a coherent and reliable narrative. This may be one of the reasons why Auden, Madhvani, and Brenton focus on one man, Cyril Radcliffe. With their choice, all three authors seem to acknowledge that a comprehensive discussion of Partition’s historical realities would result in unwieldy narratives that may obfuscate more than they explain. Additionally, they seem to have found in Cyril Radcliffe a historical person that lends himself to such historical explorations; just like the eventual readers of their literary texts, Radcliffe entered the political proceedings with great responsibility yet without much prior knowledge of the situation that he was tasked to resolve. And he left the scene quickly. From a dramatic point of view, a focus on Radcliffe reduces a tragedy, whose causes can be traced back for centuries, to a period of a few weeks. It also reduces a vast and complicated network of political actors to a man who suddenly finds himself at the very center of a conflict that would come to determine the fate of millions of people. So who is this Cyril Radcliffe, and what was his role in the weeks leading up to the Partition of India? Jisha Menon introduces Radcliffe as a wealthy and successful barrister, well known for his loyalty to the British government and his perspicacious intellegence, [who] was selected for the momentuous task of delineating the boundary between the two nation-states. A surpris-



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ing choice, Radcliffe had little expertise in matters of boundary allocation; he had no experience of India, never having visited the region. Radcliffe himself expected to have two years to complete his task, which was subsequently curtailed to six months. On his arrival in India, however, he was informed that he must produce the Boundary Award within seven weeks. (2013, 30–31)

Radcliffe’s story, on the one hand, allows for the discussion of the complicity of a rather powerful and privileged individual. On the other hand, Radcliffe’s story may also be read as a prime example of a type of decision maker who, despite his best intentions, is out of his depth. As such, Radcliffe is both an individual and a type and therefore offers a perspective that allows us to bridge the dichotomy between Old and New History. This dichotomy is introduced by Richard H. Palmer in his study on The Contemporary British History Play (1998), as follows: At least as defined by the New Historians, Old History consists principally of a narrative, chronologically organized and presented as objective fact, of political and military events, whose importance is determined by the dominant hegemony, and of the men who shaped these events, all seen from a Eurocentric viewpoint. . . . The New Historians reject the possibility of objectivity, distrust the effectiveness of narrative as a device for analyzing history, stress the relative unimportance of chronology in understanding history, discredit the significance of political and military activities to the majority of people, question the power of individuals to shape events, repudiate the emphasis given in past histories to largely masculine activities, and repudiate the bias of an exclusively European viewpoint. (12)

Neither Auden’s poem on Partition nor Brenton’s play fit neatly into this categorization of Old and New History. But Palmer’s outline offers a number of perspectives on which to base the following analysis, such as the “effectiveness of narrative” for analysis, the unimportance of chronology, and the “power of individuals to shape events.” Auden’s and Brenton’s emphasis on Radcliffe invites us to ponder how the texts themselves remember the events leading up to Partition and how the texts represent Radcliff as remembering and evaluating his own actions. W. H. AUDEN: “PARTITION” Auden’s poem from 1966 offers a short summary of Radcliffe’s role in the Partition of India and caustic criticism thereof. Over the course of twenty-five lines, Auden’s poem succinctly retells Radcliffe’s journey from London to Delhi and back. In the last stanza—a short tercet—Radcliffe is shown to hide in his club in London, in fear of being shot.

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The poem’s sparse prose, its use of the epic preterite, and the chronological outline of events and state actors leave one with the impression of a short historical account rather than an example of poetic licence. While the poem is often quoted to introduce Partition (for example, Hitchens 2003), it, in fact, undermines any such attempts. It omits names and dates and misstates facts. Radcliffe, for example, returned to England by plane rather than ship. This may seem like a minor detail, but in a poem of only twenty-five lines, mostly devoid of explicit historical backround, these changes do gain signficance. Ultimately, the poem is concerned with forgetting rather than remembering. Cyril Radcliffe, the poem tells us, “sailed [back] for England, where he quickly forgot / The case, as a good lawyer must” (ll.23–24). The poem’s brevity is used to outline the most basic events concerning the Radcliffe mission. A reader unaware of these events would only receive some rudimentary hints that would allow her or him to set the scene. Auden refers to the unnamed “Viceroy” (l.8), unnamed Moslem and Hindu lawyers (l.11), and whereas London (l.5) is mentioned once, India and Delhi are refered to only implicitly. Most notably, Radcliffe himself remains unnamed. Auden’s poem is rather unspecific, especially in comparision to Brenton’s later play, which is full of details concerning the political actors involved. One likely reason may be that, at the time of publication in 1966, memory of Partition in Britain was fairly fresh. And given the poem’s criticism of the political decisions, one can assume that Auden was not at all interested in forgetting the shameful memory of Parition. The theme of complicity may provide a clue as to the poem’s intentions. Complicity in the poem works on two levels. Intra-textually, Radcliffe’s actions are criticized flat out. Radcliffe, the poems seems to say, is not just complicit in post-Partition violence. The poem invites us to read the nameless Radcliffe in two ways: as the historical Radcliffe himself, whose individual actions are being strongly condemned, while at the same time, the poem turns Radcliffe into a metonymical signifier of the British Empire at large, where everybody is complicit and involved in the empire’s affairs. As Menon argues, “Auden affirms his [Radcliffe’s] role as merely another institutional player in the political theatre of colonialism and violently emerging nationalisms” (2013, 29). Had Auden omitted the few remaining names that clearly identify places (London), hierarchical positions (Viceroy), and religious groups (Hindu, Muslim), the poem could have been read as an allegory for politcal partitions in general. Menon states that “Auden’s poem appeared at a political moment when the question of international partitions resurfaced in the public sphere” (2013, 29). At the time of the poem’s publication, for example, the wall separating East and West Germany had only been erected five years earlier.



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The second war between India and Pakistan had ended just a year earlier. The Troubles in Ireland were about to erupt. If read as an allegory, the poem would share the kind of historiography seen for example in the Brechtian history play. In Brecht, as the playwright David Edgar claimed, the historical narrative is “set in foreign countries and/or the past, as a way of looking at the present” (quoted in Botham 2014, 170). “This Bloody Line,” an Indian short film on Radcliffe from 2017, has a slightly different function. Here Radcliffe is imagined as remorseful and haunted by his actions, as if to give contemporary Indians some sense of closure. The short film by Indian director Ram Madhvani seems to depict Radcliffe as accepting, despite hesitations, his complicity. Madhvani imagines Radcliffe’s reaction upon hearing Auden’s poem for the first time: Radcliffe is hearing, rather than reading, the poem, because his sight is impaired due to his eyes’ cataracts. The camera spends a lot of time focusing on Radcliffe’s eyes as his wife Antonia is reading the poem to her husband. Initially, the short film depicts Radcliffe as being flattered, after having been informed that Auden wrote a poem about him, and even perceives it as a “great honour” (Madhvani 2017). Radcliffe confirms the poem’s outline of the events, including the lack of time, the rash decision to accept the task, and the various demands from all the parties involved. His bewildered amusement of the poem’s retelling of events diminishes with every verse. The poem’s line on his suffering from dystenetry is, at first, omitted by Antonia in an attempt to spare his feelings. Yet Radcliffe is portrayed as an attentive listener. He picks up on the missing rhyme (“hot” and “trot”) and asks for the missing line to be read. The short film shows Radcliffe’s reaction to the poem’s accusations as that of a man who is conflicted despite trying to justify his actions: “I couldn’t say no to my country.” And ultimately, he claims, “It was not my fault.” While he is disheartened by the results of his actions, Radcliffe is entangled in what Thomas Docherty calls “institutional complicity.” This compliance “is not neutral; rather it is an acknowledgement (if tacitly held) that we subscribed to the institution’s aims. It is constitutive of a mutual confidence, of a bond that relates us to the institution, and the institution to a wider good that we wish to serve” (2017, 20; emphasis in the original). Radcliffe’s assertion, however, stands in stark contrast to his pained facial expressions. The film is, for one, an interesting attempt at humanizing Cyril Radcliffe. We see him in his private home rather than in the public sphere, as a loving and beloved husband, a dutiful but not uncritical servant of the empire. In that regard, “This Bloody Line” depicts Radcliffe quite differently from Auden’s poem. Auden’s poem closes with Radcliffe sitting among his male peers in his club in London. In Auden’s poem, he is rendered as a member of a system that is predominantly

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male and upper class, detached from the events surrounding the enclosure of the club. In the poem, it is his male peers in which Radcliffe confides, whereas in the short film, it is his wife. While their relationship appears as traditional as one would expect for the time, his soft-spoken demeanor and his intimate interactions with his wife belie the overtly gendered image of a masculine emissary of empire as presented in Auden’s poem. Additionally, the poem places Radcliffe exclusively in enclosed settings, such as the Viceroy’s palace in Delhi or a club in London. Radcliffe seems to be a man impervious to and ignorant of outside influences. Yet the film, while set in the intimacy of a drawing room, characterizes Radcliffe as curious and sociable. His home is filled with books and photos of him and others. These photos also contradict Auden’s poem. Whereas “Partition” claims that Radcliffe “quickly forgot / The case, as a good lawyer must” (ll.23–24), the framed pictures do suggest the opposite. They show Radcliffe with Mohandas Ghandi, Jawharhalal Nehru, and Mohammad Jinnah. This may be read, as in Brenton’s play, as the vanity of a man who rubbed shoulders with some of history’s most important figures. Interestingly, these photos do not include Viceroy Louis Mountbatten, who is blamed by Radcliffe and his wife in the short film. More importantly, this is the room of a man who did not forget. One closeup shows him in front of a bookshelf that includes the Bhagavad Gita and the Quran, both separated by a book on the legal practice of probate divisions. Thus, the film suggests that Radcliffe was interested in understanding the cultures he was tasked to divide into two countries. Yet the film’s repeated focus on Radcliffe’s impaired eyes hints at his inability to properly understand what he has read. In doing so, it does not absolve Radcliffe from complicity or responsibility but places him more clearly in a network of actors, laws, regulations, and expectations that ultimately caused Radcliffe to accept the task of dividing the country. Additionally, the short film contrasts the fictionalized event with historical documentary material. Radcliffe’s account of listening to the poem and of recalling the events is framed by a collage of snippets that show the newly elected prime minister of India Nehru celebrating Indian Independence. As a voiceover we hear excerpts of Nehru’s classic “Tryst with Destiny” (1947) speech. At the end of the film, as if to oppose the initial celebrations, the film adds images of refugees with only their bare necessities. In between, as if to link both events, we see Radcliffe. The question of Indian and Pakistani culpability and complicity remains largely untouched in this short film. HOWARD BRENTON: DRAWING THE LINE The use of historical events to make a point about the present, as mentioned earlier, is particularly interesting in regard to Brenton’s play. Intentional or



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not, Drawing the Line was first performed in 2013 during a time when debates concerning the Scottish Independence Referendum and a possible Brexit vote became increasingly vocal and divisive. Brenton’s play may offer no explicit nods toward these current political events; he does not misappropriate Partition to discuss Brexit or Scottish Independence. Nonetheless, the given political climate at the time adds to the seriousness of the questions asked by the play: Who is allowed to partition communities? On what basis should that be done? And who is responsible for the results of such a partition? A major theme of the play is the impossibility of finding an accurate reading of texts, cultures, and communication. This theme is connected on many levels—intra-textually as well as extra-textually—to the theme of complicity. On the one hand, I would like to claim that the play constantly stresses the responsibility of the portrayed political actors as well as of the readers to read carefully and emphatically because misreading and culpable ignorance may and actually did lead to catastrophic outcomes. On the other hand, the play repeatedly makes clear that reading often is impossible. Even despite Radcliffe’s best intentions to understand and integrate the various cultural, ethnical, religious, and sociopolitical realities around him, he is unable to penetrate the surface of what he perceives. In consequence, misreading leads to misjudgment, which in turn is often represented as an in road to complicit action. In Drawing the Line, this theme is established right from the start. When Cyril Radcliffe meets Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Secretary of State for India Lord Pethick-Lawrence, he finds their introduction hard to decipher. The secondary text tells us that “Radcliffe finds their timing impossible to read” (Brenton 2013, 8). The exposition creates several levels of misunderstanding. First, the play’s suspense rests on a strong sense of dramatic irony. And the casual banter between Attlee, Pethick-Lawrence, and Radcliffe stands in contrast to the terrible events that will eventually unfold and of which Radcliffe remains unaware. This is not only apparent to the audience but to most political actors in the play, apart from Radcliffe himself. Viceroy Mountbatten, for example, anticipates that Partition will be “a bloody business. All we can do is hope to keep an acceptable level of violence” (21). Second, the play illustrates different perceptions of legality and due conduct between the leader of that state—Clement Attlee—and Cyril Radcliffe. The initial small talk not only leads to “another awkward pause” but also demonstrates their opposing views on culpability. The topic of their small talk is a criminal case Radcliffe had to preside over on that very day at court. Whereas Radcliffe regards the “crook, trying it on,” he had to deal with at court, as a “rotten apple,” Attlee is more forgiving of the convict’s behavior and even shows admiration: “It’s part of the British genius, fiddling on the side in times of austerity” (8). This short exchange highlights Radcliffe’s continued efforts to judge events by the letter of the law. Attlee on the other side, while acknowleding the illegality of the convict’s action, realizes that these

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actions are the result of economic austerity. While legally wrong, to Attlee these actions seem to be morally defensible. Where this interpretation shows Attlee as sympathetic to a poor citizen’s plight, it already anticipates the kind of legal and moral flexibility that would be required of Radcliffe. Third, all of Radcliff’s actions in British India are judged against the repeated assertion that he knows “bugger all about India” (9), as Radcliff’s wife Antonia stresses. This ignorance may be read as one main reason that will lead to Radcliffe’s complicit actions. Is Radcliffe’s ignorance of the matters at hand framed as culpable by the play? I would argue that this is initially the case. Upon accepting the prime minister’s task to divide British India, Radcliffe is very much aware of his ignorance. Yet he does dismiss any doubt on this matter by claiming that his knowledge of the law will guide him to the “right” decision. Soon, however, he learns that his culpable ignorance did land him in a moral dilemma. This moral dilemma and his eventual insight could be read with Bob Brecher’s and Michael Neu’s discussion of “culpable ignorance” on institutional torture in mind: faced with a moral dilemma, it would be wrong to assume “that there is always a right course of action to take, rather than two courses of action, both of which are wrong” (2017, 146; emphases in the original). As a result, Brecher and Neu argue, a critical perspective should keep in mind and focus on the (systemic) structures that lead to the dilemma. And the texts analyzed here do so by focusing on a single person entangled in these structures: Cyril Radcliffe. During that moment, Radcliffe understands that he is tasked with a decision that does not leave him with any right course at all; he tries to alleviate the negative results by informing himself about the peoples at hand. At this point, however, any such endeavor is too late. Many characters in the play are represented as dealing with the unintended results of their actions. Mohammad Jinnah, the proponent of an independent Pakistan, is deeply troubled by this: “We all sank the negotiations. Did any of us know what we would unleash? Did I, when I called for a Day of Action last year, and cities burned?” (Brenton 2013, 39). At the same time, Jinnah proclaims these actions to be the inescapable result of colonial politics: “This is what colonial powers do: put us into impossible situations. Suddenly, out of nowhere, comes another impossible, irreconcilable situation” (81). Compared to Auden’s poem, Brenton’s portrayal of Radcliffe is more nuanced. The play takes more time to outline Radcliffe’s motivations and the complicated networks that lead to Radcliffe’s final decisions. Brenton’s play is by no means apologetic of Radcliffe’s eventual choices. But, as opposed to Auden’s poem, which seems to frame Radcliffe as a primary as complicit, Drawing the Line presents Radcliffe as a man who intends to do his best, a man who desires to come to a just and fair solution. Yet Radcliffe has to



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realize that there is no such thing as a just solution to Attlee’s supposedly simple task: “We want you to draw a line” (9). What makes the comparison of these texts worthwhile is exactly these different nuances when it comes to allocating blame and complicity. Where Auden’s poem, partly based on the brevity, claims a high degree of involvement on Radcliffe’s part, Brenton places Radcliffe more clearly inside a network of contrasting demands and ideologies. As such, these texts highlight and support a central claim of this book: “that complicity . . . comes on several intersecting sliding scales which entail degrees of involvement, degrees of knowledge, degrees of intention and degrees of agency” (3–4). In that sense, Brenton characterizes Radcliffe as an almost prototypical tragic hero: Radcliffe is a man who intends to do good, yet his actions result in death and destruction. Brenton would not be Brenton if this tragic hero was not undermined by two unappealing tragic flaws: vanity and opportunism. These are the motivations for Radcliffe to accept the task of dividing British India in the first place. Concerning his vain streak, he is almost as flattered as his wife Antonia by the prospect of “staying at the Viceroy House” (11). And both anticipate that Radcliffe’s actions “could lead to . . .” (11; ellipsis in the original). The ellipsis in Antonia’s awed prediction hints at the possibility of knighthood—which, ultimately, should turn into a humiliation rather than an honor for Radcliffe. In Act II, Mountbatten issues a clear order to the increasingly reluctant Radcliffe, who himself threatens to refuse the knighthood offered to him: “You take the KG” (87). Radcliffe’s opportunism invites a number of discussions of his complicity. Overwhelmed by the prime minister’s presence, he accepts the task as in a haze, only vaguely remembering the decisive moment: “And I’ve said yes. Yes. . . . And I think I heard myself say: ‘It’s an honour’” (9). Any qualms about his decision he rationalizes by—ironically—characterizing himself as somebody able to “offer a rational overview” (9). His ignorance of India does not bother him, as he strongly believes in the capabilities provided by his profession: “That the law has given me” (10). Radcliffe’s flaws contribute to his complicit acts: his opportunism leads him to accept a task he is not competent enough to complete. As such, he unintentionally yet directly contributes to and complies with a situation that will result in large-scale violence. His firm belief in the word of the law results in him believing that there is a just solution to be achieved in the first place. As seen earlier, regarding his assessment of the crook he had to try at court, Radcliffe is presented as a man who perceives personal actions as either (legally) right or wrong: “There is a right way and a wrong way, always, in everything” (22). This ironically stands in strong contrast to Attlee, who seems to have a clearer understanding of the murkier relationship of legality

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and morality. Attlee’s clear reference to postwar austerity may not free the convict from blame, but shows a clearer understanding for the “bad apple’s” motivations in committing a criminal act. The very problem at hand is Radcliffe’s application of a purely legal argument to a problem that should be solved democratically. This approach leads, following Docherty, not only to a complicity but also to a legitimacy problem: “That which is legal may lack legitimacy, precisely because it has not been agreed or determined by a community; rather, the law is imposed regardless of whether it has achieved consent or whether its constitution is grounded in consensus (or even democratic participation) among those to be governed by it” (Docherty 2017, 23). To make matters worse for Radcliffe, he has to implement a decision that does affect a community. His decision will ultimately divide various communities, each of which has its own interests and desires. And when it comes to Radcliffe’s rigid application of the law, it is his reputation of being principled that precedes him. LIAQUAT. I’ve made enquiries. He’s not a fool. JINNAH. What is he then? LIAQUAT. Principled. JINNAH. An Englishman with principles, come to take a meat cleaver to the country. Allah protect us. (Brenton 2013, 39)

The play’s other character that matches Radcliffe’s principled nature is Gandhi: “No. I will not compromise with the British, suddenly, after all these years of struggle” (28). What makes Brenton’s play so interesting is the fact that, on a discursive level, the reader or audience faces a similar problem to Radcliff’s. Upon closer inspection, Drawing the Line is a pastiche of genres, historical voices, quotations, references, and authorial invention. Both reader and protagonist face a reality they only perceive via different forms of texts. That is, both heavily rely on second- or thirdhand knowledge or descriptions of what “really” lies beyond the theater’s stage or, in Radcliffe’s case, the Viceroy’s palace. In typical postmodern fashion, Drawing the Line offers a composite of fictional dialogue and historical (mis)quotations. The line between historical fact and fictionalized history becomes increasingly blurry. The play’s final scene, for example, is a collage of speeches by Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah. This palimpsest places the reader in a situation similar to the historical Radcliffe. Menon argues in this regard that Radcliffe’s knowledge of the territory to be partitioned was predominantly textual—the urgency with which he was required to work meant that he did not

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have the time for field surveys—or even any visits to the regions in question. The confidence in empiricist methods of boundary allocation—a variety of discursive texts ranging from maps, surveys, and censuses, reinforces a particularly orientalist mode of apprehending place, one that simplifies and sanitizes the complex embeddedness and intermingling among communities of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into orientalist maxims about bounded and polarized religious communities. (2013, 32)

On the story level, it is this conflation of cultural and religious texts that leads to Radcliffe’s final decision. Radcliffe becomes increasingly aware of his own ignorance and begins to read the classic Indian epic the Bhagavad Gita. He is particularly impressed by one of the Gita’s central scenes, in which Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjun that nonaction in the face of danger and peril is impossible. When Radcliffe’s dysentery is at its worst, Lord Krishna himself seems to appear to him in a kind of fever dream to offer the same advice he offered Arjun: “The Lord Krishna said: a man does not attain freedom from the result of actions by abstaining from action . . . no one, for a moment, exists without taking action” (62; ellipsis in the original). It is more than ironic that Radcliffe’s very attempt to understand this culture so foreign to him should in a way contribute to his own complicity in tearing said culture apart. Additionally, the play increasingly deconstructs genre conventions: on the one hand, it is a history play, and on the other hand, the play turns into a tragi-comedy. The two-act structure is also reminiscent of the theater of the absurd, most notably Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. And two of Brenton’s characters increasingly realize the absurdity of the situation, as the following dialogue illustrates: CHRISTOPHER. The second time a farce. RAO. What? CHRISTOPHER. History. RAO. Oh, that bloody stuff. Pour me one. (Brenton 2013, 69)

Christopher’s quoting Karl Marx, in fact, hints at a theme that the play’s twoact structure replicates, namely the impossibility of closure. The ensuing catastrophic eruption of violence is not silenced. The third and final act remains unperformed because it is—in a sense—unspeakable. And when Radcliffe at the play’s end is “burning it all, the papers, all the maps . . .” (94; ellipsis in the original), this not-so-subtle foreshadowing sends a clear message concerning the events to come. This moment also connects Radcliffe and the audience. For Radcliffe, the burning of papers and maps represents his attempt to forget

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his immediate past and actions. For the audience or reader, this moment initiates the opposite: the remembering of a real historical tragedy. As with Radcliffe’s burning of his maps and documents, Drawing the Line shows a range of political actors trying to refuse an awareness of their own complicity. Metaphorically, this burning of the maps not only foreshadows the eventual violence but also Radcliffe’s desperate attempt to forget and to give in to the temptation of his own personal imperial amnesia. Viceroy Mountbatten, for example, advises Radcliffe to intentionally remain ignorant: “Keep your virginity, Radcliffe. Don’t flirt with things Indian” (21). Gandhi, as stated earlier, remains uncompromising in his unwillingness to cooperate, which Christopher reads as an attempt to remain blameless by refusing any action at all: “What is it? You want to keep pure? Is that why you will not intervene?” (89). Jawarhalal Nehru, on the other hand, is rather pragmatic when it comes to his view on an individual’s agency: “Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will” (31). In the end, however, all of these political actors, no matter their intentions and tactics, are depicted as deeply complicit in their own ways. As the play has shown repeatedly, there is probably no right way to act. And the play tells its readers to be careful not to become complicit in the writing of some grander, reductionist national myths, be they British, Indian, or Pakistani. In a Brechtian fashion, the play asks its readers to stay alert, critical, and noncomplicit in deceitful narratives. To conclude, it is important to mention that while this Brechtian approach is most pronounced in Brenton, similar tendencies can be found in Madhvani and Auden. At the beginning of this chapter, I asked how these texts attempt not to become complicit in writing misguided historiographies themselves. How do they attempt not to fall into the trap of furthering political propaganda, one-sided or wrong historization, or avoid—in the case of Auden and Brenton—Eurocentric perspectives? Most notably, they manage to humanize Radcliffe without excusing his actions. Madhvani is especially interesting in his attempt at placing Radcliffe and his wife as the central characters of a short film that not only allows but also invites viewers to feel for him. In doing so, all of the texts have to walk the very difficult line between two approaches: first, they could present Radcliffe merely as a peg in the imperial machine. In this case, the ideological system is to blame. The well-meaning individual just follows orders. Second, they could exclusively focus on Radcliffe, ridicule and criticize his ignorance, and ultimately blame him for the terrible outcome. Yet all texts, for better or worse, manage to place Radcliffe’s complicity in a system of social relations. These relationships mutually and constantly influence each other, blurring the lines between individual responsibility and systemic oppression.

Chapter 4

Complicity on the Small Screen Ordinary Germans as Perpetrators in Recent German TV Miniseries on World War II and the Holocaust Volker Benkert COMPLICITY AND REDEMPTION The forest is suddenly quiet, nearly peaceful. The only sounds that can be heard are the distant cries of the Polish partisans who are being captured and shot by the Germans. His face almost hidden under his helmet, his rifle pressed to his chin, and the voice of his Standartenführer counting down, the Wehrmacht soldier is about to shoot his Jewish friend. It is a sadistic ritual. Earlier, the SS officer had counted down for the soldier to shoot a Polish child or hang civilians as alleged partisans. During the hanging, the officer took pictures documenting the soldier’s involvement while the townspeople were forced to look on. Though his SS seducer’s presence explains much of his cruelty, the soldier’s participation in these crimes as bystander, participant, and increasingly as instigator of violence is beyond any doubt. Yet even as viewers are stunned by his transformation from a bookish young man into a disillusioned murderer, they sense that the soldier, unlike the SS officer, is not innately evil. Repeatedly, the narrative of the German public television miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (UMUV 2013) wraps the soldier’s actions in apologetic explanations, and viewers only gradually learn that he fell victim to the brutalizing effect of the war and the seductive power of the regime. Yet during this dramatic moment in July 1944, when the soldier, Friedhelm Winter, trains his gun at his childhood friend Viktor from better days in Berlin, the outcome is far from certain. As Standartenführer Hiemer counts one, then two, Friedhelm fires early. Will he redeem himself by shooting this grotesquely stereotypical Nazi villain, or will he kill his friend Viktor Goldstein? Unnoticed by Hiemer, Viktor, and the audience, Friedhelm quickly adjusts

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the aim of his rifle ever so slightly. The shot wizzes by Viktor, and viewers see Hiemer collapse, spatting blood. Resuming his mask of a battle-hardened soldier, Friedhelm turns to Viktor and tells him to shove off and save himself, while viewers are likely to understand that he had retained his humanity in this crucial scene and accept this as the moment of his redemption. While in the miniseries UMUV Friedhelm Winter’s participation in war crimes becomes gradually clear in the first episode, in the miniseries Tannbach (TB 2015), also produced by Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), Graf von Striesow’s complicity is only revealed retrospectively.1 Viewers are not privy to his orders to have villagers shot as alleged partisans, yet his later remorseful admission to his lover seems to signal that he too can redeem himself in the eyes of the audience. These intense scenes from UMUV and TB speak volumes about the desires of today’s audiences for apologia and redemption to help them grapple with the fact that ordinary Germans, their parents or grandparents, were accomplices, beneficiaries, or bystanders to the regime’s crimes. Series such as these also raise questions about how to remember and represent ordinary Germans as co-perpetrators while not discarding all-too-familiar narratives of ordinary Germans as victims of a war they helped to unleash. Finally, the series raise questions on degrees of complicity as displayed by the protagonists, which the triad used by most historians—perpetrators, bystanders, and victims—may not capture in enough detail (Hilberg 1992). In some cases, the protagonists were perpetrators who willingly used the space given by Nazi occupation to carry out atrocities independently, while in other cases they were co-perpetrators who adopted Nazi genocidal policies and acted in accordance with Nazi policies. At other times, ordinary Germans were complicit through contributing to the atrocities committed by others (see Lepora and Goodin 2011, 262, 272). Through a close analysis of UMUV and TB, this chapter will show how apologia veils diverse forms of becoming perpetrators and accomplices, and how redemption serves as the emotional glue holding these contradictory narratives together. THE MINISERIES UMUV AND TB UMUV follows five young Germans, friends, whose fates—as Wehrmacht soldiers, as a nurse, as an aspiring show star, and as a Jew persecuted by the regime—remain intertwined throughout the war. The three-part miniseries evokes empathy with the suffering of the German war generation without casting any doubt on their complicity in the horrors of war and genocide. The aforementioned soldier Friedhelm Winter morphs into a ruthless murderer



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of civilians as alleged partisans, becoming a co-principal or co-perpetrator in this crime (see Lepora and Goodin 2013, 33). His brother, Leutnant Wilhelm Winter, executes the infamous Kommissarbefehl and looks on while his men, at Friedhelm’s suggestion, drive Russian civilians in front of them to clear a minefield. Wilhelm’s unwillingness to stop his brother and his own men in the murder of the civilians constitutes a case of complicity because the consequences of his inaction were all too clear to him and he benefits from the crime. Charlotte, a nurse indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda, also becomes a co-principal in Nazi crimes when she betrays a Russian nurse’s aide as Jewish, seemingly committing her to certain death. Greta sleeps with an SS officer hoping to protect their Jewish friend Viktor Goldstein and in order to promote her own singing career with the help of the officer’s influential Nazi contacts. Even though her intentions to save Viktor were good, she willingly becomes a tool for Nazi propaganda, thus also turning into an accomplice and beneficiary of the regime. In this sense, all of the non-Jewish protagonists become co-principals, accomplices, witnesses, and beneficiaries of Nazi crimes, yet the series make clear that they are also victims. Greta and Friedhelm even lose their lives, while Viktor, Wilhelm, and Charlotte only narrowly escape death. TB relies on the same mix of empathy for and openly acknowledged complicity and active participation of its protagonists in crimes. The threepart miniseries portrays the story of a village on the border between Bavaria and Thuringia divided by the military occupation of American and Soviet forces in the aftermath of World War II. Though set later than UMUV, it also features the story of ordinary Germans whose participation in war crimes becomes clear even as viewers empathize with the plight of expulsion, loss, rape, occupation, and eventual division epitomized by the protagonists. One of them, Graf von Striesow, represents the aristocratic member of the officer corps who, in spite of earlier support, deserted Hitler when the war turned sour for Germany (Shepherd 2016, 180). At the war’s end, he literally deserts from the Wehrmacht and returns home. From a safe hiding space, he looks on as the SS executes his wife for not giving up his location. His very cowardice at this moment helps viewers accept his later explanation that he was too weak to resist murderous orders before he deserted. THEMES IN UMUV AND TB In showing ordinary Germans both as perpetrators and victims, the two miniseries seek to overcome the sharp divide between the learned discourse on coming to terms with the past and the long tradition of self-perception of

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Germans as victims (Kansteiner 2006, 182). The series’ efforts to portray their protagonists’ culpability and complicity are all the more praiseworthy as the producers Nico Hoffmann (born 1959) and Philip Kadelbach (1974) for UMUV and Alexander Dierbach (1979) for TB engage scholarship on the complicity of ordinary Germans. It is particularly noteworthy that this includes complicity of Germans not only at the front lines (Bartov 1992; Johnson and Reuband 2005, 226–59; Friedländer 2002) but also at home (Koonz [1987] 2013, 17; Aly 2007, 36). “Normal,” likeable young German men and women neither too close nor opposed to the regime thus appear in both miniseries simultaneously as perpetrators, accomplices, and victims of an all-powerful regime and an all-consuming war. While the filmmakers’ interest in new research is as remarkable as their willingness to problematize the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, here is where the miniseries reaches its narrative limits (Wildermuth 2016, 65). Ultimately, they offer an apologetic redemption narrative that explains the complicity of ordinary Germans only with reference to the seductive power of the regime and the brutality of war. They are thus quick to cite orders or military necessity, the horrors of war, naiveté or personal ambition as reasons for their heroes’ actions. If apologetic themes dominate the portrayal of the protagonists, stereotypical SS villains serve as negative foils to highlight the humanity of the heroes and heroines even in the face of atrocity. Yet the two series also categorically acquit their protagonists from sexual and what Jan Philip Reemtsma called autotelic violence (2009, 116), even though the wiretappings of German soldiers in American captivity found recently by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer reveal that ordinary Germans often murdered arbitrarily and raped with gusto (2011). These forms of violence would display the protagonists’ agency, lust, and self-empowerment in the victimization of others, which would render them unacceptable to viewers today. Furthermore, the miniseries include various hardly plausible twists to show that the main characters redeem themselves through their suffering, their belated self-liberation from the regime, and their sincere repentance. In an act of self-liberation, Wilhelm Winter in UMUV and Graf von Striesow in TB desert from the Wehrmacht. Friedhelm Winter kills his sadistic Nazi seducer in the scene described at the beginning of this chapter, while his older brother also gets a chance to slay the Nazi beast. He kills a brutal Oberfeldwebel in charge of the penal unit to which he is assigned after his desertion. As such, these highly successful series with market shares of 20 to 25 percent (Classen 2014, 53) and 18 to 19.4 percent (Horizont 2015) seek to fulfill, not go against the expectations of contemporary audiences, who are willing to accept the participation, though not the agency of ordinary Germans in Nazi crimes. Yet ordinary Germans clearly made few if any attempts to liberate themselves



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from the regime and had, before the late 1960s, failed to offer any meaningful ways of confronting the past, still thinking of themselves as the primary victims of war and Nazism (Moeller 2001, 118). The series thus epitomize the current state of coming to terms with the past in Germany, which, despite its great strides to create public awareness and acceptance of German guilt, has moved little beyond apologia and redemption when it comes to telling the story of ordinary Germans. HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND THE ZDF MINISERIES While the first Wehrmacht Exhibition of 1995 still triggered a storm of indignation, today the active participation of the regular army in war crimes is much less controversial than the question as to which factors triggered the transformation of ordinary men into killers (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung 1995).2 UMUV and TB use Christopher Browning’s dictum that not only sadists with some sort of psychological disposition toward violence but ordinary men became killers through opportunity, brutalization, command, and the influence of the regime’s propaganda (1992). As such, both miniseries describe situations in which violence became a seemingly rational option, enabling men to do things that in other situations and other places would be unthinkable (Baberowski 2008, 17). They also readily adopt Omer Bartov’s thesis that the increasing violence of the Wehrmacht was due to the brutalization of soldiers in a progressively primitive war, the immense losses, and the consequent destruction of the primary group of soldiers (Bartov 1992, 179ff.). In UMUV this is particularly evident in the character development of Wilhelm Winter, who struggles with a “new war” whose logic affords the brutal execution of political officers as part of the infamous Kommissarbefehl, the ruthless exploitation of Russian civilians, and the murder of innocents in retaliation to partisan attacks. In one scene representing Friedhelm Winter’s brutalization, Wilhelm prevents a Ukrainian auxiliary from capturing a Jewish girl only to see the girl executed before his very eyes by Standartenführer Hiemer (UMUV, Part I, 42:02). Even though Wilhelm is complicit in this crime as his troops guard the scene of the roundup, he registers his moral objection with his superiors, and eventually deserts when his disillusionment with the war comes to a breaking point. His brother, Friedhelm Winter, however, does not break but morphs from a sensitive and bookish young man into a murderer. This transformation is due to his brutalization in a war of annihilation, loss of any moral compass, his disillusionment in the face of the seeming death of Wilhelm, and the disintegration of the primary group of soldiers as more and

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more soldiers die or leave the unit. Later he even refuses to call new recruits by their name, saying to them: “If you are still alive in four weeks, then you can tell me your name” (UMUV, Part II, 1:19:13). This disillusionment and loss harden him and make him fall under the influence of a stereotypical Nazi villain personified by Standartenführer Hiemer. In an earlier confrontation with a war-weary Wilhelm Winter in 1943, he lists the unit’s casualties to conclude that one cannot escape the harsh logic of the war and therefore must continue it until the bitter end: It will only stop when [the war] is over. . . . We are cattle for the big slaughterhouse. Today we are heroes, tomorrow we are pigs. There is no point. God has abandoned us. There is only us, no general, no Führer! Just us, these men. And if we die tomorrow, so be it. But you will lead us, I expect that of you. (UMUV, Part II, 49:02)

Even though the murders are not shown in TB in as much graphic detail as in UMUV, the series also entangles its protagonists in war crimes. Graf von Striesow, who deserts from the army in view of the lost war and the crimes committed, particularly seems to mirror the story of Wilhelm Winter. In the third episode of the miniseries, a returning soldier publicly confronts him with his participation in war crimes, and later Striesow confesses to his lover that his personal weakness to withstand the pressures of war and his superiors, brutalization, and a sense of disillusion made him participate in war crimes: I did not have the strength; I did not have the courage [to withstand the practice of randomly shooting innocent civilians in response to partisan attacks]. There is no excuse. Time does not heal wounds. . . . What remains is guilt. (TB, Part III, 1:22:20)

Just like Wilhelm Winter in UMUV, Graf von Striesow’s lover in the series accepts this narrative as an understandable byproduct of war. Judging from letters to the ZDF, viewers today seem to equally accept this narrative, or at least not take issue with it. His admission that one cannot erase guilt also likely redeems him in the eyes of viewers. Even though showing the complicity of ordinary Germans constitutes an important representation of German war crimes in film, and even though it is remarkable that contemporary audiences are willing to accept that (Logemann 2013), brutalization, frustration, and loss serve as apologetic cushions to make the protagonists’ actions palatable for Germans today. If the miniseries’ efforts to capture the complicity of ordinary men in heinous crimes are laudable, so is their willingness to problematize the role of women in the Third Reich. The two female protagonists in UMUV are



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both aware of the systematic murder of the Jews, and Charlotte contributes to the slaughter of Jews by betraying the Jewish nurse’s aide. Even though the nurse’s aide miraculously survives, Charlotte was fully aware that in all likelihood the SS would kill her. Because she had every opportunity to ignore her knowledge of the Jewess’ secret, Charlotte becomes a co-principal in the Nazi crime. Greta cannot resist the lure of the stardom that the regime through Gestapo Officer Dorn promises. In TB an elderly female servant in the household of the von Striesows reveals deep-seated anti-Semitism, showing that women were not immune to the regime’s poison either. The series’ willingness to portray ordinary German men, and women, as accomplices—albeit wrapped in apologia and redemption—is remarkable, but that does not mean that the series seek to engage the full scope of scholarly research on crimes committed by ordinary Germans. TABOO CRIMES: Anti-Semitism and Sexual and Autotelic Violence For audiences to relate to the main characters, the series have to distance them from anti-Semitism, as well as from sexual and autotelic violence (Reemtsma 2009, 182, 359). These forms of violence are taboo in modern society and breaking them would destroy the bond between the audience and the protagonists that even the title of UMUV, “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” seeks to generate. As such, the producers carefully shield the main characters from all-too-fervent anti-Semitism, and the violence they commit must not be motivated by racial hatred. Likewise, sexual violence that seeks to brutalize and enslave a female body or autotelic violence that serves no other purpose but the pleasure of the person exercising it are also taboo. Violence as perpetrated by the protagonists can only be the result of their personal weaknesses to withstand the pressures caused by their peers and their superiors or to vent their own frustrations at the deprivation and suffering in the war. Racial hatred, sexual deviance, or random violence would render them beyond apologia and redemption and thus unacceptable to audiences today. While other soldiers or minor characters often invoke anti-Semitic phrases, the protagonists refrain from that. None of their crimes seem to be linked to anti-Semitism or racial hatred, as such passion is externalized onto SS villains or, even more problematically, to foreigners. Ultimately, UMUV only charges SS thugs, Ukrainian volunteers, and even the Polish partisans with anti-Semitism and—with the exception of Charlotte as the youngest and most naive protagonist in UMUV—none of the central characters. Particularly the close association of Polish partisans with anti-Semitism caused outrage in

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Poland (Sariusz-Wolska and Piorun 2014). As far as the main characters in UMUV are concerned, their common friendship with a Jew largely absolves them from anti-Semitism. In TB too, anti-Semitism is only attributed to villains quickly identified as true believers such as Horst Vöckle, an SS officer who murders suspected defeatists at the war’s end only to be handed over to the Soviets after the war by his own mother. Opportunists such as Franz Schober, a man with the uncanny ability to do well under the Nazis, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and in West Germany, also hold deep-seated prejudice against Jews, foreigners, and later even German refugees from the east (TB, Part I, 07:40). Not only Schober’s opportunism but also his hatred renders him beyond redemption in a way that Striesow is not. In both series, sexual violence in particular remains reserved to Soviet soldiers raping German women, even though ordinary Germans also committed countless rapes: neither the sexual violence committed at random by German soldiers knowing that they would not get punished by their superiors (Mühlhäuser 2010, 140) nor the variants of forced prostitution either in the Wehrmacht’s own brothels (Meinen 2002, 82ff.) or through the mass starvation created by German occupation are problematized (Beckermann 1998, 102–3). If anti-Semitism and sexual violence are glossed over or externalized, autotelic violence also plays no role in the series. In fact, UMUV in particular makes sure to stress that the protagonists committed war crimes only because they were acting on orders or as a response to attacks from others, mostly partisans, but not randomly. After a deadly attack on German soldiers, Friedhelm Winter in UMUV takes part in a shooting of civilians. Yet the series suggests that this shooting was not random but that the civilians participated in or at least had knowledge of the attack, which dilutes the fact that the Wehrmacht often arbitrarily shot civilians from nearby houses without any evidence of their involvement (Hartmann 2010, 727). Wilhelm Winter had noticed that Russian civilians were shepherding their children away from a well in which the bomb was placed. Before he could warn his men, the blast went off, killing two soldiers (UMUV, Part II, 15:11). The reality of such reprisals, however, was that officers from the battalion commander up could order random measures of “collective punishment” and that Soviet civilians were denied legal protection against crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers in accordance with the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeiterlass im Ostheer of 1941 (Römer 2008, 55–56, 99). Jews in particular were almost by default considered partisans and thus likely targets of such barbaric reprisals. Even if the protagonists in UMUV seem to be immune to autotelic violence, the crimes of the Wehrmacht—its participation in the Holocaust, the deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, and the ruthless murder and plunder of the civilian population—were clearly accompanied by indiscrimi-



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nate and random violence against civilians. This autotelic violence cannot be explained by pointing to the regime only as a facilitator; it was rather that the regime’s orders coincided with the soldier’s own racism, the knowledge that even the most barbaric acts would not be punished, as well as the pleasure they derived through violence. This seems evident from the wiretappings of German soldiers in American captivity found by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer that recorded private conversations between soldiers. These documents show the broad knowledge, acceptance, and participation of ordinary soldiers in the German murders in the east. In addition, soldiers sometimes even boasted about sexual and autotelic violence either perpetrated or observed by themselves. In these instances, the prisoner of war starting this conversation often assumed that his comrade, whom he did not know most of the time, had similar experiences, and at least the reference frame of war and violence was not alien to him (Neitzel and Welzer 2011, 88ff.). Because audiences today could hardly tolerate such indiscriminate violence in their (grand) mothers or (grand)fathers, the miniseries must acquit their protagonists from autotelic or sexual violence and downplay base anti-Semitism. It is in this context that the series resort to all-too-familiar apologetic narrative patterns. APOLOGIA In contrast to anti-Semitism and sexual and autotelic violence, orders by members of a small but murderous elite, seduction by the regime and its propaganda, and the brutalization of soldiers at war are much more acceptable explanations for the complicity of the series’ protagonists. Yet it is also through these apologetic explanations that the protagonists morph into victims of larger events. Not surprisingly, the miniseries thus downplay their central characters’ agency. They do not problematize the fact that ordinary Germans, not unlike the series’ protagonists, succumbed to the seduction of the regime also through shameless self-promotion and self-enrichment. The miniseries also fail to acknowledge that Germans became co-perpetrators as bystanders and beneficiaries of the persecution of Jews and others well before the brutalization of war could have any effect on them (Aly 2007, 36). Nor is there any discussion in the series about agency of soldiers in view of murderous commands, even though we know that some soldiers refused such orders with few consequences for themselves or their careers. In his book Ordinary Men (1992), Browning recounts the famous choice of shooting or not shooting that Major Wilhelm Trapp gave the men in his Police Battalion 101 when the unit was tasked with the murder of the Jews of Józefów in July 1942. Even though his men had every reason to believe in the sincerity of the offer

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coming from a man they fondly called “Papa Trapp,” few of them opted out. As promised, they faced no repercussions afterward. Browning concludes: Was the incident at Józefów typical? Certainly not. I know of no other case in which a commander so openly invited and sanctioned the nonparticipation of his men in a killing action. But in the end the most important fact is not that the experience of Reserve Police Battalion 101 was untypical, but rather that Trapp’s extraordinary offer did not matter. Like any other unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101 killed the Jews they had been told to kill. (1992, 183)

In the situation discussed by Browning, the perpetrators could be certain that they would not get punished for opting out, yet even those who did take risks to rescue Jews against the expressed desires of their superiors faced few repercussions. Saul Friedländer reports a case of a Wehrmacht officer who tried to save Jewish orphans from death and whose intervention did not result in negative consequences for himself (2002, 36). Surely only few individuals had the wherewithal to withstand the power of command and peer pressure, but these episodes show that they had more agency than the series show. In addition to participating under duress, many German soldiers needed little encouragement and sometimes even took up the initiative to murder themselves, thus becoming part of Nazi Germany’s genocidal mission. As such, the series employ abstract explanations—the lure and the power of the regime, the brutalization of war and power of command—to employ highly apologetic narratives that exculpate the individual in the maelstrom of greater events. Seduction by the regime also shapes the story of Greta, an aspiring show star in UMUV. She succumbs to the lure of the regime in the person of the ruthless Gestapo officer Dorn, who promotes her stage career in exchange for sexual favors. Yet she enters this affair with not only her carreer in mind. She also wants the Gestapo officer to give Viktor safe passage to the United States and tries to blackmail Dorn when she learns that she is carrying his child. Betrayed by Dorn, who reveals himself not only as a ruthless murderer but also kills his own unborn child, she falls out of grace and dies a lonely death in a Gestapo prison shortly before the end of the war. While engaging the idea of self-enrichment through literally sleeping with the enemy, the series cloaks this act of submission to the Nazis for personal gain into an acceptable story of trying to protect her Jewish partner. What is more, her story then leads to acts of resistance when she inquires about the fate of Viktor’s parents and suffering at the hands of the Nazi villain with her walking down a cold prison aisle in a rugged white shirt symbolizing her innocence. The story of the other female lead in UMUV, Charlotte, a nurse on the Eastern Front, also compells the audience to accept apologetic notions around seduction of the regime and feel compassion for her suffering. Her



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indoctrination with Nazi ideology is quickly explained with reference to her impressionable young age and her naive idealism. Even though she exposes a Russian nurse’s aide as Jewish to the Gestapo, she too retains her humanity through her heartfelt regret of her actions, through an act of resistance, making sure that German wounded soldiers do not return to the front lines immediately, and her later attempts to protect another Russian nurses’ aide. After being captured and nearly raped by Soviet soldiers, she also does active penance by working in a Soviet field hospital as a nurse aide, now healing the wounds of those hurt by the German invasion that she was part of. Just like Wilhelm Winter, she becomes disillusioned with the war, the regime, and her own complicity, and like Wilhelm, she too has a negative counterpart. Hildegard, a more vindictive nurse, threatens to exposes her actions as defeatism: “That is defeatism. I should report you. Do you think that the Russians will spare you, if they win?” Charlotte: “I thought you believed in final victory.” Hildegard: “In what else . . . ? If we lose the war, can you imagine what they will do to us?” (UMUV, Part III, 24:03)

Charlotte becomes a co-perpetrator through events larger than herself and the indoctrination of the regime, and similar to Wilhelm she overcomes her guilt through an act of resistance, her suffering, and sincere repentance. Lisbeth Erler in TB also voices similar notions of seduction and indoctrination by the regime that silenced those around her. She arrives in Tannbach as a refugee who saved a Jewish boy during the war by pretending that he was her son. Even she acknowledges the power of indoctrination when she says, “We all saw what was happening. It was just normal. And when it was not normal anymore, they touted their victory messages so loud until it was normal again” (Part I, 1:08:55). Reference to the seductive power of the regime offers an apologetic narrative framework explaining the complicity of the protagonists, yet so does the brutalization in war. The war, though clearly an inextricable frame of reference for all contemporaries, becomes an agent of corruption constantly invoked by the repeated phrase in UMUV that “the war will only bring out the worst in us” (Part I, 7:12 and 67:22; Part II, 49:00). The horrors of war and the pressures of command and discipline as explanation for the brutalization of German soldiers, an argument that UMUV seems to take directly from Omer Bartov’s work, comes particularly to the fore in the character of Leutnant Wilhelm Winter. The brutalization in war, especially seeing one of his men blown up by a mine, and military necessity to reach safer quarters explain why he does not prevent his men from driving Russian civilians through a mine-infested marsh. He also follows a standing order when shooting a Soviet commissar, and he orders the execution of civilians only after it seems clear

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that they know of a bomb planted in a well that killed two of his men. Yet the audience also sees how he tries to protect a Jewish girl from the certain slaughter by Ukrainian volunteers who were acting on the orders of a notorious and sadistic SS villain. He also saves Russian prisoners of war from his own soldiers who were seeking retaliation for the death of some of their own in battle. His actions—even his crimes—therefore must be seen in the context of following orders, of a strong sense of duty, and of concern for his men and occasionally even determined humanity. As such, he closely resembles his cinematic predecessors Leutnant von Witzland in Josef Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993) and Leutnant Wisse in Frank Wisbars’s Stalingrad Dogs Do You Want to Live Forever (1959). In analogy to these two movie lieutenants, Winter also later deserts and refuses criminal orders to show his estrangement from the regime. This alienation is even further highlighted when he—again just like Wisse and von Witzland—kills a Nazi henchman. Returning to Berlin a broken and disillusioned man, he pays a high price for his earlier complicity. The image of the respectable and brave officer who retains his humanity, renounces the regime at the last moment, and through his suffering redeems himself therefore remains virtually unchanged from earlier silver screen representations well familiar to German audiences. Likewise, Graf von Striesow in TB sees his participation in war crimes as part of a larger logic of war that he could not extricate himself from. As such, UMUV and TB fail to explore the question of personal agency vis-à-vis the larger historical contexts and wrap the acts committed in apologetic narratives highlighting the influence of the regime and the war. Perhaps the most interesting character in UMUV is Wilhelm Winter’s younger brother Friedhelm, whose transformation from a shy, bookish youth to a brutal killer is the most courageous part of the series. His brutality is, in analogy to his brother’s conversion, a product of the brutalization of war, high casualties among fellow soldiers, and the struggle for survival, yet more than any other character in either series he also falls under the spell of a Nazi officer who orders him to commit atrocities. This conversion occurs after the supposed death of his older brother Wilhelm, which makes him lose the last remnants of moral behavior, and he understands his brutalization as almost inevitable. Speaking to a younger recruit, he says, “You resist the temptation to be human. Some become that way, others don’t. You never know beforehand. All that is certain is that no one stays what he is” (UMUV, Part II, 53:15). The sadistic SS Standartenführer Hiemer replaces Friedhelm’s brother, in whose unit he had served before, not just as moral influence but also as his actual commander, whose orders—in the series repeatedly emphasized by Hiemer counting until Friedhelm is to shoot—he follows. Friedhelm’s innocence is therefore a victim of the war, the lack of moral authority from his brother,



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and the result of orders. Yet even Friedhelm’s humanity is preserved despite his complicity in the orgies of violence unleashed by Hiemer. In the unlikely confrontation with Viktor and Hiemer described at the beginning of this chapter, he decides to shoot the SS leader instead of his friend. Just like his brother Wilhelm, this constitutes a belated act of self-liberation, which makes the stereotypical SS villain Hiemer an integral part of the story to humanize Friedhelm. REDEMPTION If the audience’s shock about the protagonists’ participation in war crimes is cushioned by apologetic narratives, some of the main characters in UMUV and TB still redeem themselves through their self-liberation from the regime, sincere repentance, and suffering. After being numbed by the enormity of the war, the four non-Jewish protagonists in UMUV as well as Graf von Striesow in TB suddenly regain agency at the end of the war, literally killing or trying to go after their Nazi tormentors. Their own suffering in the war and afterward then is portrayed as accepted penance for their involvement in the crimes. As the audience is invited to understand the main characters’ actions, admire their courageous, though belated self-liberation, and feel compassion for their suffering, the protagonists retain their humanity as an inescapable precondition for Germans today to feel empathy with them. The humanity of the protagonists, however, stands in stark contrast to the easily identifable Nazi villains whose seductive power and sadistic inhumanity caused good Germans to follow them. In this respect, the series meets the desire of later generations for simple explanations for the behavior of their ancestors, for a self-liberation from the Nazism that never materialized, and for a meaningful engagement with the past of which many members of the war generation were utterly incapable. What is more, the redemption of the protagonists becomes a metaphor for the redemption of the nation at large, which has overcome and worked through its horrible past. CONCLUSION The common apologetic features in the representation of the main characters in both UMUV and TB are that their actions were subject to their seduction by the dictatorship, their brutalization in the horrors of war, and orders by sadistic superiors. The protagonists thus seem to retain their humanity in the eyes of Germans today even as they engage in violence. If sadistic superiors

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easily identifiable as textbook Nazis bring about these horrors in otherwise very relatable Germans, the actions of the miniseries’ protagonists are mirrored by the brutalization of others in this war, be that anti-Semitic Polish partisans or raping Soviet soldiers. While the miniseries acknowledge—albeit in apologetic terms—their protagonists’ complicity and active participation as co-principles in war crimes, they do not dare to associate them with taboo topics such as ardent anti-Semitism or sexual and autotelic violence. The central characters also liberate themselves from the regime through often courageous acts of self-liberation and offer penance for their crimes. Their own suffering also redeems them. This reveals the same need of filmmakers and the audience: apologia and redemption to cope with the active participation and complicity of the war generation in heinous crimes. In accepting this narrative, viewers unwittingly become complicit themselves in an act of self-awarded redemption brought forth by emotionally appealing, entertaining, and powerful media productions (Pfister 2000, 615). Yet the murders committed by ordinary Germans were more arbitrary and vicious than the explanations given suggest, a self-liberation from the regime did not occur, and redemption can only come through the painful and not completed process of coming to terms with the past. NOTES 1.  I am grateful to Birte Wiele for her help in analyzing Tannbach. 2.  For the debate on accuracy of the exhibition, see Bartov et al. 2000, 81ff.

Chapter 5

Literary Complicity and the Differend Naturalizing, Ontologizing, and Self-Referential Representations of National Socialist Persecution Lorraine Markotic LYOTARD’S DIFFEREND Many deeply flawed or even just mediocre novels and films about the Nazi reign can readily be seen to be complicit in misrepresenting this historical event—usually by presenting resistance, opposition, and/or escape in a way that diminishes or even trivializes the Nazi reach and power. In this chapter, I discuss three widely respected novels that are complicit, in my view, in a misrepresentation of Nazi terror and destruction. Each of these works explicitly thematizes complicity with National Socialist persecution; at the same time, each is itself complicit, I shall show, in a misrepresentation through its representational form. I discuss Albert Camus’s The Plague (La Peste) ([1947] 1948), Alois Hotschnig’s Ludwig’s Room (Ludwigs Zimmer) ([2000] 2014), and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder ([1997] 1999). Directly relevant to the notion of representational complicity in these works about Nazi terror is, I shall argue, Lyotard’s concept of the differend. Lyotard postulates a differend as something that cannot be phrased; either it cannot be put into words or its articulation is intrinsically incomprehensible. A differend occurs when possible, inchoate phrases cannot be linked onto an existing phrase, sentence, word, or gesture because they are precluded as irrelevant, nonsensical, or unreasonable. Lyotard argues that “the linking of one phrase onto another is problematic [and] this problem is the problem of politics” ([1984] 1988, xiii). Sentences are rendered dumb or obscure not by any proscription against speaking them but because they are incommensurable with the existing way of thinking, understanding, and speaking. Specifically addressing complicity in his book titled Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment (2016), Thomas Docherty makes a somewhat similar argument about the exclusion of all that does not coincide 57

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with the prevailing thinking and speaking. Docherty notes that in order to be heard one must “speak the dominant language of the tribe” (2016, 18), but that this renders us complicit with the existing way of understanding things, often “with a reduction of the vocabulary available for discussion and debate” (19). Moreover, such reduction “leads to the assertion that the existing conditions in which we live constitute something called ‘reality’; and it rests on the assumption that the existing dominant language captures and represents that reality perfectly. It follows that any other language . . . is inherently ‘idealistic’ or, as it is usually said, simply ‘unrealistic’” (19). Docherty therefore argues for the invention of new languages (24), for the importance of opening language to possibility (19). We need to establish new forms of speech; this is why poetry matters (24). He develops a notion of criticism as involving a reserve toward the given, toward what is regarded as ineluctable “reality”—in the face of which there is considered to be “no alternative.” When we do not accept “the world as it is” (19), we are considered to be naively or foolishly unrealistic; hence, criticism often remains unheard or, as Docherty perceptively puts it, “is left talking to itself” (17). Nonetheless, Docherty insists on the importance of “speaking truth to power” (61), of refusing to be complicit with systems and structures that present themselves as ineluctable. He also insists on the difficulty of doing so. Most of the time, alternatives to existing networks, organizations, and entrenched hierarchies are not only dismissed as utopian, but dissenting voices are disciplined and criticism is discarded (18). Docherty’s concept of criticism is similar to, but also somewhat different from, Lyotard’s differend, for Lyotard’s differend is less about what is stamped utopian or dismissed as ridiculous than what is not grasped in the first place, what can barely (if at all) be fathomed. Differends remain inarticulate; they are unheeded not merely because they lack power or because their position is deemed unrealistic but because they cannot be expressed, cannot be represented as such. Lyotard distinguishes between a plaintiff and someone who falls victim to a wrong ([1984] 1988, 8). A wrong is a damage “accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage” because the victim is dead or in some way restrained or “even more simply if the testifying phrase is itself deprived of authority” (5). A wrong exists as a wrong because it “ought to be able to be put into phrases” (13) but instead remains a victim of silencing. Whereas plaintiffs are dismissed or refused a hearing, victims of wrongs are never grasped as such in the first place. Lyotard writes, “A differend is born from a wrong and is signaled by a silence” (57). At the core of Lyotard’s thinking is a concern with justice, and central to his concern with justice are notions of the incommensurable and the unrepresentable. For this reason, Lyotard is interested in the sublime. In The Postmodern Condition ([1979] 1984), he describes the “real sublime sentiment”



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as “an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept” (81). It is this sentiment that characterizes the differend. The differend involves both a situation “wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” and a frustration with this failure. “A differend is disclosed by a feeling” ([1984] 1988, 13), an awareness that something cannot be represented, and a wish to attest, at the very least, to this impossibility. A differend is more than an inexpressible perspective, however. For Lyotard, “reality entails the differend” ([1984] 1988, 55). A central theme in The Differend is Auschwitz. For Lyotard, what Auschwitz comprises is not something that can be cognitively grasped. Auschwitz entailed unfathomable exterminations, plus the attempt by the perpetrators to erase the traces of their deeds and to have the event forgotten. Auschwitz includes the dearth of discussion that followed the murders: the countless dead obviously could not speak, and the few survivors did not always know how to begin to recount that about which the postwar world did not want to hear. Auschwitz was not an acknowledged place, much less a recognizable concept until the 1960s.1 What we are left with is a sense of the unpresentable magnitude of the horror—and the feeling that this evokes. Hence, the cognitive regime, involving explanation and description, may not be the best way to confront Auschwitz—even for a historian. Lyotard writes, “The historian must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (57). Lyotard does not, however, expand on how a historian should move beyond the alleged objectivity of the factual regime. As Dylan Sawyer notes about The Differend, “In a book so avowedly interested in the struggle to represent the Holocaust, it is curious that no mention is given to relevant literature such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man or Elie Wiesel’s Night” (2014, 23). Indeed, not only does Lyotard ignore first-person accounts of the Shoah in The Differend, I would note, but despite his comments on the limitations of the cognitive regime in relation to Auschwitz, and his own interest in literature and art, he does not consider literary and artistic representations about the Nazi reign. Docherty believes that “our primary responsibility . . . is not to the guilt and crimes of the past, but rather to the possibilities of the future” (2016, 24)—to new languages that resist the pull and the petrification of the given and help us imagine and articulate the world differently. He notes that poetry “operates by suggestion, by imagination—by offering a world that might be, that can be inferred, or that we can make. Far from it being the case that poetry does not matter because it never affirms anything, it matters precisely because it

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simulates possibility, and offers what we can call an opening to the possible” (107; emphases in the original). Literature inherently supports criticism’s reserve, it keeps the door open (117) through its “radical undecidability” (70), thereby resisting complicity with an apparently ineluctable so-called reality. Following Adorno, Docherty is not calling for explicitly political works of literature, however; such works do not necessarily avoid complicity. Indeed, by engaging with the contemporary situation, they may end up accepting the forms and structures of the world as it exists (111). For Docherty, what is important in literature is that it suspends meaning, that it delays us before the text, and that this allows us “time to think” (117). As noted, for Lyotard thinking is not enough. A differend cannot be articulated, including in our thoughts; it evokes a feeling. This feeling concerns an injustice that has already happened and that continues to happen insofar as it is not grasped as an injustice, insofar as the present “reality” precludes it being grasped as such. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard mentions the sublime feeling of pleasure in the awareness that something is beyond representation. In The Differend, he links pleasure to the invention of new idioms, stating that with “the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases,” and human beings “learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom) that they are summoned to language . . . to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they [human beings] can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist” ([1984] 1988, 13). For Lyotard, differends involve creating new idioms, or at least they call for the creation of new idioms. He considers that “it is not a concept that results from ‘Auschwitz’ but a feeling, an impossible phrase” (104). This feeling underlines the limits of existing idioms because “something which should be able to be put into phrases cannot be phrased in the accepted idioms” (56–57). In this chapter, I examine how three literary works seek to create new idioms to represent the Nazi reign. It is above all literature and art, I would argue, that can evoke a differend; indeed, in relation to Auschwitz, literary works should be assessed on their ability to do so. Docherty argues that the essence of literature is “reserve as slowing down and the resistance to closure, or meaning” (2016, 117). I would not want to say what the essence of literature is, but I agree with Docherty’s emphasis on the importance of literature in relation to what is excluded from the dominant mode of thinking, and I regret Lyotard’s dearth of discussion of literature in The Differend. As mentioned earlier, Lyotard explores phrase linking; he argues that “to link is necessary; how to link is contingent” (1988, 29). Here I consider how three different works link to “phrases” of the Nazi presence in their country. The Plague is concerned with the German occupation of France, Ludwig’s Room



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with a family secret revolving around a brother who joined the resistance in Austria, and Dora Bruder unfolds from the fact that a teenaged Jewish girl ran away from her convent school in Paris during the German occupation. These works, I suggest, can be understood to stem from differends and to involve the attempt to create new idioms for these differends.2 Yet these new idioms, I argue, are ultimately complicit—in different ways and to varying degrees—in diluting the Nazi terror they portray. THE PLAGUE (1947) Although set in the French Algerian city of Oran, Camus’s The Plague is widely understood to symbolize the German occupation of France and to depict symbolically those who joined the French resistance; the novel takes place during the 1940s. Besides being a political allegory, The Plague is shaped by existentialist concerns and an attempt to portray the human condition. The theme of individual choice figures prominently in the work, contrasting those who choose to fight the plague with those who prioritize their own safety and well-being or even profit from the dire circumstances. Portrayals of “quiet heroism” and “quiet courage,” such as one seen in many of Camus’s works, are also found in The Plague. Dr. Rieux’s wife lies seriously ill in a sanatorium in a nearby town, but he does not even consider trying to leave; instead he continues his work as a doctor in the plague-ridden city. The eccentric, impoverished Grand volunteers for the sanitary groups without hesitation, saying, “we’ve got to make a stand, that’s obvious” (112). Rambert, a journalist visiting Oran, initially tries every means, including illegal ones, to escape the quarantined city and rejoin his lover in France; eventually, however, he demonstrably overcomes his desire for personal happiness and decides he has a moral obligation to stay and join those battling the epidemic. Overall, The Plague seems to be a call to human solidarity in the face of widespread suffering and looming death and an indictment of those who are complicit with the spread of the epidemic. Cutting a swathe of suffering and death through the city, the plague is portrayed as a kind of differend, as something that one knows but cannot conceive. Near the beginning, Dr. Rieux recalls historical depictions of the bubonic plague and attempts to imagine the extent and enormity of death during such an outbreak—but he is unable to do so: “He tried to put together in his head what he knew about the disease. Figures drifted through his head and he thought that the thirty or so plagues recorded in history had caused nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths?” (35). Camus’s development of the allegorical idiom of a plague to portray

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the Nazi occupation of France is powerful indeed. A sense of horror quickly arises as the work opens and more and more dying rats emerge into the streets, soon numbering in the thousands. Subsequently, the novel depicts the ghastly deaths of those who contract the plague, including the detailed, extended sufferings of a child on whom an antidote is tested—but who ends up dying. Comparing the Nazi occupation to an epidemic seems compelling, especially when one recalls Lyotard’s reminder that Nazism was not refuted; it was not argumentatively defeated but was “beaten down like a mad dog” ([1984] 1988, 106). Certain characters in The Plague are complicit in the spread of the epidemic; the Prefect cannot believe his city is actually infected with the bubonic plague, and he initially refuses to take adequate measures. More disturbingly, he subsequently seeks to avoid responsibility for the outbreak, looking to the powers that be instead of acting decisively. But avoiding facing the severity of a natural disaster and then refusing responsibility is an error of a different sort, in my view, than refusing to acknowledge and oppose a political evil, and thus being complicit in its entrenchment. The idea of nature as evil is a human projection, and not taking measures against an apparently inexplicable disease is distinct from ignoring political evils and from disregarding tyranny and subjugation. The Plague contains notable depictions of complicity and collaboration. But whereas the content of the novel condemns complicity, the allegorical idiom is itself complicit in the naturalizing and therefore in the depoliticizing of a political event. There is indubitably a problem with representing the Nazi occupation of France, and Nazi persecution, as a biological disease—even as an insidious and deadly one. As many commentators beginning with Roland Barthes have noted, facing and choosing to fight an epidemic is different from facing and choosing to fight human beings (Barthes [1955] 1993–1995, 1:452–56). The metaphor of a plague is, I would argue, complicit in neutralizing or at least downplaying the social and political context of the Nazi occupation. As mentioned earlier, Dr. Rieux is unable to conceptualize the enormous number of deaths that a plague generates (35). But this kind of imaginative failure would seem distinct from the inability to conceive of a regime purposefully executing millions of innocent people and striving to cast its murderous network over an entire continent.3 What is more, although the novel addresses complicity by contrasting those characters who choose actively to fight the epidemic with those who do nothing or who profit from the situation, it avoids portraying the most dreadful form of complicity faced by the French resistance. As E. Freeman importantly notes, the novel does not address the issue of reprisals. In battling a political system that summarily murdered innocent citizens, acts of sabotage lead to further such executions: “hence



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nightmare equations had to be made” (1971, 83). The characters Rieux, Tarrou, Grand, and Rambert experience hardships and take risks; and some of them die.4 But they themselves do not bring about death as they fight the spread of the plague, and they do not have to make “nightmare equations.” The Plague contrasts those who nobly resist the ravaging spread of death with those who—to varying degrees—are complicit in its spread; this situation seems radically different from that of members of the resistance whose decision to fight a regime of murder and torture often made them complicit in murder and torture. Most noteworthy, there is no mention of the Shoah in The Plague. Although the epidemic is more devastating in certain places and certain parts of city, the plague does not discriminate. In this way, the novel is complicit in misrepresenting not only the political context but the specificity of the persecution of the Nazis. Another obvious problem with the novel is its lack of Arab characters and its at the very least implicitly colonialist perspective. In her interesting book Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), however, Debarati Sanyal explicates how The Plague is more intertwined with a critique of colonialism than it might initially seem, and she elucidates the “multi-directional force of Camus’s allegories” (19). Indeed, she argues that the novel “produced a symbolic template for subsequent reflection on the proximities between Nazism, colonialism, and racialized terror” (79). One of the epigraphs for her chapter on Camus is a quotation from the letter Camus wrote to Barthes in response to Barthes’s critique of The Plague: “Terror has many faces, which justifies that I named none of them in order to strike at them all. Perhaps this is why The Plague is criticized, for serving all resistances to all tyrannies” (56).5 But even if Camus’s allegory alludes to “multiple—if not contradictory—legacies of violence” (59), as Sanyal argues, the problem of the novel’s complicity remains. In our time of climate change, natural disasters are hardly ever simply “natural” any more. Nevertheless, a flood, an earthquake, or, as in The Plague, an epidemic, call for a distinctly different response than political tyranny. The most compelling aspect of The Plague is that it suggests that everyone, young and old, rich and poor, single and married, can be considered called upon to join the battle, to act with what the narrator simply terms “common decency” (Camus [1947] 1948, 136). Dr. Rieux’s wife dies without him in another town, while he continues to fight the epidemic during its final stages. The enormity of the evil demands that one fight against it, the novel insists, and obligations toward a family or a lover, or dedication to an important project, do not provide a valid reason for not joining the battle. The Plague is a brilliant book that a plaintiff could use to argue against those who collaborated in occupied France. It does not, however, create a new

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idiom that expresses a differend, although it may once have done so; Lyotard notes that what constitutes a differend changes historically ([1984] 1988, 56). Although the French resistance was lauded in postwar France and much of the collaboration was condemned, there was also a sense that many people had little choice but to go along with the German occupiers and the Vichy government. The scope and scale of French cooperation was not grasped; hence The Plague may perhaps have sought to express a differend by evoking a feeling of the extent and enormity of French compliance. At the present time, however, The Plague does not express a feeling for what one cannot put into words. Lyotard writes, “A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless” ([1984] 1988, 13). In The Plague, the differend is smothered in a litigation; the work does not link onto existing phrases about the Nazi occupation in a new way. As a result, The Plague is complicit in eliding the complex horrors that members of the resistance faced, and it is complicit in the postwar silence about the Shoah. LUDWIG’S ROOM (2000) The protagonist of Alois Hotschnig’s Ludwig’s Room, Kurt Weber, considers his extended family “nothing more than a disease threatening to infect me” (Hotschnig [2000] 2014, 81). Kurt has spent his life trying to avoid family members and to resist being ensnared by familial bonds, which he believes we “wear like a noose” Yet his familial past infects his existence. Whereas Camus’s The Plague paints a city in the paroxysms of an epidemic, writhing in its convoluted rise and decline, Ludwig’s Room follows a first-person narrator who acts as a kind of detective, gradually unraveling what family members are determined to keep concealed and forgotten. At the beginning of the novel, Kurt inherits a house; but only over threequarters of the way through the book do we finally learn of the betrayal in relation to the house that occurred during the Second World War and the repercussions of this event. Kurt’s great uncles Georg and Paul, while trying to compel their brother Ludwig to cease his involvement with the resistance, are complicit in Ludwig’s arrest and internment at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Inge, a friend of the three brothers, especially of Ludwig’s, had also joined the resistance. Georg wants to frighten Ludwig into ceasing his dangerous, oppositional activities. He arranges for the authorities to follow Inge as she goes to the house looking for Ludwig. It is intended as a warn-



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ing; Ludwig is not supposed to be found. But Paul has introduced a friend into the group who has become a Nazi informer and who knows of the secret alcove where Ludwig is hiding. Ludwig is taken to Mauthausen. Georg and Paul feel complicit in Ludwig’s having been discovered and arrested, and Paul later hangs himself in the very room where Ludwig had hidden. Georg spends much of the remainder of his life preoccupied with his responsibility for both events. Complicity is clearly a central theme in Ludwig’s Room. Georg and Paul are complicit in Ludwig’s internment; indeed, it was their actions that inadvertently led to his capture. In fact, Georg and his friend, Herr Gärtner, supported the Nazis in Austria and hence were complicit in the establishment of Nazi authority. But there is a complicity of silence in Kurt’s family regarding what took place during the war. Kurt only finally finds out what happened decades later from Inge and Herr Gärtner. No one in Kurt’s family, including his parents, ever discusses what occurred; they never even mention it. Even on All Souls Day, when the relatives gather at the cemetery to honor the dead, there is no mention of Ludwig or Paul, or even of Georg and his recently diseased wife Anna, from whom Kurt has just inherited the house. The family seems determined to keep the door on their past shut. The community, too, refuses to acknowledge the Nazi legacy and the horror behind the “Loibl-tunnel” near Landskron, Carinthia, where the house is located. The tunnel, linking the Austrian province of Carinthia to Slovenia, was forcibly built by the prisoners at Mauthausen, many of whom were thereby deliberately killed. The narrator notes that there is barely an acknowledgment of this fact on the Austrian side. Although this was the case when the novel was published in 2000, the efforts of the Mauthausen committee of Carinthia have resulted in plaques and regular commemorations—with a 2012 commemoration acknowledging that the Slovenians had had memorial plaques and monuments for some time, and that these were long overdue in Carinthia (Kaernten ORF 2012). Ludwig’s incarceration at Mauthausen and his brothers’ complicity are clearly the events that the novel circles around and to which it finally leads. Most striking about the novel, however, is not its dramatic story but its style. In Ludwig’s Room, it is often difficult to identify what is going on: one does not always know who is speaking, where events are taking place, and, as one reads, whether or not it is a dream—generally a nightmare—that is being depicted. Most noteworthy is that Hotschnig seems to have invented an idiom of death. As René Freund notes in the Wiener Zeitung, “in the world of the first-person narrator, Kurt Weber, who inherits the cursed house, words like cemetery, cellar, death, suicide, buried, anxiety, decomposition, destruction, ruin, and despicableness, dominate—just to name a few instances of the morbid vocabulary” (2000; my translation).6 Most unrelenting are the references

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to dying, burial, and corpses. The novel seeks to present us with a world permeated by death, as if to remind us that death and corpses are the legacy of National Socialism. Furthermore, not only the themes but the writing itself is steeped in a language that evokes death and dying. At one point, after a convoluted dream about digging up graves, Kurt states, “I’ll be awake and alert and I’ll stand on two feet and will fall into the new day as into a noose” (43). And it is not only Kurt, the narrator, who is obsessed with death, but the other characters too: “Death creeps round the house, my new neighbour’s mother said when I stopped by to introduce myself” (6). The comment of another neighbor, Herr Gärtner, when a line of honking cars passes by is: “The wedding guests, he laughed as the honking reached him, future funeral guests” (45). From the opening of the work, both Kurt Weber’s perspective and the dialogues are persistently dark and morbid. Moreover, not only does death pervade the novel but also anxiety and unease. The narrator recounts Herr Gärtner’s comment to him: “We seek refuge but encounter anxiety, he said, and you, too, you’re seeking refuge but encounter only your own anxiety. Mr. Gärtner knew me well” (41; translation modified).7 Indeed, Kurt himself experiences uneasiness to such an extent that it dominates his mind and infests his body: “This unease gnawed at me during the day and at night and it grew in my dreams like an inner organ displacing the others” (23). The emphasis on anxiety, coupled with the pervasive references to death in Ludwig’s Room, evokes existentialist concerns, specifically Martin Heidegger’s contention that as Dasein we are beings-towarddeath ([1927] 2010, 227–56). Heidegger considers Angst a fundamental mood (Stimmung) linked to our mortality. We know for a fact that we are going to die, but anxiety opens us up to death as an ineluctable, structuring certainty. Heidegger makes a point of distinguishing fear and anxiety. Fear always has an object; we fear something, even if this thing is general or elusive, for example, fear related to an economic downturn, or apprehension in the face of the election of certain politicians. Anxiety, to the contrary, has no object. It is anxiety about [blank]. Anxiety is about nothing in particular, nothing that can ever be named or specified. Anxiety is the mood that infuses Ludwig’s Room, and the novel has an existentialist dimension. This contrasts with the fear and terror created by the Nazis in Austria. Kurt is interested in knowing more about what happened to Ludwig, and he researches into Mauthausen. He learns that the official goal of the camp was to exterminate the prisoners through work and that their deaths were expedited through beatings and torture. Ludwig actually survives his internment at Mauthausen and having been forced to build the Loibl-tunnel—although he never returns to his family. Most prisoners do not



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survive, however, and each day survivors of the previous day must have been filled, not with anxiety, but with the fear and terror of being beaten and/or tortured to death. In my view, therefore, the instances of complicity with the Nazis in Austria that Kurt unearths are diminished by the existential tone of the novel.8 In fact, the first-person protagonist has an almost ontological sense of guilt. Early in the novel, in response to Inge’s remark that he is not guilty, not from the outset, Kurt thinks to himself: “This much was new and I was very interested in whatever it was I wasn’t guilty of. For once, at least, I wasn’t guilty of something from the outset” (18). Indeed, Friederike Gösweiner considers guilt to be a central theme in Hotschnig’s novels, guilt as a “Conditio sine qua non” (2014, 59; emphasis in the original), an indispensable ingredient of human existence. And Robert Schwarz, in his review of Ludwig’s Room, states that he appreciated the “thoroughly fine writing and its capturing of the metaphysical implications of human guilt and conflict” (2001, 366). For these critics, the novel is concerned with general themes of human guilt and human conflict. Ludwig’s Room revolves around very specific events, and it portrays instances of individual, familial, and national complicity. But these historical and political events are transformed, through the style of the book, into ahistorical experiences and understandings of life and death, guilt and conflict. In other words, the novel’s pervading discourse of death, anxiety, and culpability work to override and undercut the violence and horror of the Nazi presence and the import of the facts the narrator learns about Mauthausen. Ludwig’s Room seems ontological rather than historical, seems to be concerned with metaphysical truths rather than social and political events, and seems to be saying something about the human condition in general rather than the Austrian enthusiasm for National Socialism. The novel’s conclusion, when it comes, is extremely troubling. Early in the novel, we learn that the previous owner of the house, Georg’s wife Anna, used to say, “You’re only truly at home where you’ve got someone in the graveyard” (9; emphasis in the original). This is an unusual definition of Heimat, of being at home, to say the least. Nevertheless, the novel ends with the protagonist coming to feel that he belongs in Landskron, Carinthia—in part because he has dead buried in the cemetery (not so much his family, from whom he has distanced himself, but Herr Gärtner, who told him about Ludwig). On the final page of the novel, Kurt reiterates Anna’s statement: “You’re only truly at home where you’ve got someone in the graveyard” (146; emphasis in the original). In the meantime, however, this statement has become disturbing because we have learned that those prisoners who died each day while building the Loibl-tunnel were left where they fell, with the other prisoners having to step over them until the end of the day when their bodies were burned in

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a bonfire. In other words, not far from where Anna lived, the murdered dead were denied burial, not to mention a graveyard. Anna’s statement alleges that surviving friends and family of the dead whom the Nazis murdered, if they do not have other friends or family in a graveyard, are destined never to be able to feel truly at home. To say that certain people cannot truly feel at home in a particular place might also be to suggest that they do not belong there. And to suggest that certain people do belong to a place and others do not belong is not far removed from ideas espoused by the Nazis. The creating of new idioms that might express differends is not an easy task. Ludwig’s Room should be applauded for its attempt, even though it ultimately does not succeed. The novel seems to create an idiom of death in order to portray the lethal effects of the Austrian enthusiasm for and support of National Socialism and the far-reaching repercussions of Nazi violence and destruction—even as this is something most Austrians want to forget and deny. Ludwig’s Room is a story that involves breaking a certain silence and disclosing information about—and the legacy of—a concentration camp and forced labor in Austria. The style of the novel is impressively original, but the work does not find words for an incommensurable feeling. Instead of expressing a differend, the narrative is complicit in eliding the central event of the story through familiar existentialist expressions about death, traditional feelings regarding guilt and culpability, and the idea that it is important to feel at home somewhere. Ludwig’s Room is complicit in undermining the import of the very events that it uncovers through recounting the story of Ludwig’s room. DORA BRUDER (1997) Dora Bruder relates the narrator’s research into the true story of a runaway teenager during the German occupation of France. Dora Bruder did not return to her convent boarding school and was missing for four months; her father eventually reported her disappearance and a notice was placed in a newspaper—which the narrator comes across decades later. To find Dora Bruder means to lose her, however, because she is Jewish and will soon be deported. The sorrowful fact haunting the work is that Dora was not officially registered with the French police; had she not run away, there is at least the possibility that she might have remained undetected, stayed under the radar so to speak, and been among the almost three-quarters of French Jews who eluded deportation and murder. The narrator tries to learn everything he can about Dora from government and police documents, newspaper articles, school registers, photos, an interview with a surviving cousin, lists of arrests and deportations, and a study



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of the weather at the time she ran away. He is not a relative, however, and therefore is sometimes denied documents, and of course many documents were lost or destroyed at the end of the war—and afterward. The narrator’s research is protracted and time consuming; he visits archives and bureaucracies and writes letters to them requesting information. It takes him four years to discover Dora’s exact date of birth, he tells us, and a further two years to find out that she was born in Paris. But the narrator relates that he “is a patient man. [He] can wait for hours in the rain” (Modiano [1997] 1999, 10). The fairly short Dora Bruder recounts facts about Dora’s life and her familial background—or at least as much as the narrator is able to learn about them—accompanied by his account of his investigations, the associations he makes, and the connections he sees with his own life. Indeed, the narrator’s interest seems to have been impelled by the fact that Dora grew up in a neighborhood of Paris where he himself spent a lot of time as a child and frequented later. In addition, he too once ran away briefly from boarding school as a teenager, and he depicts the intensity of the feelings he experienced then, including the intoxication of escape (63). But he quickly reminds himself—and us—that when he ran away the world had once again been made safe, whereas when Dora ran away during the occupation, there were curfews and soldiers and police “all intent on her destruction” (64). Throughout Dora Bruder, the narrator recounts the thoughts and the associations that Dora provokes in him and the intersections with times and places in his own life. Shadowing the work is his own Jewish father who went underground to elude the Nazis, and who narrowly escaped arrest around the time Dora was arrested. The narrator’s recounting of Dora’s story expands beyond her individual fate. At one point the narrator quotes moving extracts from a few of the “hundreds and hundreds” (69) of unanswered letters written to the Prefect of Police seeking information about Jewish relatives, often children, who had been arrested, although most—like Dora—were French citizens. The book also reproduces a long letter, purchased at one of the book stalls along the Seine, from an art columnist held at the Drancy internment prison in Paris, where Dora also was briefly held. The man had just been told he would be deported shortly, and his letter asks that a parcel of clothes and other essentials be dropped off quickly for himself and a friend; he is certain that he will not be able to return for a while and expects to be spending the winter wherever it is in the east that he is going. This man ends up on the same transport to Auschwitz as some of the girls and young women with whom Dora came into contact at the Tourelles holding jail, where they were all held before being transferred to Drancy. One of the women had recently married a non-Jewish Frenchman against his parents’ wishes, and the narrator recounts his sad fate

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as well as hers. The narrator also mentions “Jew’s friends” whom Dora could have met; these were non-Jewish women who wore the yellow star in solidarity with Jews, mocking the authorities, and who also ended up at Drancy. A theme that consistently emerges in the book is the active involvement— complicity is too weak a word—of the French authorities in arresting and incarcerating Jews. The police were especially energetic, but various levels of government bureaucracy also participated. The novel also stresses the French interest in forgetting about the past after the war: in forgetting the collaboration, in forgetting the fact that French institutions and individuals were, at the very least, complicit in the murder of Jewish citizens and Jews from other countries, like Dora’s parents (her father was born in Vienna but had been a French legionnaire). The narrator notes that “tens of thousands” of signed transcripts of the “press-gangs”—the street police who interviewed those whom they arrested during the roundups—were destroyed. As a result, the identity of these members of the street police can never be known. The narrator recounts the eagerness with which one supervisor, Jacques Schweblin, and his search team beat, searched, and robbed the detainees at Drancy before their transport to Auschwitz (51–52). The search team was young, the narrator notes, “so some must still be alive today” (55); moreover, although Schweblin was allegedly “disposed of” by the Germans, it is much more likely he survived the war without ever being punished. Most noteworthy, there were written recordings, with copies sent to superintendents, of the hundreds of adolescents like Dora who were arrested on the streets in June 1942, passing through the police depot, and then Drancy, on to Auschwitz. Such records, the narrator notes, disappeared: “It goes without saying that the specific and individual transfer warrants of which Superintendent Roux received copies [these were made out in duplicate] were destroyed after the war, or even, perhaps, as each arrest was completed” (86). What is more, after the war, many buildings and areas in Paris were subject to reconstruction and restoration. This leaves the narrator with a feeling of emptiness. He links this feeling to his awareness that the world of Dora Bruder and her compatriots, and the occupation, has been erased, describing the new buildings thus: “The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the concrete the color of amnesia. . . . They have obliterated everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality” (113). The novel makes clear that not only did many French individuals and institutions actively collaborate with the German persecution and murder of Jews, but French society, specifically the city of Paris itself, was explicitly and implicitly complicit in the obliteration and forgetting of this past. Dora Bruder is concerned with the obfuscations and subtle silencing that make Dora and her compatriots into differends,



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their stories expunged, rendered irrelevant, considered to be of little or no importance. Dora Bruder both discloses certain aspects of Dora’s short life and indicates the silence surrounding her story, the silence surrounding the stories of the people with whom she came into contact, and the silence surrounding the many people whose stories intersected with hers. By depicting the extensive research required to learn anything about Dora, and by including information he discovers about her compatriots, the narrator forges an idiom with which to express this silence and evokes the resounding silence that existed after the war and still exists today. Very near the end of The Differend, Lyotard states that sorrow can also be an instance of a sublime feeling. Dora Bruder is infused with sorrow. It concludes with the following paragraph regarding the fact that the narrator remains unable to learn where Dora went or what she did when she ran away: I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret which not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, history, time—everything that corrupts and destroys you—have been able to take away from her. ([1984] 1988, 137)

This sorrowful ending is ultimately, however, more about the narrator and about France than about Dora. Had the narrator learned where or how Dora had spent her days while “on the run,” he would undoubtedly have recounted this information in Dora Bruder. Dora may have succeeded in not being found for four winter months and a few spring weeks for some very simple reason, but it also may have been an accomplishment of which she was exceedingly proud. It may be a “secret” Dora would have wanted made known. In point of fact, her “secret” attests to some extent to the lack of interest in her because she was Jewish, to records destroyed or information not even recorded. By referring to what he cannot learn about Dora’s escape as her “secret,” the narrator is complicit in making the story too much about himself and about France, complicit in making the story too much about what he was able to discover and what he will never know. Throughout the text, the narrator makes connections and draws parallels between Dora’s life and his own: places and buildings where Dora went that also figure in his own life; people who intersect with both their lives, sometimes in a rather oblique way; associations he makes while researching Dora’s life. The narrator tells us as much about himself as he does about Dora, and in this way he diminishes her story. Yet part of the sorrow of Dora Bruder lies in our awareness not only that Dora might have survived

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the German occupation had she not run away but also that we might never have learned of Dora. Dora’s story is dependent on the narrator’s interest and research—and on his patience. Dora Bruder comes close to expressing a differend, although it is perhaps too little about Dora, and too much about the narrator’s understanding of her, to do so. What Dora Bruder does do, however, is point to further differends or even to the differend as such. It tells of a teenager who runs away and is eventually caught: an ordinary story. But in this version of the story, the teenager is caught and subsequently killed; at Drancy, Dora finds her father who was searching for her, and who is also killed, as is later her mother, and as are millions of others. Reading Dora Bruder, one cannot but realize that Dora is a single individual and that there are countless other individuals like her, and also different from her, countless stories similar to and different from hers— stories yet to be told. These innumerable lives and innumerable untold stories, Dora Bruder suggests, are differends for which an idiom is yet to be found. Ultimately, Dora Bruder points to a differend insofar as it evokes a sublime feeling: an awareness of the impossibility of representing all the stories. CONCLUSION Clearly, a central theme in The Plague, Ludwig’s Room, and Dora Bruder is complicity. My argument is that despite these depictions of complicity and despite the fact that all three works try to create new idioms for depicting the Nazi reign, they themselves are complicit in misrepresentations, and these misrepresentations occur insofar as their idioms are unable to express a differend. The Plague is complicit in misrepresenting the Nazi occupation of France because it naturalizes a political event; it advocates the importance of battling a patently deadly evil, but it elides the dilemmas experienced by resistance members during the occupation, and it remains silent regarding the fact that the Nazis and their French supporters specifically targeted Jews, and also Roma and other groups. Camus’s novel takes the position of a plaintiff in an argument about joining the resistance, but it does not expose a silence and express a wrong; hence, it does not convey a differend. Ludwig’s Room is much more stylistically innovative than The Plague, but its anxiety-laden, death-infused tone detracts from the concrete fear and terror created by the Nazi regime—a differend it does not end up expressing. The grim narrative digs up a family secret and condemns the silencing of the past that continues in Austrian society, but its existential and ontological lens defuses the specific historical event of Austrian National Socialism. Dora Bruder comes closest to expressing a differend, but it is complicit in eclipsing Dora’s story



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through the narrator’s depiction of his own story of his interest in and understanding of Dora. In the end, the work points to differends as much as it portrays one. This may be preferable, in a certain sense, because once a differend is expressed, it is no longer a differend of course. So while Dora Bruder may not express a differend, it conjures the operative silence and silencing, and it evokes the many stories, the countless further differends that linger, unexpressed. Lyotard’s concept of the differend is, I would argue, exceedingly helpful in analyzing representational complicity. If a work does not seek to, or is unable to create a new idiom, this should alert us to the possibility that it may be complicit in an existing silence. Such silence is especially important in relation to Auschwitz: the site of exterminations and the attempt to erase the evidence of these exterminations. And finally, as Lyotard notes, the cognitive regime, the regime of factual knowledge, is not sufficient to evoke an event that is mostly unfathomable. New idioms are called for: forms of representation that break with existing presentations and with complicity in the silence and elisions they implicitly entail. NOTES 1.  This is dramatically represented in the film Labyrinth of Lies; Im Labyrinth des Schweigens literally, “In the Labyrinth of Silence” about what paved the way for the Frankfurt trials of members of the SS who worked in Auschwitz: one of the characters asks others if they have heard of Auschwitz; all shake their heads and walk away. 2.  Lyotard argues that Auschwitz is not a differend but the sign of a differend. He explicitly states, “Between the S.S. and the Jew there is not even a differend” ([1984] 1988, 106). 3.  Shoshana Felman, to the contrary, sees parallels in the disbelief of the victims of the plague and of the Holocaust. She argues that Camus’s characters disbelieve in the plague because it is scientifically and historically impossible, known to have been wiped out in the Western world (1992, 102), and because it defied human expectations; similarly, she argues, the victims of the Holocaust did not believe the “rumours” they heard about the final solution because such a “systematic campaign of destruction . . . was beyond human imagination” (103) and because they could not fathom that it could “happen here” (104). 4.  James D. Wilkinson states, “the painful decisions to kill, to expose one’s family to reprisals, to risk betrayal and torture—all these were suppressed in Camus’s description of Oran gripped by the plague” (1981, 98). 5.  Camus himself thought that his work was about combatants’ response to the human face of the scourge; the sentences, in his letter to Barthes, from which Sanyal’s epigraph is taken read as follows (with the epigraph italicized): “La question que vous posez en tout cas ‘Que feraient les combattants de La Peste devant le visage trop humain

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du fléau?’ est injuste en ce sens qu’elle doit être écrite au passé et qu’alors elle a déjà reçu sa réponse, qui est positive. Ce que ces combattants, dont j’ai traduit un peu de l’expérience, ont fait, ils l’ont fait justement contre les hommes, et à un prix que vous connaissez. Ils le referont sans doute, devant toute terreur et quel que soit son visage, car la terreur en a plusieurs, ce qui justifie encore que je n’en aie nommé précisément aucun pour pouvoir mieux les frapper tous. Sans doute est-ce là ce qu’on me reproche, que La Peste puisse servir à toutes les résistances contre toutes les tyrannies” (Barthes [1955] 1993–1995, 458). 6.  “in der Welt des Ich-Erzählers Kurt Weber, der das verwunschene Haus erbt, dominieren Worte wie Friedhof, Keller, Tod, Selbstmord, Vergraben, Angst, Verwesung, Zerstörung, Ruine, Niedertracht, um nur einen Teil des morbiden Vokabulars zu nennen” (Freund 2000). 7.  I have modified the translation mainly by translating Angst as anxiety. Angst does, of course, mean fear, but in this context it seems to refer more to anxiety. The original reads: “Wir suchen Zuflucht und stoßen auf Angst, sagte er, auch Sie suchen Zuflucht, and sie stoßen dabei auf die eigene Angst, Herr Gärtner kannte mich gut” (Hotschnig 2011, 40). 8.  Indeed, Anna Driscoll considers the novel to be about transgenerational inherited melancholy, arguing that “such a pervasive condition cannot have originated in the narrative’s background historical events” (2013, 225).

Chapter 6

Guilt and Autonomy in Harmann Broch’s and Geoffrey Hill’s Works Olaf Berwald For A. M.

Do noncomplicit texts exist? Are there any literary works of art (and of research, and of art as research) that successfully outmaneuver systemic violence, resist being instrumentalized by various regimes, and defy being rendered harmless by the market? Even most alleged commitments to reading and writing as acts of resistance remain inescapably interwoven with the very fabric of complicity and guilt-by-indifference that they originally set out to overcome. Literary scholars who pursue questions of complicity while refusing to traffic in silver linings and linear answers find themselves embedded in a palimpsest of superimposed inquiries: Is a co-autonomous interplay of ethics and aesthetics even possible and sustainable? How can lyrical evocations or prose examinations of literature’s complicity with systemic violence address their own collusion with the very process they creatively offer up for further critical exploration? Are there ways of writing that consistently refrain from what the German poet and radio playwright Günter Eich, in his 1959 Büchner Prize acceptance speech, has called “decorating the slaughterhouse with geraniums” (1991, 627; das Schlachthaus mit Geranien schmücken), or does every single attempt at a subversive approach to writing already from its inception and irrevocably become part of a floral arrangement delivery service? As Max Picard points out in his postwar reflections Hitler in uns selbst (1946, The Hitler within Ourselves), the Nazi regime suffocated the expressive potential of language (“das Wort”) and replaced it with a dictatorship of propaganda slogans (“Durch Hitler wurde nicht nur die allgemeine Diktatur, sondern auch die Diktatur der Parole errichtet, sie allein herrschte, nicht 75

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mehr das Wort”) (85). Thomas Docherty, in his recent essay “Complicity, Law, Responsibility” (2017), highlights correlations between complicity and an impoverishment of language and tentatively calls for linguistic and sympoetic renewal: “Complicity . . . is constructed through . . . a reduction of the lexicon available for discussion and debate. . . . Ethics . . . calls us to establish new modes of assembly, new forms of speech; and, for that, we need, still, a new language. That is probably why poetry matters” (2017, 27, 31). In a similar vein, but without the utopian horizon hinted at by Docherty, Paul Reynolds, in his essay “Complicity as Political Rhetoric: Some Ethical and Political Reflections” (2017a), reminds us of our political duty to critically conceive of complicity as a pattern of societal power dynamics, both rhetorically and structurally: “The political task is to articulate the rhetorical power of narratives that evoke complicity towards incorporating complicity in structural as well as agential wrongdoing” (2017a, 49). In her essay “Poetry, Injury, and the Ethics of Reading” (2014), Elaine Scarry offers a nonrhetorical question: “What is the ethical power of literature? Can it diminish acts of injuring?” Insisting on what she calls “literature’s capacity to reduce harm,” Scarry emphasizes “its invitation to empathy, its reliance on deliberative thought, and its beauty” (2014, 41–42). While it is hard to argue with Scarry’s disarmingly well-intended claims, it is precisely this kind of rhetoric that plays into the hands of power hierarchies by delegating humanistic virtues (empathy, thoughtful deliberation, an appreciation of beauty) to writers and artists. Recycling the enlightenment topos of an alleged educational value of literature for the character formation of the citizenry is an unsurprising preservation tonic for power structures that, far from questioning existing power structures, fortifies them by adding to the rhetorical arsenal of the status quo. What, then, would be a nonviolent way of understanding predatory societal power dynamics without becoming prey to them and without inadvertently proliferating them through our very own analyses? As Spinoza posits in the first axiom of his Ethica (1677), what cannot be understood by extrinsic explanations has to be understood on its own terms: “Id, quod per aliud non potest concipi, per se concipi debet” (2015, 6). Despite the perspectival flexibility and even empathy activated by Spinoza’s axiom, every terminology that trades in dichotomies while promising conceptual control partially blinds us. While stepping out of dichotomic rearrangements might prove impossible, I submit that a kinship with the silence that breathes in each word forms the submerged nucleus of a vibrantly experimental “philologia” whose provisions, replenished by caring curiosity, can stimulate our epistemic appetite to grasp and outperform its ubiquitous antagonist, pseudo-omniscient indifference.



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Even when we try to excise them from our explorations of cultural practices and products, questions of guilt-by-indifference persist and stubbornly stare back at us. Nuanced explorations of the friable autonomous self’s ways out of guilt and into poetry and back will benefit from approaching the works of exiled Austrian novelist Hermann Broch (1886–1951) and British poet Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) as inexhaustibly vertiginous textual sources of dialogic energy. Often engaged in haunting conversations with Ancient Roman poetry, Hill’s and Broch’s works examine and negotiate individual and collective guilt against the backdrop of a wide range of historical settings. Their protagonists and lyrical voices explore complicity from inside the porous boundaries that simultaneously connect and productively destabilize renewed attempts at understanding ethics and poetics. COMPLICITY’S GRAY ZONES IN GEOFFREY HILL’S POETRY The lyrical persona in Geoffrey Hill’s Odi Barbare poems from his The Daybooks project (2007–2012) laments feeling haunted by hermeneutic helplessness and scopic vulnerability: “That the severed image defies extinction / Gives me the shivers” (2013, 833–86; here 851). These lines allude to an abundance of texts that explore visual terror and desire, for instance Meister Eckhart’s reflections on the soul as an internalized image of God and his admission that every image at the same time also constitutes an unbridgeable split. In his Clavics cycle (2007–2012), also from The Daybooks, Hill evokes a scopic fight for survival between self-declared owners of alleged omniscience who encircle one another “in strife of certitudes to be outstared” (2013, 789–832; here 819). Hill’s verse posits that we cannot get rid of disturbingly uncategorizable phenomena, including the gray zones of complicity with state-sponsored terror and structural violence that cannot be isolated through competing lenses of epistemic certainty or moral superiority. An example of Hill’s works refraining from delivering one-dimensional moral didacticism and instead encouraging the reader to examine the ambiguity of complicity is his prosopopoeic poem “Ovid in the Third Reich” (1968). Written in the voice of a fictionalized Ovid, the poem stages the Roman poet as an overstrained, ambivalent, and humbled observer who refuses to pass judgment on himself and other bystanders of the Shoah (Hill 2013, 39). “Ovid in the Third Reich” begins with an epigraph from Ovid’s Amores, whose speaker embodies an extreme version of a cynically pragmatic defense mechanism (as practiced by the current occupant of the White House and his entourage): “Everyone is free of guilt who can deny any guilt, only admission

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of guilt creates a bad reputation” (Ovid, Amores III, 14; my translation). Here is Hill’s short poem in full length: I love my work and my children. God Is distant, difficult. Things happen. Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere, Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir. (2013, 39)

Werner von Koppelfels maintains that the poem accentuates the cowardice of those who look the other way in the face of crimes against humanity and whose conscience never appears to be burdened by their role as passive enablers (2014, 168). Jeffrey Wainwright, on the other hand, rather than reading Hill’s poem as a mere condemnation of self-congratulatory bystanders, foregrounds what he describes as “the moral suspension, helplessness” of Hill’s “Ovid” (2012, 104). Far from being mutually exclusive, von Koppelfels’s and Wainwright’s points are both well taken and bring us closer to a nuanced understanding of “Ovid in the Third Reich.” Making his readers productively uncomfortable, Hill’s “Ovid” can trigger our moral outrage but invites us to stop for a moment and to realize that succumbing to the readily available impulse of moral superiority would mean becoming complicit in self-congratulatory complacency. What Hill’s poems offer us instead are lucid manifestations of ambiguity and ethical explorations in the form of openended questions. It remains usefully unresolved whether his Ovid’s actions or passivity can be defined as repugnant escapism or as mildly subversive attempts at undermining a dictatorship with nonmilitaristic verses. With his Ovid’s reflections and their implicit suspension of chronological order, Hill invites the reader to analyze today’s palimpsests of our very own nexus of guilt-by-indifference and complicity with crimes against our human core. Another Hill poem from his volume King Log (1968) that confronts the reader with questions of complicity with the Nazi regime and with the Shoah uses a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost as its title: “I Had Hope When Violence Was Ceas’t.” The poem is written from the perspective of death camp prisoners. In the last verse, it switches from the first person plural to the first person singular, evoking extreme suffering and ending in a calmly defiant affirmation of selfhood that refuses to be stripped of its humanity and autonomy even while being murdered by concentration camp guards: “Dawnlight freezes against the east-wire. / The guards cough ‘raus! ‘raus! We flinch and grin, / Our flesh oozing towards its last outrage. / That which is taken



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from me is not mine” (Hill 2013, 43). While this poem might evoke empathy with the Shoah victims and move us to celebrate their resilience in the face of death, the text also provides a layer of discomfort by rehearsing the reader’s voyeuristic complicity with mass murder. Hill’s “September Song” (1968), an apostrophic poem from his collection King Log, is addressed to a child victim of the Shoah. It starts with the dates “born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42,” and continues: untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough. (2013, 44; emphasis in the original)

The poem leaves us with no comforting moral self-righteousness. Instead the speaking voice expresses an uneasy gratitude for not being itself a Shoah victim. Mixed with a moderate measure of mourning, the mindset presented here is reminiscent of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s often criticized dictum of the “mercy of being born belatedly” (“die Gnade der späten Geburt”), that is, not to have been an adult during the Nazi regime and therefore not having had to make tough moral decisions. This Hill poem invites, one could even say seduces, us to immerse ourselves in uncomfortably ambivalent states of mind. It remains undecidable whether the contrast between the suffering evoked in the first half of the poem in the form of a subdued apostrophe to the victims of the Shoah and the solemn presentation of the speaker’s locus amoenus warmed by “harmless fires” harbors an element of cruelty and complicity by indifference. The same question of the degree to which seemingly empathetic commemoration might itself be a manifestation of complicity is also examined in an untitled poem from Hill’s poetry collection Speech! Speech! (2000), which laments our “Age of mass consent” and “the outraged / hardly forgiven mourn-

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ing of the PEOPLE, / inexorable, though in compliance, / media-conjured” (2013, 298–99). Here Hill characterizes staged and ritualized public mourning as a lacuna, as a mistake, and as a moral dilemma, with a latent reference to Hölderlin, whose lyrical palimpsest choreography project Mnemosyne (composed around 1800) provides the unflinchingly apt diagnosis that we not only lack meaningful ways of mourning but also fail those we mourn every time we try to commemorate them. According to “the nymph Mnemosyne” in Hölderlin’s poem from 1803, mourning itself is a moral mistake, a vain masquerade, “fehlet die Trauer” (Hölderlin 1992, 1:365). Hill’s poem “The Argument of the Mask” (2005) from his volume Scenes from Comus outlines “the personality as a mask” but explores “character as self-founded, self-founding,” insisting on “the sacredness of the person” (emphasis in the original), and, in an homage to the anonymous treatise Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), a text that maintains the right to bear arms to fight tyrants, reminds the reader that speaking and writing can be weapons of resistance and to seek strength in “our covenants with language /// contra tyrannos” (Hill 2013, 421). The appeal to the redeeming potential of a resilient revolutionary rhetoric that is evoked and rehearsed in “The Argument of the Mask” is countered by its palinodic companion piece “A Description of the Antimasque” (2005). This poem, which also appeared in Scenes from Comus, presents a bleak outlook on the limits of language as a tool toward liberation. The speaker in this poem declares, “Nothing is unforgettable but guilt. / Guilt of the moment to be made eternal” (2013, 480). Kathleen Murphy posits that Hill “asserts the necessity for admissions of guilt in public life” (2012, 127). While Murphy’s strong word choice of “asserting necessity” runs the risk of mischaracterizing Hill’s work as apodictic and prescriptive, Hill’s poems include examples of symbolic public contrition, for example, “On Looking Through 50 Jahre im Bild: Bundesrepublik Deutschland” from his poetry volume A Treatise of Civil Power (2007). Inspired by a photograph depicting former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit to Warsaw in 1970 during which he spontaneously kneeled in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in order to honor the Polish Jewish victims of the German occupation with a gesture that changed the course of Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe, this ekphrastic poem culminates in a paraphrase of Brandt’s reflections on his wordless way of commemorating those who were killed by the Germans: “there’s Willy Brandt kneeling at the Ghetto Memorial / on his visit to Warsaw . . . / I did what people do when words fail them” (Hill 2013, 580; emphasis in the original). Juxtaposing criminal evidence of, and our ineptitude to verbalize our response to, mass killings and the disposal of bodies, Hill’s poem “Courtly Masquing Dances” (2005), also from his Scenes from Comus volume, concludes, “sooner or later we encounter evil / and find little to say. / Remembering though to say: / behind incertitude the vaulting /



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certitudes of flume and flame” (Hill 2013, 469). Hill’s poems avoid offering the illusion of moral superiority. In his textual worlds, exposing bystanders of crimes against humanity never leads to self-congratulatory assignments of guilt. Hill’s lyrical voices perform constant acts of existential skepticism, for example, in his cycle Oraclau / Oracles (from The Daybooks): “True, I do not speak truthfully; how could I? / We are a fiction even to ourselves” (2013, 782). Sympoetic discussions about the truth-value of the spoken word and the distinguishability between fact and propaganda have become of acute importance in today’s public discourse, and as literary scholars we have a duty to contribute to, or co-create, a sustained and inclusive conversation. Exploring ambivalent emotional states, including grief and gratitude, with aesthetic vibrancy, while also examining the porosity of the boundaries between empathy, indifference, and voyeuristic cruelty, Hill’s lyrical works invite the reader to become a collaborator in radically self-critical research on complicity. COMPLICITY AND CONTRITION IN HERMANN BROCH’S WORKS Challenging the play-it-safe one dimensionality of most debates on art and politics, Hermann Broch’s oeuvre assigns an overwhelming task to the labor of literature: to bring about radical ethical (and even metaphysical) change by becoming an uncompromisingly probing humanistic research journey. The series of short essays titled “Zerfall der Werte” (“The Disintegration of Values”) that Broch inserted into his novel trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1930–1932, The Sleepwalkers) centers around a compelling, if somewhat schematic, thesis: what used to be a holistic value system has disintegrated into specialized fields to which, for instance, military or business leaders, or, for that matter, artists relentlessly apply their profession’s internal logic with indiscriminate cruelty, detached from any empathy with human suffering: It is part of the internal logic of a soldier’s mindset to throw a hand grenade between the enemy’s legs; / it is part of the internal logic of the military in general to make full use of the military instruments of power in the most extreme consistent and radical ways possible and, if necessary, to eradicate peoples, to destroy cathedrals, to bomb hospitals and surgeries; / it is part of a business leader’s internal logic to make full use of economic instruments in the most consistent and extreme ways possible and to establish his own product as dominating the market by eliminating all competitors . . . war is war, l’art pour l’art . . . business is business. . . . All this is fueled by the same aggressive extremism and is focused only on the matter at hand, applying the same cruel logical mindset. (Broch 1994a, 495–96, my translation)1

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Another essayistic segment in The Sleepwalkers criticizes relief organizations such as the Red Cross as helpless or even cynical attempts at masking guilt. Instead of preventing mass slaughter, they distribute artificial limbs (Broch 1994a, 418).2 In correlation with Broch’s lifelong research project of a theory of mass psychopathology (Massenwahntheorie, Broch 1979; see also Ritzer 2016), his fictional essay writer wonders whether the widespread lack of empathy constitutes mass insanity: “are they insane because they did not lose their mind? Have they become indifferent to the suffering of any stranger!” (Broch 1994a, 420; my translation).3 But instead of rushing to a general diagnosis, Broch adds a decisive nuance, positing that the same individual simultaneously embodies the roles of executioner and victim.4 One of Broch’s most compelling literary explorations of complicity with violence and guilt-by-indifference can be found in “Steinerner Gast” (“Stone Guest”), one of the interwoven stories that constitute Broch’s last novel, Die Schuldlosen (1950, The Guiltless). Andreas, an affluent retired merchant to whom the text mostly refers by his initial A., is all of a sudden visited by an old bee keeper, a mythical figure who acts as a Socratic catalyst of A.’s admission of existential guilt. As a circumspect protector of his personal wealth, A. constantly monitors and modifies his investments. He considers the rise of the Hitler regime merely from a selfish financial perspective, as an annoying new economic risk factor that he has so far been able to keep at bay. A. finally unearths a buried distant memory of having seduced a young woman who committed suicide when he left her (Broch 1994b, 248). The narrator repeatedly uses the paradoxical term “guilty yet guiltless” (“schuldlos schuldig”) that aptly captures at least part of the question of the tacit complicity of bystanders during the Nazi regime and under any dictatorial rule (248, 257). While at first hiding behind courtroom tactics or philosophical skepticism and pretending that it is impossible for him to determine whether he is guilty or not (260),5 A. eventually confesses relentlessly, offering an inexorable self-analysis, calling himself a fraudster who had exhibited excessive toughness (“falsche Härte”) and whose only genuine quality was his genuine guilt (“echte Schuld”). He admits to having profited from the First World War and from the rise of the Nazi regime: “The war was raging in Europe, and I made money out of it. The Russian Revolution turned its country’s former class of victors into a heap of corpses, and I made money out of it. Before my own eyes, the political monster Hitler gradually came to power, and I made money out of it” (264; my translation).6 With increasing lucidity and letting go of self-serving excuses, A. accused himself of silent complicity with the Nazi regime for the sake of accumulating financial profits.



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After having summed up his self-diagnosis by declaring himself guilty of pervasive indifference toward the suffering of others, A. immediately expands his confession to a postmortem of society and the human condition in general, offering an anthropological thesis. According to A., “a primal sense of indifference toward our own humanness results in our indifference toward the pain of our fellow humans” (265; my translation).7 A. defines the human being as “indifferent toward the suffering of others, indifferent toward one’s one fate, indifferent toward the self in oneself, toward one’s soul” (269; my translation).8 Switching to the collective first person plural, A. observes widespread self-paralysis throughout society: “Paralyzed we escape from our paralysis into even more severe paralysis: we escape from our loneliness into an even more neighborless loneliness. We are paralyzed by loneliness. And we allowed Hitler to prevail, the beneficiary of our paralysis” (268–69; my translation).9 A. claims that having abandoned any sense of community, we are subjecting ourselves and one another to a blurring of boundaries between empty disintegrated selves that form a “cold unity welded together in indifference” (266, 271; my translation).10 Before he takes his own life, A. outlines a Kantian moral prescription of compelling but unattainable simplicity, declaring a universal duty to be fair to one another even under the most extreme circumstances if we are to avoid the loss of our sense of selfhood and our distinctive human qualities (270).11 At the end of his conversation with the bee keeper and harbinger of justice, the “stone guest” (“steinerne Gast,” a name and title taken from Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan, Mozart’s Don Giovianni, and Pushkin’s drama), A. announces his imminent suicide as a belated self-sacrifice for the sake of justice (271).12 In an essay on his Guiltless novel, Broch suggests to read A.’s suicide as a sign of “hope” and “comfort” because it indicates an admission of guilt, his desire to overcome his indifference, and a responsiveness to a new sense of “mercy” offered to him by the bee keeper (Broch 1994c, 308).13 Writers are not necessarily their own work’s most reliable interpreters, and this self-interpretation by Broch tries to add a religious element of hope for redemption, while the novel does not trade in reconciliation. In the same essay, Broch claims that the solitary individual is constantly ready to obliterate itself and those around it.14 Broch highlights what he calls “an absolute disengagement and lack of empathy between individuals, an allencompassing indifference whose only remaining mode of communication is unapologetic violence” (304–5; my translation).15 The author charges the novel with the impossible task of “delivering a fruitful contribution to the remaking of the world”; otherwise, he posits, there would not be any legitimate reason to produce any novels anymore (306; my translation). Focusing on what he calls the ethical dimension of guilt, Broch is less interested in

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the legal sphere than in what he calls “expiation/atonement” (“Sühne”) and “catharsis/sublimation” (“Läuterung”) (307).16 With disarming congruity, Broch argues for a “transition from the judicial to the human sphere” that he delegates to poetry (307; my translation).17 This radical claim goes hand in hand with Broch’s dismissal of literary works that cling to what for him have become outdated concerns with psychological, social, or economic explanatory patterns (307). Occasionally scholarly essays on Broch inadvertently become complicit with attempts to streamline literary works of art into one-dimensional vessels of a “message” and slip into moments of enthusiastic ventriloquism and involuntary caricature. In her recent handbook article on Broch’s The Guiltless, Doren Wohlleben claims that “only a literary ethics” (a term that she leaves undefined) “can atone” for the kind of guilt that Broch’s protagonists embody because it makes us more receptive to voices that are otherwise ignored (2016, 214; my translation). No “ethics” can “atone.” A theory is not a human being, and self-declared Broch experts still have to learn that his novels perform preliminary experiments rather than providing any dogmatic formula. A side glance at the ways in which Broch’s novel Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945) explores guilt, complicity, and a poet’s struggle for artistic autonomy from state power will provide additional nuance to our discussion. This lyrical and at times incantatory stream-of-consciousness novel, which was praised by Thomas Mann as one of the most unusual prose experiments, presents the dying and hallucinating Virgil confined to his deathbed inside a ship on the way home from Athens. At times, Virgil’s stream of (un) consciousness is interrupted by dialogue scenes in which the emperor Augustus visits him in order to persuade him not to burn the unfinished Aeneid manuscript. Intent on using Virgil’s opus magnum as propaganda material for his political purposes to cement his empire with a mythical justification, Augustus eventually convinces Virgil to hand over the manuscript that the poet had planned to burn. Existential and metaphysical layers of the poet’s sense of guilt and fear of failure to have fulfilled his spiritual calling are superimposed on the conflicted nexus of power, propaganda, and art. Broch’s Virgil recognizes an existential duty to help (“Pflicht zur Hilfe”) (1995, 126) and laments the artist’s powerlessness to fulfill this human obligation (“des Künstlers Ohnmacht zur Bewältigung menschlicher Pflicht”) and the resulting self-incarceration into art as a self-imposed “prison” (“Kerker der Kunst”) (130). Jürgen Heizmann argues that “like hardly any other poet of the modern age . . . Broch endeavors to place the aesthetic back under the primacy of the ethical” (2003, 197). While the first part of his statement is hyperbolic at best, Heizmann’s hint at the struggle for “primacy” between “the aesthetic” and “the ethical” alerts us to a fecund conflict in Broch’s



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oeuvre. But the prevalence of ethics in Broch’s work remains up for debate, given the hypnotic lyrical qualities of Der Tod des Vergil. It is therefore useful to keep in mind that Broch’s artful presentation of Virgil’s suffering from his lyrical masterpiece being instrumentalized by the Emperor Augustus as a propaganda tool also reflects Broch’s intermittent doubts about his own uses of literature and his concerns about the pitfalls of assumed moral superiority. Along these lines, in an insightful essay on Broch and Celan, Peter Yoonsuk Paik concisely elaborates on the moral conflict that Broch’s Virgil and Broch himself endure: “Art, Vergil reflects, can come into existence only insofar as it sustains an equilibrium between empathy and callousness, which are further abstracted into the principles of involvement and indifference . . . condemning the poet to the debilitating game of repeating its constituent oppositions, forbidding any passage beyond them” (2003, 210). But for Broch’s Virgil, the poet’s failure and self-imposed sense of guilt run even deeper. He feels that he has betrayed his mandate and mission (“Auftrag”) to prepare human capabilities (“das Menschliche”) for a “rebirth” (“Wiedergeburt”) and that he has perjured himself (“eidbrüchig gewesen”) by having failed to live up to an existential “oath” or “covenant” with “the earth” (“Bündniseid der Erde”) (1995, 149–50; my translation), a sworn commitment that he violated through his eventual complicity with the Roman Empire’s attempts to co-opt his poetry for propaganda projects. Broch’s Virgil declares himself guilty of having left his work unfinished (“ungetanes Tun”). Considering himself at fault for having left indispensable verses unwritten, Virgil blames himself for not having reached his full potential as a poet, and “the punishment” that he fears, but accepts, is “radical isolation, a loss of his mental abilities, and the forfeiture of conscious autonomy, imposed on him by an unrecognizable law” (152–53; my translation).18 While the spiritual allusions with which Broch’s novel intermittently operates cannot be examined in this chapter, the nightmarish torment that the contrite protagonist undergoes is depicted as a mise-en-abîme of hallucinatory scopic traumata, “deprived of his sense of being human, of which nothing had remained but the most naked and exposed guilt of the soul,” and “wrestled down and imbibed by the mirrorless emptiness of the eye that was threatening him through silence” (153; my translation).19 The dying, hallucinating Virgil is constantly exposed to “traumatic memories of primal terror, including that of a vulnerable animal abandoned by the herd, and an inescapable, omnipresent dungeon of a permanent leaden apparent death” (156–57; my translation).20 The paradoxical dilemma that Der Tod des Vergil endeavors to work through, raising insurmountable doubts about the legitimacy of art while at the same time embodying an inexhaustible work of art, makes Broch’s novel an addictive read. Heizmann however exaggerates when he calls Der

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Tod des Vergil “a unique case” of literature expressing radical doubts about literature: “In Der Tod des Vergil we find a unique situation in literary history in that the text is shaped by, and exemplifies, Broch’s own demanding poetics but simultaneously questions this poetics and ultimately all literature” (Heizmann 2003, 191; see also 2016, 179). One could turn the tables on Heizmann’s argument and claim that most literary works worth their salt, at least since the historical Virgil and Ovid that Broch and Hill use as creative points of departure, are engaged in quite similar palinodic challenges, oscillating between, or superimposing on each other, radical skepticism toward art and existential doubts (about everything, including the value of art) as art. Heizmann’s harmonizing hint at an allegedly utopian potential in Broch’s The Death of Virgil (2016, 195) also runs the risk of oversimplifying the novel’s constitutive conflict. Refusing to offer marketable silver linings of any political, religious, or teleological relief, and working through an abundance of intertextual threads and threats, including undogmatic psychoanalytical subtexts (Freud’s collaborator Paul Federn was Broch’s psychoanalyst who turned into a close friend), Broch’s novel invites the reader to temporarily suspend ready-made labels while exploring a dying poet’s exposure to streams of consciousness that occasionally uplift but often terrorize him. In their works discussed here, Hill and Broch offer literary soundings of complicity’s mise-en-abîme without resorting to easy answers. They do so by bringing ethical reflections in stimulating dialogue with aesthetic practice. In Hill’s poems and Broch’s prose works, every provisional insight leads to, and performs, a new question. Resiliently incompatible with the self-perpetuating numbness of academic assembly lines and subversively unusable as elevator music for knowledge production units, Broch’s and Hill’s artistic explorations of complicity and guilt-by-indifference resist the lure and convenience of supplying “certitudes.” Calling for untamed curiosity and a caring kind of skepticism, their works provide living listening devices (sans surveillance) that are taking the reader’s pulse. Are we still responsive in an era that is turning Orwellian again? NOTES 1.  “Zur Logik des Soldaten gehört es, dem Feind eine Handgranate zwischen die Beine zu schmeißen; / zur Logik des Militärs gehört es überhaupt, die militärischen Machtmittel mit äußerster Konsequenz und Radikalität auszunützen und wenn es nottut, Völker auszurotten, Kathedralen niederzulegen, Krankenhäuser und Operationssäle zu beschießen; / zur Logik des Wirtschaftsführers gehört es, die wirtschaftlichen



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Mittel mit äußerster Konsequenz und Absolutheit auszunützen und, unter Vernichtung aller Konkurrenz, dem eigenen Wirtschaftsobjekt . . . zu alleiniger Domination zu verhelfen . . . Krieg ist Krieg, l’art pour l’art. . . Geschäft ist Geschäft . . . dies ist alles von der nämlichen aggressiven Radikalität, ist von jener . . . auf die Sache und nur auf die Sache gerichteteten grausamen Logizität.”   2.  “Eine wohlorganisierte Humanität verhindert nichts, sondern organisiert sich als Rotes Kreuz und zur Herstellung von Prothesen.”   3.  “sind sie wahnsinnig, weil sie nicht wahnsinnig wurden? Gleichgültig gegen fremdes Leid!”   4.  “daß es ein einziges Individuum ist, in welchem Henker und Opfer vereint sich vorfinden.”   5.  “Schuld oder Unschuld, außerstande fühle ich mich, da eine Entscheidung zu treffen. Die Sachlage ist so verwirrt wie nur möglich.”   6.  “Der Krieg wütete in Europa, und ich machte Geld; die russische Revolution verwandelte die ehemalige Siegerklasse ihres Landes in eine . . . von Leichenbergen, und ich machte Geld; das politische Untier Hitler kam vor meinen Augen Schritt für Schritt zur Herrschaft, und ich machte Geld.”  7. “Ur-Gleichgültigkeit ist es, nämlich die gegen das eigene Menschtum; die Gleichgültigkeit vor dem Leid des Nebenmenschen aber ist eine Folge hiervon.”   8.  “Gleichgültig gegen fremdes Leid, gleichgültig gegen das eigene Geschick, gleichgültig gegen das Ich im Menschen, gegen seine Seele.”   9.  “Gelähmt fliehen wir vor der Lähmung in noch schwerere Lähmung, fliehen vor der Einsamkeit in noch nachbarlosere Einsamkeit; einsamkeitsgelähmt sind wir. Und wir haben Hitler gewähren lassen, den Nutznießer unserer Lähmung.” 10.  “Wir sind ein Wir, doch nicht, weil wir eine Gemeinschaft halten, sondern weil unsere Grenzen ineinander verfließen . . . zersprengten Ichs im Grenzenlosen und bar der Ich-Grenzen, sind wir gerade wegen unserer Gemeinschaftslosigkeit . . . kalt zusammengeschweißt in durchgängiger Verantwortungslosigkeit und Gleichgültigkeit.” 11. “Nichts kann uns dieser höchst militanten Anständigkeitspflicht entheben, nicht einmal die Aussichtslosigkeit ihres Beginnens, vielmehr wird jeder Verstoß gegen sie, und sei er noch so gut begründet, eine Manifestation unserer Gleichgültigkeit . . . Ich-Verlust . . . Vertierungsgefahr.” 12.  “Ich beuge mich der Gerechtigkeit, und ist mein Selbstopfer auch verspätet, ich bin bereit.” 13.  “A. . . . dem die Überwindung der Gleichgültigkeit zu einem, wenn auch noch so dunklen Bedürfnis geworden ist . . . wird . . . für die neue ‘Gnade’ empfänglich, die ihm der Imker bring . . . Trost und Hoffnung.” 14.  “ohneweiters sich auszulöschen bereit ist, aber ebenso bedenkenlos auch das Neben-Individuum auslöscht.” 15. “vollkommene[n] Verbindungslosigkeit zwischen Mensch und Mensch, die mitleidlose Situation der zwischen ihnen herrschenden völligen Gleichgültigkeit, so daß ihnen nur noch ein einziges Verständigungsmittel geblieben ist: die nackte Gewalt.” 16.  “kann und soll vom Roman verlangt werden, daß er Läuterung exemplifiziere und kraft seiner dichterischen Wahrheit ihre Möglichkeit überzeugend dartue. Gerade das ist das Thema der ‘Schuldlosen.’”

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17.  “den Übertritt aus dem juristischen in den menschlichen Bereich, also in jenen, der Dichtung zugänglich ist und ihre Aufgabe darstellt.” 18.  “vom unerkennbaren Gesetz verhängte Strafe des Erkenntnisverlustes und der Verlassenheit im Kerker des blind-notwendigen Dahindämmerns.” 19.  “beraubt seines Menschentums, von dem nichts geblieben war, nichts als die nackteste Nacktheits-Schuld der Seele . . . niedergezwungen und aufgesaugt von der spiegellosen Leere des drohungsschweigenden Auges.” 20.  “Niemals erloschen die Erinnerung des versprengten Herdentieres, die Erinnerung des Ur-Grauens . . . der unentrinnbare, der immer vorhandene, der niemals verlassene Kerker bleiernen Scheintodes.”

Chapter 7

An Illusion of Absence The Picturesque and Culpable Ignorance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant Ivan Stacy In Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), the narrator Etsuko describes a country lane close to her home and remarks that it is “the way I always imagined England would be” (181–82). Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to this notion of a picturesque England, from The Remains of the Day (1989), in which the butler Stevens acclaims the English landscape for “the calmness of [its] beauty, its sense of restraint” (29), to The Buried Giant ([2015] 2016), which opens with the narrator recalling “winding lane[s] and tranquil meadow[s]” (3). Ishiguro’s use of national myths and clichés has been much commented upon (see, for example, O’Brien 1996, para. 1; Lewis 2000, 73–74, 78; Walkowitz 2001, 1052; Wong 2005, 20–21; Shaffer 2009, 157; Berberich 2011, 136), and, as these critics generally note, Ishiguro presents these national myths precisely as myths in order to undermine them. For this reason, as Sim Wai-Chew argues with regard to The Remains of the Day (although the comment could as well apply to Ishiguro’s other novels), such references to the landscape are in fact demystificatory, not a “paean for a lost way of life” that Stevens sees as being manifest in the landscape but instead a critique of the myth of British “greatness” (2005, 99, 102). In this chapter, my aim is not to revisit the well-covered ground of how Ishiguro’s novels critique this mythologization of England but instead to explore the relationship between the landscape and complicity in his writing. My argument is that Ishiguro uses the landscape to suggest that complicity stems from culpable ignorance. Ishiguro’s fiction asks us to consider how framing the landscape as picturesque, that is, as idyllic and peaceful, may result in occluding the evidence of suffering or wrongdoing from that picture. Such an idealization of the landscape produces a disposition whereby an individual is unwilling, or simply unaccustomed, to looking for the evidence of wrongdoing. Although such culpable ignorance may not necessarily be a 89

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causal contribution to wrongdoing, I argue that it is a form of moral complicity because, when it forms a repeated pattern of behavior, this tacit assent becomes an enabling condition for atrocity. I have selected The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant for this discussion because they explore complicity through culpable ignorance in different ways. The former focuses primarily on the protagonist Stevens and the way in which small, local actions may contribute to wrongdoing on a world-shaping scale—in this case, the rise of the Nazi regime. In the latter, Ishiguro’s use of fantasy is a way of turning the lens back on the reader. The Buried Giant, I argue, asks us to consider how we might be framing the landscape, and how that framing might be a form of culpable ignorance. Before examining these two texts in detail, in the remainder of this introduction I will provide a more thorough discussion of the picturesque and what I see as its relationship with complicity. The landscape was instrumental in attempts to create a British national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 The myth of a unified national character was developed through landscape gardening, painting, and literature,2 and in all of these spheres, the picturesque aesthetic was central. Sir Uvedale Price, one of the first theorists of the picturesque, situated it between the sublime and the beautiful, as defined by Edmund Burke. In contrast to the gentle harmony of the beautiful and the spectacular drama of the sublime, the homely charm of the picturesque is created by a little “roughness” or a dash of “sudden variation” (Price 1810, 57–58). The picturesque landscape so far retains its innocence. However, this apparent innocence is the root of the way in which the picturesque aesthetic can engender culpable ignorance. In order to illustrate this point, let us turn to John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821) (figure 7.1). In the foreground, just right of center, stands the cart, attended by indistinct figures, ankle deep in the water. To the left, a darkish clump of trees almost overwhelms a cottage, to the right lies a stretch of more open ground, and above sits a mottled English sky. At first sight, the picture seems to present a picturesque and peaceful England. However, if we isolate one element of the picture, the tumbledown cottage, and view it in light of the historical moment at which Constable was painting, the picture loses its innocence (figure 7.2). The dilapidated cottage is evidence of abject poverty, the result of the exploitation of rural laborers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, the countryside itself was anything but harmonious as the process of enclosure revolutionized the economics of rural Britain. Resistance to these changes was so great that John Macarthur describes the process as a “low-level civil war” between those who owned the land and those who worked it, this unrest being a product of the poverty

Figure 7.1  Constable, The Hay Wain (1821)

Figure 7.2  Detail from Constable, The Hay Wain (1821)

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and exploitation of the latter group (2007, 8).3 Enclosures also changed the landscape aesthetically, and the irony of the picturesque is therefore that it enabled the landscape to become, as Ann Bermingham notes, a symbol of “the homely, the stable, the ahistorical” at a moment of great instability and when that landscape was changing out of all recognition (1987, 9). The Hay Wain thus embodies the historical paradox of attempting to represent an idyll that never existed through the representation of a landscape that was already disappearing. This paradox produces a representational tension: seen up close, Constable’s cottage is an index of the exploitation of the rural poor, but subsumed within the picture as a whole, the cottage loses its indexical quality and instead becomes an aesthetic detail, a pleasing “variation.”4 This interpretative choice offered by the picturesque is the crux of this chapter. When we look at the picturesque, are we taken in by an apparently pleasing scene, or do we focus on a detail and see the traces of exploitation and suffering? Does the picturesque attempt to pass itself off as an image of the “actual unity of an English countryside innocent of division” and thus offer a “mythical unity” (Barrell 1980, 5) when in fact no such unity exists? Does the “roughness” present in the picturesque attempt to direct our gaze toward these problems, or is it culpable of eliding the evidence of suffering in that it “translates the political and the social into the decorative” (Copley and Garside 1994, 6)? And in interpreting a landscape in terms of the picturesque aesthetic, are we ourselves entering into a state of culpable ignorance? The answers to these questions vary from viewer to viewer and depend on the critical stance and ideological framework through which the picturesque is seen and interpreted.5 This ambiguity indicates that the picturesque is as much a way of framing and seeing on the part of the viewer as it is inherent to artistic representations in themselves. A way of framing the landscape that results in picturesque aestheticization at the expense of attention to social and historical details is thus a form of culpable ignorance. In Ishiguro’s writing, the picturesque aestheticization of the landscape leads to failures to see the evidence of wrongdoing. Two terms, connivance and culpable ignorance, permit an analysis of the relationship between this aspect of his writing and complicity. The “minimum threshold” of complicity has been defined as a knowing, causal contribution to a “principal wrongdoing” (May 2010, 167; Lepora and Goodin 2013, 6, 32).6 Insofar as a particular way of framing the landscape results in failing to see the evidence of atrocity or wrongdoing, connivance is a useful starting point. Connivance has its etymological root in the combination of cum (“with”) and nivere (“to wink”). Turning a blind eye in this way does not necessarily fulfill the condition of causality, but Lepora and Goodin also acknowledge that connivance is not simply “doing nothing,” and they propose a counterfactual “but for” test of



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causality in determining complicity: if the wrongful act would have been prevented but for the complicit party “winking” at it, connivance can be considered a causal contribution (2013, 44–45). More pertinently for Ishiguro’s fiction, Lepora and Goodin argue that connivance can also become a form of complicity if it forms a “recurring pattern of social interaction” (46): it is such patterns of social interaction that his novels examine. In such cases, these patterns of behavior may be a causal contribution to another’s wrongdoing because they act as a form of tacit assent or contribute to a social or political climate in which the suffering of a particular group is devalued. Larry May argues that “mass killing cannot normally take place in a region where people have the disposition to protect each other” (2010, 262), and it is in how such “dispositions” develop before the fact of wrongdoing that I see a relationship between the picturesque and complicity. A way of framing or aestheticizing the world that becomes ingrained and automatic becomes just such a disposition. When repeated en masse, these tendencies can clear the ground for atrocity to occur. Indeed, “looking the other way” seems to play a necessary part in the atrocities committed by political regimes. Consider Primo Levi’s discussion of the German public’s connivance with the concentration camps: No one will ever be able to establish precisely how many in the Nazi apparatus could not have known about the dreadful atrocities being committed; how many knew something but were able to pretend they didn’t know; and how many more might have known everything but chose the more prudent path of keeping their eyes, ears, and, especially, their mouths shut. (2015, 2414)

As a widespread social pattern, such behavior does make a causal contribution according to Lepora and Goodin’s “but for” test of causation in that, but for a collective willingness to ignore the evidence, the unfolding atrocity could have been prevented or reduced in scale. However, the “prudent path” of keeping one’s eyes shut described by Levi is something slightly different from connivance when it takes place at a remove from the site of wrongdoing. Culpable ignorance better describes the behavior of those who place themselves in a position where they do not have to connive, having ensured that they will be insulated from the principal wrongdoing. Culpable ignorance has a two-part structure, being initiated by a screening action in which an actor knowingly takes steps to preclude the possibility of later acquiring knowledge, and is completed by a later unwitting misdeed (Luban 1999, 969–70; Smith 1983, 547).7 As such, the action that may contribute to the principal wrongdoing, the unwitting misdeed, is by definition not knowingly undertaken. If we are still to hold an individual

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complicit according to the minimum threshold given earlier, that responsibility is at one degree of remove further from the principal wrongdoing, in the knowing act of the screening action. Yet the screening action, because it is at a further degree of remove, is harder to definitively identify as a causal contribution. For these reasons, culpable ignorance does not necessarily meet the threshold of causal contribution posited by May and Lepora and Goodin. However, I regard it as a form of moral complicity in that, as a repeated social pattern, it becomes an enabling condition for wrongdoing. In Ishiguro’s writing, framing the landscape in terms of the picturesque aesthetic is a screening action. It is an adopted way of seeing the world that occludes evidence of wrongdoing by subsuming details into a comfortable whole rather than attending to those details as evidence of atrocity. Both The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant are suggestive of how culpable ignorance is an enabling condition of atrocity and therefore of how engaging in screening behavior is a form of moral complicity. In the former, Stevens is culpable in this way because his aestheticization of England is a way of seeing the world that allows him to turn a blind eye to the effects of Darlington’s political machinations. The Buried Giant, in contrast, asks us to consider how we frame the landscape and the blind spots that might be inherent to that view. “NO DISCERNIBLE TRACES”: THE REMAINS OF THE DAY The Remains of the Day is ostensibly Stevens’s narrative of his journey across southwest England to visit a former colleague, Mrs. Benn, and his reflections on the fact that their relationship never developed into a romantic one. However, as he narrates his journey, Stevens digresses into details of his professional service to Lord Darlington who, it transpires, was sympathetic to the Nazi regime. We learn that, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Darlington Hall was the location at which various members of the British establishment collaborated with German officials, most notably Joachim von Ribbentrop, in order first to soften the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and later to maintain relations between Britain and Nazi Germany. Stevens sets off on his journey in the mid-1950s. He cuts a tragi-comic figure: dressed in an outdated suit, the pompousness of his narrating voice is undermined by his absolute lack of familiarity with the country beyond a few miles of Darlington Hall. Stevens’s ingenuousness outside his professional bubble is shown through his use of an antiquated series called The Wonder of England as his guide, whose dated nature he acknowledges when he states it



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was “written in the thirties, but much of it would still be up to date—after all, I do not imagine German bombs would have altered our countryside so significantly” (Ishiguro 1989, 11–12). Stevens’s statement about the landscape is probably true if one’s idea of England is limited to its rural country seats and entirely ignores the industrial cities. These are, in fact, the limits of Stevens’s grasp of England, and at this point, his way of framing the landscape is merely blinkered. However, when Stevens begins to expound on the landscape, his picturesque filter begins to emerge as a form of screening that secures his culpable ignorance in the political manoeuvers at Darlington Hall. Reflecting on the countryside at the end of his first day’s journey, Stevens concedes that other landscapes may be “more superficially dramatic” but argues for the “greatness” of the English landscape on the basis that “the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle . . . sets the beauty of our land apart” (28–29; emphasis in the original). Stevens then makes a direct, but at this point abstract, connection between “greatness,” “dignity,” and this lack of show. It is when he begins to elaborate on his professional role that the connection becomes apparent between how he views the landscape and his refusal to see and acknowledge the wrongness of Darlington’s actions. For Stevens, a lack of show—a lack of visibility—is crucial to good butlering and to the smooth functioning of a great house. He illustrates the point with an anecdote about a butler serving an English master in India who, on one occasion, entered the dining room to find a tiger lying under the table. Stevens then relates how the butler discreetly explained the situation to his employer, killed the tiger with a shotgun, and was able to report that “dinner will be served at the usual time, and I am pleased to say there will be no discernable traces left of the recent occurrence by that time” (37). This logic of “no discernable traces,” whereby a respectable front is maintained thanks to invisible machinations behind the scenes, is central to Stevens’s role. It becomes the dominant aspect of his service to Lord Darlington when the sensitive meetings during the 1920s and 1930s demand a significant degree of discretion. This discretion must be balanced, however, with an ostentatious display of wealth in order to establish Darlington Hall as a venue with sufficient status to host these conferences. Stevens is particularly concerned with well-polished silver as “a public index of a house’s standards” and quotes Lady Astor as saying that the silver at Darlington Hall “was probably unrivalled” (142–43). However, Stevens is also aware that, in his own role, he is required to be visibly invisible, and he notes the particular difficulty of finding the “balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence” required during the delicate and sometimes intimate exchanges between dignitaries, and by which “the suspicion that one’s presence is inhibiting the conversation” can be avoided (75).

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Stevens’s mastery of this balance is revealed to be a form of connivance when, during one of the most sensitive gatherings at Darlington Hall, and despite its “off the record” nature, Lord Darlington informs his guests that “you can say anything in front of Stevens, I can assure you” (75–77). The question remains, however, whether Stevens’s connivance makes him complicit with Nazism, or even complicit with Darlington given that Ishiguro locates his protagonist at several removes from the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Indeed, the extent of Darlington’s complicity is itself open to question, and David Luban makes the provocative but persuasive claim that “Ishiguro set his imaginary peace conference in 1923 precisely because he wanted to choose a time when Lord Darlington’s ‘amateurism’ may have been right” (1996, 310), in other words, when Darlington’s approach may have averted the tragedy of Hitler’s rise to power. However, we might counter Luban with the proposition that, if Darlington’s contribution was to lend the Nazi regime a veneer of respectability, he was complicit in creating the climate of appeasement that allowed the Nazis to rise so far and so quickly, but not complicit with the atrocities that they committed. Stevens’s contribution can be evaluated on the grounds that, according to his boast, “the great decisions of this world are not, in fact, arrived at simply in the public chambers . . . rather, debates are conducted, and crucial decisions arrived at, in the privacy and calm of the great houses of this country” (Ishiguro 1989, 121). On this basis, his connivance can be seen not as complicity with Nazism, but with Darlington’s removal of the operation of power from the democratic, public sphere. Yet one of the ironies of Stevens’s narrative is that, while he does not causally contribute to the rise of Nazism, he insists on his own complicity, making great claims for the importance of polished silver and his own discretion. Rebecca Walkowitz argues that Stevens’s own claim that he contributes to events of “unimaginable largeness” (80) is evidence that “the novel takes seriously the idea that international, collective events can be transformed by local, individual actions” (Walkowitz 2007, 218). Moreover, when Stevens defends Lord Darlington on the grounds that the misguided nature of his actions has only become clear with the benefit of hindsight, arguing that “anyone who implies that Lord Darlington was liaising covertly with a known enemy is just conveniently forgetting the true climate of those times” (Ishiguro 1989, 145), he evokes the way in which collective behaviors can contribute to social and political climates in which totalitarian regimes flourish. In this way, as I have argued in the introduction, Stevens contributes to conditions that enabled the Nazis to gain sufficient legitimacy to ensure their continued rise. He does so because, through his aesthetic filter, he sees only “privacy and calm” and is thus culpably naïve with regard to the wider political effects of his actions even as he insists on their importance. Up to this point, I have treated Stevens’s narrative as a more or less faithful representation of his actions. However, as Bo Ekelund notes, Stevens “edits”



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the landscape in his descriptions of England (2005, para. 11, 12). He also edits his own narrative, adopting an aesthetic that parallels the logic of the picturesque by presenting his story as an analogously humble and unshowy account of his breaking heart and squandered chance of love with Mrs. Benn. By framing his narrative as a tragic romance, Stevens depoliticizes his role in Lord Darlington’s service as an incidental detail to the main story when his actions were, in fact, intimately involved with Darlington’s abhorrent politics. By inviting us to read through Stevens’s rather transparent tissue of justifications,8 Ishiguro places a degree of responsibility on the reader. In the case of Stevens, the flimsiness of his justifications means that it is not particularly difficult to apply a critical lens to his narrative, although we may still be tempted to fall into the trap of reading the novel as a comfortable morality tale of hard lessons learned rather than engaging with the messier questions of complicity that it raises. This question of the way in which readers, rather than the characters, frame the landscape comes to the fore to a greater extent in The Buried Giant, and for this reason the latter novel performs a more complex exploration of the relationship between the picturesque and complicity. “A BED OF BONES”: THE BURIED GIANT The Buried Giant asks us to consider how we frame the landscape in our accustomed habits of seeing, and what blind spots may be present in and produced by such habitual perspectives. Specifically, the novel’s use of a fantastic landscape to embody a history of violence is suggestive of how different ways of seeing may become screening behaviors that result in culpable ignorance. It does so by shifting the focus from the picture to the frame, juxtaposing the characters’ views of the landscape with our own. In this way, the novel prompts us to realize that our own way of seeing is one that may miss the evidence of wrongdoing by observing the aesthetic whole. The Buried Giant is set in a fantastic but bleak post-Arthurian landscape. It is populated by dragons and ogres from which the Britons shelter in “warrens” dug into the hillsides and the Saxons in their walled villages. The landscape is also pervaded by a fog that causes the protagonist Axl and his fellow villagers to forget the past. The story follows Axl and his wife Beatrice as, in their old age, they seek the source of the mist, hoping to restore their memories and hence to attribute meaning to their lives. However, during their quest, we learn that the mist was created by Merlin at the request of King Arthur in order to erase the memory of a massacre of the Saxon population by the Britons. Their quest therefore draws the elderly couple into a conflict between Sir Gawain, one of Arthur’s last surviving knights, who seeks to maintain the mist, and Wistan, a Saxon warrior determined to dispel the mist, revive the memory of the atrocity, and hence trigger a bloody revenge on the

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Britons. The novel also raises the question—beyond the scope of the present chapter—of the justness of such an induced amnesia.9 The novel examines culpable ignorance and connivance by using the landscape to embody Arthur’s atrocity and by presenting the landscape through various aesthetic filters. The mist initially frustrates any attempt to build a coherent picture of the storyworld as the narrative is mainly focalized through Axl, whose amnesia means that the details provided are fragmentary. However, as the protagonists travel toward the source of the mist, they begin to piece together fragmentary information in an effort to construct a coherent picture of the world they inhabit and its history, and the different ways that they aestheticize the landscape as they do so cause them to either detect or to remain blind to the evidence of the atrocity. The characters offer three distinct ways of viewing the landscape. Sir Gawain, as an accomplice in Arthur’s massacre, sees traces of violence in the landscape that increasingly manifest themselves as his sense of guilt grows. Wistan is also able to detect signs of violence, but his motive is revenge rather than justification. The other characters’ relationship with the landscape is marked by ingenuousness. Having been subject to the mist’s amnesia, they are able to make little coherent sense of the landscape through which they travel. Ultimately, though, it is the way that the novel juxtaposes the characters’ ways of seeing with the position of the reader that prompts us to examine our own way of seeing and our relationship with the mythologization of England as a picturesque site. Gawain is a co-principal in the massacre of the Saxons, and he seeks to ensure that it is condoned after the fact.10 In the passages of the novel in which Gawain is prominent, his guilt means that the landscape figuratively embodies the burial of memory. For example, when, in the dim light of a tunnel, Beatrice believes she sees a dead baby, and Axl thinks he sees a dead bat, Gawain’s nonsequitur—“What skulls? I saw no skulls, sir!”—betrays his sense of guilt (Ishiguro [2015] 2016, 192). From this point, the notion of a buried history quickly becomes actualized in the ground on which the characters walk: the floor suddenly illuminated by moonlight, Axl sees that it “was comprised of a vast layer of bones” (195). The physical qualities of the landscape further warp to reflect Gawain’s preoccupations when he generalizes the morbid qualities of this specific location to a national scale: “I dare say, sir, our whole country is this way. A fine green valley. A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead” (195). Gawain’s imagery evokes Blake’s green and pleasant land, and thus suggests that a national myth may serve to hide the evidence of a violent history. Moreover, covering the evidence of atrocity creates a parallel with the logic of the picturesque. Just as the picturesque



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subsumes the “roughness” of details into a pleasing whole, and in doing so may obscure or gloss over the evidence of suffering caused by social and political processes, the surface of the landscape in The Buried Giant covers a bed of bones. In other words, the current, tenuous peace is built on an atrocity; and at the same time, the aesthetic framing of that peace seeks to erase the evidence of that atrocity. For the Saxon warrior Wistan, who seeks to expose rather than condone the massacre, that evidence is in fact present in plain view thanks to the cultural memory that he still possesses and that Arthur’s massacre has failed to erase. Thus, when the group arrives at a monastery now populated by British monks, Wistan is able to tell his companions that “I see many signs of my kin perhaps invisible to you,” pointing out the location of defensive features in the monastery’s previous incarnation as a Saxon fort (160–61). If Gawain wishes for the past to remain buried under a pleasant surface, Wistan’s aim is to unbury the past, with a view to kindling a desire for revenge among the Saxon population. This notion is present in the title of the novel, and in Wistan’s assertion that, the mist having finally been dispelled toward the novel’s end, “the giant, once well buried, now stirs” (340). The precondition for such an excavation is the ability to see the evidence of atrocity: to employ a picturesque way of framing the landscape as a pleasant picture would result in missing this evidence. On the other hand, to detect the evidence of atrocity—to unravel specific historical contingencies by which these traces came to exist—requires a gaze that isolates and interrogates the details in the landscape. A picturesque aestheticization of the landscape requires it to be framed in a particular way, but the amnesia experienced by the other characters means that they lack that frame, and the landscape is consequently rendered as fragmentary and incoherent. This becomes clear when the other characters see the landscape from a position that might allow them to frame it in a cohesive way, but they are unable to do so. For example, a “beauty spot” called the “old thorn” provides “a good view of the land down to the water, of the river’s curve” for the inhabitants of Axl’s and Beatrice’s warren. However, the view is completed by the “marshes beyond” (16): there is no solid frame to this landscape, but only the liminal and unstable mixture of land and water. Also notable is the adolescent Edwin’s description of the view of the Saxon village where he grew up. Having been forced to flee and now on the road with Axl and his companions, he looks back from a hill, and we are told that “never in his life had he seen his village from such a height and distance, and it amazed him. It was like an object he could pick up in his hand, and he flexed his fingers experimentally over the view in the afternoon haze” (95). The novelty of such a perspective seems to unnerve Edwin, and even when

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presented with a comprehensible view of the landscape, his tentative physical groping at what he sees emphasizes his unwillingness or inability to grasp mentally the image as a whole. Similarly, a Saxon village seems to form a decipherable pattern of “two orderly rings of houses” from a distance, but once they enter it, Axl and Beatrice are confronted by buildings that “loom unexpectedly in front of them, blocking their way and forcing them down baffling side alleys” (56). As these examples show, and in contrast to the way that Stevens is able to survey and narrate the landscape as a coherent totality in The Remains of the Day, Axl and Beatrice encounter it only in strange or incomprehensible fragments. Yet while their way of seeing appears to be a weakness, the result of an amnesia-impaired understanding of the landscape, it is also through this closeness of view that the landscape ceases to serve as an aesthetic backdrop and instead becomes the terrain in which the characters begin to detect the evidence of atrocity. By seeing details in their isolation, they avoid subsuming them in an aesthetic whole and begin the slow process of tracing and understanding the historical processes undergone by that landscape—and the role of Arthur’s atrocity in that history. While the characters frame the landscape in contrasting ways that illustrate their growing awareness of the massacre, and its subsequent erasure, it is through the juxtaposition of the characters’ views and those of the implied reader that Ishiguro alerts us to our own habitual way of seeing. This way of seeing, the novel suggests, may contribute to a mythologization of the landscape that functions as a screening action that induces culpable ignorance. The opening lines of the novel contain such a juxtaposition between the characters’ ways of seeing the landscape and our own: You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. (3)

On one level, the narrator simply sets the scene here, painting a picture of an unwelcoming landscape. Yet the description is more complex because the narrator ostensibly omits the picturesque while in fact recalling it through the image of the “winding lane and tranquil meadow.” The description thus creates a temporal schism between the time of the story and that of the reader and one that is defined by the difference in the landscape between these two points in time. This opening is further complicated by the narrator reminding us that the picturesque has become “celebrated” in the interim: not only has the landscape morphed from this rather bleak setting into something more pleasing, but that pleasing landscape has acquired the status of national myth.



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Similar prompts to juxtapose our own view with that of the characters occur throughout the text. Another notable passage directs us to recognize how Axl’s and Wistan’s way of framing the landscape differs from our own: The view before them that morning may not have differed so greatly from one to be had from the high windows of an English country house today . . . there would have been elms and willows near the water, as well as dense woodland, which in those days would have stirred a sense of foreboding. (91)

This framing is initially spatial, aligning us with the characters’ panoramic view of the countryside. Yet it is also temporal, and the anachronism of placing the characters’ point of view in the upper story of a Darlington Hall–like house wrenches us out of immediate identification with Axl’s and Wistan’s viewpoint and causes the realization that we read from our own, very different, temporal site. Moreover, the use of the perfect conditional in this passage, in the assertion that the woodland “would have stirred a sense of foreboding,” reminds us that reading from a different time causes us to project different values onto the landscape. In other words, the passage creates a juxtaposition between the characters’ view, whereby they read the landscape in terms of the dangers that it holds, and our own view, which subsumes that threat into a picturesque aesthetic. Thus, while Stevens’s aestheticization of the landscape in The Remains of the Day is a screening action that allows him to turn a blind eye to Darlington’s actions on the basis of discretion, The Buried Giant alerts us to our own framing of the landscape. By removing the familiar historical referents that are present in The Remains of the Day and inserting us into a fantastic past, The Buried Giant places us in a position of profound uncertainty as to what it is we are looking at and, more importantly, as to what judgment we may pass on this situation. The characteristics of the physical landscape in The Buried Giant embody Arthur’s attempts to erase an atrocity, but it is also the case that the narrator repeatedly prompts us to recognize the way in which we frame the landscape being described. The presence of atrocity having been established thematically, the novel therefore acts as a corrective to screening actions that we might inadvertently be performing: it is a call to realize how our way of seeing, our buying into a mythical view of the English landscape, may be blinding us to the evidence of wrongdoing. CONCLUSION Definitions of complicity premised on legal concepts are useful tools for beginning to consider its nature and consequences. However, unlike legal and philosophical texts, which seek to define and categorize, literary fiction

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can explore these areas of uncertainty without the need to arrive at final and definitive conclusions. This is not to say that fiction is absolved of any responsibility in terms of attributing judgment, but rather that it is capable of delving into the grayest of gray areas and remaining there without the imperative strike out toward a resolution. This terrain is as difficult and uncertain as the moors and woods of The Buried Giant, but it is to these uncertainties that Ishiguro’s fiction encourages us to attend: his novels ask us to engage less with the after-the-fact judgments than with the question of how, before the event, we create and enter into dispositions of culpable ignorance that are an enabling condition of atrocity. I have argued that Ishiguro’s writing prompts a recognition of how framing the landscape according to a picturesque aesthetic may cause us to fail to see that landscape in historical and political terms. Such framing may therefore be a screening behavior leading to culpable ignorance. Ishiguro’s fiction therefore treads at the very edges of the two conditions of complicity set out in legalistic definitions, namely that it is a knowing and a causal contribution to wrongdoing. Where his novels come into productive tension with these definitions is around questions of the extent to which an individual’s participation in, or contribution to, repeated patterns of social behavior lays the groundwork for wrongdoing. Before a specific intent to act in complicity with wrongdoing comes a more general disposition, a willingness to turn away from the evidence available. It is the ethical slide into such dispositions that Ishiguro’s writing addresses. NOTES 1. I do not mean to use “English” and “British” interchangeably. As Ann Bermingham notes, the landscape played a role in “the discovery of Britain” in the eighteenth century (1987, 9), but when she describes the “humble aspects” of the English landscape (57), these can be differentiated from the “wilder” Celtic fringes. Ishiguro tends to evoke “humble” details, and for this reason I use the term “English” throughout this chapter. 2.  For example, Ann Toner notes that Jane Austen generally presents her characters’ awareness of the picturesque aesthetic as a virtue (2004, 3). However, such an awareness does not mean that one is necessarily also awake to the ideology involved in a way of seeing. Raymond Williams notes just such a blind spot in Austen: “what she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through the holes of this tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen” (2011, 166). 3.  Bermingham notes that the countryside experienced food riots in 1795, a period of depression following the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, and an increase in theft, poaching, and food riots between 1815 and 1830 (1987, 73, 77, 89).



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  4.  John Barrell argues that Constable was well aware of rural poverty, and as such “it was necessary for him to reduce his figures until they merge insignificantly with the landscape . . . to evade the question of their actuality” (1980, 134).   5.  The ambiguity of the picturesque is evident in some of the strikingly different critical interpretations of Constable’s painting (Barrell 1980, 132).  6. Principal wrongdoing is Lepora and Goodin’s term (2013, 32). While these two texts share a consensus on this minimum threshold, we should be wary of using it uncritically because, as May points out, there is still little consensus as to what constitutes complicity (2010, 159).  7. The terminology employed by Luban and Smith differs slightly, but I use Luban’s screening action and unwitting misdeed in this chapter.   8.  An unreliable account of events can be seen as an attempt to “condone,” that is, to pardon or forgive a wrongful act. Because condoning takes place after the fact (as is the case with Stevens’s narrative), it is rarely a causal contribution (Lepora and Goodin 2013, 47–48).   9.  The general consensus in memory discourse is that remembering is an ethical imperative. However, for recent arguments advocating the ethical value of forgetting, see Bradford Vivian’s Public Forgetting (2010) and David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting (2016). 10.  Lepora and Goodin define condoning as follows: “when principals perform wrongful actions, secondary agents who ‘condone’ relate to those wrongs by pardoning them” (2013, 47).

Part II

ENFOLDINGS AND UNFOLDINGS

Chapter 8

A Radical Unfolding Utopianism against Complicity John Storey

I will begin with a few words on what I mean by utopianism and complicity, in which I will distinguish between two versions of utopianism: blueprint utopianism and utopian desire. I will then argue that utopianism as utopian desire offers a form of resistance to dominant constructions of reality and our complicity with them. I will do this under five overlapping headings: “Power and the Social Construction of Reality,” “Desire,” “Reality and the Impossible,” “Human Nature,” and “What Desire Lacks.” I will conclude the chapter with some general remarks on utopian desire as a radical unfolding of our complicity with power. UTOPIANISM AND COMPLICITY For the purpose of my argument there are two types of utopianism: blueprint utopianism (models of the future) and utopian desire (the depiction or enactment of something that currently does not exist, or does not yet exist in a fully developed form, in order to incite the desire for it in the here and now). It is the second, simply named throughout as utopianism, that offers a challenge to our complicity with power. For example, being able to imagine radically different circumstances can produce the desire to make those circumstances a reality. For example, John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s campaign against America’s war in Vietnam was an attempt to work in this way (see figure 8.1). In a series of posters, displayed across the United States between 1969 and 1971, they invited people to imagine that the war was over in the hope that if they liked what they imagined they might be willing to work toward its possibility. The slogan had been used in a similar way by Phil Ochs in his song “The War Is Over” and by The Doors in “Unknown Soldier” (both songs appeared in 107

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1968).1 Both were examples of the counterculture’s utopian politics in which the present is being judged from the perspective of an alternative future (see Storey 2019). “Unknown Soldier” fades to the sound of celebratory bells and a jubilant voice proclaiming that “the war is over.” This is a classic example of utopianism as utopian desire: the depiction of an imagined situation in order to produce the longing for such a situation in actuality. The word complicity first appears in English in 1656. It is defined as “a consenting or partnership in evil” (that is, an accomplice in a crime). By 1847 its meaning had expanded to a “state of being involved” (that is, an

Figure 8.1 



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accomplice without necessarily criminal intent). Both usages derive from the Latin word complicare, meaning “to fold together.” My title, drawing on the second usage, is intended to suggest that power depends on complicity; that is, complicity folds us into what we might call the taken-for-grantedness of the here and now. Utopianism, I will argue, offers the possibility of a radical unfolding. POWER AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY The aim of this first section is to set up an opposition between the social construction of reality and utopianism. When it is claimed that utopianism is unrealistic, it is against such constructions of reality it is contesting rather than against some absolute reality. This is not a denial that the real world exists in all its enabling and constraining materiality outside social constructions of reality but an insistence that the real and reality are different. The mute materiality of the real is not reality; reality is the social ordering of the real into a generally accepted consensus. Such an ordering always involves the play of power. There are many ways to conceptualize power. I will briefly outline two that have been particularly influential in cultural studies, both of which depend on our complicity. The first is Michel Foucault’s regimes of truth, and the second is Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Although they differ in significant ways, both suggest that any given society has a particular sense and practice of reality; that is, a particular way of articulating the real. Foucault argues very explicitly that power produces reality. As he explains, “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” ([1979] 1991, 194). In its production of reality, it produces the “truths” we live by: “Each society has its own regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true” (2002, 131). What Foucault calls regimes of truth do not have to be “true”; they have only to be thought of as “true” and acted on as if “true.” If ideas and practices are believed, they establish and legitimate particular regimes of truth. To occupy a particular regime of truth is to share—to be complicit with—the dominant constructed reality of a society. For example, as late as the seventeenth century the prevailing regime of truth placed the earth at the center of the universe. In 1632 Galileo Galilei was charged with heresy for his support of the theory of Nicolaus Copernicus that

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the earth moves around the sun, eventually being sentenced to life imprisonment for something that is now taught to school children as an obvious fact of reality. Gramsci uses hegemony to describe processes of power in which a dominant class does not merely rule by force but leads by consent; it exerts what he calls “intellectual and moral leadership” (2018, 75). Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential economic function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic sphere but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur [for example] creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. (1)

Hegemony involves a specific kind of consensus, a consensus in which a dominant class establishes its own particular interests as the general interests of the society as a whole. Hegemony, therefore, works in part through the circulation of meanings and values that reinforce dominance and subordination. As Raymond Williams explains (he introduced the concept into cultural studies), “It [hegemony] is a lived system of meanings and values. . . . It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people. . . . It is . . . in the strongest sense a ‘culture,’ but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.” In a hegemonic situation, subordinate groups appear complicit with meanings and values that incorporate them into the prevailing structures of power; that is, relations of dominance and subordination, which, as Williams points out, appear as reality itself. To repeat, “it [hegemony] thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people” (1977, 110). What these two different concepts of power have in common is an insistence that power always produces a particular construction of reality. To remain within this reality, we are required to be realistic, realistic about this and realistic about that, but above all, realistic about what is possible and what is not possible. As Karl Mannheim observed, “the representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realised” ([1985] 1997, 176–77). While this is true, it is not so much that such conceptions of existence can never be realized, it is that they should never be realized. What should not happen from the point of view of a given social order is presented as something that simply cannot happen. Against this utopianism contends that reality is a social construct (entangled in power) and as a social construct it can always be otherwise. In other words, the real can be made into reality in a variety of



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competing ways. As Valentin Volosinov might have said, the real is “multiaccentual” (see Volosinov 1973 and Storey 2018). DESIRE Desire is one of the things that make us human. Advertising tries to colonize and satisfy it with commodity solutions—buy enough of the right things and all your dreams will come true. But humans have always desired beyond the here and now in search of something and/or somewhere better. In 1516 Thomas More named this desire Utopia (2012). Although the book is now known simply as Utopia, its original title (in English) was the far less catchy On the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia. A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining. In naming the desire he conflated two Greek words, Outopia (“no place”) and Eutopia (“happy place”). Utopia has come to carry both meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “utopia” began meaning simply what More intended, a happy place that currently exists nowhere. Following the English translation of the book in 1551, the word “utopia” slowly acquired additional meanings. For example, “a dream fit for nothing but utopia” (1685) and “no romantic impracticable utopia” (1738) (Oxford English Dictionary n.d.). What both these statements assume is that utopia means “unrealistic and impractical,” a meaning that is not sanctioned by the narrative of More’s book. In other words, they depend on a particular way of reading the book, a particular politics of reading. Something similar happens with the word “utopian.” It begins by meaning “belonging to the imaginary island of Utopia.” However, by the early nineteenth century, it is firmly signifying impossibility: “The sentiments which inspired me may be laughed at as Utopian” (1806) (Oxford English Dictionary n.d.). By the time Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came to write the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the term “utopian” was mostly used to mean “unrealistic and impossible.” Marx and Engels used utopian to describe a version of socialism (Utopian Socialism), a socialism that thought it could be achieved by mental effort alone and by appealing to “the feelings and purses of the bourgeois” (1998, 56). But there was another side to Utopian Socialism, one that Marx and Engels acknowledged and admired; that is, its ability to encourage people to imagine the world in a different way. As Marx and Engels explained, also in the Communist Manifesto, “They [Utopian Socialists] attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class” (54). In a letter written in 1866 Marx further elaborated his enthusiasm for their utopianism: “in the utopias of a

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Fourier, an Owen, etc., there is the anticipation and imaginative expression of a new world” (Marx and Engels 1977, 31). Although Marx refused to write what he called “recipes for the cook-shops of the future” (Marx 1976, 99), he and Engels, I think, were at the forefront of seeing something positive in utopianism beyond blueprints; that is, the production of utopian desire. Desire is inextricably linked with utopia and utopianism. Raymond Williams writes of utopianism as “the crucial vector of desire” (1980, 199). A. L. Morton calls utopia “an image of desire” (1952, 15), while Fredric Jameson identifies what he calls “the desire called utopia” (2005, 157). E. P. Thompson writes about how “utopianism liberates desire” (1976, 791). China Miéville simply says “utopianism . . . is desire” (2016, 6). But the most productive linkage, borrowed by E. P. Thompson in his study of William Morris, is that made by Miguel Abensour. Also writing about Morris, Abensour introduced the concept of the education of desire. What is important, he argues, is not the desire for a particular happy place but utopian desire itself, with its capacity to break open the ideological spaces of the here and now. As he puts it, “desire must be taught to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire otherwise” (Abensour 1999, 146). Abensour is almost certainly drawing on part of a comment made by William Morris. Morris made the comment in a letter written in 1884, that is, six years before the publication of his utopian novel News from Nowhere (2003). Morris writes of the education of desire and political organization as the two main components necessary to bring about radical change: “The means whereby this is brought about is first, educating people into desiring it, next organising them into claiming it effectually” (1986, 138). Although Morris is writing about socialism, what he says applies to utopianism more generally: educated desire without political organization will lead only to frustration; political organization without educated desire will be an empty action. This idea is similar to what Ernst Bloch calls educated hope. Educated hope represents the transformation of daydreaming into anticipatory consciousness and then into the possibility of action. Bloch sees it as “a question of learning hope” (3): How richly people have always dreamed of . . . the better life that might be possible. Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, it is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This part has hoping at its core, and is teachable. (3)

The role of educated desire is to make change conceivable, the role of educated hope is to believe it is possible. Similar to Morris’s concept of educated desire and Bloch’s educated hope (one that illustrates both) is the political practice of the Diggers, a radical group working in San Francisco in



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the 1960s. The Diggers gave away free food (and lots of other things). To get the free food you had to step through what they called the Free Frame of Reference. Once you stepped through the frame, you were given a small replica to wear around your neck. You were then invited to look through the frame and imagine that what you were looking at was free; continually asking the question: “what if it were free?” This is how former Digger (now writer, actor, director) Peter Coyote explains it: “So, it was like a leaderless invitation to reinvent your own world, your own definitions of freedom. And the Diggers basically understood that it was culture and the premises of culture that attached and bound and chained people. That’s what you had to shake up. You had to create new forms, so that people could experience new ways of living, and if they liked them they might defend them” (2004). REALITY AND THE IMPOSSIBLE Utopianism as utopian desire allows us to imagine differently and to think about the boundary between the possible and the impossible in a different way. It can take many forms, both in discourse and practice. “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible” is probably the most famous example of utopian graffiti. It was written on a wall in Paris in May 1968 and suggests that reality structures and mediates our experience of the real. It also suggests that being realistic in the traditional sense can make us complicit with a reality that is only ever a version constructed in the interest of those with power. Therefore, to escape an oppressive construction of reality we have to be realistic enough to demand what that reality insists is impossible and in so doing break our complicity with that reality. In such a situation, to be realistic in the traditional sense would be to remain imprisoned by and complicit with a particular construction of reality. But is demanding the impossible hopelessly unrealistic? Well, it is if we think that reality is something beyond human intervention. If instead we understand that what we call reality is a social construct that can always be constructed differently it becomes difficult to resist Muhammad Ali’s observation that “impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion.” However, as the revolutionaries of May 1968 discovered, and Ali himself did in his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, all too often impossible is an opinion supported by power, an opinion that demands our complicity. Defining reality and the possible, as already discussed, is fundamental to all regimes of power. As Mannheim observes, “[dominant groups] have always aimed to control those situationally transcendent ideas and interests which are not realizable within the bounds of the present order, and thereby

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to render them socially impotent, so that such ideas would be confined to a world beyond history and society, where they could not affect the status quo” ([1985] 1997, 173). It is against what Mannheim describes that utopianism wages its struggle, it points to ideas and practices that transcend and cannot be realized in current reality. To paraphrase Herbert Marcuse, utopianism comprehends the established society as a reality to be changed.2 Moreover, utopianism does not just remind us of what we lack; it opens up new horizons of possibility. Utopianism as utopian desire has what Bertolt Brecht called in a very different context an estrangement effect; it makes us see the familiar as suddenly unfamiliar. This making strange is “designed to free socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp” (192). Estrangement challenges situations in which things “are too obvious for us to bother to understand them” (192). This challenge is important because “when something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up” (Brecht 1978, 71). By making the familiar unfamiliar, the estrangement effect of utopian desire opens up the possibility of a radical unfolding of what complicity seeks to fold together. In doing this, it erodes our complicity with the apparent “naturalness” of the here and now to produce what the American poet Gil Scott-Heron calls “the first revolution”: “The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown” (1982).3 Without necessarily intending it, Scott-Heron captures what I am calling utopian defamiliarization. To conclude this section, I think we can distinguish among four versions of the impossible: 1.  the impossible (a supposedly “objective” category); 2.  the historically impossible (a category that recognizes that there is movement between the impossible and the possible, that is, when things once said to be impossible become possible); 3.  the politically impossible (when the impossible is used to defend the prevailing structures of power, that is, when the possible is presented as the impossible); and 4.  the unpossible. Too often categories two and three are taken to be examples of category one. The fourth category is in some ways the most interesting. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was originally going to be called The Un-Dead because Stoker understood vampires to exist in a state between the living and the dead. Borrowing from this usage we might call the unpossible something



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that is undecidedly and contingently hovering between the possible and the impossible, a category that is ultimately defined by political struggle. HUMAN NATURE Conservative accounts of human nature are often used against the possibility of radical change. This is certainly the case in attacks on utopianism. Any attempt at a radical unfolding of our complicity with power, it is claimed, will always be undermined by our human nature. The argument usually runs something like this: because our human nature is fundamentally flawed, all plans to make a better world will always end badly. Therefore, it is always better to make do with what we have, or as a famous Victorian book on etiquette told its female readers, “the highest duty is so often to suffer and be still” (Vicinus 2013, 4). The defects of human nature that are claimed are various, but what remains fairly constant is the argument that a very particular type of social order is required to prevent these flaws in human nature leading to chaos and disorder. Against this, utopianism would insist that human nature is variable across different historical conditions and therefore cannot be used as a determining force outside history. This is in effect how Marx thinks of human nature. He distinguishes between “human nature in general” and “human nature as modified in each historical epoch” (1976, 759). Human nature in general consists of certain needs and capacities; these can be divided into those that are “natural” and those that belong to our “species being.” Our “natural” needs and capacities we share with other animals (food, shelter, reproduction, etc.), while those of our “species being” are unique to us as humans. Both are historically and socially variable in their concrete manifestation. In other words, and contrary to many conservative accounts, human nature is not fixed and unchanging; it is not something set but always in a state of becoming. What it means to be human in the twenty-first century is very different from what it was five or ten thousand years ago, and it will be different again in the future. Therefore, although we may be a biological bundle of needs and capacities, these needs and capacities change as we change the world around us. Our humanity, like the world in which we live, is a social production, so, while we can argue that our human nature consists of the need to eat, shelter, and reproduce, how we accomplish these things is historically variable. Moreover, how we do these things impacts on our nature as human beings. As Henri Lefebvre explains it, “active man creates the human world and, through the act of production, produces himself. He does not simply produce things, implements

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or goods; he also produces history and situations. He creates ‘human nature’: nature in himself and for himself” (Lefebvre 2002, 95). Utopian desire is one of the finer parts of our nature in that it imagines and communicates the hope and possibility that the world might one day become what Thomas More called a “happy place.” However, knowing that human nature is historically variable makes it impossible to predict the exact form this might take. WHAT DESIRE LACKS Ernst Bloch (1986) and Herbert Marcuse (1972) use the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud to explore what desire lacks. I want to suggest that we can do something similar with the work of another psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1989, 2001, 2018), especially in terms of Lacan’s concept of lack. According to Lacan, we are born into a condition of lack and subsequently spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome this condition. The result is an endless quest in search of an imagined moment of plenitude. Lacan figures this as a search for what he terms l’objet petit a (the object small other), that which is desired but forever out of reach, a lost object, signifying an imaginary moment in time when we were whole. Unable to ever take hold of this object, we console ourselves with displacement strategies and substitute objects. As infants, we first exist as a “formless” mix of body parts and sensations in a preverbal world Lacan calls the Real, in which all our needs are met as if by magic. This is a world in which there is no distinction between subject and object or self and other. We are continuous with what surrounds us; we are complete, we do not know where we end and where everything else begins. In the realm of the Real we have no sense of a separate selfhood. Our sense of being a unique individual begins to emerge only in what Lacan calls the mirror stage. As he points out, we are born prematurely; it takes time to be able to control and coordinate our movements. This has not been fully accomplished when the infant (between the ages of six and eighteen months) first sees itself in a mirror. As he explains, “still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence” (352), the infant forms an identification with the image in the mirror. The mirror suggests control and coordination that as yet do not exist. Therefore, when the child first sees itself in a mirror, it sees not only an image of its current self but also the promise of a more complete self; it is in this promise that the ego begins to emerge. In this way, then, “the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the



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lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (Lacan 2018, 353). On the basis of this recognition or, more properly, misrecognition (not the self, but an image of the self), we begin to see ourselves as separate individuals: that is, as both subject (self that looks) and object (self that is looked at). The mirror stage heralds the moment of entry into an order of subjectivity Lacan calls the Imaginary: The imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so we are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves. As a child grows up, it will continue to make such imaginary identifications with objects, and this is how the ego will be built up. For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify. (Eagleton 1983, 165)

With each new image, we will attempt to return to a time before lack. In other words, desire is the desire to find what we lack, our selves whole again, as we were before we encountered the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Symbolic is an intersubjective network of meanings, which exists as a structure we must enter. It is what we experience as reality: reality being the symbolic organization of the Real. Once in the Symbolic our subjectivity is both enabled (we can do things and make meaning) and constrained (there are limits to what we can do and how we can make meaning). The Symbolic order confirms who we are. I may think I am this or that, but unless this is confirmed—unless I and others can recognize this in the Symbolic—it will not be really true. The day before I was awarded a PhD I was no more intelligent than the day after, but in a symbolic sense I was: I now had a PhD and I could call myself “Doctor!” The Symbolic Order had recognized and therefore allowed me and others to recognize my new intellectual standing. In summary, then, according to Lacan’s model of the three registers of reality, our development is marked by a transition from the Real to the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is a move from the “full” world of the Real to the “empty” world of the Symbolic. The Imaginary represents our unsuccessful attempt to make what is “empty” feel “full” again. The transition from Real to Symbolic is so traumatic we spend the rest of our lives trying to return, trying to get back to the “fullness” of the Real. Desire exists in the impossibility of closing the gap between self and other—to make good what we lack. We long for a time when we existed in “nature,” where everything was simply itself, before the mediations of the Symbolic. In other words, our life narratives are governed by the desire to find what we lack, which is,

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according to Lacan, our selves whole again. With each new identification, we will attempt to return to a time before lack, to find ourselves in what is not ourselves. Each identification will be an attempt to fill the space of lack and each time we will fail. Can we think of Lacan’s concept of lack in terms of utopian desire? What if lack is not driven by an impossible return? What if instead it is an example of what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory consciousness? In language that is remarkably similar to that of Lacan, Bloch argues that desire is always provoked by “a feeling of something lacking. . . . [It] is always searching to fill a hollow space . . . to fill something lacking with an external something. [T]he pull towards what is lacking never ends” (1986, 76, 46, 451). What is sought, according to Bloch, is not a return to a mythical moment of plenitude but a search for the “no place” that is truly the “happy place.” In other words, we are not trying to return home, we are trying to go home for the first time. As he concludes the third volume of The Principle of Hope: “But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no-one has yet been: homeland” (1995, 1376). If we understand it in this way, lack is not an ahistorical desire for reunion with the Real; it is a utopian desire for a better future. The utopian promise is to come home for the first time, and the “completeness” that is missing is not (or not just) psychological, it is social, pointing to our fundamental need for society and social relationships. We can also read the Lacanian model as radically utopian in another way. Rather than coming home, we can see it instead as pointing to an endless human journey. As Oscar Wilde observed, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias” (1975, 270). According to this understanding of lack, utopianism is a restless desire continually on the move in search of somewhere better. It is a continuous human journey, not a fixed destination. CONCLUSION Utopianism expands desire and generates hope. This entanglement of hope and desire can take many forms, both written and practiced, but at its core it is seeking somewhere better, seeking to make the news from nowhere manifest



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somewhere. Whether it amounts to seeking or finding, utopianism gives us the resources to imagine the future in a different way. In so doing we begin to unfold our complicity with the “naturalness” of the present. Utopian desire cannot change the world, but it can produce a demand for change, one that frees desire from our complicity with the prevailing structures of power, with all their realism and impossibilities. We can believe it will take us home or we can think instead it is an ongoing human journey and embrace with Raymond Williams the optimism that “once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of hope” (2010, 268). But whichever we decide, home or ongoing human journey, what should remain clear is that the utopian desire to imagine and construct the happy place has been and should continue to be a powerful force in human history. Moreover, unless we are certain that we have reached the end of history and have exhausted the full potential of our humanity, it is probably too soon to abandon two of the fundamental things that make us human: hope and desire. Rather than dismissing utopianism as hopelessly impossible, we should instead celebrate Thomas More’s naming of a way of thinking, writing, and acting that we might define positively as “refusing to be realistic.” And to repeat what I said earlier, to escape an oppressive construction of reality we have to be realistic enough to demand what that reality insists is unrealistic. To be realistic in the traditional sense would be to remain complicit with a particular social construction of reality. In other words, utopianism against complicity would always insist: be realistic, demand the impossible. NOTES 1.  Although Lennon and Ono were active in the counterculture, it is unclear if they were aware of these songs. 2.  What Marcuse actually says is “Marxist theory comprehends the established society as a reality to be changed” (2003, 71). 3.  The quotation is from the 1982 live version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Chapter 9

Complicity Narratives, Articulations, and the Politics of Representation1 Paul Reynolds

In this chapter, I want to develop and extend a recent argument I made about the utility of the concept of complicity (Reynolds 2017a). I argued that the usefulness of complicity as a concept is in its rhetorical power and not its value as an analytical tool. Such an approach draws attention away from questions of the accuracy, appropriateness, and efficacy of complicity as an analytical concept and toward an exploration of the metaphoric and narrative constitution of complicity as a representation and articulation of social and political relationships. This approach departs from much of the extant literature on complicity and so unlocks a different sense in which complicity as an association and/or relation is understood and attributed.2 This chapter develops this argument by exploring the concept of complicity in its cultural politics of representation. Complicity provides a conceptual “glue” for narratives that identify and characterize otherwise veiled, hidden, and hegemonized associations and relationships. Equally it allows for the development of framings that build counterhegemonic narratives and so places the representational politics of complicity at the center of the battleground of political rhetoric. By attributing forms of complicit association and relation that are then reinforced with the use of other concepts in the same “language game”—accountability, responsibility, culpability, involvement—complicity becomes a key articulation in the vocabulary of political rhetoric. The concept of articulation is particularly important because in the characterization of complicity, the key driver is not the analytical composition of the argument itself but the skill of the rhetorician and the way in which his or her narratives are constructed and representations composed. The power of attributions of complicity is not, therefore, dependent upon the relationship between the characterization of complicity and the analyzed subject relations they are applied to. It is instead driven by the self-referential character of 121

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complicity narratives themselves and the effectiveness of the rhetorician who composes those narratives. Their rhetorical power lies in their capacity to evoke cohesive and persuasive narratives as narratives, or stories that capture attention and belief in the political milieu. This contrasts with the attributions of complicity that find their purchase in analytical accuracy, with clear evidence of responsibility in the actions arising from particular associations/relations. While it might be argued that all concepts have both analytical and rhetorical dimensions in their usages, I argue that the power of the concept of complicity is far more persuasively explained by its representational politics than by any attributions of its analytical power. The argument proceeds in three sections. First, I will summarize and develop the argument (Reynolds 2017a) that complicity is best understood for its rhetorical power. Second, I will apply this thinking through an in-depth critical engagement with Thomas Docherty’s (2016) recent book-length study of complicity. Docherty provides one of the few extensive engagements with complicity in social, cultural, and political analysis. I consider the text for its overarching arguments and their deployment through particular case studies. Finally, I consider some of the implications of this analysis in how representational politics takes place, drawing from thinkers such as Raymond Williams (1977, 2005) and Stuart Hall (1997) in their development of a cultural materialism rooted in the thinking of Antonio Gramsci. COMPLICITY AS RHETORIC The common usage of complicity refers to the concept as a means of identifying and distinguishing relationships or associations that attribute significant linkage if not direct responsibility or accountability for an action, trend, or development. As such, complicity sits within a language game with several other characterizing concepts: collusion, collaboration, culpability, compliance, connivance, abetment, involvement, implication, and responsibility, among others. Wittgenstein’s (1978) conception of language games is useful insofar as it supplants the notion that words have singular meanings and definitions and a direct relationship with their referent, with a recognition of the inseparability of language from contextual and conjunctural factors such as cultural conventions and practices—the rules of that particular language game.3 A particular word is given meaning not simply by its attribution to an object, phenomenon, or event but by linguistic referents within the game that articulate its meaning. So I take one example of a definition of complicity:



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Oxford Dictionaries Online offers a typical definition: “the fact or condition of being involved with others in an activity that is unlawful or morally wrong.”4 But what does this definition tell us? As soon as we begin to instantiate it and explore it through examples, the concept becomes contested and elusive. As soon as we make a claim of complicity, we encounter disagreement about what complicity means and about whether it is legitimately applied. (Reynolds 2017a, 37)

While this might be claimed of most words as concepts, some words are used in such a way as to be more specific and direct than others. In the language game of complicity, we see attributed meanings ranging from compliance, which itself implies constraint and limited agency, to responsibility, which implies specific and evidenced agency, to involvement, which is rather nebulous. Compliance, sharing a root etymology, might suggest complicity should be understood as (to amend the Oxford definition) “the fact or condition of being involved with others in an activity that is unlawful or morally wrong, where there is a limited capacity to exercise agency and significant pressures compelling involvement.” However, such an exercise does not help in two respects. The idea of compliance having purchase on complicity in this language game is not established usage, and other uses of complicity stem from other roots, particularly responsibility or collusion. Indeed, complicity is a term often deployed as a means of identifying agents or groups of agents who should take responsibility and/or face legal redress for their involvement. Any revised definition will raise as many questions as it answers: What is limited capacity with respect to agency and how do we understand it—legally, morally, politically? At what point do what forms of pressures become significant and at what threshold compelling? How far does compliance involve a choice, limitation, or absence of choice in the agents involved? All concepts have both an analytical and a rhetorical function. The analytical function pertains to their attribution of meanings to relationships or associations for which evidence and logical supposition of argument is produced. If complicity encapsulated a relationship or association for which there is both evidence and logical argument, then it would be an analytically strong concept. Yet the term “complicity” is adequately “fuzzy” or malleable within its language game to constitute multiple encapsulations—or characterizations—of relationships and associations, so disparate as to make any analysis weak and partial. Put simply, deploying complicity as a concept feels like skating on thin ice until I deploy other concepts from the same language game and then they do the work of strengthening its analytical function. If I say that all those involved in the Nazi German war machine between 1933 and 1945 were complicit in the extermination of the Jews and others attacked as “undesirable” or “subhuman,” there are numerous analyses that

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can resist that characterization. In amending it, either in terms of periodization or more precise identification of agents, relationships, and positioning, I make a stronger analysis. In doing so, however, I deploy allied concepts of collusion, connivance, collaboration, and responsibility, and they become the characterizing concepts of the relationships I describe.5 Complicity’s strength as a concept lies not in providing for greater precision in the description or analysis of relationship or association, a process that leads to some being retained because they are found to be evidenced as collusion or bearing responsibility, and some deemed by a significant degree less so or not to be so. Because of this fuzziness in characterizing relationships, complicity in analysis merely provides the speculative boundaries of any set of relationships to be tested. Appraised as an analytical concept, its value lies with its association with other terms within its language game, and has considerably less analytical utility than those other terms. This is not a particularly contentious distinction. There is no reason to think all concepts must be similar in function or power in constructing a narrative to explicate a social event, object, or phenomenon. In Reynolds (2017a, 37–39), I clarify this claim in looking at complicity in US and UK law, noting its reliance on other concepts that are regarded as more definite in their characterizations of relationships or associations, or its recognition as ill-defined “common law.” Equally in philosophy complicity is assessed through concepts of “marginal contribution,” “shared intention,” and “inclusive authorship” of an action reinforced by a methodological individualism that focuses on either action or active omission or self-interest in the action and its consequences (37–41). While these philosophical distinctions might enable us to be more specific about a relationship or association, their deployment in a claim of complicity always ends with an attribution of collusion or responsibility that makes complicity as a concept relatively marginal in analytical import in comparison. In making this argument about the concept of complicity, I am not saying it has no analytical value. I am arguing that value is limited except in establishing possibilities in a range of relationships or associations, but marginal at best and valueless and counterproductive at worst to a precise analysis. It may be useful in providing a basis for the widening of a discussion of potential involvements in a particular event at the beginning of an inquiry, but the subsequent discussion and attributions of involvement lead to the use of other more analytically effective concepts in the language game being deployed— such as collusion and responsibility. If complicity is a term that does not have significant value analytically, where does it have significant value? In Reynolds (2017a) I argued it had a rhetorical value. When complicity is deployed within a political or moral



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narrative and conceptually represents the character of a relationship or association, it is evocative of the negative characterization of that relationship without the same burdens of evidence or precise argumentation. It captures deferrals, mediations, and indirect, veiled, and loose associations that elude easy evidencing or analysis that produces logical chains of definite associations. It has strong currency when it is deployed, and so is powerful in moral and political rhetoric. If I claim that we are all complicit in the poisoning of our environment and so the genocide of our descendants in one hundred years’ time, it might evoke a sense of responsibility and reflection that leads me to recycle more personally, think twice about what I buy, who I vote for, and which campaigns against pollution, however marginally, I ought to support. Such campaigns by environmentalists and “Greens” have been commonplace in mobilizing support, encouraging changed personal conduct, and self-interestedly building political support and participation for their organization. If that claim is then put against the structural and institutional contexts within which we live, it becomes clear that only substantial political action will effect real change. This might be changing institutional practices, such as producers using plastic containers or local councils producing an infrastructure for personal recycling to have cumulative value or supporting avowedly environmentally concerned parties and politicians. Personal practice has symbolic and communicative value rather than making a concrete difference, unless it becomes part of a mass movement, for example. When different institutions are explored for their culpability, a whole complex chain of relationships, rationales, and competing priorities come into play that can explain inertia or constraints to change and culpability or restricted choice in policy. These provide mediations from ascriptions of culpability or responsibility. Complicity can be ascribed to sustain the claim of wrongdoing, but if we want to know more than that there is a negative association, other concepts are doing the work. Much of the latter half of Reynolds (2017a) was engaged in developing this rhetorical understanding of the concept. While best understood as a powerful rhetorical tool, the concept of complicity would still be subject to evaluation. I argued that its deployment in a narrative was strong or weak dependent on the extent to which it balanced narratives of agency against structure, the imminent against the distant in contexts and conjunctures (temporal and spatial) and the normal and the exceptional. While these criteria might also have analytical value in attributing responsibility, for example, with complicity they are evaluative of the power of the narrative being asserted. It is the narrative’s—and the narrator’s—coherence, metaphoric power, eloquence, and deployment that are more important than the evidencing and argumentative structure of its claims.

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The rhetorical focus of complicity is often deployed to throw light on subterranean or veiled relationships and associations and their ethical and political import. It is invariably critical and against relationships that are characterized as negative in relation to human values. THOMAS DOHERTY’S COMPLICITY An effective way of both elaborating on and testing this argument is in dialogue with a text that explores complicity in a sense in which it has analytical power. The use of complicity I want to explore here is Thomas Docherty’s Complicity: Criticism between Collaboration and Commitment (2016).6 This is justified in the power, eloquence, and substantial contribution the text makes to an understanding of how complicity is conceived in contemporary societies.7 In doing so, some of his examples elide with mine from Reynolds (2017a), and I will draw those out in the discussion. Docherty begins his discussion by using Hannah Arendt’s recognition speech for the 1973 Sonning Prize to reflect on ancient theater and Roman law distinctions between persona—the mask or public face and voice through which recognition is achieved and the basis of rights bearing—and homo—private member of the species who simply live bare life (Docherty evokes Agamben’s la nuda vita) (2016, 1–3). He follows Arendt in seeing the persona as having agency commensurate to recognition, while at the same time avoiding the error of ascribing persona and homo to be singular, where the assumption of agency is ascribed to all people. Docherty immediately recognizes the problem this creates—which is to what extent is a person to be held responsible for his or her actions in societies with complex structural and institutional contexts, in which the agent’s authentic sense of self is constantly mediated or challenged by the cultures, institutions, and value systems within which we sit. As Docherty observes, Modernity seems to organise itself around the belief in authenticity: genuine, reliable trustworthiness as a condition of our living and being together. . . . If this position rests on some essential falsehood, then to the extent that we subscribe to it, we are as a society complicit with that fundamental lie. Is it possible, in such circumstances, to avoid complicity in our critical engagements with culture and politics? Is it the case that we are somehow coerced in collaboration with overweening or unearned or illegitimate authority if we are to be heard and to be effective? And what happens to the idea of a committed criticism, a criticism that is determined to be autonomous and to avoid the taint of any such collaboration? What might these issues around authenticity and responsibility mean for a consideration of guilt, or of a more general complicity with the actions of others? (2016, 5–6)



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This conclusion to the first chapter is worth quoting at length to make two observations. First, Docherty’s concern seems to be with the terms of responsibility and how we make the distinction between culpable responsibility and its absence while living within complex institutional systems, structures, and societies where agency might be claimed to be severely limited. These systems and structures are fundamentally morally problematic and locate agents within positions in which they directly contribute to acts and processes that are morally questionable or indefensible. This raises the question of how social agents who share in or benefit from their associations or relationships within those systems, to a greater or lesser degree, are characterized. Are they exercising agency, responsible, and culpable? Are they acting under irresistible forces in their compliance? What the focus on complicity allows Docherty to do is to consider a whole range of cases and how they can be analyzed to explain why the question of responsibility, for example, is complex, and what might be a moral response to association or involvement with immoral acts and processes. This does leave complicity as distinct from responsibility or compliance, for example, as quite amorphous in meaning. Interestingly, at the end of the first paragraph in the preface, Docherty observes, Institutional demands can override the personal, to the point where not only ethical but also professional responsibilities are made to disappear. Beyond that, those institutional demands also sit within social and political configurations: and consequently, individuals can become complicit with political positions that, personally, they would prefer to resist or reject. This book is an attempt to bring the entire idea of responsibility to bear on what is essentially the institutionalization of corruption in contemporary culture. (2016, ix; emphasis added)

If the text is focused on degrees of attribution of responsibility on agents within institutional and structural relationships, what does complicity add? In the different cases that Docherty explores—ranging widely from compliance with the law, Nazi bureaucrats and the Holocaust, drone warfare, and wartime collaboration to higher education management—while complicity frames the question, other concepts in the complicity language game do the hard work. Docherty’s avowed aim is represented in his discussion of Russell Brand, the “comedian” seeking to impress a political agenda and his “don’t vote: it only encourages them” position of 2013 (2016, 15–16).8 Docherty sees this as the exercise of negative liberty and refusal, which may set itself against complicity in the political system, but in its underlying rejection of social atomization and alienation reproduces the same effect by refusing positive participation. Here, symbolic rejection produces an absence of opposition that reinforces the status quo. That can only be broken by participation, voicing in the system, and by political engagement. So if you refuse complicity, you are complicit in the status quo, and if you are complicit, there is the possibility

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of voicing and acting producing change. This is the paradox of involvement. Docherty identifies the problem of assessing this paradox as the logic of incrementalism (2016, 23). Successive small steps accepted, ignored, or not provoking rejection and dissent lead to edifices of oppression—he cites as an example incremental steps from anti-Jewish prejudices, through legal and political intolerance, through to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. This has always been a problem for both intellectual critics and dissenters of political systems. Complicity here might be a useful device to encourage reflection and self-consciousness about the extent or degree of participation, but when it comes to ascribing complicity, there is a nebulous character to it. Is only the “Diogenistic” rejection of culture and society untainted by complicity? If any participation in the political system is complicit, then we only get a sense of meaning to the nature of participation when we begin to look for collusion or responsibility. Again, the value of complicity appears in evocation and not in more nuanced discussion. It might, indeed, be used to assault those “playing the game” to a degree by those who refuse, in such a way as to negate any pressure for change. The question of how far to be “complicit” is always resolved in specific relationships and associations, with analyses of the potential conformities or ruptures that incremental change affords, and its analysis in relation to larger ideological and political trends and developments. While the precise engagement with institutions and structures is important in such an analysis, it is interesting to note that Docherty observes, with respect to collaboration and conformity to incremental change, that “this is why the question of complicity is, in the final analysis, a question of ethics and of personal responsibility” (2016, 23). Complicity is the evocation, but responsibility is the focus. In his chapter on accounting and bureaucracy, Docherty settles on the example of Oskar Gröning, the “accountant of Auschwitz,” who escaped criminal redress until a sentence of four years in 2015 (2016, 31–36). Inevitably tied to Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, Docherty’s focus relates to the complicity of the “apparatchik” in relation to the more direct “butchers” in extermination camps in Nazi Germany. What primarily interests Docherty is not Gröning’s acknowledgment of “moral guilt” in a BBC documentary in 2004 but his distinction at his trial between this guilt and legal guilt as he had not actively taken part in the murders. Docherty evokes Arendt’s “desk murderers” in describing the centrality of Gröning’s role to the Nazi machine of extermination and profit. At the same time, he calls upon Zygmunt Bauman’s observations in Modernity and the Holocaust (2000) that the extermination machine conformed to and relied on principles of business efficiency and effectiveness and modern rational systems such as accountancy and bureaucracy and might be seen to extend from them. He ties this to Agamben’s



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(2002) observation as to the “Muselmänner,” who withdrew to the rationality of their own role and its logic and sought to obliterate any wider sense of involvement with or responsibility for to what they are functionary. This allows a nuanced discussion of the extent to which institutional logics govern behavior and its moral consequences, and what responsibility the individual has within this sort of machine. Docherty extends this through a consideration of contemporary UK higher education and its embrace of metrics that are widely regarded as flawed or problematic, and how the use of arbitrary metrics for professorial rank led to the suicide of Professor Stefan Grimm. Let us consider the Nazi example first. In Reynolds (2017a, 38–39), I reflect on the Goldhagen-Finkelstein debate as to degrees of guilt of the German people in Nazi atrocities to show how attributions of complicity, however evocative, fail to enable a final sense of where the line is drawn to act for redress. While those directly involved are easily identifiable, how are those indirectly associated to be considered? What is the culpability of police, soldiers not directly involved by sustaining the Nazi hierarchy, support workers, bureaucrats and service providers for the German war machine, and citizens aware of the dispossession and disappearance of Jews? I conclude: The purpose of these questions is not to settle whether one should argue, with Goldhagen, for a widespread complicity, or argue against it as Finkelstein does. Instead, it is to suggest that the degree to which particular people were complicit is a matter of political contestation, not analytical precision or historical interpretation. (2017, 39; emphasis in the original)

Gröning seems an odd choice to focus on in this form of argument. Notwithstanding an admission—that Docherty acknowledges—of moral guilt almost sixty years later and in the context in which no immediate legal action takes place, Gröning would not be regarded as occupying a position of complicity. He would be regarded as a responsible agent because his function, the accounting of assets removed from the Jews at the camps, was central to the machine that not only killed Jews but financially perpetuated the Nazi state that was avowedly responsible. In this respect, when Docherty says that the court found Gröning to be complicit, he should be saying they found Gröning responsible. Indeed, in noting also that Gröning is a functionary of an intrusion of money into governance, he observes, The question is not just to what extent we should condemn the Nazis for this criminal behaviour; rather, the more pressing question is whether we have ever managed to escape from the structure of thought and organisation of our politics that shaped Gröning. That is to say: why have we never escaped properly from the state of affairs in which responsibility is reduced to accountancy? (2016, 33)

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Again, the stronger discussion concerns responsibility rather than complicity, and in this case the problem is more than terminological. The analyses of Bauman and Agamben have considerable explanatory power in explaining participation in unspeakable actions, and in a discussion of responsibility they ask serious questions as to the attribution of responsibility of the agent, the necessity of structural change, and the question of appropriate redress. However, the rhetoric of complicity here is not evocative of assigning involvement but of masking it. If responsibility does not extend beyond the immediate chain of command of the murderers in the camp, his “moral guilt” has some quality in acknowledging association. If all the apparatchiks of the Third Reich are complicit, he is lost in a welter of bureaucrats. His moral guilt is sustained, whereas his legal guilt is questionable, as he suggested and Docherty notes. However, he is not complicit: his specific role at Auschwitz involved skills and functions that enabled or facilitated the operation of the death camp. There is adequate evidence that not all chose to do so and that not all faced persecution for requesting alternative duties. His is a burden of responsibility and in turn can—and was—regarded as legal guilt. The juxtaposition of the death of Professor Grimm is apposite because Docherty’s point is to emphasize how systems, cultures, and logics become pervasive in the people who occupy them and produce outcomes of everyday cruelty. This participation both treats people and produces results that, stepping away from the persona or role, someone might wish to condemn and feel moral guilt for their part in (or, as in Docherty’s example, retreat behind callow and disgusting expressions of fulfilling their function that blames the victim). The entreaties of Bauman and Agamben with respect to how systems and logics obscure cruelty or enable the obliteration of personal senses of morality in the face of their function, and how extreme examples—Nazism— share their logics with modern institutions—university managerialism—are well taken. However, while complicity as an evocation might be powerful, it can also be counterproductively obscurantist in how we make necessary decisions about redress and responsibility. Complicity gets the shoulder shrug of “that’s the way it is,” “only obeying orders or job requirements,” and occasions Docherty’s surprise at the “limited controversy” surrounding Grimm’s death (2016, 46). Responsibility gets a judicial process that makes senior managers explain themselves and tests and interrogates their easy claims to adhering to justifiable systems and logics. The same might be asserted when Docherty turns to the collaborationist example of Robert Brasillach, a French Fascist who collaborated with the Vichy regime but later criticized it for being not Nazi enough and was executed in 1945. Here, Docherty tests Brasillach’s defense that he was speaking his truth as a French Fascist in his writing and intellectual work, and his use of claiming responsibility to move from a collaborationist-resistance discourse to



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speaking to truth. Docherty concludes, in criticism of this sort of relativism: “It is clear . . . that such a position leads not just to a philosophical solipsism, but also to the demise of any serious democracy, in which individuals have to share in responsibility for truth” (2016, 92). Again, it is responsibility that is central to his analysis. This outline of some of Docherty’s arguments does little justice to his weaving of literature and politics to talk about the necessity of being a thinking subject who rejects conformity and retains an authentic subjective link to the “social bond” and against alienating discourses of system and structure. That said, one concluding quotation on complicity is useful, in the context of Docherty contrasting the public formality of rules and systems against a blurred public-private in which we might become better together than the formality of our rules and systems. In contrasting the lure of external validation within systems and structures to “authentic” and unalienated encounters with the subjective, Docherty concludes: This is the very essence of complicity; and it is therefore utterly uncritical. It denies my subjectivity by subsuming it [to] an alienated other. It is more than that: in political terms, it is the founding condition of collaboration. . . . In the end, then, the avoidance of complicity is important for one fundamental reason: complicity is the silent face of a society that not only permits oligarchic rule but that also requires political collaboration in its anti-democratic organisation. (2016, 121)

I have an absolute sympathy for Docherty’s politics and his analysis of the way in which people are subsumed within the systems and logics of what I would regard as a capitalist hetero-patriarchal, ableist, racist, and ironically anti-human society. Yet is complicity the most effective conceptual means of making this argument? Throughout, Docherty refers to responsibility, collaboration, conformity, and other concepts in the language game of relationship and association. They do the effective work, and as I have pointed out in the example of Gröning and Nazism, complicity might allow a degree of slippage in apportioning responsibility that might be regrettable. Ironically, complicity does have a primary function in Docherty’s text: as the rhetorical device by which different examples and themes can be woven together into a coherent narrative. Complicity aids Docherty the rhetorician in weaving his analyses and reflections into a persuasive narrative. RHETORIC AND REPRESENTATION If this argument has credence, and complicity is best understood for its rhetorical power, it is necessary to evaluate its use as a concept in terms of its

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representative function. Complicity becomes part of the repertoire of cultural politics—the domain of discourse and the politics of representation, in which the power of the articulation of argument and the skill of the rhetorician is more the focus than any underlying evidence or analysis. In this reading, philosophical distinctions as to the definition of complicity are supplanted by cultural critique, in which the attribution and deployment of complicity as a rhetorical device is “a practice of representation that connects language and meaning to culture” (Hall 1997, 15). While there are a number of variants to the relationship between symbols and language and their cultures, within which their meanings are constructed, a common theme is that a concept like complicity draws power from context. Where, for example, there are claims of complicity by elements of the state in acts of violence on behalf of one ethnic or religious group, such as British state and loyalist complicity in policing the North of Ireland (Urwin 2016), a history of state bias, prejudice, and mutual interest strengthens the credibility of the complicity narrative. It also suggests that complicity is commonly a charge by the dispossessed against those who possess wealth and property, and those with limited power against those who have power. So complicity narratives frequently involve attributions to state power and reflect upon past histories in which complicity has been evidenced subsequent to events. Hence, for example, complicity by state agencies to subvert democracy are reinforced culturally when those who evoke complicity refer to past cases in which historical study has shown complicit relations were evident. The assertion of complicity in a contemporary case is not the most powerful driver of that case—the cultural history of past hostilities or veiled actions are. Likewise, and converse to complicity as a narrative of radical critique, the recent use of suggestion of complicity within “post-truth” narratives of a “fake news media” conspiring against democracy has been used effectively by Donald Trump in defending his presidency by establishing a “siege mentality” around his government that evades analysis and evidenced critique. In any cultural politics of representation, the narrative of complicity depends very much on the power of the articulator. It is the capacity of the rhetorician to mobilize others through the use of representations—words, metaphoric images, credible and evocative narratives, oratory gesticulations—in articulating their argument. The construction of the narrative of “Brexit”—the UK’s exit from the European Union—is a strong example. Here, the detailed policy debates and analyzes of costs and benefits of who opposes Brexit or fears they will lose from it have not been engaged with at the level of analysis and evidenced argument, though it is now amply available. Instead the “Leave” campaign has made broad and simple unsubstantiated claims—like their “Battle Bus’s” claim of a £350 million per week “Brexit dividend” for the National Health Service.



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Even when these claims have been acknowledged as false, unsubstantiated claims for greater sovereignty and the presentation of the EU as the “enemy” have sustained significant support. The power of the Brexit narrative has been “remainers” as “traitors against democracy” (an “advisory” 52–48 percent vote on a constitutional question) engaged in “project fear” (worst case scenarios to a Brexit without agreement with the EU) and undermining “Great Britain.” This “Great Britain” narrative calls back to an idealized nationalist and racist past of British empire, power, and sovereignty. That the global world is changed and more complex does not matter. The narrative is rich in evocations, continually repeated and impervious to detailed analytical policy discourse. The “remain” narrative has concentrated on policy and political implications, supported by business and policy decisions that show the strength of their analysis but without similar rhetorical power, devices, and representations. “Let’s take back control,” while lacking specificity, has been more effective than “Britain stronger in Europe.” Anthony Barnett provides a trenchant analysis of this rhetorical appeal in eliding Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and vote Leave’s “Take back Control”: Both Battle cries combine a strong assertion about “being in the world” with an appeal to ressurect an older history—a nationalist form of self-determination. Had the Leave campaign demanded “Take Control!” it would have raised a question: How? Of what? It would feel like a threat to start a battle. Instead its call was, Take Back Control. Back has a double meaning, to take powers away from Brussels and to restore to us something that we once had. Softened with nostalgia, its appeal was inspired by a past when, supposedly, we knew who we were and governed our own lives. It combines the thrill of being assertive and its unruly rejection of the boss class with reassuring restoration. (2017, 38; emphasis in the original)

One way to theorize this rhetorical power is within the context of hegemony, as characterized by Antonio Gramsci (2010). In this case, Raymond Williams’s variant might be most useful: A lived in hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realised complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be singular. Its internal structures are highly complex, as can readily be seen in any concrete analysis. Moreover (and this is crucial, reminding us of the necessary thrust of the concept), it does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own. (1977, 112–13)

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Williams’s articulation of hegemony is situated within a conception of cultural politics in which the dominant culture and its narratives are always in juxtaposition with residual (past) and emergent (future) cultures (2005, 37–42). It is the power of the rhetorician and their articulations within that complex cultural field of contestations to capture the present cultural milieu while drawing from past and future. Past US presidents Clinton and Obama’s different visions of hope and Blair’s “New Labour—third way modernisation” in the United Kingdom are examples of seizing on the promise of emergent political narratives, however nascent and limited in their playing out in policy and practice. The current British government’s policy of Brexit from Europe and the political ideas of President Donald Trump draw from residual cultures of nationalism, tradition, simplicity, and racism to energize their populism. What Williams (1977, 2005) does effectively is provide a model through which the cultural politics of representation and rhetoric can be understood and the power of complicity as rhetoric can be comprehended. It is a continuous process of rhetorical practice and reinforcement both politically and in everyday living through the media and the use of popular culture, and it is both made by the powerful and can be subverted. The complicit are made and remade within cultural framing through persuasive narratives exercising rhetorical power. In this framing, complicity is a concept often used critically by the left to attack a dominant cultural power that can evade accountability and responsibility for their actions. The use of a rhetoric of complicity is a powerful tool for “counterhegemony,” in which persuasive attributions of complicity in actions against the people will challenge dominant narratives and power. At the same time, it also provides an explanation for the power of narratives such as those of Trump and Brexit from the powerful, who secure their hegemonic power by constituting a hegemony in which they present themselves as besieged for following the virtuous path. In either case, its power is in evocation, providing a “conceptual glue” that allows powerful speculations as to the culpability or responsibility of agents within structures before the more specific analyses and mediations that validate (or invalidate) such a claim take place. This is a valuable role insofar as abuses of power and claims of adhering to systems and logics that excuse or condone cruelty often come from those who veil their culpability and have interest in hegemonized social and political arrangements, where only political force will begin the process of enacting scrutiny and accountability. Or, conversely, complicity in “fake news” suggests a veiled or hidden network of agents seeking to usurp legitimate power, as with Trump’s populist narrative. At the same time, it should be recognizable that complicity is a blunt instrument and can be used to besmirch the innocent or taint the truth teller



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with corruption. The early media hysteria around the politics and affiliations of Jeremy Corbyn after his election to leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, for example, repeatedly claimed his complicity with antiBritish interests and ideas. Only with a London School of Economics Media and Communications analysis did it become clear that this press coverage was severely imbalanced and unevidenced smears, yet complicity with antiBritish sentiments continues to be asserted unabatedly.9 This underlines complicity as articulation, in which it is in the narrative constructed by the narrator that the rhetorical power exists. Complicity is a powerful device in a narrative that seeks to attribute moral, economic, and social failings in the existing order and build narratives of interpellation (calling to join and subscribe to a worldview), belonging, solidarity, and resistance that are both political and personal. In this sense, the power of complicity in rhetoric is not dependent upon the relationship between its characterization and the subject being characterized. The “Jeremy Corbyn” of the British press does not have to have a relationship with Corbyn or reflect his beliefs— though when analysis is applied that will quickly become apparent. Equally, the relationship between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and a cool analysis of US politics might be divergent. The power of rhetoric is self-referential within the articulated narrative, in the way in which any characterization has the capacity to evoke cohesive and persuasive narratives as narratives—persuasive stories—as opposed to analytical explanations, which are often far messier and conditional upon logical argument and evidence. While all concepts can be analyzed as having analytical and rhetorical components, this argument is that complicity is limited in analysis but powerful in rhetoric, persuasive in its self-referentiality and suggestiveness of wrongdoing. It is this very rhetorical power that should be understood both in its deployment against powerful interests and in its capacity to damage on behalf of power, which should inform how we seek to name and articulate “complicities.” COMPLICITY AS RHETORIC What are the implications of this sort of analysis? They fall into two categories, one conceptual and one intensely political. The first is to argue for rhetoric to be considered as important as analysis in critical thinking. Rhetoric has had relatively “bad press” in intellectual circles, conceptually dichotomized with dialectic (articulated as truth, wisdom, analysis) in the schism between Roman influenced pre-Socratic thinking and Plato’s dialogues in Greek philosophy.10 Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic dialogue Gorgias, itself a model of rhetoric practice as Plato (2004) demolishes the skills

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of rhetoric as being absent of virtue and truth at their core. It is Aristotle and later Cicero who contradict this ironic separation of a dialectical relationship between, as Dixon remarks, “the union of res and verba, of thinking and speaking, of ethics and style” (1971, 17; emphasis in the original), where wisdom is joined by eloquence. The focus of rhetoric—the rhetor, the quality of oratory, and the impact on the audience, whether in speech or written word, focused classically on three forms (judicial [forensic], deliberative [argumentation], and demonstrative [ceremonial])—becomes a focus of analysis in itself, not apart from the discussion of the quality and logic of analysis and argument (Dixon 1971, 1–3, 22–23). When Michel Foucault (2001a; 2010; 2012) later retrieves the concept of parrhesia to advocate for the necessity of speaking truth to power, he does so with that unity reconceived within the critical subject of discourses, the rhetor speaking his or her truth with a commitment to a truth emergent not from an objective truth but a more complex discursive articulation that draws upon eloquence as much as it does discourse. The poststructuralist constitution of the subject in discourse makes the quality and character of that discourse once again critical to conceiving truth and articulating it. Rhetoric was central to Greek and Roman thought, and subsequently diminished to a feature of literary criticism. Poststructuralist critical thinking has not explicitly rehabilitated it as being central to a critical understanding of society, although contemporary theorists such as Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas are effectively talking about rhetoric when they analyze language and communication.11 Recognizing that complicity as a concept should be best analyzed for its rhetorical power as any analytical value also asks how far conceptual analysis in general should give equal weighting to use in balance with meaning, deployment in balance with import. The second implication stems from that and is more peculiar to, or perhaps more evident in, the past two decades. The theorized “exhaustion” of democratic politics and the rise of a “post-truth” politics, in which emotional commitment and speaking from positions of power outweigh evidenced argument and in which “fake news” is deployed as powerfully on considered argument as it is on fiction, has returned rhetoric to center stage. Rhetoric can be seen to matter. It is evident first in the rhetoric of hope represented by Obama in the United States or Blair in the United Kingdom, promising rights, equality, and justice, and then, when that promise seemed to fail, in the rhetoric of Trump or Brexit and the resurgence of nationalist, populist, and xenophobic far right discourse. Rhetoric can move Brexit from the product of an advisory referendum with limited content to an article of faith in which opposition is treachery before an image of “Great” Britain echoing an imperial past. Trump can dismiss argument with mantra that is inconsistent and frequently easily



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challenged for its inaccuracy and hyperbole and sustain a base of electoral support tired of the “inconveniences” of evidence and actuality. These examples have to be understood as representative of the power of rhetoric as well as its impact when it fails. Complicity as a rhetorical tool allows critics to articulate webs of hidden relationships—whether Trump, Russia, and the far right or Brexiteers, the far right, and those profiteering on Brexit in the money markets—as yet shrouded from full view in analysis. Though there is considerable evidence for both cases in the public domain, it has not been adequately and powerfully brought into the public consciousness, and their enveloping in narratives of complicity might be powerful tools if they are deployed, just as the right use such narratives to criticize the oppositional media and public dissent as antiAmerican or anti-democratic respectively. If we recognize the power of the concept of complicity—among other evocations—in rhetorical politics, we avail ourselves of a better appreciation of discursive politics in an information age. We also come to understand more clearly the balance of the use of concepts as both critical and articulatory, and the importance of that contradictory unity in understanding and arguing.

NOTES 1.  Thanks to Cornelia Wächter and Robert Wirth for the editorial advice and suggestions, which immeasurably improved this chapter. 2. Indicatively Bratman (1984, 1993, 1999), Chiara and Goodin (2013), Kutz ([2000] 2007), and Lawson (2013). 3.  See Wittgenstein (1978, 67, 200–240). 4.  Oxford English Dictionaries Online, accessed June 22, 2016, http://www .oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/complicity. 5.  This reflects the Goldhagen (1997) / Finkelstein (2015) debate, which I discuss in Reynolds (2017a, 38–39). 6.  Docherty’s work and the Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu collection in which I made my argument both come from the same conference organized by CAPPE, University of Brighton, organized by Bob Brecher and colleagues in 2015. This volume arises from a conference also inspired by the 2015 conference in 2017, organized by the editors. 7.  This note is by way of an apology to Thomas Docherty, whose book includes elegant discerning comment on both literature and politics. A review would emphasize the virtues of the book in itself, but here I am primarily concerned with a particular reading of the text in relation to the concept of complicity. 8.  Brand subsequently made a U-turn on this stance, supported Labour leader Ed Miliband, and endorsed Green Party MP Caroline Lucas in the 2015 election.

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 9. For a discussion of Corbyn’s press, see Reynolds (2017b) “Corbyn, the Media and the Election: Misreading the Runes,” published in Chartist magazine in July/August 2017. 10.  Indicatively see Mailloux (1995), Conley (1990), Keith and Lundberg (2008), and Mason (1989). 11.  For an overarching discussion see Bernard-Donals and Glejzer (1998).

Chapter 10

A Murmur of Indifference to Authorial Identity in Intellectual Life1 Brendan Moran T. W. Adorno refers critically to “the artist’s or scholar’s flattering conviction” of “naivety and purity.” Artists and scholars, according to Adorno, have a tendency to acquit themselves and convict the world; these artists and scholars even acquit the world insofar as it is they who enact it. Yet this world involves “a thousand political and tactical considerations” (1974, 215; [1951] 1991, 288).2 Complicity with this world of often obsequious and opportunistic manoeuvering may be one onerous factor that inspired some theorists to try to imagine a situation in which the author is no longer central, a situation in which there would be no reason for the current prevalence of sycophancy and aggressive intrigue on behalf of one’s author function. With their questioning of the author function, theorists such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben might be responding to this complicity that often seems constituted in the very exercise of authorship. In the latter positing of the author, the simple claim to authorship not only asserts a legal property claim but also indicates a complicity with the moral apparatus that facilitates entry into the author function. In academia, or intellectual life more broadly, this entry is often, if not always, bound with distinct institutional practices of appropriate fawnery and somehow relentless opportunistic scheming. Such practices are performed in writing as well as in other venues. The constructions and the complicities involved in scholarly authorship more or less fulfill institutional expectations but are otherwise questionable. It might be difficult for us to imagine significant diminishment of the relevant obsequiousness and opportunism. They can perhaps seem integral to career making. Yet precisely such a requirement can, on some level, be questioned. The alleged necessity can particularly be questioned once it is conceivable that the force impelling one—the quest to be considered an author—is itself an identification without compelling necessity. 139

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Release from the narcissism of authorship may become a way to acknowledge more effectively all the other influences involved in the emergence of a work. To extrapolate from comments made by Walter Benjamin in 1940: “cultural goods”—in this case, the cultural goods known as the products of academicians and those called intellectuals—must be approached with a certain distance, indeed “horror,” by the “historical materialist.” Such products “owe their existence not only to the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.” In the context of academia and intellectual life, this anonymous toil could be the societal actors and influences that—partly in inconspicuous drudgery—contribute to the emergence of academicians and intellectuals. Benjamin elaborates with his now famous statement: there is “no document of culture” that is not “at the same time a document of barbarism.” Benjamin adds remarks that might be even more pertinent to the topic of academic and intellectual complicity: neither a document nor its transmission over time is “free of barbarism.” No document or its transmission over time has arisen independently of the anonymous toil of those who made it possible and yet in all likelihood did not receive much credit or acknowledgment for this toil. Of course, Benjamin contends that the historical materialist will dissociate from this barbarism of transmission as much as possible. The ensuing “task” will be “to brush history against the grain” (2003, 392; 2010, 73). Attentiveness to the barbarism of transmission could lead to an at least attempted dissociation from the—on some level—unnecessarily selfish needs and aspirations that academicians and intellectuals bring to the fore in the exercise of their trade. These needs and aspirations not only distract from the anonymous forces contributing to the emergence of a scholarly author but also result in career-oriented submissiveness and intrigue that risk disregard for whatever is outside those parameters. To analyze, and also to question, some of the relevant constructions and complicities, the following chapter will adapt a mode of archaeological inquiry from works by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. This notion of archaeology will concern practices that seem to prevail in scholarship and yet could—through their archaeological presentation—be regarded as practices that might someday expire. Benjamin enacts something like an archaeological practice; for this, his work draws on the notion of myth. The term pertains to closures that are presupposed and yet are also somehow decomposing—that is, entering their own ruination. On the basis of such myth analysis, Benjamin highlights ways in which the baroque Trauerspiele drew on Aristotelian principles of moral closure but also had an artistic force that undermined such closure, such myth (1998, 62, 188–89; 1974, 242–43, 364). Foucault’s archaeology includes consideration of the possibility that what human beings most readily take for granted about their identity as humans could simply be



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a historical accomplishment, one that could conceivably give way eventually to other, very different, formations (Foucault 1970, 386–87; 1966, 398). With Foucault’s work as his principal inspiration, Agamben gives a very Benjaminian definition: “Archaeology is . . . a science of ruins, a ‘ruinology’” (2009, 82; 2008, 83). Agamben refers to “a kind of archaeological epochē” that at least provisionally suspends the predication normally taken for granted with regard to an object of study (2009, 90; 2008, 91). This epochē is an exercise in the future anterior (future perfect) whereby inquiry turns its object of study into something that will have been (2009, 106; 2008, 106). We can thus imagine the practice of authorial identity in scholarship as a historically devised apparatus that history would be able to mutate in significant ways. The mutation could abandon currently prevailing practices of authorial identity that frequently flourish under, or even seem to entail, submissiveness and bullying intrigue, or sometimes even involve the initiation of, or participation in, collective intrigues—known as mobbings—against someone specific.3 In this regard, it could be inferred that the arguments of Foucault and Agamben not only propose an ethics of indifference to authorial identity but also hint that this ethics would suspend somewhat the obsequiousness and opportunism often involved in emerging as an authorial name in academia and in intellectual life. The obsequiousness and the opportunism include some of those decisions we make in order to facilitate our careers as authors. On one level, such decisions might just involve our choice to cite certain sources in order to ingratiate ourselves with the authors or supporters of those sources, or our choice not to cite other sources in order to avoid alienating an audience that we consider important to our career. Such exercises of inclusion and exclusion can, however, be much more aggressively pursued, on the one hand, in the form of a more general vacuous flattery, and on the other hand, in the form of character assassination or other such practices of denunciation. Would it not be salutary in some sense if such practices, which are only examples of an array of possible instances of relevant pliancy and intrigue, were not necessary—that is, if their raison d’être, the career of an author, no longer functioned in its current permutations? Focus on the author is, moreover, an abstraction from the multiplicitous processes and factors that are operative in the emergence of the author: the author’s assumption of responsibility and credit is a simplification of a condition that is far more complex, as is intimated in passages by Benjamin that were cited earlier. Extrapolating from remarks made by Benjamin, Foucault, and Agamben, it may be further recalled that any celebration of authorial identity operates in systems of self-representation that often involve considerable cruelty and denigration for some. Any system in which my authorial identity is celebrated is, in all likelihood, also a system that denigrates others—and does so on the basis

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of criteria that could seem questionable once they are subjected to scrutiny. One of the consequences of persistent study is to undermine our confidence in standards that we would otherwise take for granted; study can show those standards to include something arbitrary.4 There is no reason to think that intellectual narcissism could not be the object of such scrutiny. If this study or scrutiny simply focused on the moral failings of specific individuals, it would be reenacting the aforementioned simplifications of credit and responsibility. The archaeological study must be devoted rather to consideration of the contexts, systems, and institutions that cultivate intellectual narcissism. There are, of course, specific individuals who are more relentlessly and brutally narcissistic than others. Insofar as they flourish, however, these extremes are indicative of a norm in the business of intellectual life. Works by François Laruelle specifically assail philosophy for its contribution to intellectual narcissism. Proclamation of intellectual authority, Laruelle contends, is facilitated by those aspects of philosophy that inculcate a presumption of transcendence; this self-ascribed transcendence licenses some to a self-celebration in the very systems of self-representation that demean others who participate in those systems. These philosophically impelled intellectuals thereby undertake self-serving measures that include obsequiousness and opportunism. The following chapter will address the concerns mentioned earlier with regard to complicities of self-representation that may characterize becoming an author in academia and in intellectual life generally. For this inquiry, brief consideration will be given initially to some of the reflections Benjamin, as well as others, make on societally inculcated self-representations that involve quite constrictive attachments to the proper name with which the relevant persons identify themselves or with which they are identified. WHAT’S IN A NAME? “What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours” (Joyce 2000, 269). This statement by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is widely considered an allusion to Juliet’s reflection: “What’s in a name?” (Shakespeare [1599] 1996, 2.2.43). With this remark, Juliet is somehow urging herself and Romeo to break with the hitherto prevailing societal associations of their names. Those associations, and their constraints, are a contamination from which she and Romeo do not successfully flee, although they do posthumously disrupt the contamination somewhat: their families terminate the feud that thwarted the



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love between Romeo and Juliet. Such independence of the name from its societal associations and constraints is a topic of great interest to Benjamin. Hence perhaps the question posed in early notes for his Arcades study: “Am I the one who is called W.B., or am I simply called W.B.?” (Bin ich der, der W.B. heißt, oder heiße ich bloß einfach W.B.?) (Benjamin 1999a, 868; 1982, 1038).5 I too could think that I am not the entity usually addressed by my alleged proper name. I am more complex than that—more complex than I or anyone else can quite imagine. As an author in academia, however, I perpetuate, and let others perpetuate, certain notions of responsibility and credit about me. Could there not simultaneously be conveyed a sense of how limited these associations are? They are societally recognized standards that do not convey much about all the relevant factors, outside of credit and responsibility, that may contribute to the emergence of the works to which my proper name is attached. “My” proper name itself is, moreover, independent of all the societal associations that it may acquire through my participation in academic authorship. In his 1916 essay on language, Benjamin notes that the human’s proper name communicates no property of the person that it names; it can be no “finite word,” no “knowledge” (Erkenntnis). No “knowledge”—besides, perhaps, of an etymological sort—accrues from the proper name (1996, 69; 1977, 149–50). In this sense, the human’s proper name, as Shakespeare’s Juliet may have sensed, betokens independence from communicating, and communicable, properties. In reflections of 1933, Benjamin suggests that the human’s proper name is the deepest image of the necessary secret, which is the secret that remains secret even to the proper name’s bearer. The secret of the human’s proper name is independent of specific words and letters, and it is independent of lived associations with those words and letters (1999b, 712, 714; 1985, 520, 522). Apart from what Benjamin might commit here in the way of a questionable elevation of the human over other entities, the point remains that the interminable secret of the human’s proper name is not embodied by any entity with which the sounds or visual marks of the letters in this name might be associated. Betraying the secret within proper name, Joyce’s Molly cannot quite help dwelling on how society might mock the sounds of certain proper names or might mock other associations with specific proper names (Joyce 2000, 903–4, 927). In contrast, Franz Kafka’s abbreviation of names, such as Josef K., are—according to Benjamin—condensings, intensifications, heightenings, compressions resulting from memory of what can only be recalled as ultimately not conscious (Benjamin 1977, 1196). Humans cannot expunge the secret that frees names somewhat from the societal functions

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of credit and responsibility. Names such as Josef K. accordingly enact an outbreak against the conscious subject that might often be implied by untruncated, unabbreviated names.6 The author’s name at the beginning of this chapter you are reading should accordingly perhaps not be there—at least not in so hackneyed a form. The author’s proper name is there, however, as a device for participating in social systems of identification and, more specifically, in conventions of academic or “intellectual” branding. That is its contamination, so to speak, and there might be very little compelling justification besides such complicity with closures that Benjamin calls myth or mythology. The notion of transcendental ego or “I,” to which many enamored of identification with their own proper name at least implicitly refer, is “mythology” and, with regard to its suppression of truth content, “the same as every other recognition-mythology,” says Benjamin in an essay of 1917–1918 that endeavors to conceive of philosophy beyond such recognition mythologies (1996, 103; 1977, 161). That we can become enthusiastic over certain—in many ways superficial— associations with “our” name is an indication of how we choose to live those associations. In 1922, Benjamin remarks that, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), Eduard’s painfully superficial development of a love seems not unrelated to his enthusiasm over the sound of a new name that he gives himself (Benjamin 1996, 305; 1974, 135).7 His name change anticipates his inability to love in a way that would have kept fairly obvious societal pressures in abeyance. When, in One-Way Street (1928), Benjamin claims that people in love are indeed “attached above all else to their names” (1996, 467; 1972, 119), he seems to mean that they are attached to the secret inherent in proper name. Recent protests by relatives and supporters of First Nations people in Canada may also be construed as survival of the secret of the First Nations proper names against those who assumed the right of recognition, abuse, execution, or disregard. In its independence of any recognizable association, the proper name marks independence from any presumed historical fate. Apparently in this sense, Benjamin says in his Elective Affinities essay that nothing “binds” a human so much to language as her or his proper name (1996, 305; 1974, 134). This is perhaps also one point of the remark in Benjamin’s 1916 essay on language that the proper name guarantees “each human” her or his “creation by God” (1996, 69; 1977, 150). In other words, the proper name guarantees release from any associations that the proper name acquires, which—in their simplification—often conceal, among other things, many complicities of such simplifications. Jacques Derrida observes that a “pure address” is, of course, “impossible,” and even “the most secret proper name” can have effect only by risking “contamination and detour within a system of relations” (1988, 107; 1982, 142;



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see also 106–8, 110, 140–43, 146). In Benjamin’s terms, risking contamination in a system of relations and self-representations is, nonetheless, distinct from using a mythic vision to identify the empirical self with the alleged purity of a specific fate (Benjamin 1996, 315; 1974, 148). As noted earlier, Benjamin seems to suggest that the abbreviated K. in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle effectuates distortions conveying the unconscious as ultimately free of any specific fate. In the somewhat abbreviated names in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, however, Benjamin detects enactment of a “nameless law” that is a mythic “doom” (Verhängnis) (1996, 305; 1974, 135). Abdicating the proper name’s relationship with inextinguishable secret, the characters protest relatively little and resign themselves to a doom, an assumed fate. They stultify in a specific contamination, a specific representation of how they should live. They do not say much against this outcome. The character most expressly addressing the stifling mythic representation does so solely in order to reinforce it; named only by surname, Mittler is a moralistically meddling preacher who does not rise above his self-perceived position of mediator (Mittler): his “self-love allows no abstraction from the traces which seem given to him in his name,” a name thereby appearing to degrade him (1996, 305; 1974, 135).8 With secret as its only irrevocable inheritance, however, proper name is the death knell of any specific contamination, any specific representation. This is noted by Derrida in an essay on “the politics of proper name” (1988, 7; 1982, 18–19). As Benjamin might put it, the proper name is no mythification of this or that contamination, this or that representation (see Rrenban 2005, 43–48). This we forget or disregard in our complicity with specific representations that are associated with our proper name. It is correlatively the secret in proper name that is betrayed when specific societal associations with a proper name become the object of fixation in settings such as those of academia or intellectual life. The object of fixation is not the irrevocable secret of the proper name but is rather complicity with specific systems of self-representation that encourage obsequiousness and opportunism to facilitate notions of credit and responsibility. That aspects of such complicity can be experienced as somehow unnecessarily onerous, stifling, or simplistic may invite consideration of Foucault and Agamben’s ethics of indifference to authorial identity. ETHICS OF INDIFFERENCE TO THE AUTHOR An ethics of indifference to appropriative authorial identity is intimated in many passages by Friedrich Nietzsche, such as a famous one in Beyond Good and Evil (1886):

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Why couldn’t the world that concerns us—be a fiction? And if somebody asked, “but to a fiction there surely belongs an author [Urheber]?”—couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this “belongs” perhaps belong to the fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object? Shouldn’t the philosopher be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? ([1886] 1989, 46–47; 1999, 54)

Suspension of the notion that linguistic manifestations belong to a human subject is obviously a departure from authorial appropriation; this departure is integral to the ethics of indifference to the author that has been explored in various sources since the 1960s. For these sources, the belonging, the authorial appropriation, can instill not only a simplistic notion of responsibility but also a vanity and a correlatively dubious insistence on taking credit. This criticism of the appropriative author function is not to detract from the observation that authorial rights were attained after a long struggle. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, for instance, this struggle was at least partly against publishers (and printers) who gained financially while their authors did not (Orsenna 2017, 102). Among contemporary academic authors, too, there can be wariness of corporate influence in a publishing house. Such dominance by publishers is obviously not endorsed by the criticisms of the author function that are to be discussed shortly; in the spirit of these criticisms, that kind of bullying by publishers would have to be deterred or at least avoided. The ethics of indifference to the author simply concerns ways in which the focus on the author creates an abstraction of credit and responsibility, an abstraction that oversimplifies. This oversimplification becomes a self-representation that downplays other ways of considering linguistic expressions, and this suppression may have ethical implications. Albeit in a paradoxically effusive claim on behalf of the author Stéphane Mallarmé, Roland Barthes in 1968 praises Mallarmé as “doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner” (1977, 143; 1984, 62). Barthes’s principal point is that there can be a Brechtian Entfremdung, “a veritable ‘distancing,’” whereby “the Author” is diminished (1977, 145; 1984, 64). In these remarks, Barthes is primarily concerned with the analysis of literary texts and with opening literary texts to a multiplicity of possible readings, a multiplicity he considers opened once the primacy of the author is abandoned (1977, 148; 1984, 66–67). The focus on the author is a very limited perspective that unduly constrains interpretation of the texts presumed to belong to an author. Foucault enormously broadens Barthes’s statements on the author, and does so by drawing out ethical implications. With regard to the usage of authors’ proper names, Foucault notes a certain naivety in scholarship. Even concerning work appearing under his name,



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Foucault is critical of the tendency to employ “the names of authors . . . in a naïve and often crude fashion” (1977b, 113; 2001c, 819). This pertains to a practice that is also obviously effective in the chapter before you, in which the same naivety and crudeness is evident in references to proper names, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and François Laruelle. Notwithstanding such crudeness and naivety in his works, Foucault does deal with relevant questions in a way that indicates his willingness to dissociate somewhat from the usual taken-for-granted character of the author function (1977b, 115; 2001c, 820).9 Foucault was surely not oblivious of the situation in which Foucault himself seemed (and, of course, still seems) to thrive from the very notion of author that his reflections endeavor to relativize. In this context, one could cite his own statement on how a “certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning” of the author’s “disappearance” (Foucault 2010, 103).10 Remarks by Samuel Beckett set the stage, nonetheless, for Foucault’s reflections: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking” (Beckett 1967, 85; 1958, 129, quoted in Foucault 1977b, 115, 138; Foucault 2001c, 820, 840; Foucault 2010, 101). Foucault concludes: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (2010, 120). Given various professional imperatives, this is a difficult notion to introduce into academia or intellectual life in any effective way. At least partly in light of this condition, Foucault suggests that we recognize in the “indifference” conveyed by Beckett’s remarks “one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing” (1977b, 115–16; 2001c, 820; 2010, 101). This indifference is an immanent ethical principle. It conveys indifference as “an immanent rule” that “dominates writing as a practice” (2010, 101). Indifference prevails over writing, as indeed it prevails over everything, and the ethics proposed by Foucault entails that writing—including scholarly writing—be responsive to this condition. Beyond Foucault’s lifetime, a cult of the author has persisted, of course, in the arts as well as in scholarship. As intimated already, Foucault expresses concern “that the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change” (1977b, 118; 2001c, 822). To put this a little differently: that these themes are being explored may imply an exoneration even though the privileged position of the author has not been unsettled. Authorship concerns a form of “appropriation,” a “form of property” of a kind codified a long time ago, and Foucault suggests that precisely the consolidation of “a system of ownership

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and strict copyright rules” roughly coincides (at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century) with the point at which “the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing become the forceful imperative of literature” (1977b, 124–25; 2001c, 827). Although Foucault does not quite say so, he seems to hint at the notion that the heightening of the transgressive character of literary writing coincided with a situation in which an author could punitively and more clearly be held responsible (2010, 108–9). In taking very seriously the literary imperative, particularly its resonance of dissociation from the author function, Foucault extends the imperative considerably: “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate and be received without the author function ever appearing” (1977b, 138; 2001c, 839). A recent book on complicity has cited “literature— and, by extension, culture itself” as involving “reserve.” This reserve entails “slowing down and the resistance to closure, or meaning” (Docherty 2016, 117). If there is such reserve about closure and meaning, it could include imagining a release from focus on the author. This is a matter of calling into question the idea of the author as source of proliferating meanings (Foucault 2010, 118). In view of the longstanding tendency to place “bourgeois” identity in question, Foucault in 1979 wonders if the time for change could be upon us: “given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence” (2010, 119). There could be new forms, new complexities, and perhaps even new simplifications. Foucault anticipates that “fiction” will lead the way, but this does not mean that what emerges instead of the author function will be without constraints. The constraints will simply be different from those effective in the author function. Foucault does, nonetheless, claim that “all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur” (119). We would hear the “murmur,” the “stirring,” of “indifference,” Foucault says in 1969 (1977b, 138; 2001c, 120). Recalling this preponderant indifference is integral, for Foucault, to the possibility that less would revolve around authors, including in scholarship. To extrapolate: if there emerges such a willingness to break with the author function, this could contribute a little to credible alteration of the systems of self-representation from which not only authors emerge. These are the systems of self-representation in which so many are handled with a disregard or cruelty that are integral to the occasions of celebration in such systems. People are, of course, often treated as responsible for success and failure.11 Correlative practices of obsequiousness and opportunism are fueled by particularly intense complicity with systems of self-representation in which one’s responsibility and acclaim are accorded.



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Agamben too notes a transgressive power in art that might contribute to reconsideration of the question of whether the author function could be dispensed with entirely. Agamben does indeed summarize Foucault’s identification of indifference—with respect to the author—as a fundamental ethical principle of contemporary writing. Agamben emphasizes, however, relevant aspects of Foucault’s outlook that have not been mentioned above. Agamben is particularly interested in Foucault’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s writings to speak of “life as a work of art”; this “implies,” Agamben reiterates, “calling into question the paradigm of the exclusive artist-creator of a work-object.” Works of art can instead be exemplary precisely in their dissociation from such authorial identity; in this dissociation, there lurks the possibility that “‘everyone’s life become a work of art’” (Agamben 2016, 100; 2014, 139).12 Life is much more complicated than we can possibly say, and the focus on the alleged accomplishment and responsibility of the author is a false abstraction from this complexity. Living life as a work of art is to enact life with regard for such complexity and for all that eludes credit and responsibility. Adapting Foucault, Agamben suggests consideration of ourselves as artwork is a possibility of opening to form-of-life as that which is removed from credit and responsibility. Subjective reminders, such as the latter, along with the attendant hypostases, have nothing utterly compelling about them (2016, 247; 2014, 313–14).13 This claim by Agamben is particularly delicate as he addresses death camps. Even if the perpetrators in the camps confessed, even if they assumed responsibility, Agamben’s new ethics remains “the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility. . . . To assume guilt and responsibility— which can, at times, be necessary—is to leave the territory of ethics and enter that of law,” or at least the derivatives of law that function as moral order (1998, 24; 2002, 22). There is the obvious responsibility of camp soldiers and officials for what they did; that they be held accountable is necessary in so many ways. Such responsibility cannot, however, be the end point of inquiry into the camps. Indeed, the executions and abuse entailed a presumption of privilege and authority, a presumption of which Agamben considers authorial identity a diminutive form. This privilege and authority can be questioned; hence Agamben’s emphasis on a radical desubjectivization that underlies all speech (1998, 114–15; 2002, 106–7). In a short note titled “Materials towards a Self-Portrait,” Benjamin says, “I do not want to be recognized [erkannt]” (1985, 532). For Agamben, this remark pertains to a liberation from complicity with a form of self-identity; it is basically the liberation that Foucault envisions with his notion of life as a work of art (2016, 248; 2014, 314).14 Agamben amplifies Foucault’s articulations that would encourage an ethics of indifference to authorial identification.

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MUTATING INTELLECTUAL IDENTITY: Beyond Philosophically Impelled Hubris More frontally addressing the relevant complicity, François Laruelle very publicly challenges those often called intellectuals to relinquish the selfidentification that is customary in the media and in the business of academia. Although he does not seem to use the notion of archaeological inquiry, Laruelle’s work often involves an exercise of questioning identifications that are normally operative in intellectual life; his work treats those identifications as intellectually compromising and as something to be overcome.15 Unlike Benjamin, Foucault, or Agamben, Laruelle extends this critique to identifications that he considers inherent in philosophy itself. He claims that philosophical identifications permeate intellectual pretence generally. He contends, moreover, that precisely such identification with the transcendence proffered by philosophy, and the eagerness of career motives often behind this selfacclaimed transcendence, impede people from undertaking the very causes that they ostensibly wish to serve. Only indifference to all that occasions opportunism and narcissism can open to those victimized in the very systems of self-representation that such opportunism and narcissism cherish. The human (called by Laruelle the human-in-person) is “foreclosed as a point of indifference to the world” (Laruelle 2015a, 148; 2012, 203). Victims correlatively have an inherent aloofness from representation in the world (2015b, 117; 2003, 127). Laruelle claims that those called intellectuals cannot open to the weak force of victims when they themselves are perpetuating the strong force of greed and narcissism. The only alternative is to weaken attachment to the identifications otherwise so prevalent. “Weakness, as radical immanence, is the essence of force as ‘weak force’ and opposes strong force” (2015a, 81; 2012, 120). The “weakness” of (what Laruelle calls) “the Victim-in-person” accordingly “shares nothing with any force of the world whatsoever” (2015a, 81; 2012, 120). Benjamin claims that the history of culture has always been the history of victors (2003, 391; 2010, 72). Laruelle implicates even more explicitly those called learned or intellectuals. In contrast with the weakness mentioned earlier, “it is always the history of the victors which expresses the order of the World, of the learned over the unlearned, of the bright over the humble, of precisely the intellectuals over the ‘masses’” (2015b, 136–37; 2003, 148). Intellectuals who presume to speak on behalf of victims are also exerting their own strength over victims. It is, according to Laruelle, in this context that intellectuals partake of an occupational hazard of philosophy. Laruelle is concerned about “the immense philosophical self-justification and the denial of its participation in evil” (2015a, 13; 2012, 36). Philosophy, Laruelle claims, operates precisely on the pretence to transcend the systems of self-representation that generally prevail:



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“philosophical transcendence contains something like hubris . . . ; this is that gesture of overcoming that still lives in the intellectuals who intervene in public debates and try to transcend those debates. In this gesture of transcendence, we rediscover the excess that is fundamentally at the root of philosophy” (2015b, 14; 2003, 29; emphasis in the original). The putative transcendence is the self-adornment that complements, indeed perhaps facilitates, the opportunism of intellectuals. Laruelle discusses the things in which an intellectual might engage—“discourse and writing (call, testimony, petition signing, etc.)”—and says that the intellectual, who is always “dedicated to a certain opportunism,” takes on an ethico-political “rather than purely political” profile (2015a, 53; 2012, 86). Such a pretence to the ethical is the duplicity, or at least unconscious denial, so integral to self-proclaimed intellectual authority. There is denial of the machinations at work in emerging and continuing as an intellectual. The exercise is all the more narcissistic if these machinations—including obsequiousness and opportunism—are accompanied by the insistence that one is serving some victim or other. The “embedded intellectual in fact orbits around power (which he must seduce to be able to limit) rather than around victims, whose defense becomes a pretext for the exercise of the intellectual’s narcissism” (2015a 54; 2012, 87; emphasis in the original). To consider this depravity of intellectuals, it is necessary not to take what they say at so-called face value but rather to consider their expressions products of the machinations they conduct with each other, machinations that permeate their activities, including their writings. “I do not confuse the ultimate cause of the intellectuals with the meaning that they proclaim. . . . The reality of their engagement is one of being an engagement-between (between them) and, after that, nothing more” (Laruelle 2015b, 9; 2003, 24; emphasis in the original). Regardless of whether Laruelle is right that the relevant engagement is nothing more than something between intellectuals, noteworthy may be his supplementary point that the “belief in their impact” is the opium of intellectuals and is the opium of philosophy, “though it [philosophy] only really acts in an oblique way” (2015b, 9; 2003, 24). Notwithstanding the obliqueness with which philosophy might be effective in intellectuals, the opium of the intellectuals—the belief in their impact—can be so strong that the presumed relevance filters out acknowledgment of, or at least preoccupation with, the considerable irrelevance of what intellectuals do. This opium also encourages the implicit, if not explicit, pretence to purity—the presumed absorption into some noble cause or values, a presumption that, for Laruelle, is all too philosophical: “The intellectual is a mixed or multiple being that has no purity—purity to which he lays claim and which he puts on display—except through the ideal cause or the values he defends, and from which he derives

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appreciable benefit, in particular that of attaining the rather miserable reputation and dignity of a ‘philosopher’” (2015a, 54; 2012, 88).16 If the pretence to transcendence is a legacy of philosophy itself, the intellectual perpetuates this legacy, and does so while also perpetuating selfaggrandizement through association with the purported cause of victims. For this purpose, the intellectual is a possibility of having “an object and a role,” which the intellectual “tries to look after” by managing “statements of ethical intention and opportunistic philosophical mediations” (Laruelle 2015a, 55; 2012, 89). This managing of the ethical and the opportunistic is facilitated, Laruelle claims, by philosophy itself. The intellectual dons the assumed transcendence awarded by doing philosophy, but thereby only obscures the victims on behalf of whom the mediation is ostensibly made. The intellectual “has only an overly general and inadequate object: the system of philosophy itself rather than the victim and the justice suitable to it, which here are nothing but a part of its discourse” (2015a, 55; 2012, 89–90). Impelling the philosopher is, according to Laruelle, the eagerness to cover the victims with speech. Philosophers find victims “too silent,” for philosophers cannot but identify themselves with “speech” (parole) (2015a, 70; 2012, 107). Laruelle portrays intellectuals as people who are not only philosophic in their pretence to transcendence but—by this means—also criminal in their desperation to exploit victims for the sake of dramatic greed. “Philosophy takes part in that hunting” of the human-in-person, and does so “from the first row, and perhaps even leads it” (2015a, 96; 2012, 137–38). This possibly startling accusation is based on Laruelle’s observation that philosophy permeates intellectual activity and yet is not an aide to victims, but rather another abuse of them, another victory over them. Philosophy follows, moreover, not the victim but the victimizer, the one whose deeds against the victim guide philosophic inquiry into victims. A “primacy of the criminal, representing victorious force, has an affinity with philosophy, despite appearances” (2015a, 143; 2012, 198). Philosophy intervenes in response to the prominence of the perpetrator, not in response to the weakness of the victim (2015a, 144; 2012, 198). A further point seems to be that philosophy is not insurrectionally but largely institutionally oriented, not least when its pretence to transcendence obscures this orientation. This is perhaps best illustrated in the assumption by philosophers of the role of guardian, as though philosophy is not itself complicit with the very system of self-representation that philosophy claims to help victims oppose. Victims become an occasion for the philosopher’s self-aggrandizement all the more if the victim becomes an honored memory or monument rather than an insurrectional force that could more clearly put in question the pretence of the philosopher (2015a, 56–57; 2012, 91).



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Can intellectuals break with pretences of transcendence and purity to a point where their writings and other activities do not simply reenact the powers of which intellectuals are the most obvious beneficiaries? Such an outbreak would require an insurrectionism that is utterly destabilizing for self-contentment in intellectual life. Laruelle sometimes calls such an insurrectionism cloning. “Against the puppets of power,” Laruelle proposes “clones of victims,” clones that the intellectuals Laruelle calls “generic” could become. The generic intellectual clones the generic human, which is the human foreclosed to representation, perception, and reason. Precisely in this foreclosure, the human can only be a victim in relation to—that is, a victim of—representation, perception, and reason (2015a, 29, 31, 33, 36–39, 87, 120; 2012, 56, 58, 61, 65–68, 127, 168). The generic intellectual must not violate this foreclosure. “The dominant intellectual interpellates victims, even ‘inspects’ them; the generic intellectual imitates them the way a clone to a certain extent imitates its original material” (Laruelle 2015a, 118; 2012, 166). The cloning is, therefore, utter destabilization of representation, perception, and not least of the intellectual’s philosophically inspired exploitative guardianship of victims (2015b, 106; 2003, 116). In contrast with the “mediatic and dramatic greed” of intellectuals and the correlative “betrayal” of the victim by the philosopher, Laruelle proposes “relations-without-relation, ‘non-relations’ with victims” (2015a, 74–75; 2012, 111–12). As he says in an earlier statement, “relationswithout-relations” is “a facile formula” and “dissimulates the seriousness of the problem” (2013a, 194; 1989, 196; see also 75, 83; 76, 85). The point is, however, to abandon the pretence to represent victims; victimhood is ultimately not available for representation and remains particularly indifferent to the self-representation of intellectuals. It “is necessary to pose this indifference, an unlocalizable and untestable point, a point of non-criminality,” a point that accuses “the criminal tendency of the ‘world’” instead of indulging its sense of sufficiency (2015a, 147; 2012, 201–2).17 EPILOGUE Notwithstanding their differences, a common desideratum of Foucault, Agamben, and Laruelle is that authorship be regarded as more complex and culpable than is customarily conceded in academic self-identity and intellectual narcissism. Foucault, Agamben, and Laruelle enter an archaeological mode that isolates—and attempts to raise the prospect of suspending—certain practices common to intellectual self-identification. Even with such archaeology in works by Foucault, Agamben, and Laruelle, not one of these “authors”

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utterly dissociates from, or attains complete distance in relation to, his own authorial self-identity and intellectual narcissism. Benjamin, who sometimes uses pseudonyms beyond what is required to avoid censors, enacts such dissociation or distance occasionally but obviously not always. Of course, Laruelle is much more insistent than Foucault or Agamben, or indeed Benjamin, in regarding philosophy as inherently responsible for intellectuals’ love of their self-representation. In doing such a relentless archaeology of philosophy, which he calls “a science of philosophy,”18 Laruelle finds that philosophy inculcates in intellectuals an appropriative self-identity, an opportunism of presumed transcendence, and an intellectual narcissism. In any case, it is a mild measure to do what Foucault, Agamben, and Laruelle have done in various ways: accentuate the indifference that prevails over all such identity and greed. There is, after all, inexhaustible potential for opening, as Benjamin encourages, to this indifference inherent within the human’s proper name: the name in its independence of almost any knowledge associated with it. Foucault, Agamben, Laruelle, and even Benjamin could go further than they have, albeit at the risk of having no audience. Their retention of their— to varying degrees—famed names, which they have not seen fit to abandon or conceal entirely, undoubtedly contributes to their works having been discussed in this article. In that respect and others, the chapter before you is complicit with the devices that its “author” is—perhaps only ostensibly, or even disingenuously—criticizing. Even that remark could seem to be a case of accusing oneself in order to accuse the world, as is said—although in a very different context—by the narrator in Albert Camus’s La chute: “Plus je m’accuse et plus j’ai le droit de vous juger” (1956, 148). The above analyses are indeed relevant only insofar as we somehow recognize ourselves in the discussed institutions of authorial identity and simultaneously recognize that we are not those institutions—that we can dissociate ourselves in a way from those institutions. In this sense, Laruelle’s highly critical assessments of philosophy may be especially poignant. Why, after all, should the critical faculties of those called intellectuals desist once they consider the contexts or institutions that may permeate their activities? To paraphrase the statement by Adorno that was quoted at the outset of this chapter: Why should I acquit those contexts and institutions once it is I who performs them (1974, 215; 1991, 288)? Of course, in totalitarian settings and even in ostensibly nontotalitarian settings, many intellectuals are murdered, imprisoned, tortured, and physically or otherwise threatened. Willingness to undertake the self-critical considerations required by archaeological rigor is, however, distinct from participating in the various kinds of authoritarian and self-stupefying anti-intellectualism so pervasive today. On the basis of our very capacity to think about what we do, aspects of



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intellectual life that we take for granted could become something we imagine suspending to some extent or other. Works by “Tiqqun” and “The Invisible Committee” already abandon the claim to personal authorship.19 It may too be conceivable that a time will come when the murmur of indifference about authorship in academia and intellectual life will rustle more obviously than it currently does. To envision this scenario of greater anonymity could, of course, seem unrealistic and seem even callously oblivious to the many intellectuals whose livelihoods, if not lives, are threatened. As a recent book on complicity replies, however, such conditions do not require that one entirely submit one’s imagination to “an almost necessary complicity with ‘the way things are,’ or as we usually call it, ‘realism’” (Docherty 2016, 105; see also 110). This book even argues that it is incumbent upon “the contemporary university . . . to think and present the world differently from how it is” (129n12). The imagined murmur of indifference about authorship in academia and intellectual life could after all release us somewhat from perceived career imperatives of submissiveness and opportunism that might detract from our credibility to the public (insofar as it is interested), our credibility to students (insofar as they are interested), and perhaps even our credibility to ourselves (insofar as we are interested). ADDENDUM If there were transitions to greater anonymity in authorship, an obvious practical question would concern plagiarism. If anonymity were a widespread practice, it might seem that plagiarism disappears as a problem. The problem of plagiarism persists, however, as long as there are people claiming as their product something they have taken from “somewhere else.” Of course, there may already be an authorial appropriation in that from which someone plagiarizes; the document stolen might have an authorial claim on it. Both forms of possession—the initial claim and the claim of the person stealing—involve an illusion of appropriation, albeit in very distinct ways. The emergence of a work is more complex than the associations with an author might make us inclined to concede: we prefer to think of our accomplishment and others’ failures or even of others’ accomplishment and our failures. Simply to abandon concern with plagiarism would, nonetheless, be premature in many circumstances. In the current humanities and social sciences, there are journals, publishers, and indeed professional associations that sometimes (and in some respects) provide even less protection against plagiarism than in the so-called hard sciences where plagiarism can occasionally be more clearly discernible. Institutions may, moreover, be reluctant to enter the complicated conditions

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under which they would fault their established authors on behalf of the less established authors “from whom” material is perhaps more readily taken. Even if those established authors were taking from something that has been published anonymously, moreover, they might be doing so on behalf of their own appropriative author function. The latter practice is part of the malaise that has been addressed in this chapter. NOTES   1.  Thank you to audiences in Bochum and Toronto for their responses to earlier versions of this chapter.  2. First the English-language source is given and then the original language source. If a translation has in any way been modified, the page number for the original source is given in italics.   3.  For a very brief recent account of mobbing in universities, see Seguin 2016. Of interest may also be the comments that follow the article.   4.  This has been elaborated elsewhere under the rubric of Kafkan study (Moran 2018a; see too Moran 2018b, chap. 7).  5. For another formulation of the question concerning W. B., see Benjamin 1999a, 866; 1982, 1036.   6.  For an attempt to address this topic in more detail, see Moran 2018b, 280–82.   7.  See Goethe 1971, 86; 1972, 58.   8.  Goethe remarks: those superstitious about “the significance of names” maintain that the name Mittler, which means mediator, had impelled him into this very role (1971, 34; 1972, 16).   9.  See too Foucault 2010, 101. 10.  Foucault notably contributes to the idolatry of the author function when he declares that “perhaps one day,” the twentieth century will be known as “Deleuzian” (Foucault 1977a, 165; 2001d, 944). 11.  For a study significantly drawing on Foucault’s works to call into question a two-centuries-long fixation on “responsibility,” see Vogelmann 2014. 12.  Agamben cites Foucault in conversation in English with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in 1983 (Foucault 1997a, 261; 2001b, 1211). 13.  Relevant in this context is Agamben 2009/2008, especially the last section of chapter 2 (76–80; 77–81). 14.  It is somewhat out of context, however, when Agamben (2016, 248; 2014, 314) enlists further Foucault’s comment that “I prefer not to identify myself/Je n’aime pas m’identifier” (1997b, 113; 2001e, 1412). Foucault’s comment is actually about his reluctance to identify himself with labels such as Marxist, liberal, anarchist and so on. 15.  Anthony Paul Smith does not use the notion of archaeology but does note certain parallels between Laruelle’s outlook and Foucault’s exercise of treating alleged “a prioris” as historical (2016, 22).



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16.  Laruelle uses the masculine form for the noun l’intellectuel. 17.  On cloning as rejection of any of the world’s sufficiency, see Laruelle 2013b, 163–230; 1996, 197–280. 18.  There are various statements by Laruelle on his notions of “a science of philosophy.” For one succinct statement of his idea of a science of philosophy, and a statement of the “transcendence” that Laruelle finds questionable in philosophy, see Laruelle 2010, 185–89. 19.  For some examples of the relevant work, see Tiqqun 2009 and 2006; Comité invisible 2007 and 2014.

Chapter 11

“I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple” Eighteenth-Century Caricature Tricks Mihaela Irimia

Published in 1712 as a jeu d’esprit, Alexander Pope’s masterpiece of salon elegance, libertine pleasures, and, unavoidably, complicity as modus vivendi enjoyed immediate success. Already in its two-canto version, dovetailing with Pope’s unabated cultivation of two-to/as-one numerological sophistication, The Rape of the Lock was received with overt delectation. This sophistication he deftly applied to matters of vision as well as of form all through his oeuvre. Were it only for his masterly handling of the heroic couple, with the iambic pentameter marking horizontally what the narrative thread span vertically, then this would already be enough to consider as a consistent use of artistic finesse. The text was soon expanded to five articulations of similar length. In this new, longer form of his mock-heroic poem, the author was not shy of admitting to his dedicatee, Mrs. Arabella Fermor, that simply launching his lines “with the Air of a Secret” would not do any longer. He therefore set upon completing his work by adding “the Machinery, . . . a term invented by the Critics, to signify that part which the Deities, Angels, or Demons are made to act in a Poem.” The Augustan homme de société concluded assertively that ancient poets were “in one Respect like modern Ladies” in their determination to never let an action be “trivial in itself” and rather to “always make it appear of the utmost Importance” (quoted in Holden 1936, 35). This explanatory incipit to what we now recognize as The Rape of the Lock contains useful elements for the key concerns of this contribution: there is the simple as there is the complex or completed, and there is the private or secret as there is the public or known, and the passage from the one to the other could be understood in terms of the complicity holding together text, author, and reader in a given cultural context. There was more, it was 159

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felt and transmitted, than what the text made readily apparent. This surplus could lie hidden or be revealed, either way implying some complicity: if not brought out to light, it could make the work the more complicit; if, rather, disclosed, it could expand complicity to all the human factors involved, certainly to the work’s readership. In principle, complicity is associated with misconduct and malefaction and, depending on the case and circumstance, it can extend to encompass transgression and violation. In extremis, it can be consubstantial with immorality. All of these, all matters moral, find their natural place in a text dealing with a rape. Here the symbolic violation of the belle’s lock is dealt with in terms of cosmic derangement, the ensuing hybris requiring equally symbolic reparation. The mechanical event, which thus turns ethical, is discernible in its operations in the very lexeme complicity, as will become clear further on. At this point, let us halt a while to see the evolution of the term as it came down to Pope’s day. Attested as complicité in French in the mid-1600s, complicity settled down on English linguistic soil in the later 1650s. To this day, it recalls the Old French complice, “accomplice, companion,” and can be traced back to the Late Latin complicem < complex, “partner, confederate.” It is a case of etymology, as it were. All these derivatives of the verb complicare, “to fold together,” suggest complicity in more than one sense: com-, “with, together,” plicare, “to fold, to weave,” induces in our minds the tricky-wicked indirectness of language. Canny and deceitful, duplicitous and guileful, words can be at once revelatory and obscure, folding up and unfolding their message according to the craft of the user. They can be slippery and strategic, just perfect for political innuendos, amorous affairs, and various other emotionally charged positions. Already in the late 1500s English had produced an unetymological extension of complice, namely accomplice. By this it designated an associate in crime or lawless action, one ready to complicate things with dexterity, as well as slyly and shrewdly. In the early 1600s complicate meant “to intertwine, interlace, entwine,” all pointing to some elaborate pattern. The meaning “to make more complex” is an evolution of the 1830s. Both, however, originate in the seventeenth-century sense “to combine in a complex or sophisticated way,” requiring special skills for a resolution. In an adjoining semantic field, that of the Latin complere, “to fill, fill up,” the verb accomplish echoes its twelfth-century sense “to fulfil, to fill up, to complete.” Its radical plere reveals the word-forming element pleo-, “more.” As a development from the Greek πλείων, “larger, the more part,” it eventually ended up in the Latin pleres, “full.” Apparently πολυ, the Greek word-forming element meaning “many, much, multi-,” features in οἱ πολοί and has its source in the Proto-Indo-European *pele-, “to fill.” In all these cases, a sense of identity as we humans assess it based on natural proportion,



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size, shape, color, and so forth, or by cultural use and convention, appears affected by excessive addition or boundary-breaking moves. The logic of such identity-breaching strategies becomes apparent in the eighteenth-century culture of satire and caricature, both of which are forms of excess as fashionable expression. The age was one of public curiosity displayed at the crossroads of customary practices and scientific advancement as in, for instance, the public curiosity associated with “balloonomania”: balloons began making a relatively customary, if not easily accepted, appearance, as they were becoming problematic signs of “complicity with a trivial thirst for mere novelty” (Keen 2006, 523). This is not to say that novelty was ignored by daily protocols of beauty and fashion promotion or by endless beautification exercises. Assisted by, and circulated in, fashion periodicals, eccentricity filled the hearts and the minds of highlife society, with ladies delighting in bizarre matters and putting up a consistent air of bizarreness. Out were sent “the sacred, the philosophical, and the tedious—. . . all one thing” to make room for “gallant varieties, which is to say literature, music, painting, anecdotes, and witty puns” (Sama 2004, 401; emphases in the original). This complacent embrace of the unserious and gratuitous was part and parcel of the modern cultivation of sensibility in more than one sense. The heart seemed to show “an immediate and unreflective complicity of the mental and the physical” (Kavanagh 2000, 508). Substantially promoted by a growing female readership, the novel, particularly in its sentimental samples, asserted itself as the scene of emotional duplicity of the private and the public. While the public sphere was assuming shape, privacy was more and more a desirable condition of emotional fruition. Masquerades served the purpose even more visibly because “the voluntary complicity of women” was perceived as a daring move in the direction of personal emancipation; the “metonymic relation between masquerade and sex [became] a metaphoric one” (Castle 1983–1984, 168), and what we currently call the Bakhtinian celebration of the lower strata of the human body wedged in a new dialectics of sameness and otherness. Toppling the expected and accepted and promoting novelty and/as alterity gradually became a matter of assumed complicity, indeed. Such were the “comedies of the body” (quoted in Castle 1983–1984, 176) enacted in the name of liberty. Libertine life made for no few forms of complicity, whether between individual actors on the social stage or within collective bodies, in indoor or outdoor pastimes, in socializing and in pragmatic activities, and, as a proclivity to be found in complicit moves, in human-object relations. It also enhanced the hedonistic dimension of everyday life and praised luxury as privilege. Lavish interior decorations did justice to the luring furniture meant for recreation. Such decadent ornaments of daily salon life agreed to the last

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detail with elegant fittings, exotic shapes, and fanciful colors, fragile china and delicate figurines. Coffee and chocolate became complicit beverages for lazy late-rising ladies and their wooers, both direct participants in the aristocratic female levee, a proof of privacy receiving public acclaim, and a display of the public hosted in fashionable privacy. Paintings and narratives of the time focus on luxury items involved in the elite lifestyle and are made into accomplices of easy-going lovers. Through “strategically designed aspects of form and function, furniture appeared to accommodate and flatter its users as they pursued [various] activities” (Hellman 1999, 416). These could be reading, writing, having a dish of coffee and taking chocolate or sipping at one’s afternoon tea, holding a fashionable conversation, playing cards, enjoying a snack while dressing or being dressed, and being equipped by maids and hair engineers with an extravagant face and hairdo. Caricatures and satires produced in the British 1700s betray visual and conceptual scenarios and designs that could hardly be considered outside the sphere of complicity. The range is fairly extensive and includes, at one end, skin-deep details attesting something wrong with the figure exposed to the viewing eye. It goes on with weird combinations of sartorial, culinary, and socializing practices, and it comprehends, at the opposite end, only subtly discernible foibles. Such cultural texts face the reader with a popular maxim, at once a children’s riddle game line and a serious adage: “I spy with my little eye . . .” We shall add to the former half of the phrase a latter one of our own coining: “something complicitly simple.” And we shall embark upon an identitary excursion aimed at singling out complicity at work in a few samples of eighteenth-century cultural texts. In 1762 Mary Darly put on the London arts market A Book of Caricaturas, with the etymological Latin lexeme caricatura as the accomplice of the Greek χαρακτήρ, as we shall see further on. As it happens, Mary and her husband Matthew Darly served their commercial interest by shrewdly adding those particular tinges of humor, criticism, or overt attack able to please their buyers. Indeed, as a husband and wife team, the Darlys advertised in the daily papers and complied with their customers’ preferences as best they could, for instance, by shifting from the initially political-only agenda to a business- and fashion-geared one. This procured them financial profit, as well as a still living cultural memory victory. “MDarly,” the tricky signature underneath many of their own or merely published caricatures, was itself a shifty and slippery identity standing for either given name. Mary, commonly known now as the “mother of caricature,” appended to her Book of Caricaturas a definition of the said comic subgenre as “the burlesque of Character or an exaggeration of nature, especially of those forms or features which have a striking peculiarity in them.” She was particularly stirred to detect the “comical similitude,”



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holding out “defects and blemishes in full view,” and saw in any phiz or carrick the “distinguishing mark, whether . . . in the air and outline of the whole face, or in the size and shape of any particular feature” (1762, 1). By phiz she meant physiognomy, the anglicized version hiding to the hearing ear and to the seeing eye the full original Greek lexeme ψυσιογνομία, which meant judging somebody’s nature by their facial features, < ψύσις, “nature,” γνόμον, “judge,” < Proto-Indo-European *gno- “to know.” By the same token, carrick was the Anglicization of caricature. To sum up, caricature and character held a rich if sharp relation to each other, as signaled in the previous paragraph. The one, caricature, has remained the “enfant terrible” of art history (Hofmann 2006, 7; emphasis in the original), the other, character, referred to the mark impressed or engraved on coins and seals or, in the figurative sense, to the mark impressed on a person or thing as a distinctive, characteristic one—a character. In effect, Hogarth’s Characters and Caricaturas of 1743 was a felicitous coupling of the two subgenres. Character puts one in mind of Henry Fielding’s use of the term preeminently in the phrase “in character,” as an impersonation by an actor. In The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, published on February 28, 1749, the father of the English novel speaks of “a short Sketch of the Characters of two Brothers, a Doctor and a Captain” (I, 10), “the Character of Mr. Square, the Philosopher, and of Mr. Thwackum, the Divine” (III, 3), “the Character of Mrs. Western, Her great Learning” (VI, 2), “the Character of that House” (VIII, 8), as he ponders on how “we may . . . lower the Character [of Mr. Jones] in the Estimation of those Men of Wit and Gallantry who approve the Heroes in most of our modern Comedies” (IV, 6). Caricature goes back to sixteenth-century Italian caricature in its literal meaning of “overloading,” < caricare, “to load, to burden, to exaggerate,” < Vulgate Latin carricare, “to load a cart (carrus).” Both the Latin radical carrus and the anglicized noun carrick point in that direction. Satire, the onetime satura in classical antiquity, designated as lanx satura none but a mixed dish filled with various fruits. It also featured in lex per saturam lata and named a law containing several regulations at once. The one-to-many dialectics is here at work again. Like farcimen, “sausage,” < farcire, “to fill up, to stuff,” it emphasized the unstable nature of variegated components in one and the same item. The French verb farcir has inherited this meaning all through, and the comic subgenre known as farce only confirms it: a humorous short play is performed at the end of a grave or longer production, the amassing of the two together producing a farcical effect. Satire has been associated with Greek σάτυρος, “satyr,” one of the ithyphallic male companions of Dionysos, with horse-like features such as a tail, ears, and a proportionate phallus. The more obvious relation

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of this mythical being was through the faunus, a god of the countryside swayed by bestial pleasures. The common denominator of all these is the violation of identity, whether as features, sizes, or behaviors, one baffling current expectations and commonly shared practices and values. It is worth recalling the historical roots of eighteenth-century caricaturesatire culture. Behind Hogarth’s Characters and Caricaturas our cunning eye can spy Annibale Caracci’s Caricature Heads (c. 1590). And as we speak of Fielding as father of the English novel and of Hogarth as father of English caricature, we can likewise enlarge upon Annibale Caracci’s stature as father of caricature in Western culture. In tandem with his brother Agostino, he used to draw portraits of pilgrims to Rome by distorting to a certain extent their likeness. The aim of such artistic intervention was “to unmask the victim” (Gombrich 1940, 1). As the term in the Italian original suggests, these were ritratti carichi, “laden portraits,” literally images displaying deformed physiognomy. Hogarth had a subtle understanding of this, and in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) he lamented his critics’ inept confusion of character and caricatura. His own Characters and Caricaturas of the previous decade juggled with referentially natural faces and laden features on purpose, namely in order to show how inborn proportions, shapes, size, colors, and any other physical coordinate could be made into “improved” appearances for cultural or other purposes. In this sense, again, we can see a complicity of its own making between character and caricature. In 1768 The New Foundling Hospital for Wit came out as a six-volume set. It put what had initially been a satirical miscellany in a complicit relation to the 1741 inaugurated hospital for abandoned and deserted children. Of uncertain authorship, this satirical series had been known to its readers since 1743, the year when Alexander Pope published his Dunciad. It wound up with its sixth installment in 1749, when Tom Jones cemented Fielding’s fame as novelist and theoretician of the new genre. This weird complicity between cutting irony and pathetic pity was meant to contain “All the Satires, Odes, Ballads, Epigrams, &” (New Foundling Hospital for Wit 1768, 1), which could be saved from lying “bury’d and suffocated in Dunghills of Trash in the monthly Magazines” (4). The new and expanded version ran until 1773, apparently under the quill of Samuel Silence briefly turned Timothy Silence. It is also presumed that Handbury Williams, whose name lies on a copy of the 1763 reprint, was a frequent contributor to the publication. “An Ode to the Ladies,” first published in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit in 1768, also featured in The Scots Magazine, describing a lover’s astonishment as he takes a thorough look at his mistress’ head dress.



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The text deserves full quotation as an illustration of what was said earlier: When he sees your tresses thin, Tortur’d by some French friseur; Horse-hair, hemp, and wool within, Garnish’d with a diamond skewer. When he scents the mingled steam Which your plaster’d heads are rich in, Lard and meal, and clouted cream, Can he love a walking kitchen? (1804, 364)

Focusing on hilariously elaborate coiffures, the like of which must have served as apposite stuff in Pope’s composition of The Rape, this Ode to the Ladies makes of an individual case a matter of generic evaluation. In the satirical tradition of clothing evidence in complicitly reverse apparel, the author of this anonymous poem offers the reader a palpable source and a sensible object of praise and admiration. It is an ode, its dedicatee being an indefinite number of “ladies.” The presumed wooer takes imagological pity on his beloved lady’s thin tresses being “tortur’d by some French friseur.” The French suddenly turn merciless aestheticians of sorts. Their skill requires the use of disgusting materials that disintegrate easily and leave a diseased view behind. The more ridiculous will appear the diamond skewer put to the service of far-fetched shapes. The verse then moves to olfactive images recalling the kitchen space, somehow ironically anticipated by the diamond skewers. Round them will have been coiled so many sausage-like curls fixed fast, so many locks stuck together with lard, meal, and cream. They give off an indistinct steam and, as the lady carrying this “walking kitchen” on her head steps on, the ladies’ “plaster’d heads” stick out like a sore finger. Metonymically this lady stands for all the ladies engaged in similar protocols of beautification, most of which stemming from the complicity of artifice in the service of the public show and shabby natural appearance pathetically concealed under some beguiling cover. They are of the same lot as the old bald-headed lady drawn by James Gillray in Leaving Off Powder; or, A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea of 1795 (figure 11.1). Little persuaded by the bony French hairdresser who tries to put an unpowdered wig on her skull, she desperately hopes that the craze of gigantic hairdos will last forever. Behind such scenes is Jonathan Swift’s Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed (1734), itself written for the honor of the fair sex as such rather than merely for an individual beauty. Here Corinna, the neoclassic nymph with a Latin identity, is replaced by a London prostitute, as the former’s going forth into the world in full sunshine is dislocated by the harlot’s returning home in

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Figure 11.1  James Gillray, Leaving Off Powder; or, A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea (1795)

the late evening. Going forth, into what we now call the Habermasian public sphere, is counterbalanced by stepping back into privacy, into an obscurity not simply of the physical but of the moral kind. Class is marked along these lines as we are witnesses to a voyeuristically described rickety body. Behind every bit of prosthetic enhancement, the naked body reveals to the spying eye utter unsightliness: plumpers under sunken cheeks, false teeth fixed with wire to the bearer’s gums, rags contrived to prop the protagonist’s flabby nipples, whalebone-lined stays to give her figure sexy plumpiness, a crystal eye and mouse-hide eyebrows, but, most of all, abundant artificial hair to make her social presence respectable. Bathetically, assembling nature into fine-looking culture is suspended by divesting the protagonist’s public persona of the artifices meant to disguise her corruption. All in all, the viewer could rightly assert “I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple.” Bathetic, indeed, is the cook maid’s head, “drest” to catch the viewer’s eye, as is “the lady’s maid, or toilet head-dress.” These succinct yet definitory formulations feature in two caricatures composed in 1776. They are The Lady’s Maid, or Toilet Head-Dress and Betty the Cook Maids Head Drest. The former has come down to us as an anonymous composition and shows a young woman carrying a huge coiffure in reversed pyramid shape, with layer after layer of curled hair at the bottom and a large dressing table on top. Under a fine drapery and tablecloth meant to enhance the refined taste of the owner, we see a dressing mirror flanked by tapers in candlesticks, a couple of vases with delicate flowers stuck in them, a pincushion, a pair of buckles, some jewelry, and a little book. Intertextual complicity we may want to call it,



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and here it is: in Pope’s Rape, Belinda’s toilet room is provided with “silver vase[s] in mystic order laid” (I, 122) flanking “the glass” that reflects a “heavenly image” (I, 125), “files of pins” (I, 137) make up shining rows; to sum up, “Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux” (I, 138); the inventory is standardized in various texts of the day, as we shall also see when we decode The Preposterous Hair Dress. The latter caricature is William Humphrey’s Betty the Cook Maids Head Drest (figure 11.2), which depicts a female servant given a symbolic promotion of looking fashionably dressed and fashionably hair dressed. Nor should gigantic coiffures lavishly covered in white powder be underestimated as confirmation of special status in society. London cook maids aspired to higher rungs on the social ladder not least by sharing with their mistresses the painful burden of heavy hair embellishments. Betty’s heart-shaped hairdo is so frighteningly out of any proportion that, mutatis mutandis, it can function as a mobile kitchen rather than a toilet table. Instead of cosmetics and toilet instruments, here we see a proud display of cleaning and cooking tools on either side of the pompous hairdo and variegated items of food as in a cornu copia of its own class. It may not be irrelevant to underline

Figure 11.2  William Humphrey, Betty the Cook Maids Head Drest (1776)

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the superposition of identitary layers: the maid’s head, her hairdo, the kitchen larder (with a dog and a cat snarling at each other, tense, as they breastfeed their offspring each, and three mice glibly sitting on a huge round cheese), all surrounded by vegetables (cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, carrots, turnips, and potatoes), and, on top, the kitchen fireplace with meat roasting on spits and, on top of the top, a little monkey in a fool’s cap admiring itself in a mirror. “I spy with my little eye something complicitly simple” once again. The trick was commonly used in illustrations of ladies’ coiffures as flower or vegetable gardens, with their respective function as pragmatic display of items: buds, stems, leaves, bed flowers, and choice species such as roses profusely spread out, or autumn vegetables such as carrots, turnips, or cabbages suggesting abundance. In effect, boringly simple items, albeit concealed under a sophisticated appearance meant to advertise them as choice class(y) signals—a matter of farfetched complicity crowned in the act of aping: supreme reigns the monkey making the simple complex. There is the same bathetic strategy at work in the 1777 A New Fashion’d Head Dress for Young Misses of Three Score and Ten by Philip Dawe (figure 11.3). Here, too, the toilet scene stands up to the expected excess of cosmetics in their vials, bottles, or boxes as they do in The Rape. There is an aristocratic lady here, too, seated in front of her toilet table with her looking glass neatly adorned by fine velvet curtains. This is reduplicated by the windows draped in velvet curtains as they look into a presumably more discreet space than the street. A floral- and geometric-patterned wallpaper and carpet add to the lavish decoration of the interior. And here comes the opposite impression, one of fright rather than ease and of disgust rather than pleasure. Three human figures people the scene, of which the seated young miss “of three score and ten” is the butt of the caricature. Her monstrous appearance fills the boudoir: she is grotesque, her nose, cheeks, and ears drop all over her face, her balding hair leaves a miserable skull bare. No wonder two, instead of one hair engineer, take pains to stick an enormous wig on her head. No wonder, too, this hugeness of a prosthesis stands in a one-to-one proportion to her body. No wonder the wig is burdened with as many as seven rows of side curls, a rich flower arrangement on the top front, and a profusion of ostrich plumes on top of the top. Layers of challengeable identity can be discerned by the spying little eye of the beholder. For one thing, the “three score and ten” biblical reference is downgraded to the level of frivolity as seven rows of curls, and the main hair engineer casts a furtive glance at the potential spying little eye outside the caricature, while his assistant betrays a rather scared side look at the female beauty ready for further beautification. Her look and her looks will be complicitly simple when the said surplus has been removed. The pet dog in her lap seems to sense it, and it is the only being looking elsewhere than at the world out there.



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Figure 11.3  Philip Dawe, A New Fashion’d Head Dress for Young Misses of Three Score and Ten (1777)

More famous and much better circulated in a number of versions, whether in black pencil or color representation, The Preposterous Head Dress, or The Featherd Lady (1776) (figure 11.4) offers a comprehensive summary of these illustrations. It is the very epitome of the head dress, the cultureme par excellence of eighteenth-century fashion. Its rationale is based on a complicit agreement between (generally accepted) common sense and its artificial violation. It also brings into relief the clever punning on the literal meaning of the qualifier. The Latin etymon praeposterous made the oxymoronic combination of the forward with the backward quite transparent, the overall meaning focusing on the incompatibility of the two in a nevertheless attempted manoeuver. An unnatural, therefore traumatic birth went by the name of praeposterus partus,

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Figure 11.4  MDarly, The Preposterous Head Dress (1776)

with the baby being literally brought forth backward. Whimsical, wayward, or downright unreliable people were referred to as homines praeposteri, at once moving on and stepping back from the expected norm. Thus, the “featherd” lady is at the same time pulled back by a huge head dress and stirred by her social status to move forward and show a public face in accordance with her intricately decorated hairdo. Like Belinda in The Rape, she admires her “divine” face in the toilet mirror as she has the difficulty of the choice, if we consider the profusion of cosmetics in the profusion of containers on her toilet table. Like Belinda, she is assisted by a well-trained female servant and shares her private space with a socially important male assistant. The three of them are engaged in a complicit session of private-into-public metamorphosis. A selection of more such illustrations will point in the same direction, their common technical denominator being the simple (< Latin sine, “without,” plica, “fold”) disguised or/and concealed as complex (< Latin, com, “with,” plica). As suggested earlier, coiffures could be semiotically interpreted as layers gradually covering and eventually absorbing the natural base of their make and percolating into a much more comprehensive cultural pattern. Such was the national pattern. In a complicit intertwining of personal and collective identity, transatlantic imitations of the British craze for mountainous hairdos could pass for shows to be commended and acclaimed. The more there was



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of exaggeration, the more intense the feeling that it was in tune with reality. A late 1790s satirical print published by the German engraver Johann Martin Will shows America personified as a couple of fashionable ladies who, in effect, are nouveau riches, complicitly displaying European aristocratic pomp. Both their extravagant gowns look modest in comparison with their colossal head dresses. The latter are made up of local flora and fauna, with palm trees and exotic bird plumes competing and being completed by beads surmounted by ribbons and shells. They complacently display costly decorations like elephant tusks, scorpion hides, seashells, and corals, all accompanied by tropical fruits. The last decade of the eighteenth century was all exorbitant ornaments and decorations, and the mania of “big hair” could fall into the most striking categories. They could range from images of aristocratic ladies burdened by their lavish coiffures with, on top, other ladies carrying heavy coiffures themselves, etc., to mountainous hairdos supported by garden hedges and trimmed from ladder tops by gardener-friseurs. Or they could feature ladies seated in elegant carriages whose ceilings have been lifted to accommodate their stupendous hair treasure or coiffures on ladies’ heads that function as flower or vegetable gardens, harbors or battlefields. In a very telling way, hairdos and hair dresses could replace and thus enhance visual images of the century’s cultural identity, whether it be indoor furbishing, outdoor paraphernalia, landscape gardening, or landscape as such dexterously improved on for added ease and enjoyment. In 1777, versions of an astute caricature called Top and Tail became quite popular in London aristocratic circles. Drawn by one Mr. Perwig and engraved by one Miss Heel, these were sheer variations on the same theme: the coiffure craze shown as considerably more conspicuous. It became a matter of ostentatious visual display. Such images were a laughable matter all through. Not that high life society had not been used to eccentricity, nor that they did not expect any further exaggeration. All this had been part and parcel of chic entertainment for years now—as were the names attributed to potential caricature drawers or to their caricature characters. Perwig, sounding like and easily associated with peruque, in its anglicized form periwig, covered the essential, substantial construction of the model lady’s identity. Peruques were worn by gentlemen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the male upper classes could not be conceived of without such embellishments. Royalty considered them absolute musts, as we recall from famous portraits of Carolinian and Georgian times. Mr. Perwig could not be more appropriate in terms of onomastic identity for an exacerbated hairdo arrangement. Likewise, Miss Heel was a transparent name, one easily suggesting the other mania of the day’s fashion: high heels. Fancy shoes necessarily had high heels and these were indicators of status and distinction. Female shoes of

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the kind were normally made of soft stuffs, especially silk or delicate leather. Like sartorial decorations, shoe ornaments abounded in glamorous colors and shiny effects. Gold and silver lace and braid found their way into footwear. Buckles, preeminently silver ones, were outstanding decorations on male and female shoes, though comfortable slippers became an alternative in the late century. More or less regular female shoes were by and large made of pliable woven stuff, satin and twilled cloth. Silk ones were destined for more formal occasions instead. Apparently wearing high heels was to the physical advantage rather than discomfort of the ladies, in that they pressed upon the balls of the wearers’ feet, which made their toes able to expand and avoid pressure. To sum up, the latest fashion in ladies’ clothing, footwear, and hairdos could be essentialized as Mr. Perwig and Miss Heel, a symbolic couple standing in inverse relation to our notion of male vs. female fashion. Both underline the complicity between class and fashion, one fortunately tamed by satirical lashing: the lady’s multitiered hairdo, rich in curls and ribbons, is counterbalanced by her naked buttocks, whose dimensions are one-third of her overall figure. Top and Tail, rather than “head or tail,” the usual association in idiomatic English pointing to what does and what does not make sense, carries a sizable amount of cultural specificity. Versions showing the lady in fine clothing appear less marked, the choice stuffs and refined colors of her dress paling in contrast with her coiffure top and footwear tail. The Marie Antoinette complex, in the making at the time, is undeniable. Where things go amiss massively, some random detail assumes colossal dimensions: both physically and symbolically cake instead of bread, a pink-fringed dress instead of stark nakedness, all this stood for proud identity, never accepted as an exercise in complicity, though clearly being one. There is then the play of proportions to be discerned in literal depictions of pomp. Unmistakably a caricature ingredient, this engrossed insistence on deformed sizes, itself responsible for maimed shapes, catches the eye and stirs the brain. Were it not so, literality would serve no purpose. But it does in the emphasis it lays on physicality pushed to the fore as nature compromised by complicity to appear grotesque. In James Gillray’s Characters in High Life (1795b), for example, we view huge plumes on top of elaborate coiffures supported by clumsy female figures. Two ladies, one attractive enough and on the youngish side, the other plain and oldish enough to suppress complicit glances, offer the show of public status literally as high extensions of their physical make. One-third for the former and half for the latter female figure is the proportion of their culturally induced uniqueness of sorts versus their unadulterated natural body. We perceive the same effect in the anonymous Big Hair (1777), in which a lady astride another lady’s coiffure looks like a distinguished aristocrat comfortably seated in a leisurely armchair, from



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which she can look down on other ladies and on the world. Thus, the already doubled female figure of the subaltern is doubled by her own, to the amazement of a gentleman complicit with the craze of the spectacle. Such was the folly of coiffures, whether in the simple, literal, or in the complex, figurative sense. And such have been the interpretations with which we have coped since. We can, it is presumed, spy with our little eye the minuscule behind the gigantic and the boundless behind the tiny and discern in their interplay the complicitly simple at work in these topoi of eighteenth-century cultural identity.

Part III

NARRATIVE COMPLICITY CRITIQUES

Chapter 12

The Black Counter-Gaze Complicity and White Privilege in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen Alexandra Hartmann

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 (2012, 17). Now, as I write this chapter in late 2017, the United States is still a long way from the postracial utopia, the dawn of which the public has been celebrating throughout the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. The Black Lives Matter movement and other civil rights struggles protest ongoing racialized inequalities and injustices because, from their point of view, the color line continues to be a major problem of the twenty-first century. While acts of overt racism in many cases trigger reactions of indignation and outrage, incidents of covert racism often go unnoticed, and the harm they cause remains unacknowledged by mainstream society. They either become supposed specters of the imagination or, possibly worse, are turned into blame-the-victim narratives: the victims do not behave right, speak properly, or do not try hard enough in order to succeed given that all structural obstacles have allegedly been removed by landmark decisions made in the courtroom.1 Since covert racism comes in various shades, these variations require increased attention when seeking to undo racism. One of the shades that anti-black racism comes in is white privilege. It is white privilege that lies at the heart of Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric. Citizen is a collection of prose poems, visual pieces, and short essays that are loosely connected through the topics of race, racism, and white supremacy and their manifestations in the twenty-first century. Rankine’s work addresses the problem of overt racism—by referencing the police killings of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, among many others—but, in particular, it explores the covert form of white privilege. Citizen does so by highlighting and evoking the intricate and complex phenomenon of complicity with anti-black racism. In this chapter, I will argue that Citizen narrates moments of complicity to make visible and dissect white privilege by employing 177

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what George Yancy has termed the black counter-gaze (2012). This gaze uncovers the oftentimes prereflective and unconscious habits of whiteness and hence also the seemingly invisible processes of racism. In relying on secondperson narration, Citizen creates a heightened intimacy between the speaker, the fictive addressee, and the reader, thus making it possible for the reader to sympathize and identify with the unnamed speaker of the text while also feeling both implied and called on by the text. It is the goal of white privilege discourse to challenge the invisibility of whiteness as a racial category. The discourse itself has been on the rise since the 1990s, but it is one that has not remained uncontested. Thus, I will first lay out the ways in which I employ the concept. Rather than being meant to override the discourse of black rights, as some critics fear, I regard it as a necessary additional component of the anti-racist work that already contests injustices. Having done this, I will offer a working definition of complicity and introduce the concept of the black counter-gaze, which will form the basis for my subsequent analysis of Rankine’s work. WHITE PRIVILEGE AND ANTI-RACISM: On Potentials and Risks Both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) deal with the problem of anti-black racism; they both know the structures of white hegemony to be deeply ingrained into US life, public as well as private; both fields also acknowledge that whiteness and blackness imply and evoke one another. Whiteness, in fact, relies on blackness for its very existence (see Yancy 2008). As a field that developed out of CRT, CWS analyzes the ways in which whiteness operates as a racial identity that takes on the cloak of invisibility and normativity, and thus of racelessness. CWS recognizes the importance of engaging with whiteness in order to confront the problem of anti-black racism. Thus, what is central to undoing the disruptive effects of racism is a critical and honest engagement with the conscious and unconscious habits of whiteness. Academic criticism of whiteness dates back to the founding days of black studies programs in the United States in the late 1960s. Even prior to that, black writers, critics, and artists analyzed the central role of whiteness in racism.2 Many were well aware of the intricate connection between blackness and whiteness as binary opposites. While blackness as a racial category is constructed as visible and hypervisible even, whiteness is constructed as invisible, natural, and normative. Precisely because of blackness’ hypervisibility, the black subject is nearly invisible, whereas the white subject, as racially invisible, is visible as only human. Richard Dyer observes that the “assumption that the normal face is a white face runs through most



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published advice given on photo and cinematography” (1997, 94), while Toni Morrison (1992) identifies whiteness as the invisible racial specter that haunts American literature. The principle of invisibility also pertains to white privilege. First popularized by Peggy McIntosh (1990) and her list of privileges reserved for white people, white privilege3 has become a buzzword in CWS. It describes the possession of advantages that one did not earn but receives automatically because of one’s whiteness. As an analytical tool, white privilege can render visible instances of racism that benefit whites and perpetuate the dominance of the white group. It uncovers situations that many whites take for granted and consider to be uninformed by race but that are, in fact, clearly raced. Such revelations are important because “as long as racism can be attributed to ‘bad white people’ and the violence and discrimination that victims of racism endure, then ordinary, often well-intentioned, white people do not have to consider their complicity in the perpetuation of systemic racism” (Applebaum 2010, 9). White people’s ability to remain (willfully) ignorant of their identity as raced is a powerful one, Dyer notes, for “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human” (1997, 2). The perpetuation of this tacit belief more often than not occurs in intersubjective ways of looking, speaking, and perceiving, that is, in individual practices. Since McIntosh’s early work on white privilege, many anti-racist scholars have investigated white privilege, among them a number of predominantly white (female) philosophers who often self-reflexively and critically examine their own involvement in and contribution to white privilege.4 While this trend is a positive development because it points to an increasing awareness of the invisible workings of race, it nonetheless requires caution. Criticizing a lack of terminological accuracy, Shannon Sullivan (2017) promotes the term white class privilege over white privilege because, she remarks, not all white people benefit equally from their whiteness.5 According to Sullivan, it is especially the poor white for whom their whiteness holds hardly any advantages over people of other races. Rather, they are bound up in the same daily struggles for survival and against stigmatization as other poor and working-class people (2017, 33–37). While Sullivan is certainly right to remark that not every white person profits equally from whiteness— a fact that few anti-racist scholars would object to—there are nevertheless undeniable advantages that come with being white in a white hegemonic society. Accordingly, while I conceive of identity as intersectional, racial identities can, at times, override all other identity categories. In some situations, racial identity markers stand out, especially in those situations in which there is no time to take notice of the various levels of identity. Unlike race, other identity categories do not all rely on the principle of visibility and are

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thus not immediately identifiable; often then, a person’s racial identity accounts for similar experiences across his or her own life and the life of others. Consequently, a white person, regardless of class position, gender identity, or sexual orientation, will repeatedly experience greater benefits than a black person. For the former, the racial contract (Mills 1997) works to his or her advantage. There are two other points of criticism aimed at white privilege discourse that must be addressed briefly. First, scholars raise the fact that critics at times conflate white privilege with systemic injustices, or rather, cast as white privilege what is, in fact, a general human right. Naomi Zack is particularly alert to this misrepresentation: “Contemporary academic discussion of social justice has now shifted to the discourse of white privilege. I think this is a mistake, insofar as privileges are extra perks and more is at stake in recent police killings of unarmed black men than denial of perks” (2015, xiii). Relatedly, pondering white privilege is questionable when it serves as a white therapeutic tool or a means of self-flagellation, as well as when it is constructed as inescapable in such a way that it paralyzes whites rather than leading to revised behavior by those who benefit from their whiteness. Second, critics caution that a white perspective on anti-racism is problematic because it is more often than not impervious to a number of problems racism entails. Didi Delgado accordingly asserts: “Anti-racism work with a white lens is inherently flawed” (2017). Evidently, white privilege must not be used to exclude nonwhite voices that are, after all, the ones who bear the negative consequences of racial inequalities and thus contribute a vital part to discussions of the problems of anti-black racism. It goes without saying that Zack’s concern is justified; violations of human rights must not be sugarcoated as white privilege. Of course, anti-racism is fundamentally problematic when focused only on privileges, consequently silencing discussions of the violation of black rights and structural racism. There are, however, also nuanced and less easily discernable instances of racism that can be addressed through white privilege discourse, especially those that occur on an interpersonal level. These, in turn, cannot be adequately discussed by social justice discourse. Hence, both black rights and white privilege discourse are indispensable dimensions for anti-racist work because they address related and nonetheless disparate problems of racialization in contemporary political, social, economic, and cultural life. Two strategies can contribute to a solution in white privilege discourse, making it possible to address white privilege in addition to requesting black rights and social justice: given that white privilege is used only to refer to instances of microaggressions or microadvantages that do not violate human rights per se,



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then one part of the solution is to focus on complicity and by extension on individual responsibility; a second is the conceptual instrument of the black counter-gaze. COMPLICITY, RESPONSIBILITY, AND WHITE PRIVILEGE Applebaum effectively rethinks white privilege with the help of white complicity in public and private structures of racialization. When the focus is shifted away from white guilt to complicity and thus onto individual responsibility, the discourse becomes more productive: instead of being/feeling guilty for wrongs that are clearly located in the past, such as slavery or Jim Crow segregation, whites can begin to see and take seriously their responsibility for ongoing wrongs, many of which are rooted in this very past and the ways in which these wrongs perpetuate the longstanding practice of racism (see Applebaum 2010, 8–21). From the perspective of embodiment theory,6 whiteness is a sedimented knowledge, that is, inscribed structurally and seemingly invisibly not only into society but also into individual bodies as perceptions, habits, and values. Whiteness is not a layer easily cast off, but it rests at the heart of and constitutes white identity as an embodied racial habit. In a white hegemonic society, anti-blackness and a preference for whiteness form one organizing structure that entails consequences for everyday human conduct. This structure shapes a person’s lived body, which then, in turn, also accounts for racism’s perseverance. If anti-blackness is embodied, then the perpetuation of racist structures by individual agents does not necessarily occur voluntarily or consciously; embodied racism is frequently displayed even by those who consider themselves anti-racist as habits, prereflective speech patterns, and unconscious perceptions transport the subtle(r) forms of racism. In turning to complicity, then, we can begin to address these issues. Here, I follow Paul Reynolds’s notion of complicity (2017a). He argues that complicity should be “used rhetorically and reflectively to start and sustain interrogations of the ethical and political choices we have in twenty-first-century societies” in order to highlight responsibilities for “forms of wrongdoing that are ordinary as well as ones that are exceptional” (2017a, 48–49). In their introductory essay to Exploring Complicity (2017), Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford, and Michael Neu conclude that complicity should be used as a “demand for recognizing the ways in which people are connected both to one another and to the non-human world; [it is] a demand to be critically attentive” (10–11).

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Such an approach illuminates the intricate connections between existing systemic structures and an individual’s agency, that is, between structural advantages granted to those who identify as white and personal ways of perpetuating or challenging this system. It is in this sense that complicity can productively contribute to a more nuanced discourse of guilt. When Applebaum asserts that “all white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce” (2010, 16), she acknowledges a minute but relevant difference between guilt and responsibility. Whereas guilt is too often focused on a person’s actions or inactions and relates to “a direct causality to harm,” complicity can address a person’s being and his or her structural positioning in the world (3). Complicity, then, locates human subjectivity in an intermediary position between structure and agency, accounting for white supremacy’s persistence as well as for human ability to challenge the system. While the individual is not necessarily guilty of installing an unjust status quo, he or she is responsible for maintaining it; he or she is complicit in its maintenance and thus morally and ethically obliged to challenge it. He or she is not so much guilty as responsible. Responsibility is not free of culpability; rather it underscores the complexity of the issue by highlighting the many ways in which individuals partake in, contribute to, and benefit from systemic injustices. While there certainly are different degrees of complicity in perpetuating anti-black racism, there is no real and permanent outside of it. When considering complicity as a default position that can only be objected to temporarily and changed through repeated acts of confrontation precisely because humans are embodied beings with habitual ways of knowing and acting (see Yancy 2015, 136), we can see how the individual and the structural shape and support one another. THE BLACK COUNTER-GAZE: A Conceptual and Practical Tool Arguably one of the more difficult things in addressing white privilege is getting whites to acknowledge its existence because part of identifying as white is being ignorant of many of the benefits that this identity category entails in the (Western) world. While the existence of white privilege is a fact for blacks, whites can easily dismiss it as nonexistent. Accordingly, the first step toward doing whiteness differently or rather undoing it is a recognition of the workings of whiteness. It requires whites to acknowledge their complicity in white privilege. Borrowing from Du Bois, George Yancy calls on whites to develop a double consciousness that enables them to see themselves not only through their own



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eyes but through the eyes of blacks as well (see 2012, 12–14). Such a perspective might help one to acknowledge one’s privileged position as well as one’s individual contribution to its maintenance. Cultivating a white double consciousness, though, requires being open to and allowing oneself to be “unsutured” by the reversed gaze (Yancy 2015, xvi); this exposure of how whiteness is seen by others can be painful, but the reflex to dismiss it as false must be resisted. This is, however, not easily achieved: owing to their structurally privileged positioning, whites can always reject the reversed gaze as incorrect and/or irrelevant. In addition, whites tend to think of themselves not as members of a racial group who benefit from their positioning as whites but rather as raceless individuals, a vision that is possible due to what Robin DiAngelo has termed “internalized dominance” (2016, 354). What is clearly a sign of whiteness is read as natural and individual—and thus about anything but race. Yancy identifies two concepts at the core of white identity that account for these difficulties and render an escape from whiteness (nearly) impossible for the white subject: one, the embedded white racist self, and two, the opaque white racist self (2012, 163–75). Whereas the former designates the structural positioning of whiteness in society as a position that inheres privilege, the latter describes both the difficulty of seeing whiteness for what it is and the trouble involved in unlearning it precisely because of its embodied nature. Accordingly, because whiteness is inscribed into the lived bodies of white subjects and because it is so difficult to untrain, whiteness, Yancy explicates, time and again ambushes the white subject (169). And yet the meaning of whiteness can be unsettled, rendering it un-sutured (169) vulnerable (in the most positive sense). Yancy suggests pointing out whiteness whenever it functions as whiteness. Reversing Frantz Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!,” he proposes exclaiming, “Look, a white!” literally and figuratively (4). It is a means to make whiteness visible as a racial category whenever it is at work. This is the potential of the black counter-gaze: it can make whiteness visible to whites through the eyes of blacks because of the latter’s epistemic “advantages.” As Yancy puts it, “‘Look, a white’ has the goal of complicating white identity. It has the goal of fissuring white identity, not stabilizing it according to racist myths and legends” (11). Ultimately then, becoming attuned to the black counter-gaze precludes the possibility of employing an entirely white lens in anti-racist activism; it also opens up space to interrogate whiteness with greater honesty for those who identify as white alongside its consequences in everyday life. While this is not an easy thing to do, Rankine claims that “we have to embrace discomfort as a resource” of anti-racist efforts (2016, 84). Citizen employs the concept of complicity in its representation of white privilege to highlight individual responsibility while the book itself serves as a black counter-gaze, a vital part in the struggle for change.

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REPRESENTING COMPLICITY AND WHITE PRIVILEGE Citizen is a collection of prose poems that revolve around anti-black racism in the twenty-first century. Rankine’s book was published in 2014 at a time of increasing racial tensions; two years after the violent death of Trayvon Martin, 2014 saw the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Both deaths sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.7 Apart from visual artworks and references to racist events that famously made the news,8 it is the collection of private racialized encounters in everyday situations that stands out in Citizen: encounters on the train, at the store, or during work meetings. While the subject of those encounters differs immensely, a unifying feature is that all situations interrupt, disrupt, and constitute moments in which whiteness and blackness are performed and thus also determined. Rankine relies on plain descriptions of such encounters in order to create intensity. Despite the politically charged racial climate of 2014, Citizen begins with the confidential and melancholic rumination of the speaker: “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows” (5). One sentence into the book, Rankine establishes the past as one of its central tropes. What follows then is a theoretical yet literary, societal yet personal, and poetic yet direct inspection of the visible and invisible workings of whiteness in the United States. It is precisely this blend of literary art and theoretical nonfiction that makes Citizen such an interesting work to consider in the context of complicity in anti-black racism; it effectively blurs the line between the individual and the institutional. The everyday encounters are moments that especially prompt the question of what exactly citizenship means for African Americans in the context of white hegemony. The book’s materiality and visuals already hint at an answer. For the most part, the pages show black print on a bright white page; many pages only show very little print, often only two-thirds of the page are covered in print, leaving the pages strikingly white. While black letters on a white page are, of course, the standard print of most books, one cannot help but notice the symbolic meaning this takes in the context of race and racism in the United States: the black letters become black lives, the white pages become the white space in which black lives are lived. In this white space, people of color exist in an environment that is inhospitable to their existence. The extent of whiteness on every page further indicates the sheer overwhelming power of the white space. In addition to the structural racism of the space, it is important not to forget that this is also the space in which different races interact with one



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another in the world; it is the space in which racist microaggressions can take place without any consequences for the white perpetrator because the space always already privileges his or her actions. Similarly, the book’s cover shows a black hood—torn off of a black sweatshirt—against a bright white background, a 1993 artwork by David Hammons titled “In the Hood.” Dan Chiasson remarks with regard to the cover that it “suggests that racism passes freely among homonyms: the white imagination readily turns hoods into hoods” (2014). The cover already advances the idea that it requires whiteness in order for blackness to emerge in its real and imagined shape, that is, as a fantasy but at the same time as an experiential truth. It requires the white space in order for the image of the hood to become the image of the black criminal wearing that hood. Time and again, then, Citizen riffs on Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote in 1928: “I feel most colored when I’m thrown against a sharp white background” (2000, 116).9 This, Citizen implies by its very materiality and visuals, still holds true a century later. By extension, Citizen sheds light on the ways in which public life is hostile to black existence. The historical legacy of institutionalized racism in the United States accounts for a continually racially charged public life. This legacy has left both space and time structured in such a way that it serves to the advantage of whiteness. It privileges white body movements, whereas it often makes black body movements feel out of tune.10 But the problem of racism is not systemic only. In order to show how whites are implied, complicit in, and thus responsible for racism without being personally guilty of it, Citizen helpfully distinguishes between the “self self” and the “historical self”: A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. (2014, 14)

This distinction underlines how the racial legacy, the “historical self,” ambushes personal relationships. According to the speaker, the racist history of the country continues into the present and shapes personal encounters. Because the “self self” is never raceless and is never fully independent from the “historical self,” responsibility is not a question only of individual actions but also extends to the very positions people inhabit in and through their lived bodies (see Lee 2014, 246). A failure or refusal to acknowledge the burden of the “historical self” and how it comes to shape the present is a complicit

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act because it reinforces the status quo as allegedly just and contributes to its maintenance. In fact, Citizen suggests that one’s historical positioning makes complicity inevitable. However, while it is not possible to avoid being complicit at all times, consciously anti-complicit acts are and can actually begin to unsettle the status quo (see Reynolds 2017a, 42), and they are in the realm of human actions. As agentic subjects, humans are bound but not predetermined by the structures that surround them. Citizen offers a lens through which to learn to take notice of the everyday workings of race that can cause one to challenge one’s racial habits. In doing so, it invites readers to reflect upon the ways in which they themselves perpetuate and/or resist the racial legacy. By narrating incidents of white privilege that most readers will have experienced themselves, Citizen examines forms of complicity. In many episodes, white privilege functions as the support system of white microaggressions, those seemingly minor racist acts that often either go unnoticed by the perpetrator or can be dismissed as not racially motivated. Microaggressions can even be well intentioned but never cease to be harmful.11 In one noteworthy scene, the speaker takes the reader to a supermarket: The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work. If this is his routine, he didn’t use it on the friend who went before you. As she picks up her bag, she looks to see what you will say. She says nothing. You want her to say something—both as witness and as a friend. She is not you; her silence says so. Because you are watching all this take place even as you participate in it, you say nothing as well. Come over here with me, your eyes say. Why on earth would she? (54)

Without explicitly disclosing her friend’s racial identity, the speaker identifies her as white via her friend’s behavior, the interaction between the man and her friend, and her own expectations. The speaker is waiting for her friend to be an ally12 by leaving her comfortable position and speaking up against the only seemingly subtle racist inquiry. She expects her friend to point out the nature of the situation by identifying the man’s question as racially motivated, as rooted in his position as a white man, and thus figuratively exclaiming, “Look, a white!” Doing so might have uncovered the disruptive dynamic of the encounter and would have exposed how the cashier was performing whiteness, even if he did so unconsciously. This episode illustrates how complicity in white privilege is not necessarily willful, intentional, or malicious even, but instead often occurs unnoticed or involuntarily (at first) by those in possession of it. It frequently also results from the failure to do something. In the scene, the performance of embodied whiteness renders both the speaker’s friend and the cashier complicit in white privilege. Her friend could have put whiteness into crisis by challenging its



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unconscious habit with “fearless speech” and “fearless listening” (Yancy 2014, 46). Her friend fails to speak up; she might be uncomfortable or she might not think of it as important. The fact, however, that she looks up at the speaker indicates that she did notice it. Because she refuses to intervene, she fails to act in an anti-complicit manner and is thus actively passive. Her being aware of the nature of the situation increases the degree of complicity in her white privilege that usually makes her experience when shopping a pleasant one. Resting in the comfortable position of whiteness as racial invisibility and remaining immune to the speaker’s black counter-gaze, she allows her comfort to triumph over what would have been the ethical thing to do. It is important to keep in mind that the speaker considers the woman a friend, but one who cannot resist the force of the “historical self.” This underscores how white complicity is nearly impossible to avoid altogether because whiteness is embodied, but—once again—this does not lead to the absence of responsibility. On the contrary, Michael Neu and Bob Brecher speak of “culpable ignorance” with regard to public intellectuals whose works help to justify the practice of torture (2017, 145). A person is “culpably ignorant” when she “ought to have known better” and can be expected to have an awareness of what they do not show one (152; emphasis in the original). Such ignorance, Neu and Brecher rightly note, renders persons intellectually complicit. While their take on intellectual complicity adds an important element, it has a tendency to overlook the structural dimensions of complicity and how these shape the lived body as sedimented knowledge. Both culpable ignorance and its sociohistorical foundation must be thought together. This is where I once again find Applebaum’s work to be helpful. Applebaum argues: White ignorance may be a type of willful ignorance because there is a sense in which white people deliberately contrive their own ignorance. But white ignorance might also be willful not necessarily because the ignorance is consciously or deliberately manufactured but instead willful because such ignorance benefits the person of the social group the person is a member of. (2010, 39; emphasis in the original)

The structures we live in dominate what we deem appropriate, justified, or wrong. They influence our actions and naturalize our behaviors. By no means, though, does this mean that humans are predetermined by them. While whiteness is an integral part of those who identify as white, it does not preclude the possibility of anti-complicit acts that break the cycle of anti-black situations that privilege whiteness. Accordingly, actors can be held accountable and are culpable even/especially when they are ignorant or fail to take positive action. The short scene from Citizen illustrates further how complicity in white privilege is a complex phenomenon that comes in many different shades and

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can also pertain to blacks. Blacks, too, can partake in the reiteration of the racial imaginary, often simply through inactivity, that is, through not pointing to the workings of whiteness/race respectively. The speaker lets the situation go rather than confront the man because she has also internalized racial habits and hierarchies. However, I would caution to equate the two forms of complicity because the latter one bears a decisive difference: blacks seldom benefit from the racial imaginary. On the contrary, the stakes of raising attention to the racist nature of the encounter are high: a frequent response might be, “You see race everywhere.” And so the speaker does not challenge the cashier in his whiteness because of a hierarchical power structure inherent in their racialized encounter in a supposedly colorblind world. What is the point in speaking up if you can already anticipate the reply? What is of concern here, though, is not so much the speaker’s agency and willingness to call out the man, but rather the friend’s decision not to intervene and the reasons that lie behind it. She is incapable of resisting the ambush of her white self. While none of the characters points out the white ambush as it takes place, the scene as part of the book does scream “Look, a white!” and thus serves as a black counter-gaze: it allows the reader to partake in the speaker’s experience of being perceived as hypervisible in that seemingly unproblematic situation, but it also renders graspable white privilege and the ways in which inactivity causes complicity. The second-person narration especially contributes to this effect by generating the impression that these stories are collective experiences rather than mere individual ones. Siobhan Phillips, for example, writes, “The pronoun hovers between particularity and generality, accusation and identification” (2015, 97). The second-person you implies the readers while simultaneously directly addressing and seeking to affect them. Consequently, narrative ethics are a question of importance to the text because, as James Phelan remarks, there are “interrelations between the affective and ethical dimensions of reading” (2014). At the same time, the you-narration, of course, refers to the speaker and is most personal. It therefore has a uniting effect across the intra- and extra-textual levels. The second-person speaker invites the reader to join her in the situation, to envision herself in the same place and to become un-sutured. This can work for readers no matter which racial background they have as long as they have been trained in the white hegemonic racial imaginary. In these everyday encounters, Citizen confronts readers with situations and schemas with which they, in many cases, are familiar. Echoing Phelan’s work, Paula Moya (2016) notes that a high level of familiarity in perceptual schemas can contribute to a book’s affective potential and foster racial literacy. Racial literacy, then, can also foster a recognition of one’s own involvement in everyday practices. This is precisely what Citizen does with regard to the readers’ positioning—it unveils their complic-



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ity in everyday racist acts and challenges their self-ascribed self-images as innocent and uninvolved agents in the perpetuation of both racist practices and structures. Another scene from Citizen has the speaker ride in the car with a colleague to a work meeting: “You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there” (2014, 10). While this moment does not qualify as overt racism either, this microaggression is sustained by the same principles as institutionalized racism in general: the “value gap,” the (tacit) belief that “white people are valued more than others” (Glaude 2016, 30). Here, language once again inflicts harm and reinforces notions of whiteness as normal and as an unraced identity category. Ignorance of one’s racial identity and the impact such ignorance has on one’s social world is a privilege nonwhites are denied (see Mills 2007). In performing the simple speech act, the man becomes complicit in the reiteration of that very notion: there are great writers, there are black writers, and probably there are also great black writers. However, a great writer who is black is never just a great writer. This statement might have been a (prereflective) slip of the tongue and yet it remains harmful, thus rendering the man complicit in the maintenance of white dominance. The scene continues as follows: “As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now” (Rankine 2014, 10). The speaker experiences the past as present; this is not a situation out of the ordinary, rather it is one that has occurred similarly before so that the extraordinary is part of everyday life—past, present, and (probably) future. The man sits comfortably in his whiteness because being part of the dominant group enables him to conceive of himself as human and not white human, all the while disrupting the speaker’s identity. “The harm done by language turns to flesh,” Jonathan Farmer (2014) notes. The book thus makes perceptible as racist what might otherwise go unnoticed. Yet another scene is particularly important as it offers an additional angle on the construction of whiteness in opposition to blackness. The speaker is on a plane: “Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle” (Rankine 2014, 12). Let us trust in the speaker’s (experiential) authority in interpreting the situation

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and believe that this is a racialized encounter. The multitudinous but simple ways in which whiteness is learned and gets passed on become quite clear. The mother signals that the discomfort tangible in the girl’s statement is not only okay but justified. In a way, she even affirms the girl’s uneasiness or fear. This tacit feeling of her fear as justified will in turn inscribe itself more deeply into the girl’s lived body and find itself reenacted in future situations of the same kind. This is a situation in which she is learning to be white and one that she is likely to recreate over and over again in the future, whether consciously or not. Actively, then, the mother renders her daughter—but especially herself—passively complicit. While neither the situation in the car nor on the plane has the speaker voice his or her discomfort, the reader can nonetheless sense it because of the mirror that the black counter-gaze offers. All of the encounters discussed have an effect not only at the very moment they take place but continue to have an impact in the present lives of the characters involved. Thus, for all of them (whether “perpetrator” or “target”), it holds true that “the world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you” (63). On the contrary, “the past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow” (72). While each encounter reinforces whiteness as a safe space and an invisible, raceless embodied norm for the “perpetrators,” the experiences of disruption inscribe themselves into the speaker’s embodied self. Time and again the speaker emphasizes her embodied subjectivity when pondering the effects of microaggressions: “An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center” (8). The speaker further remarks: “Yes, and the body has memory. . . . The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness” (28). It seems to be a battle that cannot be won, Rankine goes on to remark on the moments’ persistence, because “all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games” (28). The past is always also the present of one’s lived reality. Citizen uncovers seemingly raceless encounters as not only racialized but racist, thus seeking to shock the reader into recognition and action. Phelan maintains that many texts “invite or even require their audiences to engage with them cognitively, physically, emotionally, and ethically” (2005, 5). Of course, the reader can always withdraw and not identify with the speaker, that is, reject the second-person address. However, refusing to do so proves just as effective. It is precisely when the reader opts out that the book is all the more powerful. It is the refusal to identify and accept the experience as “true” that shows how deep the split along black and white lines is. It might, then, actually be in moments of withdrawal from the perspective offered by the speaker—“This is not me!”—that complicity is most visible/tangible for the



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reader. Citizen thus creates a sense of complicity for the reader on an extratextual level whether or not he or she chooses to be included in or addressed by the speaker. CONCLUSION White privilege and white ignorance often go hand in hand, keeping whiteness in its advantaged position and simultaneously putting black bodies at risk—both literally and figuratively. Citizen reflects on two types of racism: besides the personal experiences with racism, it recalls incidents of overt and brutal racism. While all of these have happened to individuals, they are collective nonetheless because they can happen and have happened to so many. In combining the two, Citizen underlines how the two phenomena feed off of one another; the everyday and the spectacular are not worlds apart. Both versions pose a threat. Consequently, being responsible for one thing renders humans responsible for the other, too. Citizen, Phillips concludes, illustrates how the failure to see racism becomes the failure to understand it (2015, 97). Because microaggressions hold the larger system of white hegemony in place, one’s microaggressions constitute one’s complicity in the larger system. It is precisely because of this mutual reinforcement that addressing and challenging the problem of white privilege in addition to social justice discourses is so crucial. I have further argued that in exposing how quotidian situations are driven by race and are not harmless but harmful and disruptive, Citizen holds up a mirror to whiteness, thus showing different degrees of (white) complicity in these situations. In doing so, it offers moments of recognition, reflection, as well as transformation on the part of whites. Citizen, then, is a black countergaze, offering an insightful lens through which to see the shades of racism known as white privilege. Dedicated to making whiteness in the continuing everyday workings of racism visible, Citizen is a literary contribution to the struggle that seeks to undo racism. It can shock the reader into recognition and therefore spark, as Cornel West requests, a “righteous indignation” at the suffering of others and the will to fight it (quoted in Yancy 2017, 263). In order to help foster the sense of righteous indignation, Fred Moten argues that white supremacy is not merely a problem of people of color but one that endangers societies as a whole. Thus, he jarringly demands black and white coalitions: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too” (Harney and Moten 2013, 140). Moten calls on

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white people to take responsibility for their own—and by implication, black people’s—situations. After all, subjectivity is intersubjectivity, and in order for any struggle to be successful, Moten seems to suggest, it is important to realize this. Hence, it is only the degrees of involvement and suffering that differ, and, while there is no permanent noncomplicity for whites in a white hegemonic world, anti-complicit acts are a possibility. Citizen rejects what Alexis Shotwell has critiqued as purity politics. Shotwell identifies a turn to discussions of (individual and collective) purity and thus innocence as a frequent but inherently flawed response to any form of wrongdoing in the world. Instead of embracing purity, Shotwell argues that “if we want a world with less suffering and more flourishing, it would be useful to perceive complexity and complicity as the constitutive situation of our lives, rather than as things we should avoid” (2016, 8). In this light, “complicity and compromise [can be seen] as a starting point for action” (5). It is this potential that makes complicity a valuable concept and tool for cultural studies. Conceptualizing complicity allows for or even requires a critical analysis of cultural practices that remains carefully aware of the powerful grasp of the structures we inhabit and live but also of the human agency to struggle against and break with these structures again and again. It can thus point the way to more sustained activism and more self-conscious cultural practices. On the final page, Citizen’s voice shifts from the second-person you to a first-person I. The lyrical I has undergone “a lesson,” but she has not won. Citizen itself is “a lesson”—if the reader is willing to accept it as such, it is also a fight that seems to be forever ongoing because “how [does one] end what doesn’t have an ending?” (2014, 159). What we as readers can do, however, is make visible and work against the past’s influence on human beings—as citizens—in the present. As Black Lives Matter activist Brittany Packnett aptly states, “We will have only lost if we lose the will to resist” (The New Yorker 2017). This is the solution—the little hope—Rankine is willing to hold out in Citizen. NOTES 1.  Liberal discourse is often camouflaged by a universalism that is blind to persisting inequalities because it poses to see all humans as equal and thus disregards differences (see Alcoff 2006, 180–83). This is also the central problem of colorblindness. 2.  David Roediger (1998) has collected numerous reflections by black writers on whiteness ranging from Du Bois to Langston Hughes and Alice Walker. 3.  See also the related concepts of white ignorance, white fear, and white rage in, for instance, Charles W. Mills (2007), Carol E. Anderson (2016), and Tim Wise (2015).



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 4.  For a good overview, see George Yancy (2015); for an account that problematizes this, see Naomi Zack’s review (2016).  5.  Sullivan further maintains that it might be necessary to think of a different term other than “privilege” altogether. She cautions that privilege might be etymologically misleading (see 2017, 339). There is no room to develop this thought in detail here, but I propose that white primacy might be a concept worth considering. However, given the dominance of the term “white privilege” as well as the focus of this chapter, I will continue to refer to the problem as white privilege, postponing developing alternative concepts to some other point in time.   6.  Rather than advocating a mind/body split, embodiment theory acknowledges the inextricable connection between the two and recognizes that perception and behavior are often automated because they are inscribed into the lived body. This understanding poses a challenge to the Western conception of humans as free willed, agentic, and always in charge (see Alcoff 2006).   7.  Martin’s death caused Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi to create #BlackLivesMatter and led to a number of protests, many of which quickly ebbed away. It was Brown’s death that culminated in what is now considered a coherent civil rights movement (see Lowery 2017).   8.  A central piece in Citizen is an essay about Serena Williams at the 2009 US Open, where she yelled at and threatened a line referee after a highly questionable call. Rankine interprets this scene in the context of the history of racist experiences Williams has had in the world of tennis (see Rankine 2014, 23–36). Recent instances of police violence against people of color also figure large in the book—an important quote from Citizen reads: “because white men can’t police their imagination, black men are dying” (135).   9.  Rankine turns Glenn Ligon’s artwork, which takes up Hurston’s words, into one of Citizen’s central tropes (see 52–53). 10. George Lipsitz (2011) argues that space is white, while Charles W. Mills (2014) outlines how time must be thought of as white. Sara Ahmed (2007) similarly argues that blackness equates the experience of being stopped rather than that of free bodily movement (2007, 161). 11.  “Well-intentioned” microaggressions are sometimes problematically referred to as “positive stereotypes.” For a detailed discussion of the various types of microaggressions, see Derald Wing Sue (2010). 12.  Laura LeMoon remarks on the role of allies: “An ally should be personally gaining nothing through their activism. In fact, if you are an ally, you should be losing things through your activism; space, voice, recognition, validation, identity and ego” (quoted in Delgado 2017).

Chapter 13

Challenging Complicity in the Context of Mentalism Mental Distress Autobiographies and Performance Art Elisabeth Punzi and Katrin Röder The term mentalism refers to dominant contemporary ways of thinking that construct mental illness as the polar opposite of mental health as well as to correspondent processes of oppression, exclusion, and belittlement toward individuals with mental differences. It is sometimes compared to ableism toward individuals with physical differences (Lewis 2013). The present chapter analyzes two examples of autobiographical art that challenge complicity with mentalism: a serial autobiography by British author Amanda Green and a performance by Swedish conceptual artist Anna Odell. More specifically, these works challenge cases of mental health professionals’ complicity with mentalism that led to the harmful, stigmatizing Othering of two women experiencing mental distress. The focus on women’s experiences with psychiatrists and psychologists is not coincidental. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD; Green’s diagnosis) and hysteria (a term used to describe Odell’s performance) are often defined as female maladies.1 Although both works are partly informed by normative conceptions of mental health or may invoke stereotypical images of women suffering from mental distress, they can (at least in part) be classified as practices of anti-complicity (see Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 11) because of three reasons: they question the pathologization of mental difference, inform readers/audiences about the harmful consequences of mentalist structures in clinical psychology and psychiatry, and have the potential to create social networks that can fight the stigma of mental illness. In our critical analysis we make use of the broadened (structural) concept of complicity introduced by Afxentis Afxentiou, Robin Dunford, Michael Neu, and Pam Laidman as well as of Paul Reynolds’ definition of complicity as a rhetorical tool. These concepts go beyond a legal use of the term complicity and allow us to investigate situations in which people produce and uphold 195

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“social structures that have harmful, indeed often fatal, effects” (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 2, 4–7; see also Laidman 2017, 69–77; Reynolds 2017a, 35, 38, 48), that is, situations in which they may often be forced to be complicit. In our examples, these circumstances take the form of neglect of duty, sexism, mentalism, humiliation, normalization, forceful restraint, and medication. As complicity “consists in the indirect participation of an agent or a group of agents in wrongdoing,” it is not identical with primary wrongdoing (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 4; emphasis in the original): neither the psychiatrists and psychologists diagnosing Green with BPD (using a highly contested [see Pilgrim 2001], sexist, stigmatizing, and denigrating psychiatric category) nor those prescribing compulsory mental care in Odell’s case (including forceful restraint and medication) are directly responsible for the mentalist classifications of personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4 and 5 (DSM-4 and DSM-5) or the drawing up and the passing of the Compulsory Psychiatric Care Act in Sweden. However, the psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses making the decisions in Green’s and Odell’s cases had responsibility as well as a scope of action; they might have decided otherwise, but by following the mentalist classifications and structures that dominate in the system of clinical psychiatry and psychology (no doubt as a result of the institutional pressure to do so), they became complicit with them, engaging (in part unwittingly or unintentionally) in indirect forms of wrongdoing. Following Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu, we seek to open up the concept of complicity “to the realm of well-established practices that produce wrongdoing(s)” (2017, 8). Our examples will show that this realm comprises the politics of mental health, the structures of the English and Swedish mental health care systems, and the decisions and actions of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses (8). Green’s and Odell’s works show that diagnostic practices and therapeutic and/or psychiatric treatments, contrary to common belief, are not only not always helpful or beneficial for clients but can actually be harmful. These practices and treatments are complicit with mentalist and sexist practices of Othering and, more specifically, with the pathologization of women suffering from mental distress, in Odell’s case also with the use of violence. They produce and uphold discourses and social structures that suppress diversity and endorse essentialist gender norms as well as normative concepts of mental health and rationality. In our examples, this complicity in wrongdoing may not be obvious at first sight because psychiatrists, psychologists, and nurses may have acted in good faith, with good intentions and as law-abiding citizens—that is, they are not complicit in the narrow or atomistic use of the word (see Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 2–4). In our analysis, we will,



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however, apply a broader concept of complicity that takes into account that “the law of the land” or, in this case, the structures of mental health care, may be flawed or even wrong. Our examples emphasize the duty of both scientists and clinicians to take into consideration the knowledge provided by critical studies on the highly problematic sociocultural as well as psychological impact of being diagnosed with BPD and of undergoing enforced psychiatric treatment, respectively. As Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu have pointed out, “someone’s potential in becoming complicit in wrongdoing appears to require at least some ability to do otherwise, individually and/or collectively. A necessary precondition of that ability is knowledge . . . a state of complete ignorance in almost always a fictional condition” (5; emphasis in the original). Ever since its inception as a discipline, psychiatry has been striving for scientific status. Michel Foucault describes, for example, that in the nineteenthcentury asylum, the science of mental disease was based on observation and classification ([1972] 2006, 190–99). The power of classification continued with unmistakable strength in the twentieth century. This naming process gave psychology and psychiatry an air of scientific preciseness (Danziger 1997; Mayes and Horwitz 2005). Various diagnoses, with hysteria as a paramount example, were perceived as medical discoveries, and dubious treatment interventions were administered. To a large degree it is women who have been subject to oppressive classifications and treatments. During the nineteenth century, women who were categorized as hysterics were forced to undergo harmful and humiliating experiments in which they were, for instance, hypnotized and exposed to physical pain or influenced to enact sexual behaviors (Hustvedt 2011). For these reasons, it is perhaps unsurprising that early criticism toward psychology and psychiatry, from within the disciplines themselves, has notably often been articulated by female researchers and clinicians (Austin and Prilleltensky 2001, 6; Morrow 2007). During the first decades of the twentieth century, Leta Hollingworth criticized the tendency to portray boys and men as more cognitively capable than girls and women and used statistical data from so-called IQ tests to convincingly argue that this perception was a myth (1919). Bonnie Burstow describes that the majority of clients who have received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a highly debated and potentially memory damaging intervention invented in the 1930s, have been women, regardless of the varying diagnoses ECT has been said to treat (2006). The heritage of psychiatry is certainly terrible. It should be noted that there have been alternatives to mainstream psychiatry in which clients’ narratives, social context, and meaning making have been acknowledged. During the twentieth century, a socially-oriented psychiatry had some influence in for instance the United Kingdom (Hogan 2001), the United States (Probst 2012), Italy (Scheper-Hughes and Lovell

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1986), and Sweden (Englander and Ingvarsdotter 2017). During the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the endeavor to identify psychiatry as a biomedical discipline intensified, and this perspective is currently dominant. Manifestations of mental distress thus come to be conceptualized as neatly defined disorders, with the DSM serving as a canonical diagnostic system, and bio-psychiatric approaches and standardized interventions becoming increasingly hegemonic (Lewis 2009; Nilsson Sjöberg and Dahlbeck 2017). Even though the DSM is not the officially recommended diagnostic system in clinical practice, it has become the golden standard of classification. The DSM, conceived by the American Psychiatric Association, influences the official diagnostic system International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD), formulated by the World Health Organization (WHO). The production of the DSM is financially better funded than the ICD, which might explain some of its success (Frances and Nardo 2013). This dominance of bio-psychiatric approaches is closely connected not only with essentialist and individualizing perceptions of mental distress but also with a worrisome increase in drug prescription (Moncrieff 2014; Timimi 2011). It is striking how widespread the complicity with medicalization of mental difference and distress is. Researchers and clinicians of various professions, and also clients with various forms of distress, tend to accept and even embrace diagnostic classifications and bio-psychiatric approaches. Furthermore, overinclusive criteria for so-called mental disorders have become accepted, which means that an increasing number of individuals receive diagnoses that previously were considered rare (Frances and Nardo 2013). Moncrieff (2014), for example, shows that criteria for “bipolar disorder” have become so flexible that they even apply to individuals who display mere mood variations. Because “bipolar disorder” is said to result from a chemical imbalance, medication is presented and perceived as the preferred treatment. Schizophrenia is another diagnosis that needs to be scrutinized in this regard. Schizophrenia is said to result from a brain dysfunction, yet despite decades of research aiming at producing precise symptom descriptions and discrete biological causes underlying the “disorder,” no discrete chemical imbalance or neuroanatomical deviance has been found (Moncrieff and Middleton 2015). While the challenging of diagnoses and the discipline of psychiatry as a whole has been common practice in literary and cultural studies since the publication of Foucault’s History of Madness in 1961 and the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in its own field psychiatry has been presented as a story of success. Bio-medical psychiatry thus continues to thrive with undiminished strength. The mainstream perception is that in earlier times psychiatry was oppressive and nonscientific, but now it is humane and offers precise diagnoses and effective treatments (Wikström 2018). More-



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over, perspectives from humanistic disciplines are not acknowledged in a medicalized paradigm that pronouncedly prioritizes so-called evidence-based methods (Thomas, Bracken, and Timimi 2012, 297). Research, teaching, and clinical practice thus tend to be complicit with positivistic perspectives and decontextualized diagnoses (Moncrieff and Timimi 2010; Scheid 2000). Nevertheless, criticism is repeatedly raised. David Cooper (1967) and Thomas Szasz (2006), for instance, describe how diagnostic systems and bio-medical perspectives give an illusion of precision while contributing to decreased clinical flexibility and an individualized perception of mental distress. From a feminist perspective, especially BPD has been criticized because the majority of those who have been diagnosed with BPD are women and the criteria need to be scrutinized with respect to gendered and class-related expectations (Speanburg 2012; Wirth-Cauchon 2001, 5, 56, 66, 78, 87). “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger” is one criterion of BPD according to the DSM, and it has traditionally been less accepted for women to express anger than for men. As Janet Wirth-Cauchon has demonstrated, BPD is a sexist, denigrating label that defines especially (lower-class) women suffering from mental distress as “unstable” and “irrational,” pathologizing nonnormative, purportedly “unfeminine” behavior: manipulation, the expression of aggression and anger, and the frequent change of sexual partners (Wirth-Cauchon 2001, 89, 56, 87). Being diagnosed with BPD is to be marked as Other and to be placed in opposition to a normative, masculine, stable, and rational concept of selfhood (9, 80, 83, 84, 99; Shaw and Proctor 2005, 485). As a consequence of this diagnosis, clients experience discrimination inside as well as outside of psychiatric institutions: they are labeled as difficult, manipulative, attentionseeking patients; they have difficulty getting help and finding support; they receive strongly negative responses and little empathy from health staff members; and they may even engage in self-stigmatization that leads to a lower quality of life, an increase in suffering, and suicidality, as well as to normalization, that is, the (at least ostensible) subjection to the norm (Grambal et al. 2016, 2439–40; Wirth-Cauchon 2001, 87–89, 62–63; Veysey 2014, 20–21).2 It should also be noted that the diagnostic criteria of BPD fail to take account of the fact that any display of anger is situational (Benjamin 2002, 9). Yet the contextual and relational aspects are invisible in the listed criteria. Thus, the diagnosis becomes reified and perceived as a neutral fact. Moreover, the DSM is said to be guided by contemporary research; however, contemporary research about personality holds that personality is dimensional, not typological (Krueger 2010; Pocnet et al. 2018). In spite of the pervasiveness of such criticism, researchers and clinicians still continue to deploy said diagnostic typologies. We argue that researchers and clinicians tend to be complicit with the mentalist ways of thinking and acting that pervade

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Western culture and that comprise the social stigma and oppression against mental difference, forced or manipulated hospitalizations and restraints, as well as medications and standardized interventions aimed at, and based on, diagnostic typologies. Mentalism intersects with subject positions such as gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. Mental distress also needs to be understood from a transcultural perspective because individuals from non-Western cultures run a risk of being perceived and classified as dysfunctional or disordered when they express emotions and distress in ways that differ from the majority in a Western country (Adeponle, Groleau, and Kirmayer 2015, 27–35). Mentalism is related to the idea that it is possible, and in fact even desirable, to distinguish individuals with mental dysfunctions from individuals without such dysfunctions. Those who suffer from mental distress are seen as deviant, whereas others are positioned as “functioning.” This idea puts immense pressure not only on those who are perceived as dysfunctional but also (perhaps counterintuitively) on those who are seen as functional. The latter group are expected to be functioning all the time and in any place, representing the reasonable, rational, and productive ideal (but illusionary) citizen. It thus becomes understandable why individuals not only comply with diagnostic entities but embrace and strive for them; with a diagnosis one is able to rest from the pressure of needing to appear as fully functioning. While some psychiatry users embrace diagnostic entities and bio-medical perspectives, others raise their voices against the brain dysfunction theory, refuse to be complicit in the application of dominant perspectives and diagnostic entities, and instead, for instance, engage in the Mad Pride movement (Beresford and Russo 2016, 270–71). Scholars, researchers, clinicians, and users have also emphasized belonging, supportive relationships, meaning making, and agency for understanding distress as well as processes of recovery. Already in the first decades of the twentieth century, clinicians acknowledged the importance of interpersonal and social interactions both for the genesis of, and the recovery from, mental distress (Haack and Kumbier 2012). More recently, Anne Denhov and Alain Topor (2016) found that psychiatry users emphasize that stable long-term relationships with attentive and genuinely interested professionals are fundamental for recovery and for preventing overwhelming distress, including psychotic experiences. Various forms of self-expression have also been underlined as important for recovery. Creative writing and visual arts might for example support confidence and belonging in ways that traditional treatment seldom provides (De Vecchi, Kenny, and Kidd 2015; Macpherson, Hart, and Heaver 2016). Moreover, through life writing and the expressive arts, users express their own perspectives on diagnoses and treatment: they may retort the reductive, stereo-



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typical denigrating descriptions of persons suffering from mental distress and bear witness to experiences of stigmatization, oppression, powerlessness, and cases of neglect of duty as well as of alternatives to complicity with mentalism. Artworks are important forms of expression that contribute to cultural images of mental diversity and biodiversity, but they are also important because they contribute critical perspectives on health and health care as well as provide readers and audiences with insights that may help them avoid complicity and fight stigma (Broderick 2011, 103–5). Life writing and the expressive arts hold the capacity to challenge mentalism and processes of objectification. In this chapter we focus on one example of life writing and one example of performance art, both centered on mental distress and current psychiatry. First, we reflect on the serial illness autobiographies My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me (2013) and 39 (2014) authored by psychiatry user Amanda Green, who was diagnosed with BPD, and thereafter we focus on the performance artwork Unknown, woman 2009-349701 (Okänd, kvinna 2009349701) by visual artist Anna Odell, who stages a psychotic experience and displays the treatment received. Green’s and Odell’s works show how users of psychiatry become trapped in the system and might be forced to explicitly or implicitly be complicit with, yet simultaneously might challenge, diagnostic labels and mainstream treatment interventions. MY ALIEN SELF AND 39 Green’s My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me and 39 give important insights into aspects of complicity with mentalism in relation to the English health care system. This complicity is part of a general, deeply rooted sociocultural perspective on illness that has been dominant in the West for many centuries (Couser 2009, 21–22; Shildrick 2009, 3). My Alien Self and 39 address this complicity strategically in order to challenge stereotypical views on mental distress and to criticize society’s perpetuation of them. In both of Green’s autobiographies, the engagement with mentalism is complex and ambivalent. It is precisely this quality of the texts that gives insight into the pervasive sociocultural impact of mentalism in the West. In Green’s autobiographies, representational strategies that criticize mentalist stereotypes complement, and are often contingent upon, strategies that invite the stigmatizing stare3 on the body in mental distress and are thus complicit with mentalism. Thus, the texts illustrate the complexity of critical involvements with deeply ingrained stereotypes and images about mental distress. Mental illness autobiographies are responses to a long history of oppression, humiliation, silencing and objectification, that is, to experiences of being written

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about, categorized, diagnosed, and pathologized by psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals as well as by laypersons. Katie Rose Guest Pryal observes in this regard that the psychiatrically disabled have long suffered exclusion from public life. Historically, doctors have isolated the psychiatrically disabled in asylums. . . . Today, the psychiatrically disabled continue to be denied civic participation: they are dismissed as criminals, committed patients, or simply unreliable observers of their world. . . . Psychiatric disabilities, even mild ones, or ones that respond well to treatment—mark a person as unreasonable . . . , producing an unreliable ethos for the mentally ill. (2010, 479–80)4

One example of how wide-ranging practices of complicity with mentalism are—and in what way social and medical forms of stigmatization go hand in hand—can be observed in the fact that in the United States “the ‘character’ portion of the professional licensing process for lawyers scrutinizes psychiatric treatment in order to determine whether a person is competent to advocate in court” (Guest Pryal 2010, 480; Stempien 2016, 188). Doctors are not exempt from this complicity as they “bar psychiatric patients from speaking to the decision-making portion of their treatment” (Guest Pryal 2010, 480). In the case of mental distress, “civic exclusion often yields rhetorical exclusion as well” (479). Guest Pryal’s observation can be productively related to Thomas Docherty’s concept of linguistic complicity according to which complicity . . . is established through the establishment of a reduced lexicon: the change in the language is actually a reduction of the vocabulary available for discussion and debate. It leads to the assertion that the existing conditions in which we live constitute something called “reality”; and it rests on the assumption that the existing dominant language captures and represents that reality perfectly. It follows that any other language—like that of Scottish independence, say—is inherently “idealistic” or, as it is usually said, simply “unrealistic.” We are asked to be complicit with TINA, with the coercive language that states baldly that “There Is No Alternative.” (2016, 19)

In those terms, what many mental illness autobiographies aim to achieve is giving voice to a group of persons that is usually silenced as well as “changing the language, opening the language to possibility” (19). Authors like Green challenge the rhetorical exclusion of psychiatric patients; they seek to break the silence, share their stories, and fight stigma and mentalist stereotypes (2013, 10, 27, 392; 2014, 56–57). They give readers (professionals, laypersons, fellow sufferers, relatives, lovers, friends, and colleagues) access to experiences of mental distress, neglect, oppression, humiliation, and objectification that are otherwise suppressed and silenced. According to Elizabeth Bruss and Phillippe



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Lejeune, the personal, intimate, and affective bonds between authors and readers that are established through autobiographical writing are based on pacts of truth telling (Bruss 1976; Eakin 2008, 32–34; Lejeune 1989), but Green’s works do not disclose a given reality or truth that exists outside of discourse and representation and instead question these concepts. The process of questioning dominant discursive paradigms in mental illness autobiographies and in autobiographical performance art can be linked to the Foucauldian concept of parrhesia, that is, to fearless speech in the face of oppression (Foucault 2001a, 9–24; McLaren 2002, 147). According to Foucault, the proof of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes is that he or she “says something dangerous—different from what the majority believes” (2001a, 15). Thus, the questioning of mentalist paradigms is connected to personal risk taking and is a form of counterdiscourse. The challenging of mentalist paradigms in mental illness autobiographies is a representational practice of anti-complicity because it shows the harmful consequences of psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ complicity with mentalist classifications and diagnoses. It often includes information about the pathologization of mental difference (for example, through a stigmatizing diagnosis that endorses normative conceptions of gender and sexuality) and its devastating effect on clients (self-devaluation, shame, despair, depression), about forms of abuse and of neglect of duty in mental health care, and is, therefore, a decisive strategy of challenging complicity with mentalism. In her autobiographies, Green creates a space of agency in which she acts in accordance with the concept of anti-complicity (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 11); she initially questions the BPD diagnosis and resists the moralizing medical perspective on her behavior as well as the binary opposition between “normal” and “abnormal” types of personalities that informs the definition of BPD in the DSM-4 (Green 2012, 295, 356, 361, 369).5 “A counterdiscursive practice” need not aspire to notions of absoluteness, objectivity, or completeness, as Green’s texts show. The narrating “I”6 affirms the significance of her story but acknowledges her memory gaps and points her readers to them by using conspicuous graphic gaps between text passages. The narrator describes how she dissociates under stress and how her perception of the environment changes. Yet she does not deny the counterdiscursive value of her experiences, establishing a speaking position that is often contested in psychiatric literature as well as by laypersons (Guest Pryal 2010, 479–80). The narrating “I” affirms the fragmentary nature of everybody’s memories of childhood, thereby challenging the binary opposition of “illness” and “health” that informs mentalist discourse: “now it’s a haze in my memory. So long ago. But I still remember the feeling of being lost. We remember only fragments of childhood” (Green 2013, 21–22; emphasis in the original).

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The act of public silence breaking is challenging for authors of mental illness autobiographies for different reasons: because processes of writing about mental distress can be retraumatizing and can trigger mental distress (2013, 7, 14), and authors put themselves (and their families and friends) at risk by acknowledging their personal history of mental distress, a fact that might lead to ostracization, discrimination, assaults, loss of career options, and other social disadvantages. Green’s use of a pseudonym at the beginning of her writing career (her real name is Sandra Dean as she announced on her website only on November 3, 2014) is a way to avoid becoming stigmatized because of her diagnosis (Green 2007–2017; 2014, 46). Her autobiographical act of self-staging is an ambivalent gesture that involves exposure as well as concealment: she “changed the names and places” to protect her family (2013, 7). Green’s texts were self-published in Britain in Kindle format (in 2012 and 2013) and in print (in 2013 and 2014) with the help of her trusted editor and friend Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, an act through which Green wanted to avoid the interference of publishing houses: Hobbs-Wyatt molded Green’s narrative into the story now available for readers “using my own words, preserving my voice” (2013, 4; emphasis in the original). Green wanted to share her story with people suffering from mental distress, with their family members, friends, and colleagues (Green 2013, 12). She provides her readers with information on her experiences with diagnoses, therapies, and medication, on literature about mental illness and its symptoms, and she recommends films, TV serials, memoirs, and novels dealing with mental illness (339, 354, 356). Furthermore, she emphasizes that she wrote her books with members of the mental health profession in mind, hoping that her story would be accepted as a medical case study from which doctors, psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists, and therapists could learn more about BPD and depression (Green 2014, 57). In addition, My Alien Self, as Green’s editor points out, “has universal appeal. For who, at times, has not felt their life spin into chaos and wondered what is normal?” (Green 2013, 10). The blurb (which we will analyze later) attracts curious, even voyeuristic readers who may or may not have a personal connection to mental illness. In the following section, we will focus on the ways in which Green’s texts represent her experiences with psychologists and psychiatrists who act (or do not act) in complicity with mentalist classifications of mental distress as well as on the ways in which Green responds to the diagnoses she receives. Sandra Dean (alias Amanda Green) was born in 1973 in Essex into a working-class family (Green 2013, 10, 20). My Alien Self has many interesting formal aspects: it is not told in a chronological order, it moves backward and forward in time, starting with a scene from 2008, her therapeutic session with her psychiatrist “Doctor Jones” in which she was diagnosed with BPD, and ends with the preliminary end of therapy in June 2011 (49–51).7 Formally, Green’s au-



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tobiographies can be linked to the tradition of the quest narrative, as analyzed by Arthur Frank (see 2013, 115–36), because Green describes her story as my journey back to me from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, OCD and Borderline Personality Disorder. . . . I was able to use my collection of mementos, photos, diaries, journals, letters, emails and text messages of my past to finally see who I had become, and more importantly with a combination of therapy, medication and my writing, how I became that alien self and how I found the real me. (2013, blurb)

However, the autobiographies themselves show that the narrative journey creates a variety of shifting, fluid, and thus decidedly postmodernist self-images rather than a solid, stable sense of self (the “real me”). Green is a bricoleur of different self-images and views on her person. Her style of writing is polyvocal and heteroglossic; although Green emphasizes that her own voice is heard, her texts contain the voices of psychiatrists, parents, siblings, teachers, friends, co-workers, and boyfriends, as well as a mixture of medical and colloquial discourse. Green’s autobiographies are characterized by nonlinearity; they are collages and readings of fragments from her old diaries and other materials mentioned in the quotation shown earlier. In 39, the sequel to My Alien Self, Green describes her writing style as proliferating and “rambling,” as moving “from subject to subject, swinging between past and present, the good and the bad—covering all sorts of topics as my ever busy mind does” (2014, 16–17; see also Green 2013, 4). Although Green uses the confessional form of autobiographical writing by including excerpts from her diaries, the autobiographies as a whole do not belong to this tradition. Instead, they are experimental works of autobiographical art, postmodern practices of narrative self-formation that can be described in terms of Paul John Eakin’s concept of narrative identity (2008, x, 2). Green’s serial autobiographies generate heterogeneous self-images that continue to evolve in the textual movements between past and present. The process of narrative identity formation is continued in Green’s blog (2007–2017). Green calls My Alien Self her “therapy life story” (2013, 4). The narrating “I” describes writing as a “cathartic” as well as (re)traumatizing experience (2014, 53, 55, 56). She argues that the decision to write her autobiography was prompted by her psychiatrist’s suggestion to use life writing as a form of narrative therapy (2013, 19). However, Green does not create a linear autobiographical narrative; she is a collector of snippets from her life, with which she creates a collage as well as an ethnography of the self. In the preface of My Alien Self, Green states: I have kept every little memento of my life: diaries, airline tickets, photos, videos, letters, emails, text messages, cinema tickets and notes from people— everything and anything. I always had an inkling from a young age that my life was different, and that I might one day write my story. (2013, 12)

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She collects texts about and objects from her life (including pop songs) because she sees herself as being different from others and because she does not regard her own self as transparent, coherent, unified, or stable. She dissociated from many traumatic experiences (rape, neglect, devaluation) so much that the person in her diaries appears alien to her when she reads them years later. Green’s autobiographies deal with many different manifestations of mentalism: with the voyeuristic stare of the reading public, the pathologizing and objectifying scrutiny of psychiatrists who are complicit with the mentalist definitions of personality disorders in the DSM, as well as with the moralizing gaze that informs both public and medical perspectives on mental illness. Green quotes the diagnostic criteria of BPD according to the DSM-4: “unstable personal relationships,” “variable self image,” “impulsive behaviours (sex, driving, eating, spending and substance abuse),” “chronic feeling of emptiness,” “overwhelming fear of abandonment,” “suicidal threats, gestures or attempts and/or self-harming,” “mood swings; anxiety, anger and depression” (2013, 50–51). The autobiographies show that Green experienced dissociation, depression, suicidal attempts, self-harming, and addiction. Many diagnostic criteria of BPD (unstable relationships, variable self-image, impulsive behaviors concerning sex, drugs, eating, driving, easily triggered anger) pathologize personalities and personal lifestyles that simply deviate from social norms and are common among many people. The criteria capture experiences and behaviors that might characterize the life of anyone; it is not odd to enact impulsive behaviors, be in unstable relationships, or have conflicting self-images. These experiences might, of course, be more salient among some human beings than others, and it would be unethical to diminish the suffering of those individuals who seek out psychiatric care. Yet the criteria of BPD are seemingly elastic and it is easy to interpret the behaviors of anyone as symptoms of BPD, especially if that someone is in a relational crisis (Benjamin 2002). In her autobiographies, Green addresses and challenges these criteria. She invokes the mentalist stereotype of the emotionally unstable, irresponsible, promiscuous, sexually adventurous BPD personality, addressing her readers on the blurb of My Alien Self as follows: If I told you that I have been to twenty-four countries . . . that I’d worked . . . in so many office jobs I’ve lost count . . . then you might think I’ve had an interesting life. But if I added to that a mix of child rape, mental health problems, promiscuity, drug-taking, alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, violence, mood swings, obsession, jealousy, loss of self worth, being raised by a mentally ill mother . . . and public masturbation in a school at age nine, then I’m not sure what you’d think. But this is me; Amanda Green. (2013, blurb)



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My Alien Self does not disappoint its readers’ expectations; it contains detailed descriptions of verbal and physical fights between Green and her boyfriends and descriptions of a high number of sexual contacts, including the passages describing her rape (67–78, 299–302). At the beginning of 39, she sums up her sexual history as follows: I had plenty of boyfriends . . . , and tonnes of erotic sex, as I always had an insatiable appetite for sex and orgasms. . . . I imagined myself as a porn star. . . . I had sex in and on cars, in trains, open fields, and even in a hotel corridor and public toilet. I had sex with guys I’d just met or knew well. I had sex with all kinds of men . . . I slept with Americans, Thais, English and Japanese. And, once, I had sex with two men (friends of mine) at a time in a hotel. (2014, 35–36)

These passages may be seen as endorsing stereotypes about BPD. Many readers may enjoy the sexual scenes rather than question the stigma of BPD, thereby becoming complicit with the sexist and mentalist attitudes toward women’s sexuality and mental difference that are expressed in the DSM-4 and DSM-5. However, these scenes have an interesting, highly ambivalent effect: readers may find themselves in the productively uncomfortable positions of a complicit staring at “abnormal,” “immoral,” and “pathological” behavior on the one hand and of perhaps enjoying representations of this behavior, of facing their own sexual desires, and of being offered a possibility to question the mentalist binary opposition of “normal” and “abnormal” behavior on the other. As Green represents these incidents through the lens of her BPD diagnosis, readers will find themselves oscillating between enjoyment, fascination, interest, and arousal on the one hand and rejection, disgust, and (self-)condemnation on the other, paralleling Green’s own responses to her sexuality. Although Green repeatedly emphasizes that she was very lucky because she did not become pregnant or get HIV, she expresses no moral condemnation of her sexual experiences. Instead she enables her readers to acknowledge the human needs that motivated her “strange” sexual behavior. In her description of the masturbation scene at school, the narrating “I” takes on the perspective of the narrated “I” and describes her behavior as a form of comfort, as a release and escape from familial and social pressure: I knew something was not quite right with these actions, but I didn’t know what, other than the fact that no-one else did it. All I knew was that the comfort it gave was wonderful. I had problems in my head: confusion, loneliness and fear of being bullied at home and in school, and this helped me to deal with them and escape for a few minutes. (2013, 40–42)

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The narrating “I” shows that these actions are not “sick” or carried out with a “wicked” or immoral intention. Here, as in many other passages, Green enables her readers to transform their complicit practice of staring at “abnormal” behavior into a form of perception that affirms female sexual pleasure and is infused by the narrator’s loving and caring gaze on the narrated “I.” At times, the narrator adopts a medicalizing view on her own behavior, for example, when she finally accepts the BPD diagnosis and internalizes her psychiatrist’s pathologization of her condition. However, this does not mean that Green’s texts are complicit with mentalist approaches to mental distress. Rather, they show the harmful effects of this diagnosis as it led to severe bouts of anxiety and depression and can move readers to question its benefit. The narrator states: Nine symptoms . . . nine things that I can own as mine and a name; am I supposed to be happy now? Can I take a pill and make it all go away? . . . It doesn’t seem to me that I’m getting much empathy, let alone sympathy, so I feel inferior and the inferiority complex feeds my anxiety and anxiety leads to confusion, frustration and then anger and disruption of relationships. And it goes round. (2013, 51–52)

Later, she ruminates: “Doctor Jones said I would have a fifty-five percent chance of full recovery if I took the drugs and treatment. . . . Doctor Jones seems to have me down as some promiscuous, drug taking, manipulative nutcase. I thought and thought . . . my brain hit overdrive” (299; emphases in the original, indicating internal monologue). The consequences of Green’s BPD diagnosis are different from those experienced by Susanna Kaysen, author of Girl, Interrupted (1993), who was diagnosed with BPD in 1967 and hospitalized for eighteen months. Green mentions the film based on Kaysen’s autobiography and includes Kaysen’s text in the list of literature on mental illness that she recommends to her readers (2013, 339, 483). Green, as the narrator remarks with relief, did not experience hospitalization herself, but she expresses her fears about it (339, 439). The passages quoted earlier as well as Green’s autobiographies as a whole show the damaging effects of being diagnosed with BPD at the beginning of the twenty-first century: they can comprise (but are not limited to) humiliation, self-devaluation, agony, anxiety, confusion, frustration, drug prescription, and normalization, all manifestations of an almost imperceptible but pervasive oppression of neurodiversity. Readers may wonder if Green’s psychiatrist acted in complicity with mentalism and whether there were ways to avoid this complicity within the psychiatric system.8 Green’s narrator does not accuse “Doctor Jones” of complicity with mentalism, but readers may be aware that in 2008 (the year of Green’s BPD diagnosis) there existed a great number of critical studies



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that described the problematic nature and harmful, stigmatizing effects of this diagnosis.9 There is no indication in the text that “Doctor Jones” was aware of such studies or regarded them as significant, but this does not free him from the charge of complicity. As a clinician, he had the responsibility to be informed about the possible negative effects of his diagnoses and to take them into consideration. The fact that he did not do so makes him complicit, that is, guilty of “culpable ignorance,” to use Paul Reynolds’s expression (2017a, 40). My Alien Self and 39 do not explicitly pose the question whether there were alternative ways in which “Doctor Jones” could have helped his client, but My Alien Self includes the example of another psychiatrist (called “Dr Singh” from the NHS) who responds very differently to Green’s distress. When she has her first appointment with the latter in October 2009, he tells her that she does not have a mental illness and offers her a prescription of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy only if she thinks it could be beneficial. At this point, Green is so convinced of her BPD diagnosis that she explicitly rejects “Dr Singh’s” viewpoint and takes the medication (Quetiapine, an antipsychotic), prescribed by “Doctor Jones” (2013, 310, 387–90). The relative improvement of Green’s condition (she remains medicated and in therapy) is very much connected to her practice of life writing, which in part stands in for therapies that she could not afford (12–13). It enables her to draw connections between her mental distress, her experience of sexual violence, and the mental health and social policies in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present. It also allows her to counteract the complicity with mentalism that may exist among her readers: the narrating “I” criticizes the moralistic, biologistic views on BPD and indicates that the “symptoms” classified as BPD are caused by a stressful, invalidating social environment and are often related to experiences of sexual violence, especially rape (351, 427–28). The narrating “I” emphasizes that there is no binary opposition between “mentally ill” and “normal” persons, thereby challenging widespread mentalist convictions: “The more I read the more I realised how mental health is like guesswork. We all have varying degrees of one form [of mental illness or distress] or another it’s just that it’s not always clinical” (295). She argues that mental illness is a relative notion: “we are all a little mad . . . [w]e all have obsessions,” “[we] are all broken. Who has the perfect life?” (356, 361, 369; emphases in the original). Green challenges mentalist assumptions about her own mental distress as well as about her mother’s diagnosis. She argues that it was not her mother’s schizophrenia that caused most of her suffering and that led to problems in her family but the medical treatment (hospitalization, ice-cold baths, electroconvulsive therapy, sedative drugs) that her mother received (34–36). In addition, the narrating “I” problematizes the failures of the NHS and of the English social services, showing that her family did not receive any social or

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psychological support: “Although mum had out-patient psychiatrist appointments, not one person—carer, social worker, doctor, came to see if we were OK; if we could cope—ever” (30; emphasis in the original). Another counterdiscursive act that challenges complicity with mentalist practices in My Alien Self is Green’s discussion of the neglect of duty committed by health care professionals who refused to take her on as a patient when she asked for help and declared that she was suicidal (224, 226). The narrating “I” relates this experience to structural problems in the English mental health care system and links them to the impact of mentalist images of mental distress, indicating that she was refused help several times because she did not look ill enough.10 Thus, Green’s autobiographies show that her experiences of medicalization as well as of a lack of care and support result from the harmful impact of mentalist practices and ways of thinking: When I sought help professionally, the obstacle became the way I looked—because I “look alright” I can’t be too bad. Yes, I do look alright—my skin does not portray the years of angst, turmoil, drugs and alcohol abuse—but if I was not alright I would stay indoors, as I often did, unable to get out for days. Noone would ever see me when I was not alright. But this is no reason to ignore someone’s pleas for help. People “discriminate” against others with mental health problems and therefore are in effect confirming that the “stigma” is true and correct, yet it clearly is not. (2013, 353; emphasis in the original)

Green’s serial autobiographies represent the harmful effects of psychiatric diagnoses and treatments as well as instances of neglect of duty in mental health care and social services that can all be linked to an often thoughtless, unintentional complicity with pervasive mentalist classifications, structures, and ways of thinking. Their problematic effects are difficult to recognize because they are usually presented as being applied for the benefit of clients. My Alien Self and 39 raise awareness about the negative impact of this complicity and enable readers to challenge their (often implicit and unconscious) stigmatizing viewpoints and actions. UNKNOWN WOMAN Swedish visual artist Anna Odell also deploys her artwork in order to contest widespread complicity in mentalism, but she uses her experiences of mental distress and her memories of being a psychiatry user in different, partly explicit, partly enigmatic, ways. In the performance work Unknown woman, Odell made a movie of herself walking alone, lightly dressed, on a sixteen-meter-high bridge in Stockholm on a cold winter evening. She acts



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confused and is approached by fellow human beings who try to talk to her, comfort her, and stop her from reaching toward the bridge railing. Someone makes an emergency call. Policemen take her to a psychiatric hospital. There she is strapped to a bed. After some time, she tells the staff that this is part of her exam from the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design, and she is permitted to leave the hospital. She reads her medical journal, which states that it was necessary to have her strapped. Her work was exhibited at the gallery of Stockholm House of Culture and City Theatre from October 17, 2015, to January 24, 2016. It was presented as an artwork that many people had opinions about but few had actually seen. Therefore, the Stockholm House of Culture and City Theatre chose to show it in its entirety. One of Sweden’s best-known visual artists, Marianne Lindberg de Geer, produced the scenography of the exhibition. Anna was, in fact, acting. The role she was playing was herself. When she was young she went through a period of overwhelming mental distress and had once balanced on the railing of this specific bridge. Back then, she was taken to the hospital, was strapped to the same kind of bed, and was diagnosed with psychosis. In Unknown woman, she reenacted these painful experiences and simulated psychosis in order to present to the public how psychiatry works or, in fact, fails to work. She wanted to show how psychiatric clients are robbed of their agency and deprived of possibilities to give their side of the story. In newspaper interviews (Ekholm 2009; Sörbring 2013), Odell described that she wanted to show that once you are diagnosed with a severe mental disorder, anything you say is turned against you; you are forced to comply with the diagnosis and also with the treatment interventions. Unknown woman is one of the most debated artworks in Swedish history. The head psychiatrist at the hospital to which Odell was taken wrote in one of the major Swedish newspapers that Odell’s work was not art but kitsch, comparable to the infamous pictures of “crying children” (Dagens Nyheter 2009). He also claimed that her work did not say anything about psychiatry. We beg to differ and find it noteworthy that those in charge at the hospital cannot tell the difference between a person who is actually having a psychotic experience and a person who is consciously acting out psychotic behaviors. This seems somewhat embarrassing, given psychiatry’s striving for increased scientific status based on precise diagnoses. Odell officially challenged the view of psychiatry as neutral and precise, and she refused to be complicit with its diagnostic system and treatment interventions. It is, however, doubtful whether she succeeded in making people reconsider how patients are treated. Even though the head psychiatrist later on apologized for his harsh tone, she became ridiculed and pathologized. In popular media, for instance, the fact that she had been a psychiatric patient earlier

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in life was presented as sufficient reason for not taking her seriously, and people produced parodies and made fun of her on YouTube. Paradoxically, this proved her point that anything is turned against you once you have been diagnosed with a “severe mental disorder.” In mainstream psychiatry, the focus is on “atheoretical” symptoms and behaviors not on a dialogic, holistic understanding of the client concerned (Lewis 2009, 2–7). This means that clients, in order to receive treatment, need to present themselves and their suffering so that they match diagnostic criteria and symptoms. So when Odell is faking psychosis, she is actually illustrating that in order to receive care and attention, you need to present, comply with, or even fake symptoms that correspond with the diagnostic system. Intentionally or unintentionally, people respond to diagnostic descriptions and sometimes embody them (Hustvedt 2011; Kirschner 2013, 23). The costs, however, might be considerable and sometimes unpredictable. Once you have been diagnosed, you become identified as a dysfunctional person and anything you do will be understood with respect to your diagnosis. Alternative narratives are difficult to develop in such circumstances. Users have indeed underlined that their narratives contribute important understandings of what it means to experience mental distress and become hospitalized, and perhaps even receive compulsory treatment. As a response to criticism from users as well as from clinicians and researchers, there is increasing interest in involving users in clinical psychiatry and education. One example is that users might be invited to educate professionals in understanding users’ perspectives and experiences. This sounds like a good idea, and in many ways it is. However, the tendency is that those who have “positive” attitudes are preferably invited, and they are educated in how they should tell their narratives. Eriksson (2013) shows how users who are noncritical of the system and of the diagnostic labels are invited to present some critique. The focus is on their subjective experience, which of course is beneficial. The result is, unfortunately, that the critique they deliver is also understood as their own experiences, not as examples of a system that needs to be changed. Odell wanted to show how users of psychiatry are treated and perceived. We would like to argue that not only her work but also the reactions to it show how complicity with mentalism pervades current Western society. It is noteworthy that an established psychiatrist officially and publicly portrays another human being in degrading and ridiculing ways, even if he later on apologizes for it. Through mentalist perceptions, Odell becomes a dysfunctional individual, also in the public discourse. Her position as a student at one of the most prestigious art schools in Sweden, as well as the thought that she might have something important to say and show, became subdued. In her



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work, she challenges mentalism and refuses to be complicit with the current view of mental distress. She thereby becomes an activist for psychiatrized individuals’ rights and personal narratives. Perhaps Swedish society and its highly bio-medicalized psychiatry was not ready for Odell’s work. Given that ableism, sexism, heteronormative ideals, and ethnocentrism are currently challenged, her work might inspire users, clinicians, and academics to question mentalism and refuse complicity with biased classification systems, oppressive interventions, and essentialist perceptions of individuals. CONCLUSION We argue that works of art, such as Unknown woman, 39, and My Alien Self, are capable of showing the unique subjective experience as well as the oppressive processes of power in psychiatry, and how individuals struggle with resistance as well as complicity. In Odell’s art work, the deeply personal becomes intertwined with structural power processes, and thereby stereotypes that are based on mentalism and complicity with current psychiatry become challenged. Odell and Green also challenge the master narrative that poses that current psychiatry is “humane and serious” while psychiatry in history was “oppressive and unserious.” Portraying earlier psychiatry in this way serves to justify the current system. Foucault describes how Pinel and Tuke are often portrayed as founders of a “humanitarian” psychiatry leading to reforms and liberation, even though their methods constituted the replacement of one form of oppressive power by another ([1972] 2006, 394–95). There certainly was injustice and oppression in earlier times. Unfortunately, there still is, even though today injustice and oppression are expressed in other ways, using power structures that are less obvious but with which users nonetheless need to comply. One example is the use of bio-medicalized language, which is insidiously neutral and thereby difficult to argue against. Nevertheless, individuals with overwhelming mental distress seem to fare better in non-Western cultures, where psychiatry and mentalism are noninfluential, than individuals in the global metropol who are diagnosed and treated according to the bio-medicalized perspective (Timimi 2009, 14–19). In many parts of the world, overwhelming distress, such as psychotic experiences, is often seen as temporary, whereas when someone is diagnosed as psychotic, the underlying mentalist meaning is that the individual concerned suffers from a lifelong disorder, which is rooted in the brain and can be so devastating that treatment, no matter how oppressive or dangerous, is needed. The “experts” hold the power to define, interpret, and decide what is best for the individual concerned.

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It should be noted that the force to comply with diagnostic systems and standardized interventions falls not only on users but also on clinicians. In many Swedish mental health clinics, clinicians are supposed to diagnose clients in order for them to match diagnoses and interventions that policy makers have defined as important. In the United States and Sweden, for example, certain diagnoses and methods might even be connected to economic support. If clinicians register these diagnoses and provide standardized interventions, the treatment unit receives more financial support (Cantor and Fuentes 2008, 642; Psykoterapicentrum 2012). Clinicians are thus lured to satisfy the organizational system. Some are complicit; others experience severe complicity dilemmas that correspond to the saying “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” If they prioritize the clients’ needs, they become an economic burden to their unit; if they prioritize the system, their possibility to support the client is diminished or nonexistent. It becomes more important to comply with the system and the administration than to meet the clients’ needs (Andersson Bäck and Lane 2016; Cantor and Fuentes 2008). Regrettably, it is a system of deprofessionalization. The knowledge and perspectives of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and others are forced into subordination. This means that when an individual seeks out psychiatric care, the treatment received is not necessarily planned by professionals but by policy makers with no experience or education in mental health suffering or its treatment. We do not argue that empowerment of professionals is a solution to the problem with oppression and complicity. After all, clinicians might treat clients in degrading ways; Green’s autobiographies and the reception of Odell’s work makes this painfully obvious. What is needed seems to be a change in perspective. According to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on mental health, Dainius Puras, mental health policies and services are in crisis due to power imbalances (United Nations 2017). This counts not exclusively for low- or high-income countries but for countries across the income spectrum in the global community. Puras also declares that gatekeepers representing biomedical psychiatry control how mental distress is perceived and mental health care performed. He calls for participatory and psychosocial care that pays adequate attention to socioeconomic and political questions. He also says that professionals and policy makers need to question the system and the normative perspectives. In their work, Green and Odell insist that they have something important to tell and that treatment should be planned according to unique needs and narratives of each individual client. Following Green, Odell, and Puras, we would like to suggest that scholars and researchers as well as clinicians who experience severe moral dilemmas could take sides with clients, and artists, and challenge complicity with mentalism.



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NOTES   1.  On the description of Odell’s performance as an impersonation of a “hysterical and suicidal woman,” see Schwarz 2013, 399–400. On the feminization of hysteria and BPD, see Wirth-Cauchon 2001, 5, 66, 78, 84.   2.  Although Ales Grambal et al. address the negative consequences of self-stigma in persons diagnosed with BPD, they do not suggest that the diagnostic classification is a major cause of the problem. Rather, they suggest that clients should be taught to correct their perceptions of the stigma (see Grambal et al. 2016, 2446).  3.  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has investigated the ethical dynamics of the gaze in the context of physical disabilities, but her concept of “staring” can be applied in the contexts of psychiatric disabilities and autobiographies as well (2009, 3–62, 185–95).  4.  Guest Pryal discusses the genre of the mood memoir that deals with the socalled “mood disorders” depression and bipolar disorder (2010, 481).   5.  Although Green and the psychiatrist who diagnosed her with BPD live in Great Britain, both use the DSM-4 as authority to classify symptoms, not the ICD (Green 2012, 50–51, 289, 294–95, 479).   6.  For the distinction between “narrating ‘I’” and “narrated ‘I’” in autobiography, see Smith and Watson 2010, 72–73.  7. The term borderline was initially used to denote conditions on the border between neurosis and psychosis. In 1980, BPD became established as a so-called personality disorder in the third version of the DSM.  8. On the problem of identifying options through which members of medical systems (not only within the NHS) can avoid being complicit, see Laidman 2017, 48.   9.  Wirth-Cauchon’s book appeared in 2001 but the critical studies about BPD she refers to date back to the 1980s and 1990s. 10.  For a discussion of the dominance of evidence-based approaches within the NHS that enforce complicity and that can lead to both the treatment of people who are not ill and to a lack of treatment of those who are or do not appear to be sick enough, see Laidman 2017, 74.

Chapter 14

Representation of Complicity with Child Sexual Abuse in the Movies Spotlight and Doubt Eli Teram

Complicity is a key concept for understanding the occurrence of child sexual abuse. Some victims and survivors feel responsible for their abuse by somehow attracting the perpetrator or not doing enough to stop the abuse. Family members, particularly mothers, are often directly or indirectly accused of complicity. When the abuse happens in institutions, such as schools, sport teams, or hospitals, the relationships of survivors with formal systems and officials are shaped by their history of abuse, including the perception of complicity by witnesses of the abuse and silent bystanders. Thus, not surprisingly, the concept of complicity permeates personal, social, psychological, organizational, and legal discourses related to child sexual abuse. Complicity is particularly relevant to discourses about the attribution of responsibility for the abuse, the exploration of preventative measures, and the facilitation of complaints and whistle blowing. Because the media plays an important role in amplifying certain discourses and constructing social and self-perceptions about child sexual abuse in general and complicity in particular, it is important to explore how these discourses are represented in popular culture. Informed by discussions of the relationship between structure, agency, and complicity in Exploring Complicity (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017), and the conceptualization of complicity as political rhetoric (Reynolds 2017a), this chapter compares the representation of complicity with child sexual abuse in two movies: Spotlight (2015), directed by Tom McCarthy, and Doubt (2008), directed by John Patrick Shanley. Based on true events, Spotlight tells the story of the Boston Globe journalists who uncovered and made public the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. Taking place in 2001/2002, the story follows their investigations, frustrations, setbacks, and eventual success in exposing the complicity of religious, government, law enforcement, and legal institutions and professionals in covering up hundreds 217

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of sexual abuse cases in Boston. The movie clearly portrays the immorality of complicity and the harm it causes, leaving the viewer appalled with the extent of the cover up and the power of the complicit systems and officials. In contrast, the movie Doubt is a fictional story set in the 1960s. Although its narrative can be construed as a dramatization of one of the sexual abuse cases uncovered by the Boston Globe, the movie leaves the viewer with questions rather than with a clear position about complicity. The story revolves around the principal of a Catholic school, her unsubstantiated suspicion that a priest is having a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old black student, and her failed attempts to remove the suspected perpetrator from the school. The complicit act occurs toward the end of the movie, when the boy’s mother rejects the principal’s plan to expel her son from school in order to protect him from the allegedly abusive priest. The following two sections explore how each movie represents the interplay between complicity, structure, and agency. Following Paul Reynolds’s view of complicity as a “political device,” the focus of the analyses is not on “the forensic line drawn between complicity and non-complicity” (2017a, 39) but on the persuasiveness of the films’ narratives to make claims about people’s agency and complicity. The third section discusses how these representations complement each other and highlights their potential contributions to thinking about complicity with child sexual abuse by institutional agents and individuals in their private lives. With the ongoing disclosures of sexual abuse by politicians and celebrities, and the recurring questions about why victims of abuse and/or their families do not come forward when the abuse occurred, the two movies offer valuable contributions for the discussion. Specifically, Spotlight pushes us to think about the responsibility of complicit powerful institutions, ask why some officials who have the ability to make different choices take the complicity path, and explore what can be done to encourage these officials to make moral and ethical choices. Doubt highlights the constraints that force nonoffending mothers of sexually abused children to be complicit, because they may not have a choice, and makes us think about the systemic changes required to facilitate appropriate choices.

SPOTLIGHT: Complicity by Individuals in their Official Roles Spotlight could have been a chapter in Exploring Complicity, as it follows the anti-complicity agenda outlined by Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu (2017) in their introduction to the book. Like these authors, the Boston Globe’s chief editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), understands the futility of going after



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individual wrongdoers and the need to address, in the words of Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu, the implicit harms constituted within structures of oppression, and . . . the ways in which these structures cannot be upheld other than through the indefinite number of acts of complicity, committed by a multitude of agents, ignorant and non-ignorant, culpable and non-culpable, powerful and powerless. (12)

In the first scene, Spotlight effectively introduces the viewer to the collaboration between the three main complicit institutions—the police, the district attorney’s office, and the Church—and the individual acts that supported, maintained, and covered up for many years the sexual abuse of children by priests. Set in 1976 in a Boston police station, a Bishop is talking to a mother in a back room while the following exchange takes place in the lobby of the station: Assistant (DA): Any press? Senior Police Officer (PO): Some guy from the Citizen but we sent him away; none of the big papers. Assistant DA: Let’s keep it that way! Young PO: Who is that? Senior PO: Assistant DA. Young PO: It’s gonna be hard to keep the papers away from the arraignment. Senior PO: [scoffs] What arraignment? (00:01:42–00:02:02)1

The scene ends with the Bishop persuading the mother not to press charges against the abusive priest by reminding her of the good work of the Church and promising that the offender will be taken away from the parish. Smoking outside the station, the young police officer watches the priest being put into a car and driven into the horizon. The institutional perspective on complicity is clearly expressed throughout the movie, which moves from this 1976 scene to 2001 when Spotlight, the Boston Globe’s investigative team, started to look into the cover up of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. In one scene, the team members excitedly talk about publishing their findings on fifty priests who sexually abused children. However, Marty Baron holds them back, telling them, We need to focus on the institution not the individual priests. Practice and policy; show me that the Church manipulated the system so that these guys

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wouldn’t have to face charges; show me they put them back into parishes time and time again; show me that it was systemic—that it came from the top down. (01:11:53–01:12:23)

To accentuate this point, one of the participants says, “Sounds like we are going after [Cardinal] Law,” to which Marty Baron replies, “We are going after the system” (01:11:53–01:12:23). Cardinal Law, the head of the Catholic Church in Boston (1984–2002), well understands the threat posed to the system by Marty Baron and the Boston Globe. In his first meeting with Baron, the Cardinal highlights Boston’s interinstitutional harmony, vividly portrayed in the first scene, subtly exploring the new editor’s inclination to join them: “I find that the city flourishes when its great institutions work together.” Baron replies without hesitation: “Thank you. Personally, I’m of the opinion that for a paper to best perform its function it really has to stand alone” (00:30:25–00:30:43). The institutional stance of the movie is reinforced through a number of statements. A psychotherapist involved in the treatment of abusive priests, and a long-term study of abusing priests and their victims, states that “the Church wants us to believe it is just a few bad apples . . . based on the research I would classify it as a recognizable psychiatric phenomenon” (00:47:21– 00:48:24). Mitch Garbedian (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer who represented many abuse victims and was instrumental in exposing the cover up, counters the “few bad apples” argument with one of the movie’s most memorable quotes: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one” (00:57:50–00:57:57). The exposure of the Boston “village’s” complicity in the sexual abuse of children is facilitated and headed by and large by outsiders, who do not take the existing institutional arrangements for granted. Garbedian, who collected evidence through his involvement in the litigation of abuse cases, points out that the two people leading the investigation against the Church are a Jew (Baron) and an Armenian (himself). Garbedian also makes his feelings about Boston very clear: “This city, these people, making the rest of us feel like we don’t belong. But they are no better than us. Look at how they treat their children” (00:56:50–00:57:57). The Church wants Garbedian to be disbarred, while Baron is discredited for his lack of affiliation with the Boston community in statements about him being an unmarried Jew and, perhaps more importantly for Bostonians, his dislike of baseball (00:25:42–00:26:20). As such, it seems obvious that he “does not care about the city the way we do” (01:41:35–01:41:43). Ironically, the last comment serves to highlight the distorted ways the city’s institutions cared for children, and their concerted efforts to hide the truth about the epidemic of child abuse within one of its most powerful in-



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stitutions. The obstacles posed by these institutions for those who wanted to expose the complicity of the Church in the abuse of children by priests amplifies the accomplishment of the two outsiders, Baron and Garbedian, as well as the Boston Globe’s journalists. At the end of the movie, the long list of locations where children were abused by priests in the United States and around the world provides a grim warning of the consequences of institutional complicity. DOUBT: A Mother’s Dilemma of Complicity The movie Doubt represents a complicated complicity dilemma, defined as “a situation in which, for contingent reasons beyond one’s control, one cannot help but be complicit in the doing of wrong, regardless of what one does, or does not, do” (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 11). Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu make a distinction between dilemmas of complicity and humanitarian conundrums (Lepora and Goodin 2013) to emphasize that their concept is not intended to facilitate the justification of complicity on the grounds that it prevented a greater harm but to problematize “the very condition of someone being complicit (and having no alternative but to be complicit) in wrongdoing” (Afxentiou, Dunford, and Neu 2017, 14).2 Doubt powerfully represents this circumstance through the agony of a mother who has no choice but to be complicit in leaving her son in a potentially risky situation. As such, it seems to be the kind of “rhetorical device” Reynolds (2017a) has in mind for illuminating the structural conditions that force complicity. Taking place in the 1960s, Doubt presents a different kind of complicity with the sexual abuse of children by priests. Whereas Spotlight represents the undisputed complicity of institutions, Doubt tells a more intimate and nuanced story of complicity and the interactions between individuals acting in their official roles and those who depend on them. The three officials are Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who is the principal of a Catholic school, Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a priest, and Sister James (Amy Adams), a young teacher. The two individuals who depend on them, and the school, are Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first and only African American student, and his mother, Mrs. Miller (Viola Davis). The story revolves around Sister Aloysius’s unsubstantiated suspicion of Father Flynn having a sexual relationship with Donald Miller.3 Her own relationships with the Father are tense as she disapproves of his progressive ideas and is determined to stop him. Sister Aloysius is portrayed as a strong but rigid person: she does not like change and is incapable of changing her

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mind about Father Flynn. Her rigidity is accentuated by Sister James, a young idealist teacher, whose view of Father Flynn changes dramatically from suspicion to trust. Most of Doubt’s narrative is not about complicity but about Sister Aloysius’s refusal to be complicit and her attempts to remove Father Flynn from his position. However, as we learn in Spotlight, the Church has ways of protecting its priests, and Sister Aloysius realizes that her efforts to remove Father Flynn are in vain. Thus, she decides that the only way to protect Donald Miller is to expel him from the school, which, toward the end of the story, brings us to the issue of complicity. In one of the movie’s most dramatic scenes, Sister Aloysius attempts to gain Mrs. Miller’s cooperation with the plan to expel Donald from the school. To Sister Aloysius’s surprise, Mrs. Miller rejects this idea and begs her to allow Donald to stay in school until his graduation. The exchange between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Miller powerfully represents the complicity dilemma experienced by the two women and the intersection of race/class/gender/sexual orientation that leaves the mother with no choice but to be complicit with her son’s possible abuse by the priest, compelling Sister Aloysius to accept this complicity (1:10:07–1:17:40). The scene is analyzed in detail to facilitate a full understanding of the irreconcilability of the two women’s positions. At the beginning of the conversation, to Sister Aloysius’s disbelief, Mrs. Miller minimizes the severity of any issue the principal wants to discuss with her as Donald is going to graduate in a few months. She also explains the importance of Donald’s graduation for his academic future. Relieved to hear that Sister Aloysius sees no reason for Donald not to graduate with his class,4 Mrs. Miller reiterates, “that’s all I care about.” After Sister Aloysius states that the relationship between Father Flynn and Donald “may not be right,” Mrs. Miller attempts to normalize wrongdoing and universal unconditional forgiveness: “Well there is something wrong with everybody and that’s all got to be forgiven.” Clearly not interested in forgiveness, Sister Aloysius reiterates, “I am concerned, to be frank, that Father Flynn may have made advances on your son.” Noticing the tentative nature of the concerns, Mrs. Miller tries to use the uncertainty as a way out: “May have made?” “No evidence?” “Maybe there’s nothing to it.” Forced to confirm the uncertainty, Sister Aloysius turns to questions about the possible effect of the Father’s actions on Donald’s behavior at home, and when this line of inquiry is not productive she frustratingly expresses doubt about Mrs. Miller’s complete understanding of the situation. However, what follows demonstrates that Mrs. Miller astutely comprehends what is going on and the conditions underlying the injustice of having her son punished for the wrongdoing of Father Flynn. Not satisfied with Sister Aloysius’s responses to her questions about Donald being blamed for



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Father Flynn’s transgression,5 she strongly asserts, “Sister, you ain’t going against no man in a robe and win. He’s got the position.” Although Sister Aloysius did not mention her failed attempts to remove Father Flynn from the school, Mrs. Miller articulates awareness of the principal’s position in an organization dominated by men and may be attempting to shift the focus to the oppressive structure of the Catholic Church and the principal’s limited choices within this structure; she may also be subtly hinting at their commonality as women. Sister Aloysius ignores this opportunity to be open about her constraints and uses Mrs. Miller’s statement “he’s got the position” to continue focusing on Father Flynn, which leads to a strong shocking response from the mother. Sister Aloysius: [strongly] And he has got your son! Mrs. Miller: [angrily] Let him have him then! Sister Aloysius: [in disbelief] What?? Mrs. Miller: It’s just till June. Sister Aloysius: Do you know what you are saying? Mrs. Miller: Know more about it than you.

Mrs. Miller’s assertion leads to the principal’s claim of certainty (“I know I’m right”) and an offensive remark (“What kind of mother are you?”) followed by an exchange that displays the contrast between their lived experiences, in general, and the differential understanding of their choices, in particular. Evidently upset by Sister Aloysius’s judgment of her as a mother, Mrs. Miller questions the framework of the principal’s understanding and living life based on some general rules. However, a more significant disparity between the two women is articulated in the way they view the acceptance of their realities: Sister Aloysius knows what is not acceptable to her, whereas Mrs. Miller accepts whatever life throws her way and works with it. This difference may explain Sister Aloysius’s complete repudiation of Father Flynn versus Mrs. Miller’s ability to consider that “maybe he’s doing some good too.” Mrs. Miller has to accept Donald’s homosexuality, for which he is beaten by his father, and work with it within the constraints experienced by a religious working-class black woman. Disclosing Donald’s sexual orientation, and its consequences, may be her final attempt to make Sister Aloysius understand why he must remain in school. However, stating that she is only interested in action, Sister Aloysius does not want to talk about Donald’s homosexuality, astutely portrayed by Mrs. Miller as the boy’s nature, for which he can’t be held responsible as it was given to him by God.

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Considering Sister Aloysius’s strong religious beliefs and action orientation, her refusal to bring Donald’s homosexuality into the conversation seems like an unexpected turn. We do not know whether she does not want to be deterred from her focus on stopping Father Flynn or prefers not to know about Donald’s homosexuality, as it would require her to take a detrimental action. Either way, her lack of action-oriented reaction opens the door for Mrs. Miller to talk about the realities of her homosexual son. My boy came to your school ’cause they were going to kill him in the public school. His father don’t like him. He come to your school, kids don’t like him. One man is good to him—this priest. Then does the man have his reasons? Yes. Everybody does. You have your reasons. But do I ask the man why he’s good to my son? No. I don’t care why. My son needs some man to care about him and see him through the way he wants to go. I thank God, this educated man with some kindness in him wants to do just that.6

Following this statement, Sister Aloysius makes threats and tries to explain why she has to do something. However, her body language suggests lack of conviction, as Mrs. Miller’s statement is followed by more compelling pleas and explications, including, “Please leave my son out of this, my husband will kill that child over a thing like this.” Sister Aloysius concedes and the conversation is concluded by Mrs. Miller: “I am late. Sister, I don’t know if you and me on the same side. I’ll be standing with my son and those who are good with my son; it’d be nice to see you there. Good morning.” The final utterance of Sister is very different from its previous references to the principal’s authority. Here the word is expressed in a way that signifies their shared gendered realities, and an understanding that they have more commonalities than differences. With this understanding, it is significant that Mrs. Miller does not thank Sister Aloysius but expresses the hope that they will meet again at her son’s graduation, along with all the people “who are good with my son.” With this invitation, Mrs. Miller may be pointing out that, notwithstanding their differences, Father Flynn and the two of them have something in common. Donald graduates with his class, and Father Flynn is still there. However, it is the Father’s last year at the school, as Sister Aloysius forces him to resign by telling him that she contacted his previous school and will use the information she got against him. Again, it is unclear whether Father Flynn agrees to resign because he was sexually involved with students, or whether he leaves to avoid the embarrassment that would be caused by Sister Aloysius’s allegations. Finally, Sister Aloysius shares with Sister James her lasting doubts about Father Flynn’s guilt and confesses that she lied to him about contacting his previous school. In the end, it seems that Sister Aloysius, who rigidly



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knew what she would not accept, adopted Mrs. Miller approach of accepting “what you gotta accept and work with it.” CHOICE AND NO CHOICE IN INSTITUTIONAL AND PERSONAL COMPLICITY The uncertainty about Father Flynn’s relationship with his students may make Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Miller’s agreement to keep Donald in school easier to accept. However, this uncertainty does not make their complicity less significant or different than if there were certainty around this relationship. After all, Mrs. Miller is willing to accept this man’s goodness to her son notwithstanding his reasons. In the opposite direction, in spite of her doubts, Sister Aloysius takes action, and is even deceptive, in her resolve to remove Father Flynn from her school. Thus, whether Father Flynn was taking advantage of the students is less important than the choices of those around him who have to manage this possibility. In an ideal world, Sister Aloysius would have better ways to address her suspicions rather than use deception to force Father Flynn’s resignation, and Mrs. Miller would have better choices than leaving her son in a potentially harmful relationship. In an equal and just society, Mrs. Miller would not have to face the difficult complicity dilemma played out in Doubt, and Spotlight’s journalists would not have to overcome multi-institutional complicity to cover up the unimaginable magnitude of child sexual abuse by religious institutions. Thus, while the stories told in Spotlight and Doubt are very different, they share the rhetorical power to highlight “complicity in structural as well as agential wrongdoing; in distant events, activities and relations as well as close ones; and in forms of wrongdoing that are ordinary as well as ones that are exceptional” (Reynolds 2017a, 49). Viewing them together is important as they offer a vivid contrast between complicity by individuals who chose to be complicit, while having other choices, and individuals who had no choice but to be complicit. An obituary to Cardinal Law, who recently died at the age of eighty-six, tells us that the Boston Magazine listed him fourth on its 2001 “power list,” which included then-senator Ted Kennedy in third place (McFadden 2017, B23).7 Clearly, such a powerful man could have chosen to care for the victims of sexual abuse rather than protect child molesters by transferring them from parish to parish. Unlike Mrs. Miller, Cardinal Law apparently did not experience a complicity dilemma because he could have chosen to alter the interinstitutional conspiracy of silence that started years before his arrival in Boston in 1984. The juxtaposition of Doubt and Spotlight can be used creatively to expand and enrich the discussion of complicity dilemmas, shaped by relationships of

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power, gender, race, structure, and agency, within the context of child sexual abuse and more broadly. It can also be helpful for making a distinction between complicity by individuals performing their official roles and complicity by individuals making choices about their personal lives within their families and communities. The sense of arrogance and righteousness exhibited by Cardinal Law and other complicit powerful officials in Spotlight provides a striking contrast to the humble crying figure of Mrs. Miller who has to accept Father Flynn as a gift for her son even if wrapped with bad intentions. Cardinal Law’s obituary quotes R. Scott Appleby, a professor of Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame, who offers a possible explanation, or excuse, for the Cardinal’s complicity: “His piety, his prayer life, his love for the church was profound. It was his very great strength and love for the church that ultimately kind of impaired his judgment about what was best for the church itself” (McFadden 2017, B23). With this quote in mind, Spotlight can be used to discuss whether the love and commitment many of us feel about the institutions we represent justifies complicity with wrongdoing. The symbolic and material damage caused to the Catholic Church following the exposure of its leaders’ unethical practices can facilitate a discussion on the priorities of officials who care about their institutions. Specifically, it can bring into focus the possible long-term consequences of complicity with wrongdoing against the short-term benefits of covering it up, with the hope that the transgression will never be discovered. Doubt can be useful for raising related questions about the risks associated with resisting complicity, as exemplified by Sister Aloysius’s experiences, and whether one has to be a hero or a superhero to fulfill one’s professional responsibilities and advocate for moral justice within their organizations.8 Sister Aloysius’s lying to Father Flynn to induce his resignation may also be used to generate debate about the ethics of deception as a way out of complicity. Broadening the discussion to structural issues, the two movies can facilitate discussion about the conditions required to make resistance to complicity possible, and how to minimize difficult complicity dilemmas. Spotlight draws attention to the adverse consequences of interinstitutional harmony and the need for institutions and professionals to remember their unique roles and identities. Although collaboration between organizations has many benefits, there is a risk that by becoming too close they start caring about each other more than about the people they are meant to serve or protect.9 Doubt can also be used to take the discussion of structural issues to the societal level by using an intersectional lens to explore the conditions that force Mrs. Miller to reject Sister Aloysius’s plan to protect her son from possible sexual abuse. “What kind of mother are you?” is a question that may be implied by child welfare workers of many mothers who are blamed for



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failing to protect their children.10 Viewing this mother blaming through an intersectionality analysis can help us understand how markers of racial difference alter mothers’ gendered experiences of parenting in the aftermath of child sexual abuse. This approach enables an examination of the different layers of mothers’ experiences and illuminates nuances that might be wrongly interpreted as failure to protect. It provides a means for understanding that Black mothers experience deep conflictual loyalties, because their experiences take place in a context of race and gender oppression, making their situation multi-faceted, ambiguous, and laden with tensions. (Bernard 2013, 116)

This statement, which relates to familial child sexual abuse, equally applies to Mrs. Miller’s response to the possibility of the institutional abuse of her son and to understanding why reporting her husband’s abusive actions is not a viable option. The reality she describes powerfully represents the experiences of many women who remain silent for years before they feel sufficiently safe to report their abuse or the abuse of their children by powerful men. Spotlight complements this representation by demonstrating the ability of powerful men and institutions to silence those who come forward and collude to cover up child sexual abuse of epidemic proportions. Although the evolution of the #metoo movement and the swift reactions against sexual predators in the entertainment industry generate hope that some of the structural conditions that perpetuate complicity with sexual abuse are changing, there is much more work to be done. It is yet to be seen whether this development will be limited to highly visible people and institutions or will expand to less glamorous environments. In this regard, Spotlight and Doubt can provide avenues to highlight the need to pay attention to people and institutions that are not in the limelight. If the box office revenues generated by these movies are any indication, representations of complicity with child sexual abuse are not very popular.11 This makes their screenings in educational settings even more important as both films carry invaluable political messages and open up opportunities for productive discussions of issues that should be in the mind of students, particularly in professional programs. NOTES 1.  All transcriptions are mine. 2.  It is important to note that Lepora and Goodin (2013, 14–15) take into consideration “voluntariness” under the “responsibility factor” of their framework for assessing blameworthiness.

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  3.  For an extended discussion of Doubt’s representation of religion as a social institution, see Susanne C. Monahan (2013). My analysis of the structure and power differentials that restrict Sister Aloysius’s ability to stop Father Flynn is similar to the observations made by Monahan. While Monahan is interested in the way Doubt represents the broad relationship between religion and society, this chapter focuses more narrowly on its representation of complicity. Thus, the exchange between Sister Aloysius and Mrs. Miller receives more detailed attention here than in Monahan’s analysis.   4.  Considering Sister Aloysius’s plan, this assurance is surprising. While it may indicate her lack of certainty about the plan, it may also reflect her difficulty to break the news to Mrs. Miller.   5.  This criticism echoes that of the child welfare and family violence systems for removing the victim rather than the perpetrator from the home.   6.  Monahan (2013, 308), who also fully quotes this statement, interprets Mrs. Miller’s insistence to keep Donald in school as an attempt to avoid greater harm, rather than reflecting the lack of other choices, highlighted in the concept of complicity dilemma.   7.  The same obituary suggests that Cardinal Law, who was appointed in 2004 to a powerful position in Rome, was not changed by his disgraceful experience in Boston and continued to use his authority to resist change and progressive ideas. “The Cardinal played a part in encouraging the Vatican to open an investigation of US nuns, by fanning suspicions that some communities of nuns had abandoned Catholic doctrine and replaced it with radical feminism” (McFadden 2017, B23).   8.  For a general discussion of this question, see Brenzel (2005), and Loeb and Morris (2005); for a discussion of this question within the context of social work, see Fine and Teram (2013).   9.  On the way this dynamic is played out in the field of child welfare, see Prue Rains and Eli Teram’s Normal Bad Boys: Public Policies, Institutions, and the Politics of Client Recruitment (1992). For a teaching case based on the book, see Teram (2012). 10.  For a collection of writings on this issue see Susan Strega, Julia Krane, Simon Lapierre, Cathy Richardson, and Rosemary Carlton (2013). 11.  Although it won the best film Oscar in 2016, Spotlight’s cumulative worldwide gross income was just over $90 million (IMDb 2018); Doubt generated just over $53 million (The Numbers n.d.).

Chapter 15

“. . . to understand everything that came her way”1 Complicity and the Child Protagonist Elizabeth Gilbert

COMPLICITY AND THE FICTIONAL CHILD In recent years, studies have highlighted how childhood is a construct designed by adults, a liminal space that is familiar but at the same time mysterious and indecipherable, well known and yet unknowable (see Gavin 2012; Lesnik-Oberstein 1998; Nodelman 2008; Thornton 1998). As a vital element of the core family, a child and its microcosm are understood to be a reflection of society; children are often presented as symbolic embodiments of the future. Looking at children and our constructions of an ideal childhood makes us aware of what life is like and what we wish it were like—thus foregrounding our nostalgic and utopian desires, as well as the way in which society has created children as the archetypal “other” (see Gavin 2012, 2). A child protagonist is therefore the perfect projection surface, offering a set of roles and images to be molded and shaped, to be staged as a foil, an onlooker, a victim, or even a victimizer. Whereas most studies dedicated to the child protagonist in literature focus on children’s literature, my claim is that looking at the way young people are portrayed in contemporary novels intended for an adult readership allows us a deeper insight into relevant topics that authors might feel the need to explore these days. In the context of complicity, a child or teen protagonist can serve as a tool to investigate how the question of culpability and innocence, of an involvement in and awareness of wrongdoing, are interrelated. Complicity here means being aware of, though not necessarily actively involved in, a wrongdoing that is harmful to somebody else. My suggestion is that childhood as a construct offers the ideal conditions for authors to probe into the evasive epistemic fields of awareness, knowledge, and nescience and to ask questions concerning individual agency, systemic constraint, and our concept of 229

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guilt: Can a child be complicit with a wrongdoing if it did not understand the situation and could not foresee the consequences? Should, could, ought the child to have been able to grasp what it was either doing or not doing, saying or not saying? Can it be blamed or held responsible? Can a child be said to be morally culpable because it was involved in some wrongdoing? Does the concept of culpable ignorance (see Brecher and Neu 2017, 152) apply to a child? As children are generally not legally liable,2 the focus shifts from questions of guilt to the individual and interpersonal effects of being involved in some wrongdoing. Does a child feel responsible? If so, why? How can this be conveyed on the discourse level? And what does this say about the adults involved and their attitude to responsibility? These questions convey a sense of social, ethical, political, and intellectual unease that becomes even more pressing because child protagonists are traditionally seen as innocent, unknowing, and vulnerable characters. A child protagonist thus allows authors to address complicity on various intra- and extradiegetic levels from character development and constellations via reader response to different modes of narration used to explore the impact of repression, memory processes, and perception on a child’s identity formation. In the stories introduced here, the children are all faced with someone’s death and have to come to terms with their own possible involvement. The authors are less interested in their causal contribution to the specific death; rather, they are concerned with the question of whether the child understood the situation, what it can be thought to have known, and how it processes and verbalizes the feeling of being complicit. These novels explore the relationship between guilt and self-awareness; memory, language, and identity; and between the text and its readers. Child protagonists have traditionally been portrayed with a limited perception and hence restricted reliability. As a literary child is expected to not understand everything anyway, readers are less likely to feel suspicious about the narrator’s reliability, might intuitively suspend their disbelief even more when a child character speaks, and refrain from inferences concerning the child’s intention to deceive or cover up the truth. In other words, the readers’ relationship to the narrating child and their acceptance of its reliability is more intense than in most postmodern novels featuring unreliable adult narrators. If we further define complicity as a form of (conscious or unconscious) ideological support, this entails that authors can experiment with the emotional involvement of the readers, creating a form of what I call narratological complicity whereby the readers’ willing suspension of disbelief and gullibility is operationalized and exposed, for instance by making them wish to believe in the innocence, unknowingness, or noninvolvement of the children.



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After a brief look at the traditional portrayal of child protagonists, this chapter will focus on Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Michael Frayn’s Spies (2002), and Ian McEwan’s two novels Atonement (2001) and Nutshell (2016), which not only explore the intradiegetic twilight zones of a real or imagined causal involvement in a crime but also address societal and existential conflicts as well as the readers’ complicit involvement through the act of reading. THE TRADITIONAL PORTRAYAL OF LITERARY CHILD PROTAGONISTS The strong binary between child and adult results from Rousseau and the Romantic Age (see Gavin 2012, 6–8). Whereas up to the eighteenth century children were simply treated as small adults and mostly only appeared as secondary characters in literature, when looking at the nineteenth century, there is a clear dividing line between the adult and the literary child as “other” (see R. Mills 2000, 8–29). But where is this dividing line situated? Only the law demarcates a specific age of transition into adulthood. In traditional literature, it seems that a character’s understanding the degree of his or her responsibility, involvement, or even guilt constitutes a decisive moment of revelation that marks the child’s transition to adulthood. Acknowledging one’s personal responsibility for actions and their aftermath can thus be distinguished as the threshold marker that equates loss of innocence with transition into adulthood—innocence being one of the strongest distinguishing features of the traditional literary child (see Rose 1994, xii). To nineteenth-century authors like George Eliot, childhood was securely shut off from adulthood because it was a state of innocence, of clear moral rules and boundaries, a safe space of comfort and reliability. Beyond it lay dangerous and inscrutable adulthood, as she describes it in The Mill on the Floss (1860): “They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them” (Eliot [1860] 1963, 204; emphasis added). Eliot’s novel is one of many Victorian bildungsroman-type life stories in which child protagonists appear in one section of the overall depiction of the trials and tribulations of their protagonist. Her portrayal of childhood stresses the nostalgic viewpoint of a lost state of paradisiacal existence that appears in numerous nineteenth-century works and is further enhanced in this quotation by the allusion to the “golden gates” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) (see J. Mills 2000, 42–43).

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The extreme contrast between innocent child and guilty adult is addressed in many Victorian novels. In works by Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, or Mark Twain, child characters observe the ambiguity and corruptness of grownups; they might even be coerced into carrying out criminal acts, as in Oliver Twist (1837–1839), but they remain inwardly intact themselves, morally untainted, and free of self-doubt. When their complicit knowledge of a crime becomes too much to handle for their conscience, as in Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), they confess all that they know, thus seemingly recreating their former state of innocence and morality. The notion of a clear dividing line between innocent child and corrupt adult still permeates much of literature to this day—it also comes to the fore in Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which shows the young tomboy Scout’s initial belief in the goodness of all people and her initiation into maturity when she learns about the ambivalence of life and the prejudices, lack of compassion, and selfishness of adults. Her crossing the threshold from child to young adult is exemplified when she accepts complicity regarding the fate of her neighbor Arthur “Boo” Radley, who killed the local villain in order to save her and her brother’s life. In a moment of epiphany, Scout understands that Boo Radley, however heroic his actions might have been, must be left to live quietly and peacefully. It is the final scene of the novel and thus seems to imply that Scout has left behind her childhood and will henceforward accept the expectations of adult life, dropping her tomboy name and role, and continuing her life “properly,” as Jean Louise Finch. She has moved from believing in the innate goodness of mankind to witnessing and acknowledging the sinful sides of people and life; she has learned to judge actions by their motivation and is able to make decisions and take steps to cover up the truth for the good of someone else. Yet this is where the story ends—her state of complicity, her acknowledging that a criminal act might sometimes have to be committed to prevent a worse act, her accepting that some heroes prefer not to be publicly praised as such, her being actively involved in a white lie, all mark a boundary after which the story about her childhood can no longer be continued. Lee’s novel thus stands symptomatically for most traditional literature that features a child protagonist and in which accepting complicity marks the end of their childhood. CHANGES IN THE PORTRAYAL OF CHILD PROTAGONISTS There are, however, a few exceptions to the traditional portrayal of childhood. The most outstanding examples in late nineteenth-century literature, in which



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the New Testament image of the child as angelic, unsullied, and innocent is challenged and even has the explicit aim to shock, can be found in the works of Henry James. James depicts children who break the norms, whose innocence is violated, or who at least leave the readers in grave doubts as to their involvement in a crime and thus their level of complicity. What Masie Knew (1897) already featured a highly morally ambivalent child character, but in The Turn of the Screw from 1898, the readers must decide whether the narrating young governess is right to suspect that the two children in her charge are communicating with evil ghosts or whether the children are innocent, in which case the readers have been believing an insane, unreliable narrator. How can we readers justify feeling emotionally involved with and supportive of the governess or the children? The reader is denied any form of closure. This quandary could be described as a first case of narratological complicity—the lack of any dependable authoritative narrative voice and the way James opens the door to an entirely different, negative conception of childhood makes The Turn of the Screw one of the most mystifying, incomprehensible, and disturbing stories to date. By introducing ambivalent and inscrutable child protagonists, James challenges the construct of the ideal Victorian child as innocent victim, highlighting instead what Margarida Morgado calls “the elusive and multiple meanings of childhood for adults” (1998, 215). Elusiveness and lack of closure also define William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). This publication constitutes a momentous sea change in the portrayal of children and teenagers in literature, showing their innate cruelty, selfishness, and moral degeneration and thus putting a harsh end to the romantic and utopian idealization of the innocent, plucky child as it had been featured up until then in canonical adventure stories such as R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858). In the 1950s, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was the first to characterize adolescence as a phase of crisis in an individual’s development in which values and worldviews were challenged (see Falconer 2010, 91). This sense of crisis is brought to extremes in Golding’s story. He not only portrays an ambitious young leader ready to kill his rivals to secure his position among the peer group but, maybe even more shockingly, the other children’s consent to these ruthless and brutal acts. The thrill of the hunt catapults the children into a form of barbarian jingoist frenzy in which none of the rules of civilization have any impact and the children lose their sense of identity, as shown when the prior familiarity transforms into estrangement: “This was not Bill. This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and shirt” (Golding [1954] 1986, 202). Lord of the Flies refuses to offer any satisfactory closure: although the boys are eventually rescued, no mention is made of guilt and responsibility. The only topic that is underlined is the loss of innocence, stressed and inverted through

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the intertextual references to Coral Island, and that can be understood as an allegorical comment on all of mankind after World War II: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (223). The effects of Golding’s portrayal of children cannot be overemphasized. As Morgado points out, “this novel was and remains a turning-point for the cultural study of child representation in contemporary society” (1998, 223). Golding opened the doors to novels in which children are portrayed as causally involved in a crime and have to come to terms with their feelings of responsibility, guilt, and shame, and in which the adult projects “on the child her/his fears, anxieties, frustrations and desires” (205). THE CHILD PROTAGONIST IN POSTMODERN NOVELS Kate Atkinson, Michael Frayn, and Ian McEwan are among the contemporary British authors who use child protagonists for various effects: to show the moral complexity of the notion of complicity, to address the subject of unreliable memory, and to experiment with narration and reader response. On the story level there is no longer a definitive threshold that marks the boundary between (safe, innocent, idealized) childhood and (corrupt) adulthood—instead childhood is shown to be rotten to the core. This discrepancy between traditional concepts of childhood and the ugly truth is foregrounded by introducing issues of complicity: child protagonists are placed into situations in which they have to cope with questions of knowledge and awareness, guilt and responsibility, sex and death, yet they remain excluded from the world of adults. As Perry Nodelman points out, the limited point of view has always been a key feature of literature dealing with a child protagonist as it helped make authentic the child’s limitations, his or her innocence or lack of knowledge, and his or her “blindness to life’s complexities” (2008, 196). This limited perspective creates a power imbalance between protagonist and readership, as the adult readers are able to read between the lines and understand the greater meaning of a situation—as for example in To Kill a Mockingbird, in which much of the pleasure of reading is caused by the innuendo and the discrepancy of what Scout tells the readers without understanding it. But a third-person narrative voice, whether it uses focalization techniques to offer an insight into the characters or not, does not allow authors to address the issues of childhood being a construct and of a literary child’s perspective being filtered by the adult author. In the novels discussed below, the child’s



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involvement in or knowledge of wrongdoing is mirrored on the discourse level, in a change in narrative perspective that has a disconcerting effect on the reader: first of all, the traditional third-person perspective, which implies an authoritative (adult) narrator, shifts to an autodiegetic narrator that restricts the readers to the focalizer figure’s subjective viewpoint. Second and more importantly, there is a shift from the traditional narrative past tense to a present-tense voice reflecting the story time. This allows only the immediate personal viewpoint of the experiencing child, a narrative technique that has the effect that the readers are left in the same state as the experiencing child protagonist: confused and helpless. While readers of a traditional bildungsroman will always be tacitly (complicitly) aware of the fact that the child’s voice is in reality a homodiegetic adult delving back into significant moments of the past, as in Jane Eyre, the present-tense narrative refutes this implicit sense of anticipated closure. James Phelan explains the unsettling effect of the homodiegetic present-tense (adult) narrative voice as follows: the homodiegetic simultaneous present [as events are happening] places the reader in a very different relationship to the [protagonist] and to the events of this narrative [because,] as he [the narrator] does not know how events will unfold, he cannot shape the narrative according to his knowledge of the end. Consequently, we cannot read with our usual tacit assumptions that the narrator, however unself-conscious, has some direction in mind for his tale. (1994, 223–24)

These new techniques of appropriating the fictional child’s voice and perspective allow the authors to address various issues of complicity, of a selfawareness of responsibility or involvement, not only on the plot level but also on a linguistic and narrative level. By restricting the readers to the level of the experiencing child and inviting identification or empathy while at the same time implying that there might be some other, hidden truth that needs to be uncovered between the lines, the authors make readers feel complicit. All of the four novels analyzed here use child protagonists who think they are in some way responsible for someone’s death. But instead of learning to cope with their sense of guilt or involvement, they resort to strategies of repression long before reaching adulthood. If there is an older narrating I at all, he or she is shown to be unable to mediate between the experiencing child and the adult self; there is no reliable adult filter organizing the narration anymore and so the readers have to weigh up the assumed responsibility or involvement of the child by themselves. In Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), the readers are confronted with a plethora of clues relating to the truth but lack the background knowledge to decode them during the first reading, as autodiegetic

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narrator Ruby only acknowledges what really happened shortly before the end of the novel: at the age of three, Ruby watches her twin sister Pearl walk onto an icy pond and drown—she is made to believe that this traumatizing accident was her fault and immediately suppresses any memories of the event. Ruby’s erroneous sense of guilt (her perceived complicity in making Pearl walk on the ice and not being able to act or call help) and her real complicity (actually witnessing her other sister Gillian provoke Pearl to walk onto the ice but not telling anyone) lead her to create a fictitious life story for herself and her family whereby she completely blends out the existence of Pearl. So the readers are offered a lengthy and detailed autobiography in which the second most important character is never explicitly mentioned though often present, as for example in the fact that there are twice as many baby pictures of Ruby than of any other child in that family. Instead, we are invited to share Ruby’s vague feelings of guilt and loss. This sense of loss and confusion is fostered by the present-tense narrative voice, which allows no retrospective explanations—everything is imparted unfiltered and simultaneously, in the very moment, and, coming as it does from a quirky child and later a moody teen, it could be equally important or irrelevant—the readers are forced to decide how much attention they give to the many details and how to make sense of them: “Why does nobody notice how unhappy I am? Why does nobody comment on my bizarre behaviour— the recurring bouts of sleepwalking . . . when I wander the house, indeed very much like a little ghost-child, one that is searching futilely for something it’s left behind in the corporeal world. (A toy? A playmate?)” (Atkinson 1995, 318). I would suggest that the readers are forcefully made complicit on a narrative level as they empathize with Ruby and thus share her state of (not) knowing, even though, at a second reading, they realize that they ought to have been able to detect the truth between the lines, which brings to mind the concept of culpable ignorance—discussed with regard to complicity, for instance, by Brecher and Neu (2017, 145). We readers fall prey to a veritable narrative complicity trap because of our emotional involvement with the child protagonist and because of the focalization technique of present-tense narrative, which increases our sense of disorientation while simultaneously signaling that there is some other truth lurking between the lines that we ought to be able to grasp, and to which clues are often explicitly given. A curious feeling rises up inside me, a feeling of something long forgotten. . . . I try to concentrate on the feeling, to bring it to life, but as soon as I do it evaporates from my brain. . . . I know there’s something incredibly important which I’ve lost and have been looking for—something that’s been torn out of me, leaving a hole inside. (Atkinson 1995, 227)



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As shown here, the present tense heightens the readers’ sense of disorientation because the narrating I is so dissociated from her experiencing former self that there is no possibility for her to reflect on her own state and guide the readers’ process of meaning making, although she is constantly pointing out that there is more to uncover. When Ruby is finally confronted with the existence—and death—of her twin, she suffers a severe identity crisis: “I stared and stared until my eyes ached trying to work out which one was me and which one wasn’t” (328), which directly results in a suicide attempt. This crisis and her near-death experience are also reflected on the narrative level: while she usually tells her story in linear chronology, Ruby now flits back and forth between the highly impressionistic, associative present tense and the more traditional narrative past tense, which is introduced all of a sudden and connoted with the stepfather, a negative character. As both tenses are used to refer to the same moment in the story, this grammatical discrepancy highlights the shock of the moment when Mr. Belling triggers the memory process, while at the same time calling into question the traditional—patriarchal—narrative past tense and all its implicit authority: I search my mind for the terrible thing I must have done to deserve such a punishment. . . . Mr. Belling’s apparition hurtles down the well of time with me so that I have to put my hands over my ears to shut out what I know he’s going to say—but I can’t block out his voice which is repeating over and over again, “You killed your own sister, Ruby! You killed you own sister!” “I ask you—what kind of little girl would do that?” he shouted. (326; emphasis added)

This narrative technique of interspersing discomforting and illogical past tense into the present tense reinforces the protagonist’s sense of detachment from the self, highlights gender inequalities even on the discourse level, and has a disconcerting effect on the readers: being suddenly confronted with the traditional narrative means of storytelling (the past tense), we realize that we have been relying on Ruby’s flawed perceptions and misleading information. This not only addresses issues of male and female forms of storytelling but also leads to challenging our concepts of time, memory, and identity. As “words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense” (382), Ruby turns to language, using tropes and plotlines from fairy tales and the family romance to create a new, imagined reality and establish an alternative identity that makes sense to her. Ruby’s crisis of memory, her inability to control time, her helplessness, and her lack of any sense of agency also pinpoint society’s difficult relationship to the past and to traditional discourses—our ambivalent and complicit relationship with personal and cultural memory, the cult of the

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past, and how to put this into appropriate words and an appropriate narrative mode. In fact, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is not restricted to Ruby’s story— as the title implies, it includes lengthy subsections (called footnotes) that focus on the three generations preceding Ruby. The fates of the various—mainly female—family members presented in the “footnotes” convey a depressing sense of ironic fatality, as every individual, singular as the character may be, seems to replicate the moves and decisions of the previous generations, creating a pattern of similar unfortunate moves and decisions that call into question concepts of individual agency and responsibility, thereby also ultimately challenging concepts of complicity. The characters’ freedom to make the wrong decisions does not relieve the readers of a sense of premonition, and in this respect the novel again addresses more general thoughts about how meaning making, storytelling, forms of justification, and our relationship to the past are intertwined and how they relate to complicity. The postmodern focus on language, on the importance and frustrating impossibility of finding the right terms to express traumatizing events, is also explored in Michael Frayn’s Spies (2002), in which childhood memories are being retrieved step by step as the elderly narrating I travels back physically and emotionally to his childhood surroundings and finally begins to face the extent of his involvement in the death of a military absentee and former neighbor. In the midst of World War II, the child Stephen and his best friend mistake a man for a German spy, which eventually leads to the man being chased by the military police and dying in a train crash. To retrace his childhood memories and come to terms with his own involvement and why he has been dissociating from his childhood self, old Stephen, the narrating I, unfolds a form of interrogation with young Stephen, the main experiencing I. However, he remains unable to answer the question whether or not the child Stephen was aware of the true identity of the deceased. This is important, however, as it vitally changes the question of Stephen’s guilt or complicity. The narrator not only at first denies any kind of knowledge, he also involves the readers, making them complicit through the bits and pieces of information he offers. Old Stephen’s narrative selfquestioning and the helpless half-answers in present tense blur the boundaries between story time and discourse time, stressing the lacking credibility of witnesses and how impossible it is to rely on memory processes, especially if the situation is related to an identity crisis, for example triggered by a possible nonacknowledgment of complicity: “‘She’s a German spy,’ I explain. No, I don’t say the words. Do I? They’re filling my head, struggling to burst out of me. . . . But I don’t actually say the words. I don’t think I actually say them. Barbara Berrill’s still looking at me, and she’s smiling again. No, I



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haven’t actually said the words. The smile’s no longer mocking, though. It’s conspiratorial” (Frayn 2002, 110). This circling of statements and doubts is more than the typical postmodern play with (un)reliability—it shows how the slow realization of having denied his involvement in a past crime has affected the character to the point where he no longer trusts himself and his own life story. Even when old Stephen eventually acknowledges the fact that he knew the man who was hiding in the barns, his statements are still marked by narrative uncertainty and inexactness: Did I really not know at the time that the broken man in the Barns was Uncle Peter? Of course I knew. I knew as soon as he called me by name. No, before that. As soon as I heard him behind me in the moonlight. Or much earlier still, even. From the very beginning, perhaps. Just as he himself had always known that she really was the one. Always her. From the very beginning. When was the very beginning, for him and her? . . . And yet probably he hadn’t known at all, any more than I did about him. I went on thinking, even after I’d heard him speak, that he was a German. This is what I clung on to—that he was a German. His Germanness hung in the air, as pervasive and as transforming as the scent of the privet or the sound of Lamorna. Whatever I secretly knew, and whenever I knew it, I also understood that it was something that must never be known. (260–61)

In his desperate epistemological attempts to make sense of what happened in the past and how far his personal responsibility can be taken, Stephen eventually draws a connection between what the child might have known and what he was not supposed to know because it violated common propriety (that is, that the mother of his friend had an affair with her brother-in-law). These private conflicts unfold against the backdrop of World War II, allowing the narrator to cast a wide and intricate net of complicity—of knowing but not publicly acknowledging the existence of moral wrongdoings—that serves to partly exculpate the young hero. This move of placing a child character’s complicity into a sociohistorical context in which every adult seems to be transgressing rules and breaking a law, in which society at large can be described as dysfunctional, is a strategy also employed by Ian McEwan in his novel Atonement (2001). In Spies as well as in Atonement, the issue of complicity moves on from the readers’ involvement on the plot level (we are complicit because we still believe in the innocent child even though we ought to have known better, we share the feeling of guilt due to our identification processes) to extradiegetic questions of morality, in which readers are to draw parallels to real life, to consider the context, pass judgment, and offer absolution.

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McEwan’s work often revolves around questions of guilt and moral responsibility. Even in his first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), first-person narrator Jack directly addresses his complicity, his feeling guilty without being responsible, when he says, “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way” ([1978] 2006, 9). In Atonement (2001), similar to Frayn’s Spies, thirteen-year-old Briony’s personal guilt is set alongside society’s atrocities in World War II, with an obvious reference to Hannah Arendt’s critique of collective exculpation, “Where all are guilty, nobody is” (1987, 43): “Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence. . . . All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?” (McEwan 2001, 261). Throughout the novel, Briony’s actions are constantly weighed up—was she solely responsible and thus guilty of sending an innocent man to prison and eventually to a war, in which he died, or are others to be tried and convicted as well: the neglecting parents, the prejudiced police officer, the true rapist, the rape victim, or society in itself, and, ultimately, the war? Can a young girl on the cusp of puberty, while not legally liable, be judged to be morally culpable, or is she culpably ignorant? Can she be held fully responsible? Is her desire to be taken seriously by adults, to fully understand the world, the first step toward moral corruption? McEwan seems to suggest that it is indeed Briony’s desire to belong to the adult world and to take on responsibility that makes her guilty: “Attaining adulthood was all about the eager acceptance of such impediments. She herself was taking them on. It wasn’t her scratch, but she felt responsible for it, and for everything that was about to happen” (122). Interestingly, McEwan only briefly brushes the complicity of rape victim Lola, who, it is suggested, has a hunch of who the real rapist is from the beginning but prefers to remain consciously passive, but McEwan does not elaborate: Briony offered her a chance and she seized it instinctively; less than that—she simply let it settle over her. She had little more to do than remain silent behind her cousin’s zeal. Lola did not need to lie, to look her supposed attacker in the eye and summon the courage to accuse him, because all that work was done for her, innocently, and without guile by the younger girl. Lola was required only to remain silent about the truth, banish it and forget it entirely, and persuade herself not of some contrary tale, but simply of her own uncertainty. (168)

Instead, McEwan focuses entirely on Briony’s sense of guilt, on what this child is willing to do and sacrifice to finally be accepted by adults, and on how the consequences shape her life. Only when reading the final part of the novel do we begin to understand the true extent of Briony’s complicity,



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as in fact the character Briony is also the fictive author of the main sections of the novel (I–III). Briony, as the autobiographical author hiding behind an omniscient third-person narrator, has rewritten the life story of her family but given them a different, better life, hoping to thus find atonement for herself. Once we know this, we can no longer trust any information gleaned from the narrative—any character’s secret thoughts and desires, intimate conversations, facial expressions and movements, all of these turn out to be invented by Briony in order to draw us into her version of the story, to make us complicit in her attempt to find redemption. In his latest novel Nutshell (2016), McEwan makes complicity the key issue. Whereas the first three novels discussed earlier address topics like perceived guilt, repressed knowledge, and meaning-making processes, here the autodiegetic narrator is a lucid witness to all that happens in real time. It is clear that causal complicity is out of the question: our narrator is an embryo who witnesses his mother’s plans to kill the father. He is an apparently helpless, passive, mute by-floater, so to speak, who can only listen and feel. However, it turns out that the embryo does possess some form of agency as he eventually, in the final chapter, makes the mother’s waters break and thus prevents her from fleeing the crime scene: “After all my turns and revisions, misinterpretations, lapses of insight, attempts at self-annihilation, and sorrow in passivity, I’ve come to a decision. Enough. . . . Time to join in. To end the endings. Time to begin” (McEwan 2016, 192). The state of complicity in wrongdoing is thus ended the moment the embryo chooses to no longer remain passive but to take action. Yet, throughout the novella, McEwan relishes as much in the enforced passivity as in the emotional involvement of his “child,” thereby also drawing a parallel between the child’s viewpoint and state of complicity and that of the readers: “What sickening complicity that I should wish them [that is, mother and uncle] success” (169). Just like the child cannot help but love its mother, the readers, too, tend to morally support the main protagonists—this is how the state of narratological complicity that I introduced earlier can be induced by an author: “This is how it is, how stories work, when we know of murders from their inception. We can’t help siding with the perpetrators and their schemes” (94–95). McEwan stages his embryonic narrator to pinpoint a feeling that seems to be spreading throughout Western society: unease and powerlessness in the face of social, political, and environmental instability. Creating such a powerless protagonist leads to readers reflecting on individual responsibility, collective involvement and complicity, on adults’ responsibility and what happens when they do not fulfill their role of caretaker and guardian, and how this mirrors other beings and situations in modern life—minorities, nonhumans, or nature—that have been wilfully neglected.

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THE LURE OF THE CHILD PROTAGONIST Traditionally, a child’s view of reality is portrayed as slightly distorted, which allows the author to experiment with comic effect, delayed decoding, and unreliable narration. But when looking at recent publications, it seems that novelists are also interested in using a child protagonist to explore what lies between morally acceptable or inacceptable, legally guilty or innocent, physically involved and consciously responsible because childhood itself is a gray area—we all know it, we have all been through it, but we also all have forgotten most of the details of childhood experiences. Reading about children opens a door for the readers’ emotional involvement. Also, we tend to think that children have not yet entirely completed the process of socialization, so that any kinds of transgressions are more easily accepted while at the same time these transgressions invite us to ponder societal developments. Since the late 1980s, Western capitalist notions of life and work as play have been propagated: we remain playful even in adulthood, foster our inner child, indulge in fun and games. The Western youth cult has placed society’s focus on the ideal image of the eternal teen (Bogdan Costea et al., quoted in Falconer 2010, 92), and modern popular culture has constructed an ongoing event-oriented childhood that is like a playground for adults. Many adults in our late capitalist, post-truth world feel so overwhelmed by all the wrongs leaked on a daily basis that they react by refuting any kind of responsibility— in such a moment, traditional escapist stories including child protagonists seem to offer a safe haven, and the adults identify themselves increasingly with their childhood selves. Indeed, the “slipping and sliding between the once distinctly marked stages of life has become a recognized social phenomenon in the new millennium” whereby society “flees” into a constructed childhood—in this context, Rachel Falconer has defined the phenomenon of kiddults: adults who “tumble back into childhood” (92). But there is no such thing as a static moment in childhood—it is a phase of epistemic probing, of constant change and transition, but also one of discovery, of experimenting, of getting lost, of moving in a realm beyond time and space, of desperate attempts at meaning making, of constant readjusting, and of striving to become like an adult. This may explain why authors, especially those wishing to address existential doubts, use the child protagonist to highlight moments of crisis. As Richard Mills suggests, writing about children is an “enquiry into the essence of human nature” (2000, 11). By using the child’s restricted point of view, novelists force us to read between the lines and weave our way through the emotional, cognitive, and intellectual gaps; they can shock us much more effectively and make us reflect on problematic societal, political, psychological, aesthetic, and narratological issues. When authors introduce



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child protagonists who face moral dilemmas (and falter), who thus become complicit, they can experiment in manifold ways and involve the readers to such an extent that the readers vicariously experience these quandaries. By deconstructing our idealized childhood, novelists force us to acknowledge that there is no idealized space in time that we can escape to and that storytelling does not absolve us from facing questions of morality and complicity, responsibility and guilt. NOTES 1.  McEwan 2001, 180. 2.  Legal liability is, of course, slightly different from one country to the next, for example concerning the age of the child. In any case, a child’s actions can have a negative effect on its parents (also in legal terms), which then leads to parental liability. My focus here, however, is more on the psychological effects on the child protagonists.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized. academia, 139–45, 142–43, 147, 150, 152. See also intellectual accountability, 5–6, 134 agency, 3–4, 39, 42, 46, 51–55, 123, 125–27, 182, 188, 200, 203, 211, 217, 218, 226, 229, 237–38, 241 American Psychiatric Association, 198 A New Fashion’d Head Dress for Young Misses of Three Score and Ten (Dawe), 168, 169 anti-Semitism, 49–51, 56 Arendt, Hannah, 126, 128, 240 Atkinson, Kate: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 235–38 Auden, W. H. “Partition,” 33–36, 39, 42 Auschwitz, 12, 59–60, 69–70, 73, 73nn1–2, 128, 130. See also Holocaust author, 83, 139–49, 154–56, 159, 203–4, 229–30, 234–35, 241–43; authorial function, 6, 139, 146–48, 156, 156n10; authorial identity, 6, 139, 141, 145, 149, 154; authorship, 124, 139–40, 143, 147, 153, 155; autobiography, 203, 205, 208, 215n6

Bhagavad Gita, 36, 41 bildungsroman, 231, 235 Black Lives Matter, 177, 184, 192 Boston Globe, 217–21 Brand, Willy, 80 Brenton, Howard: Drawing the Line, 36–42 Brexit, 37, 132–34, 136–37 Broch, Hermann: The Death of Virgil, 84–86; The Sleepwalkers, 81–82; The Guiltless, 82–84 bystander, 44, 51, 77–78, 81–82, 217 Camus, Albert: The Plague, 61–64, 72 capitalist: present, 5; entrepreneur, 110; society, 131; notions of life and work, 242 caricature, 161–68, 171–72 childhood, 229, 231–34, 238, 242–43 Church, 220–23, 226–28 collusion, 123–24. See also collaboration colonialism, 34, 63 complicity: anti-, 195, 203, 218; as rhetorical tool, 3, 124–26, 131–37, 267

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181; atomistic, 2, 196; critique, 3–6; definition of, 1–7, 31, 71, 92–94, 101–2, 103n6, 108–9, 122–23, 160, 181–82, 195–97, 217; dilemma, 214, 221–22, 225–26; institutional, 35, 219–21; linguistic, 202; narrative, 30–33, 132–33, 135; narratological, 230, 233; representational, 53, 73; structural, 5; trap, 236; white, 181, 187 compliance, 2–3, 35, 122–23, 127 Corbyn, Jeremy, 135 consensus, 40, 110 Constable, John: The Hay Wain, 91 Critical Whiteness Studies, 178–81 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 111 concentration camp, 64, 68, 78, 93, 130, 149 connivance, 92–93, 96, 98 counterculture, 107–8 culpability, 125, 129, 134, 182, 229 culpable ignorance, 4, 37–38, 89–90, 92–95, 97–98, 100, 102, 187, 209, 230, 236 Darly, Mary: A Book of Caricatures, 162–63; The Preposterous Head Dress, 169, 170 death camp. See concentration camp Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 196, 198– 99, 203, 206–7, 215n7 differend, 57–73 The Doors: “Unknown Soldier,” 107–8 double consciousness, 182–83 Doubt (Shanley), 221–27 Du Bois, W. E. B., 177, 182 fake news, 132, 134, 136 Frayn, Michael: Spies, 238–40 Gillray, James: Leaving Off Powder; or, A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea, 165, 166

Golding, William: Lord of the Flies, 233–34 Google, 29–30 Green, Amanda: 39, 201–10; My Alien Self, 201–10 guilt, 32, 48, 67–68, 75, 77–78, 80–86, 98, 128–30, 149, 181–82, 230–43 hegemony, 4, 33, 109–10, 133–34; white, 178, 184, 191 Hill, Geoffrey: King Log, 78–79; Scenes from Comus, 80; Speech! Speech!, 79–80; The Daybooks, 77, 81 historical self, 185, 187. See also self self Holocaust, 29, 59, 63–64, 73n3, 77–79, 127–28 Humphrey, William: Betty the Cook Maids Head Drest, 167 ideology, 3–4 innocence, 54, 78, 90, 192, 229, 231–34 intellectual, 110, 117, 128, 139–55, 187. See also academia Ishiguro, Kazuo: The Buried Giant, 97–102; The Remains of the Day, 89–90, 94–97 James, Henry: The Turn of the Screw, 233 lack (Jacques Lacan), 116–18 language games (Ludwig Wittgenstein), 121–24, 128, 131 law of the land, 2–3, 6, 197 Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird, 232, 234 Lennon, John, 107, 108 Ludwig’s Room (Hotschnig), 64–68, 72 Madhvani, Ram: “This Bloody Line,” 35 Martin, Trayvon, 177, 184 McEwan, Ian: Atonement, 239–41; Nutshell, 241



Index 269

memory, 98–99, 103n9, 143, 152, 230, 234, 237–38; collective, 32; post-, 28–30 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 78, 231 mirror stage (Jacques Lacan), 116–17 Modiano, Patrick: Dora Bruder, 68–73 national myths, 42, 89, 99–100 Nazi crimes: complicity with, 44–56, 78–79, 82, 96, 123–24, 127–31; representation of, 57–73 The New Foundling Hospital for Wit, 164 Ochs, Phil: “The War is Over,” 107–8 Odell, Anna: Unknown Woman, 210–14 Ono, Yoko, 107, 108 Packnett, Brittany, 192 parrhesia (Michel Foucault), 136, 203 partition, 27–37 Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock, 159, 165, 168, 170 postmodernism, 5, 59–60, 206, 238–39 racism, 177–91 Radcliffe, Cyril, 27, 30–42 Rankine, Claudia: Citizen: An American Lyric, 177–78, 184–92 redemption, 43–56 regime of truth (Michel Foucault), 3, 109 responsibility, 5–6, 31–32, 42, 59, 62, 94, 97, 102, 121–31, 134, 141–49,

156n11, 181–83, 185, 187, 217–18, 227n2, 231, 234–35, 238–43 revolution, 113–14 Rice, Tamir, 177 satire, 161–64 self-representation, 141–42, 145–46, 148, 150–51 self self, 185. See also historical self Shoah. See Holocaust Socialism, 111–12 Spotlight (McCarthy), 218–21, 225–27 stereotype, 193n11, 201–2, 206–7, 213 the sublime, 58–60, 71–71, 90 Swift, Jonathan: Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, 165–66 the Symbolic, 117 Tannbach (TB), 44–50, 53–56 Trump, Donald, 132–37 Trump, Ivanka, 1, 3 Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 232 Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (UMUV), 44–56 utopian desire, 107–8, 112–16, 118–19 violence: autotelic, 46, 49–51; complicity with, 27, 34, 75, 82, 132; sexual, 46, 49–51, 56, 217–27 white privilege, 177–91, 193n5

About the Contributors

Volker Benkert is assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, United States. His research focuses on the impact of sudden regime change on biographies after both totalitarian regimes in twentieth-century Germany. He is the author of Glückskinder der Einheit: Lebenswege der um 1970 in der DDR Geborenen (2017). Olaf Berwald is professor of German studies and department chair of foreign languages at Kennesaw State University, United States. His publications include monographs on Melanchthon and on Peter Weiss. He has edited a volume on the works of Max Frisch and co-edited a volume on modernist aesthetics and religion and a book on creative collaborations between Latin American and German writers. He has also written articles exploring modernist writers and literary theory and modernism’s indebtedness to post-Kantian philosophy. Elizabeth Gilbert is a lecturer at the English Department of Cologne University, Germany. She specializes in British literature and culture, children’s and young adult fiction, and film studies. She has published extensively on Italian Renaissance poetry as well as on twentieth-century literature and various contemporary young adult novels. Alexandra Hartmann is a PhD student and lecturer in American studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. In her dissertation, she analyzes black humanism in African American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a tradition that emphasizes the embodied nature of humans. In 271

272

About the Contributors

doing so, black humanism has sought to challenge white supremacy and serves as a rich source to the field of anti-racist criticism. Other research interests include American literature of the twentieth century and American intellectual history. Mihaela Irimia is professor of cultural studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She is the director of studies of the British Cultural Studies Centre (BCSC), director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity, and vice president of the Romanian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Among her recent publications are Literature and Cultural Memory (ed., 2017) and Literature and the Long Modernity (ed., 2014). Lorraine Markotic is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, Canada. She has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Adorno, contemporary French philosophy, psychoanalytic theory (Lacan as well as Freud), feminist theory, film theory, and Austrian literature. Brendan Moran is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has written extensively on philosophic aspects of Walter Benjamin’s writings, as well as on works by Agamben, Heidegger, Lévinas, and others, such as Salomo Friedlaender. Much of his work is concerned with relations of philosophy and literature. His current research also focuses on the relationship of philosophy and victimhood, particularly with reference to relevant writings by Benjamin, Agamben, and Laruelle. Elisabeth Punzi is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She also leads the work on heritage and well-being at the Center of Critical Heritage Studies, a cooperation between Gothenburg University and University College London. Her research concerns the prerequisites and possibilities of client-centered mental health care, artistic expression in mental health care, and the heritage and history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Paul Reynolds is reader in sociology and social philosopher at Edge Hill University, United Kingdom. His research interests focus on three areas: sexual ethics and politics, radical theory and politics, and intellectuals in society. He is co-convener of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics (INSEP), co-editor-in-chief of the INSEP journal, and co-director of the international network of Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity (CDSS).



About the Contributors 273

Katrin Röder is lecturer in English literature and culture at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She received her postdoctoral degree at the Universität Potsdam in 2011 and her doctoral degree at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2003. She co-edited a volume that covers recent scholarly articles on Fulke Greville’s works for Oxford University Press, as well as a theme issue of the European Journal of English Studies on the topic of shame in the context of British literary and cultural studies, which will appear in 2019. Christoph Singer is assistant professor in the Department of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He has published anthologies on intersections of middlebrow and modernism and the iconography of Dante and Milton. Currently he is working on a project titled A History of Solitude: (Post-)Modernist Narratives of Waiting and Delay. Ivan Stacy is associate professor at the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University, China. His research addresses complicity in postwar fiction, and he is also interested in the carnivalesque. He has published articles on Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, and China Miéville and on the American television series The Wire. He co-edited (with Arin Keeble) The Wire and America’s Dark Corners, and he is currently working on a monograph provisionally titled Literature and Complicity. John Storey is emeritus professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom. He has published extensively in cultural studies, including twelve books. He is currently working on a thirteenth book, Utopian Desire, to be published with Routledge. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Vienna, Henan, and Wuhan, and a senior fellow at the Technical University of Dresden. Eli Teram is professor emeritus of social work at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, where he taught for thirty years. He has numerous publications related to social work ethics, qualitative research, and the organizational context of social work practice. Teram was involved in research projects related to mergers, youth resilience, ethical issues in social work practice, and the experiences of childhood sexual abuse survivors with health professionals. He was on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health from 1995 to 2017; during this period he served as an associate editor for six years and was a co-guest editor for a special issue on young offenders.

274

About the Contributors

Cornelia Wächter is assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin) of British cultural studies at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The “Warder” in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015) and co-editor of Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945 (2016). She is currently working on a book project on complicity and the politics of gender and sexuality, as well as a book on Hellenism in the works of Victoria Cross (with Annie Sophie Cory). Robert Wirth is a research associate in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Germany, lecturing in English language and British cultural studies. His primary research interests lie in the field of Scottish literature, politics, and culture, with a main focus on the utilization of history and nostalgia in contemporary political campaigning. Together with Christoph Singer and Olaf Berwald, he is co-editor of Timescapes of Waiting (2019).